December 19, 2014

first bilateral shoulder-level amputee to wear and simultaneously control two robotic arms.

The future is here.

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/amputee-simultaneously-controls-two-prosthetic-arms-with-his-mind/

December 19, 2014

The 15 Most Powerful Members Of 'Skull And Bones'

William Howard Taft - Class of 1878

Amos Alonzo Stagg - Class of 1888

Archibald MacLeish - Class of 1915

Prescott Bush - Class of 1916
"believed to have dug up and absconded with the skull of the legendary Native American warrior Geronimo "


Robert Lovett - Class of 1918

Henry Luce - Class of 1920

Potter Stewart - Class of 1936

McGeorge Bundy - Class of 1940

George Herbert Walker Bush - Class of 1948

William F. Buckley Jr. - Class 0f 1950

John F. Kerry - Class of 1966

George W. Bush - Class of 1968

Stephen A. Schwarzman - Class of 1969

Austan Goolsbee - Class of 1991

The best of the rest...

http://www.businessinsider.com/skull-and-bones-alumni-2011-2?op=1

December 19, 2014

The Evidence That North Korea Hacked Sony Is Flimsy

First of all, Sony and the FBI have announced that they’ve found no evidence so far to tie North Korea to the attack. 2 New reports, however, indicate that intelligence officials who are not permitted to speak on the record have concluded that the North Koreans are behind the hack. But they have provided no evidence to support this and without knowing even what agency the officials belong to, it’s difficult to know what to make of the claim. And we should point out that intelligence agencies and government officials have jumped to hasty conclusions or misled the public in the past because it was politically expedient.

Nation-state attacks aren’t generally as noisy, or announce themselves with an image of a blazing skeleton posted to infected computers, as occurred in the Sony hack. Nor do they use a catchy nom-de-hack like Guardians of Peace to identify themselves. Nation-state attackers also generally don’t chastise their victims for having poor security, as purported members of GOP have done in media interviews. Nor do such attacks involve posts of stolen data to Pastebin—the unofficial cloud repository of hackers—where sensitive company files belonging to Sony have been leaked. These are all hallmarks of hacktivists—groups like Anonymous and LulzSec, who thrive on targeting large corporations for ideological reasons or just the lulz, or by hackers sympathetic to a political cause.

Despite all of this, media outlets won’t let the North Korea narrative go and don’t seem to want to consider other options. If there’s anything years of Law and Order reruns should tell us, it’s that focusing on a single suspect can lead to exclusionary bias where clues that contradict the favored theory get ignored.

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/

December 19, 2014

The World's Biggest Car Company Wants to Get Rid of Gasoline

The first thing you notice about the Mirai, Toyota’s new $62,000, four-door family sedan, is that it’s no Camry, an international symbol of bland conformity. First there are the in-your-face, angular grilles on the car’s front end. These deliver air to (and cool) a polymer fuel-cell stack under the hood. Then there’s the wavy, layered sides, meant to evoke a droplet of water. It looks like it was driven off the set of the Blade Runner sequel.

Just as the Prius has established itself as the first true mass-market hybrid, Toyota hopes the Mirai will one day become the first mass-market hydrogen car. On sale in Japan on Dec. 15, it will be available in the U.S. and Europe in late 2015 and has a driving range of 300 miles, much farther than most plug-in electrics can go. It also runs on the most abundant element in the universe and emits only heat and water—and none of the gases that lead to smog or contribute to global warming. “This is not an alternative to a gasoline vehicle,” says Scott Samuelsen, an engineer and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California at Irvine. “This is a quantum step up.”

The Mirai is hardly a speedster, though it’s quicker than a Prius. It can reach 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour in 9.6 seconds. When you punch it, the car feels like an electric—there’s none of the vibration of a combustion engine. Driving the Mirai around a large, man-made island in Tokyo Bay called Odaiba is a little surreal. The interior is a Zen sanctuary of silence, save for the rush of wind passing around the vehicle and the occasional muffled sound of the suspension doing its work. The car can double as a mobile power station: A socket in the trunk can electrify the typical Japanese home for about a week in the event of an earthquake or other emergency.

As cool as the Mirai is, selling it is a hugely risky move. While fuel cells are a proven technology, used by NASA during Apollo missions in the 1960s to generate electricity and produce drinking water, a mass market for fuel-cell cars will require big investments in hydrogen fueling stations that may not be forthcoming. And, thanks in large part to Toyota itself, the auto industry has sunk serious money into hybrids, plug-in electrics, and advanced batteries in the expectation that these technologies will dominate the post-gasoline era, whenever that may be. “Every manufacturer has multiple hybrids and electrics coming,” says Mike Jackson, chief executive officer of AutoNation (AN), the largest U.S. retailer of new cars, trucks, and SUVs. “And here you have Toyota saying, ‘We’re not going to go full electric. The ultimate answer is fuel cells.’?”

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-17/toyota-embraces-fuel-cell-cars-for-post-gasoline-future

December 19, 2014

Task Force on 21st Century Policing

Today the President will sign an Executive Order to create the Task Force on 21st Century Policing and announce its members. The Task Force is part of the Administration’s efforts to strengthen community policing and strengthen trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve. The Task Force will be chaired by Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey, who also serves as President of the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, and Laurie Robinson, professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University and former Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs.

The Task Force will include law enforcement representatives, community leaders, academics, and youth leaders. Ron Davis, Director of DOJ’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office will serve as the Executive Director of the Task Force under the direction of the co-chairs. The Task Force will examine, among other issues, how to strengthen public trust and foster strong relationships between local law enforcement and the communities that they protect, while also promoting effective crime reduction. The Executive Order directs the Task Force to prepare a report and recommendations to be presented to the President. An initial report will be due to the President in March.

The taskforce will engage with Federal, State, tribal, local officials, technical advisors, young leaders, and nongovernmental organizations through meetings and 21st century technology to provide a transparent process to engage with the public. The Task Force will convene listening sessions where they will hear testimony, including proposed recommendations for consideration, from invited witnesses and also receive comments and questions from the public. The first session will be held in Washington D.C. in mid-January. Subsequent listening sessions and additional outreach details, including the online public comment process, is forthcoming.

Recent events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland, and around the country have highlighted the importance of strong, collaborative relationships between local police and the communities they protect. As the nation has observed, trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/12/18/fact-sheet-task-force-21st-century-policing

December 19, 2014

Why Indian Reservations Won't Be Marijuana Wonderlands Anytime Soon

The Department of Justice announced last week it would no longer enforce federal marijuana laws on Native lands, which theoretically opened the door for tribes to pass the same sort of progressive pot legislation that some states have. But some are asking why the DOJ took that step when it's not clear that the tribes themselves want to legalize the stuff.

snip

Located four hours north of Minneapolis deep in Minnesota's northwoods, Bemidji is a regional hub for three Indian reservations—White Earth, Leech Lake, and Red Lake. All are bands of Ojibwe, but only Red Lake is a closed reservation—meaning the tribe has increased autonomy.

Red Lake's closed status is important to note because Minnesota, like several other states with large Native populations, operates under Public Law 280. The act means the state—not individual tribes—has prosecutorial jurisdiction over felonies, including marijuana possession (past a certain threshold) and distribution. So just because the feds aren't going to enforce pot laws doesn't mean every police officer from Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension down to Bemidji beat cops won't throw you in jail for holding.

Then, even if you're an enrolled member of a tribe, you'll likely be indicted for possessing whatever amount of weed you have on you. And, like other minorities, "the rate at which Natives are arrested compared to their white peers is higher, the rate at which they're sentenced is higher, and the length of those sentences is longer, as well," according to Treuer. These facts of life, combined with the power of Public Law 280, essentially make the DOJ announcement an illusion in his eyes.

"I think at Red Lake or Bois Forte, or any reservation where Public Law 280 is not in effect, you get a little bit of that gray area. But most of those tribes have some kind of drug code where [possession] would be illegal," he told me. "It does make the Justice Department statement kind of confusing, but I don't think this is going to create a major paradigm shift."

http://www.vice.com/read/why-indian-reservations-wont-be-marijuana-wonderlands-any-time-soon-1218

Earlier: WOW.....Native American reservations now free to legalize marijuana

December 19, 2014

German researchers discover a flaw that could let anyone listen to your cell calls.

Source: Washington Post

German researchers have discovered security flaws that could let hackers, spies and criminals listen to private phone calls and intercept text messages on a potentially massive scale – even when cellular networks are using the most advanced encryption now available.

The flaws, to be reported at a hacker conference in Hamburg this month, are the latest evidence of widespread insecurity on SS7, the global network that allows the world’s cellular carriers to route calls, texts and other services to each other. Experts say it’s increasingly clear that SS7, first designed in the 1980s, is riddled with serious vulnerabilities that undermine the privacy of the world’s billions of cellular customers.

The flaws discovered by the German researchers are actually functions built into SS7 for other purposes – such as keeping calls connected as users speed down highways, switching from cell tower to cell tower – that hackers can repurpose for surveillance because of the lax security on the network.

snip

These vulnerabilities continue to exist even as cellular carriers invest billions of dollars to upgrade to advanced 3G technology aimed, in part, at securing communications against unauthorized eavesdropping. But even as individual carriers harden their systems, they still must communicate with each other over SS7, leaving them open to any of thousands of companies worldwide with access to the network. That means that a single carrier in Congo or Kazakhstan, for example, could be used to hack into cellular networks in the United States, Europe or anywhere else.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/12/18/german-researchers-discover-a-flaw-that-could-let-anyone-listen-to-your-cell-calls-and-read-your-texts/

December 18, 2014

Black staff, faculty stage silent protest at Sproul

More than 100 members of the African American community at UC Berkeley held a silent protest in front of Sproul Hall on Monday to demonstrate solidarity with the nationwide #BlackLivesMatter movement of recent weeks.

Standing two to five deep across the width of the Savio Steps, campus staff, faculty, students and alums stood silently for 28 minutes, in a driving rain, shortly after noon.

The duration of the silence was by design. “We’re here to proclaim that black lives matter and inform others that every 28 hours a black person is killed by law enforcement, vigilantes or security,” the Black Staff and Faculty Organization (BSFO), which organized the action, said in a flyer.

“Our silence is respectful of the time of year for our students,” who are taking finals, “but our voices will be heard and our message clear,” Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Harry Le Grande – one of a number of top administrators present — said in a statement for the group.

Some wore tape across their mouths. Others held signs reading “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Always Matter,” along with more Berkeley-specific messages: “#Ferguson2CAL” and “Not on Our Watch.”

https://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/12/15/black-staff-faculty-stage-silent-protest-at-sproul/

December 18, 2014

Rise of the car-sharing apps poses threat to auto sector

The humble smartphone could throw a spanner in the works of the car sector's post-crisis turnaround, with the big manufacturers facing a long-term threat from apps that make it easier and cheaper to share or hire vehicles than to buy them.

Investor sentiment is on a knife edge. Car sales are back in recovery mode in most major European markets, yet the fragility of the turnaround could yet be exposed by another economic slowdown while investors have flagged the potential danger posed by web-based services further down the road.

The rise of the likes of car hire app Zipcar and car-pooling rival BlaBlaCar are expected to present new challenges to mass-market carmakers such as Ford, GM, Volvo, Renault and Volkswagen while presenting fresh opportunities for existing rental networks.

Online taxi business Uber is another seeking a slice of the market with its UberPop operation, which links private drivers to passengers, though the U.S. company faces legal challenges in countries including France and Germany.

http://news.yahoo.com/rise-car-sharing-apps-poses-threat-auto-sector-152349635--finance.html

I use "city car share" not mentioned in the article. Fact most peoples cars spend more time sitting then being driven. You drive to work, car sits there 8-10 hours. You drive home, car sits there while you sleep. Cars sitting around doing nothing, often for city dwellers you pay for parking for your car to sit there. It's foolish way to use a machine.

December 18, 2014

American troops battle ISIS for first time as they see off attempted attack by militants on Iraqi ba

Source: Daily Mail

A number of militants have been killed in Islamic State's very first battle with U.S. ground troops after the extremists attempted to overrun an Iraqi military base.

The militants attacked Ein al-Asad military base on Sunday where more than 100 U.S. military support troops are based.

Despite launching the surprise attack just after midnight, ISIS's offensive was swiftly repelled when U.S. troops and F18 jets joined in the skirmish in support of the Iraqi Army.

Facing both Iraqi and US troops supported by F18 jets, an unknown number of ISIS attackers were killed during the two hour firefight before being forced to retreat.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2878897/American-troops-battle-ISIS-time-attempted-attack-militants-Iraqi-base.html