Japan’s Births Decline To Lowest Number On Record
December 25th, 2019Japan has been trying to increase its birth rate for years, hoping that a youthful boost could offset an otherwise rapidly aging population. It’s not working.
The country’s health ministry announced Tuesday that the number of babies born in 2019 fell by an estimated 5.9% this year, to 864,000. It’s the first time since 1899, when the government began tracking the data, that the number has dipped below 900,000, according to The Asahi Shimbun.
Mysterious Drones Flying Nighttime Patterns Over Northeast Colorado Leave Local Law Enforcement Stumped
December 25th, 2019Via: Denver Post:
A band of large drones appears to be flying nighttime search patterns over northeast Colorado — and local authorities say they don’t know who’s behind the mysterious aircraft.
The drones, estimated to have six-foot wingspans, have been flying over Phillips and Yuma counties every night for about the last week, Phillips County Sheriff Thomas Elliott said Monday.
The drones stay about 200 feet to 300 feet in the air and fly steadily in squares of about 25 miles, he said. There are at least 17 drones; they emerge each night around 7 p.m. and disappear around 10 p.m., he said.
“They’ve been doing a grid search, a grid pattern,” he said. “They fly one square and then they fly another square.”
The sheriff’s office can’t explain where the drones are coming from or who is flying them. The estimated size and number of drones makes it unlikely that they’re being flown by hobbyists, Undersheriff William Myers said.
The Federal Aviation Administration told the sheriff’s office that it had no information on the drones, and the U.S. Air Force said the aircraft aren’t theirs, Elliott said.
A spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration told The Denver Post on Monday that the drones aren’t operated by the agency. A spokesman for the FAA said that agency likely has no information on them. Drone pilots aren’t required to file flight plans, unless they’re flying in controlled airspace, like near an airport.
Patent: Rivian’s New ‘Guardian Mode’ Will Safely Move Passengers Without Any Driver Present
December 24th, 2019Here’s the end point of this technology, should it ever come to exist:
Night City Police Department Autonomous Vehicle Override System
Make a selection and click Next to continue:
Disable vehicle and lock occupants inside
Geofence vehicle
Deliver occupants to nearest re-education center
Deliver occupants to nearest vaccination center
Etc.
Via: Teslarati:
A new patent submitted by electric car maker Rivian aims to create a safe traveling experience without anyone actually operating the vehicle. This would allow the vehicle to transport individuals who are not fully-competent to operate a vehicle to a destination without having a driver present.
Rivian named the patent “Systems and Methods for Operating an Autonomous Vehicle in a Guardian Mode,” and filed it to the United States Patent Office on June 11, 2019. The patent would create a new mode that could allow a physical driver to not actually be present for the duration of a trip. It would instead give the vehicle’s owner the option to request a ride for someone who is not capable of legally or safely operating the vehicle, like a child or a senior citizen. The company calls this capability “Guardian Mode.”
Using examples like a child needing a ride home from school, Rivian mentions that the development of autonomous vehicles are allowing for safe travel without someone having to be in direct control of the vehicle. However, there is the possibility for someone who is not fully competent to still control the car and make use of the vehicle’s autonomous features to travel, even if they are not legally able to.
Rivian explains this point further in the following section:
“Modem autonomous vehicle technology allows an autonomous vehicle to transport passengers between destinations without being directly controlled by a human driver. Consequently, it is now possible for an autonomous vehicle to transport a user who is not fully competent (e.g., a child user, a senior citizen user, or a mentally challenged user) without a fully competent user being present. However, in such a situation, a user who is not fully competent may misuse the capabilities of the autonomous vehicle while in transit. Such misuse may lead to undesirable situations (e.g., a child requesting to go to a wrong location), or even dangerous situations (e.g., a child opening a door while the car is still in motion, or a child unbuckling a seat belt). Consequently, what is needed is an autonomous vehicle with a mode of operation that is appropriate for transporting users who are not fully competent.”
Related: GM Pushes Feds To Approve Chevy Bolts With No Steering Wheel
Rivian Scores $1.3 Billion Investment
December 24th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Electric vehicle startup Rivian said on Monday it closed a $1.3 billion investment round led by T. Rowe Price and including existing investors Amazon.com and Ford Motor Co.
The investment round, which also included BlackRock Inc, is the fourth this year for Rivian and positions the Plymouth, Michigan-based company as one of the better-financed players in a crowded EV manufacturing market where Tesla Inc is the most established player.
Anonymous Story About a “School” that Borders Denver International Airport
December 24th, 2019Via: Reddit:
But the craziest job I had there was a Waterproofing job for a “school”. It wasn’t actually on DIA property, but was on the Eastern edge of the property, just outside it. It was ran by the Corp of Engineers. Which in itself was odd, being that it was supposed to be a school not on a base.
The part that really made me start asking questions was what we were doing. Our crew was tasked with waterproofing the foundation… Which was 3 stories underground. There was only one story above ground. Being as we had to make sure the concrete was water tight, I saw every square inch of the foundation.
We started the job in winter and had to bury our work as we went. It was a tedious affair of painting, slapping on some peel and stick, and tracking down the diggers to move dirt when we were done with a section.
Every piece of the foundation was at a minimum 3ft thick with countless layers of steel rebar. For those who don’t know, that’s nuke proof specs. Some areas were a solid 8-10ft thick.
It gets weirder. In the front section of the building were giant bay door holes. The size to fit semi trucks and large military vehicles.
That’s pretty much the extent of my observations. Large Bay doors, nuke proof specs, 3 stories underground, at the edge of DIA property, ran by the Corps of Engineers. Very peculiar.
Our crew took to using finger quotation marks when talking about “The school”. It was an ongoing inside joke with us. If that helps elaborate on how obviously weird the whole thing was.
After we left the waterproofing aspect I never returned to that job, as I transferred across the country to a different Union. But I often wonder of the true intentions behind what we put in the ground.
‘My Business Card Runs Linux’
December 24th, 2019Via: thirtythreeforty:
This is the finished product. It is a complete, minimal ARM computer running my customized Linux firmware built with Buildroot.
It has a USB port in the corner. If you plug it into a computer, it boots in about 6 seconds and shows up over USB as a flash drive and a virtual serial port that you can use to log into the card’s shell. The flash drive has a README file, a copy of my résumé, and some of my photography. The shell has several games and Unix classics such as fortune and rogue, a small 2048, and a small MicroPython interpreter.
All this is accomplished on a very small 8MB flash chip. The bootloader fits in 256KB, the kernel is 1.6MB, and the whole root filesystem is 2.4MB. So, there’s plenty of space for the virtual flash drive. It also includes a writable home directory, on the off chance that anyone creates something they want to keep. This is also saved on the flash chip, which is properly wear leveled with UBI.
The whole thing costs under $3. It’s cheap enough to give away. If you get one from me, I’m probably trying to impress you.
NSA’s Backdoor Key from Lotus-Notes
December 23rd, 2019Via: Cypherspace:
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA’s public key. The NSA would then only have the small matter of brute-forcing the remaining 40 bits to get the plaintext, and everyone else would get a not-that-great 64 bit key space (which probably already back then NSA would have had the compute power to brute force also, only at higher cost).
Anyway as clearly inside the application somewhere would be an NSA public key that the NSA had the private key for, I tried reverse engineering it to get the public key.
In doing this I discovered that the NSA public key had an organizational name of “MiniTruth”, and a common name of “Big Brother”. Specifically what I saw in my debugger late one night, which was spooky for a short moment was:
O=MiniTruth CN=Big Brother
Literary note: for those who have not read Orwell’s prescient “1984” the Ministry of Truth was the agency who’s job was propaganda and suppression of truths that did not suit the malignant fictional future government in the book, and “Big Brother” was the evil shadowy leader of this government.
Cancers Strike Veterans Who Deployed to Uzbek Base Where Black Goo Oozed, Ponds Glowed
December 22nd, 2019Via: McClatchy:
U.S. special operations forces who deployed to a military site in Uzbekistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks found pond water that glowed green, black goo oozing from the ground and signs warning “radiation hazard.”
Karshi-Khanabad, known as K2, was an old Soviet base leased by the United States from the Uzbek government just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because it was a few hundred miles from al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northern Afghanistan.
The base became a critical hub in the early days of the war to provide airdrops, medical evacuation and airstrike support to U.S. ground forces in Afghanistan.
But K2 was contaminated with chemical weapons remnants, radioactive processed uranium and other hazards, according to documents obtained by McClatchy.
At least 61 of the men and women who served at K2 had been diagnosed with cancer or died from the disease, according to a 2015 Army study on the base. But that number may not include the special operations forces deployed to K2, who were likely not counted due to the secrecy of their missions, the study reported.
Invisible Ink Embeds Immunization Records Into a Child’s Skin, “The Team Eventually Wants to Inject Sensors”
December 22nd, 2019Via: Scientific American:
Keeping track of vaccinations remains a major challenge in the developing world, and even in many developed countries, paperwork gets lost, and parents forget whether their child is up to date. Now a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has developed a novel way to address this problem: embedding the record directly into the skin.
Along with the vaccine, a child would be injected with a bit of dye that is invisible to the naked eye but easily seen with a special cell-phone filter, combined with an app that shines near-infrared light onto the skin. The dye would be expected to last up to five years, according to tests on pig and rat skin and human skin in a dish.
…
The work was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…
…
The researchers hope to add more detailed information to the dots, such as the date of vaccination. Along with them, the team eventually wants to inject sensors that could also potentially be used to track aspects of health such as insulin levels in diabetics, Jaklenec says.
Giant Surveillance Balloons Are Lurking at the Edge of Space
December 22nd, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
It’s a brisk December morning at Spaceport Tucson, America’s premiere (only?) dedicated launch pad for stratospheric balloons, and a small army of technicians in reflective vests is milling around on the concrete and thawing out after a long, cold night. Nearby, a white metal tripod the size of a smart car is tethered to two dozen solar panels and hundreds of feet of clear plastic that stretches across the pad.
This alien-looking contraption is referred to as a “stratollite,” a portmanteau of “stratospheric satellite,” operated by a company called World View Enterprises. It’s a finely honed surveillance device outfitted with a suite of sensors and a camera sensitive enough to detect people standing on the ground from the edge of space. The stratollite travels by virtue of two balloons, one filled with helium to provide lift, and the other with pressurized air, which functions as a steering system.
