Iran Hijacked U.S. Drone by Exploiting Long Known Vulnerability, According to Iranian Engineer
December 20th, 2011Via: Christian Science Monitor:
In an exclusive interview, an engineer working to unlock the secrets of the captured RQ-170 Sentinel says they exploited a known vulnerability and tricked the US drone into landing in Iran.
Iran guided the CIA’s “lost” stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone’s systems inside Iran.
Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.
Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone’s GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.
Gigapixel Photography of Crowds
December 20th, 2011If you thought the one of Obombya’s inauguration was impressive/terrifying, try zooming in on this one.
Via: gigapixel.com:
The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels. Special thanks to Bonita Howard and CBC Real Estate.
Related: Coming Soon: Retroactive Surveillance on Anyone
Research Credit: GH
Nano-Scale Anti Counterfeiting Technique for Looks Like Electronic Display; Will Be Used on Cash and Pharmaceuticals
December 20th, 2011Via: FastCompany:
Imagine a bill covered with microscopic holes that make it glow slightly in the light. It’s tech borrowed from a butterfly, and it may soon be foiling counterfeiters around the world.
If all goes as planned, the world’s supply of cash will soon be secured with a nano-scale optical defense that is as secure as it is visually impressive. Using arrays of holes no bigger than a virus, scientists at Toronto-based Nanotech Security have created an atoms-thick display that can be read by humans or machines and that shines with the brightness of a typical LED despite using nothing but reflected light.
The technology was inspired by the Blue Morpho butterfly, whose brilliant blue coloration comes not from pigment but the way that tiny holes in its scales reflect light. But the tech, called Nano-Optic Technology for Enhanced Security (NOtES), is different from the Morpho butterfly’s wings, and pretty much all other bio-inspired reflective optical technologies, in that it is both extraordinarily thin and functions even in dim light.
Research Credit: anchoviesmegma
Thousands of Rare Documents Burned in Egypt Clash
December 20th, 2011Via: AP:
Volunteers in white lab coats, surgical gloves and masks stood on the back of a pickup truck Monday along the banks of the Nile River in Cairo, rummaging through stacks of rare 200-year-old manuscripts that were little more than charcoal debris.
The volunteers, ranging from academic experts to appalled citizens, have spent the past two days trying to salvage what’s left of some 192,000 books, journals and writings, casualties of Egypt’s latest bout of violence.
Institute d’Egypte, a research center set up by Napoleon Bonaparte during France’s invasion in the late 18th century, caught fire during clashes between protesters and Egypt’s military over the weekend. It was home to a treasure trove of writings, most notably the handwritten 24-volume Description de l’Egypte, which began during the 1798-1801 French occupation.
The compilation, which includes 20 years of observations by more than 150 French scholars and scientists, was one of the most comprehensive descriptions of Egypt’s monuments, its ancient civilization and contemporary life at the time.
The Description of Egypt is likely burned beyond repair. Its home, the two-story historic institute near Tahrir Square, is now in danger of collapsing after the roof caved in.
“The burning of such a rich building means a large part of Egyptian history has ended,” the director of the institute, Mohammed al-Sharbouni, told state television over the weekend. The building was managed by a local non-governmental organization.
Al-Sharbouni said most of the contents were destroyed in the fire that raged for more than 12 hours on Saturday. Firefighters flooded the building with water, adding to the damage.
During the clashes a day earlier, parts of the parliament and a transportation authority office caught fire, but those blazes were put out quickly.
Many Foods Made with High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contain Mercury
December 20th, 2011Lots of people are submitting this two year old story.
Smartphone Given You a Lobotomy? There’s an App for That
December 20th, 2011Via: Engadget:
Do you have an iPhone 4S? Do you drive a car? Do you have amnesia? If you answered yes to at least two-and-a-half of these questions, you’ll probably be interested in Find My Car Smart — a Kickstarter project that wants to help dudes find their cars, with the help of Bluetooth 4.0 technology. The system is relatively straightforward, consisting of nothing more than an iOS app (available now on iTunes for $0.99), and a USB-based Bluetooth proximity adapter. All you have to do is download the app, stick the dongle in your car, and let your iPhone 4S automatically mark your parking spot. Whereas similarly-designed apps typically require users to manually record their car’s location before leaving the lot, Find My Car Smart allows you to forget even that, since the app will automatically record your GPS coordinates.
Programmers Win DARPA Prize for Reconstructing Shredded Documents
December 20th, 2011Make sure to keep reading to the end…
Via: Bloomberg:
To most people, 10,000 slivers of shredded paper are as good as trash. To three coders in San Francisco, they’re a challenge—especially when the jumbled mass of paper once made up five classified government documents.
The trio were not hackers trying to steal state secrets, but participants in a contest run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the government group that funds high-tech military research. In October, Darpa offered $50,000 to the first group to piece together the shredded documents or the one that made the most progress by Dec. 4. In previous Darpa tournaments, participants have been asked to build robotic cars or use the Internet to find balloons scattered across the country. The goal of the paper shredder puzzle was to unearth technologies that could be used for national security.
“I figured I know enough really damn good programmers that I could get a few people together and we might be able to win it,” says Otávio Good, the entrepreneur behind the iPhone app Word Lens, which translates foreign-language text as it’s viewed through the phone’s camera. Good and his partners, a software engineer working at Lockheed Martin (LMT) and a mobile app maker, spent 600 hours combined piecing together the five shredded pages. Out of nearly 9,000 teams, theirs—which they called “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.”—was the only one to complete all five puzzles, which they did with two days to spare.
…
Two weeks in, Good’s team was stumped by the fourth sheet of paper, which was more of a challenge because the words were irregularly spaced and written on unlined paper. “I think everybody hit a wall on puzzle four and didn’t know what to do,” Good says. Then he happened on an article about a little-known government project: The U.S. Secret Service has been working with manufacturers of color laser printers to place tiny, imperceptible yellow dots on printed pages so that the government can track the machine that produced them. Good put the puzzle under a blue-light filter and saw the dots. “It was a breakthrough moment,” he says. “The pattern of dots is practically a map for how everything comes together.”
Flashback to 2004 on Cryptogon: Government Uses Color Laser Printer Technology to Track Documents
Research Credit: noguru
Swedes Arrested for Butter Smuggling
December 19th, 2011Via: Telegraph:
Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.
The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.
“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.
“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit.
Swedes have posted nearly 100 adverts on the local auction website Blocket offering to drive butter across the border at prices ranging from £20 to above £50 a pack.
The poster of one of the adverts, Yusuf, from Gothenburg, told the Daily Telegraph that he was now making two trips a week to service clients in Oslo, the Norwegian capital, but refused to give more details.
Research Credit: Douglas
50 Economic Numbers From 2011
December 19th, 2011Via: Economic Collapse Blog:
#1 A staggering 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#2 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be “low income” or impoverished.
#3 If the number of Americans that “wanted jobs” was the same today as it was back in 2007, the “official” unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent….
Former Mexican Govrnment Officials Work for U.S. Intelligence
December 19th, 2011Via: AFP:
At least 80 former Mexican government officials are currently working as informants for US intelligence agencies, the daily La Jornada reported, citing senior Mexican officials.
Most of them are gathering information for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, the prestigious daily reported.
Senior officials in the attorney general’s office and the interior ministry said that those informants work as spies, gather and analyze information, and follow cases on request.
“We have not dismissed the possibility that current government employees are also working for the Americans in combination with their ex-colleagues,” a senior government official who has participated in counternarcotics meetings with US officials told the newspaper.
The spying case came to light during a probe into whether the DEA has laundered drug money seized from criminal groups in Mexican territory, La Jornada reported.
On December 4, The New York Times reported that undercover US counternarcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds to see how the system works and use the information against Mexican drug cartels.
Related: DEA Launders Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels
