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Phoenix666 writes:

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Chicago Police Department is fighting a lawsuit to force them to reveal how they use Stingray cell tower-emulating devices:

Since 2005, the department has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on cell-site simulators manufactured by the Harris Corp. in Melbourne, Florida, records show. The devices — with names like StingRay and KingFish — capture cellphone signals.

Cops can use the technology, originally developed for the military, to locate cellphones. Police agencies in other states have revealed in court that StingRays and similar devices have been used to locate suspects, fugitives and victims in criminal investigations.

But privacy activists across the country have begun to question whether law enforcement agencies have used the devices to track people involved in demonstrations in violation of their constitutional rights. They also have concerns the technology scoops up the phone data of innocent citizens and police targets alike.

The Chicago Police Department has also been running a CIA-style black site, according to a recent report by the Guardian.

When the federal government began imprisoning people at Guantanamo in violation of the Constitution, some argued it was the only place, and that there were exceptional, extenuating circumstances. When the network of CIA black sites around the world and its practice of "extraordinary rendition," known to normal people as, "kidnapping," were revealed, some argued it was only for terrorists and other bad guys. When the NSA's mass violations of the Constitution were revealed by the Snowden leaks, some argued that it was for our own protection. Each time, they were justified as defense against the "Other."

Is this Chicago case a harbinger of things to come, that those tools and practices developed to violate the rights of the "Other" elsewhere, are now being applied to "Us", here?

martyb writes:

Ars Technica just published a story: Google warns of unauthorized TLS certificates trusted by almost all OSes. From the article:

The bogus transport layer security certificates are trusted by all major operating systems and browsers, although a fall-back mechanism known as public key pinning prevented the Chrome and Firefox browsers from accepting those that vouched for the authenticity of Google properties, Google security engineer Adam Langley wrote in a blog post published Monday. The certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings, an intermediate certificate authority that operates under the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). The Chinese domain registrar and certificate authority, in turn, is included in root stores for virtually all OSes and browsers.

[...] In Monday's post, Langley held out certificate transparency as one potential antidote. Other possible remedies include a more streamlined form of certificate pinning and several proposals similarly aimed at mending the most serious holes.

I am just an average user on the internet and I do not pretend to fully understand all the ramifications and intricacies of internet security. Still, as I understand it, there are hundreds of Certificate Authorities (CAs) out there, each of whom could issue certs for any domain. When I set up a domain, why can I not list the CA or CAs that *I* have authorized to issue certs for *my* domain? A cert issued by anyone else should be rejected. Maybe use some extension to DNSSEC? If not, through DNSSEC, is there some other way to restrict which CA can issue certs for my domain?

frojack writes:

When working with old fossilized bones, palaeontologists appear to be in no particular hurry.

The EurekaAlert reports that bones discovered ten years ago had languished in the North Carolina Museum of Natural History until they finally garnered some attention last year. When finally examined, palaeontologists from North Carolina State University discovered that the collection of bone fragments belonged to an undocumented species.

Carnufex carolinensis, or the "Carolina Butcher," was a 9-foot long, land-dwelling crocodylomorph that walked on its hind legs and likely preyed upon smaller inhabitants of North Carolina ecosystems such as armored reptiles and early mammal relatives.

To get a fuller picture of Carnufex's skull the researchers scanned the individual bones with the latest imaging technology - a high-resolution surface scanner. Then they created a three-dimensional model of the reconstructed skull, using the more complete skulls of close relatives to fill in the missing pieces.

Walking nearly upright, the 9 foot creature filled a large predator role 231 million years ago in the beginning of the Late Triassic.

This was before dinosaurs had come to rule the predator world. Other than the novelty of a large "crock" walking upright, the key finding of this discovery is that there were many candidates for top predator in this era in the equatorial region. (Which is where North Carolina was in those days). Dinosaurs won out in the southern areas, but in the northern portions of Pangaea that would eventually become North America, it wasn't the dinosaurs at the top of the food chain.

Artist's rendering of the Carolina Butcher found at first link. Full text of descriptive paper in pdf form is available.

moondrake writes:

Some people tend to believe it is no problem for government agencies to collect and store large amounts of private information about people. Surely the government will not abuse such information? One might assume that such information is safely stored, and that is is unlikely to fall into the wrong hands. However, the current trend for information sharing among secret services drastically increases the risk for a large security breach.

There are now reports that such info has already leaked to criminal organizations. In 2010, corrupt government officials in Curacao are said to have given criminals full access to the database of the secret service. This database is said to have also contained information from the Dutch Secret Service (AIVD) and the CIA . It is still unclear (and we are unlikely to be told) just how much data they got their hands on.

[Dutch MP for the Socialist Party (SP),] Van Raak explained:

This week I received documents of the secret service of Curacao (VDC). These internal documents provide a revealing picture of how the gambling mafia managed to buy the secret service.

From text messages that were intercepted on January 18, 2010, it shows that Lawrence Pietersz asked George Jamaloodin for money to pay off a debt and that Jamaloodin was more than willing to lend even more than what he had asked for. This request goes directly against his position as an officer of the secret service and makes him susceptible to being bribed. Lawrence Pietersz was chief of the department of internal and external security of the secret service of Curacao.

George Jamaloodin, who is closely linked to the gambling industry, became finance minister in October 2010. This information comes from a report made by an officer of the VDC.
[...]
In the weekend of October 29 and 30, 2011, there was, to my knowledge, the largest theft that ever took place at a secret service. All information of the Curacao VDC (founded in 1963) was copied, destroyed or stolen. Including information from the Dutch Secret Service (AIVD) and the CIA. The robbery took place by Colombians, commissioned by Gerrit Schotte, along with a number of Dutch men of a private agency.

c0lo writes:

The Independent reports:

For years, Finland has been the by-word for a successful education system, perched at the top of international league tables for literacy and numeracy.
...
Which makes it all the more remarkable that Finland is about to embark on one of the most radical education reform programmes ever undertaken by a nation state – scrapping traditional “teaching by subject” in favour of “teaching by topic”.

Subject-specific lessons – an hour of history in the morning, an hour of geography in the afternoon – are already being phased out for 16-year-olds in the city’s upper schools. They are being replaced by what the Finns call “phenomenon” teaching – or teaching by topic. For instance, a teenager studying a vocational course might take “cafeteria services” lessons, which would include elements of maths, languages (to help serve foreign customers), writing skills and communication skills.

More academic pupils would be taught cross-subject topics such as the European Union - which would merge elements of economics, history (of the countries involved), languages and geography.

There are other changes too, not least to the traditional format that sees rows of pupils sitting passively in front of their teacher, listening to lessons or waiting to be questioned. Instead there will be a more collaborative approach, with pupils working in smaller groups to solve problems while improving their communication skills.

---- More after the break ----

Phoenix666 writes:

ScienceAlert reports Costa Rica has generated 100% of its power from renewables for 75 straight days:

The ICE [Costa Rican Electricity Institute] says the country's zero-emission milestone was enabled thanks to heavy rainfalls at four hydroelectric power facilities in the first quarter of 2015. These downpours have meant that, for the months of January, February and so far in March, there has been no need to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.

Instead, Costa Rica has been powered primarily by hydro power — both pumped storage and run-of-the-river plants — and a mixture of geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.

The original ICE press release (in Spanish) is here. It sounds like Costa Rica has vaulted to the forefront of the energy revolution that Germany and Denmark had been leading. The comparative statics would say oil companies have been taking a bath recently, with an increase in global supply and ongoing demand destruction sending prices well below the previous competitive equilibrium.

morpheus writes:

A Germanwings (Lufthansa subsidiary) Airbus A-320-200 airliner has crashed in the French Alps. It is reported to have carried 154 people on board (including 6 crew members). Unfortunately, no survivors have been found so far. There were reports about the crew sending out distress calls shortly before the crash. The flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf was last registered on the radar at 6800 feet.

http://www.laprovence.com/article/actualites/3326948/un-airbus-a320-secrase-dans-les-alpes-de-haute-provence.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/24/us-france-crash-airbus-lufthansa-idUSKBN0MK0ZP20150324

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/german-a320-airbus-plane-crashes-french-alps

[Edit 16:35 UTC. janrinok. Source: BBC] The 'black box' has been recovered. The aircraft descent took place over a period of approximately 8 minutes, and communication between the crew and the French air traffic controllers was 'broken' when the aircraft was at an altitude of around 6000 feet. The TV pictures being broadcast show a large number of helicopters being deployed to a snow free landing-zone but the surrounding mountains have significant snow cover and there is a low cloudbase. French authorities have said that the recovery of the bodies will take 'several days'.

Phoenix666 writes:

Quartz India reports the revival of johads, earthen dams, in India's largest state, Rajasthan, is making a tremendous difference in the viability of thousands of villages in that arid province.

The impact of these johads was spectacular. The water table—the depth underground from where water may be extracted—rose from about 100 metres to between about 13 metres and 3 metres. The area under single cropping increased from 11% to 70%, and the area under double cropping went from 3% to 50%. Forest cover expanded from 7% to 40%.

In 2001, when [Rajendra] Singh was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award, the citation mentioned:

Now, 4,500 working johads dot Alwar and ten adjacent districts. Fed by a protected watershed and the revitalising impact of the village reservoirs, five once-dormant rivers now flow year round. Land under cultivation has grown by five times and farm incomes are rising. For work, men no longer need to leave home. And for water, these days women need walk no farther than the village well.

We often think of "technology" as anything that has blinking lights or goes really fast, but when you think about the broader definition of the term, "technology is the rational process of creating means to order and transform matter, energy, and information to realize certain valued ends," it's clear technological solutions from ages past remain as clever, effective, and relevant to today's world as the latest multi-core CPUs. It's also evident that despite the buzz and controversy surrounding the modern concept of climate engineering, it's something we as a species have always done, with dramatic human benefit, and should continue.

Phoenix666 writes:

The Telegraph reports Silicon Valley executives are taking extreme measures to protect their privacy:

The famously discreet technology set are going to extraordinary lengths to keep their affairs secret, regularly employing what is legally referred to as a “domestic non-disclosure agreement”.

The agreements, or gag orders as they are more commonly known, do not concern matters relating to their businesses however, but rather to innocuous home renovation work.

The documents can compel contractors to keep quiet on everything from the details of a house’s floorplan to the styling of the garden shrubbery and the colour of the paint. Even the mere mention of their client’s name could see a painter, electrician or gardener slapped with an expensive lawsuit.

It seems as though in their eyes, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. Still it seems their efforts will ultimately fail given that they live in a world surrounded by other people, the vast majority of whom are not billionaires. It's only a matter of time before somebody builds a crowdsourcing platform to invade their privacy.

Phoenix666 writes:

The Kernel reflects on the Anarchist Cookbook and its legacy in the Information Age:

The Anarchist Cookbook is largely a book of recipes—for drugs, for explosives, for trouble. It contains directions on how [to] make LSD and tips for growing magic mushrooms. There are sections about constructing bombs out of fertilizer, putting bombs in mailboxes, and “how to send a car to Hell.”...

The Anarchist’s Cookbook‘s proliferation initially spread only as far as people who were willing and able to physically sell it, limiting its reach mostly to independent bookshops and hand-me-downs from knowing older brothers. As the book rippled across America, a pair of Duke University graduate students in the late 1970s were figuring out how to link their computers together into a new kind of network.

Using homemade modems, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis created a decentralized system called Usenet that plugged into the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet linking a handful of universities across the United States. Usenet functioned like a bulletin board service where users could post messages for each other. It started by linking Duke with the nearby University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but it quickly grew exponentially.

Truscott and Ellis called it the “poor man’s ARPANET.” Getting a computer to hook into that network took upward of $100,000 and the explicit backing of a major research institution. Usenet, on the other hand, only cost as much as a computer that could run the Unix operating system, a modem to get online, and however much the telephone company charged for the time spent online.

Since 9/11 The Anarchist Cookbook surfaces in the public discourse every 5 years as new journalists rediscover it and write breathy articles about its ties to threat-to-civilization-du-jour. At the moment, that's ISIS. But even before the Internet there was as much information in the US Army Field Manual about how to build IEDs and booby traps as there was in the Cookbook. Now with YouTube, Instructables, several billion other how-to sites and files, and even Mythbusters, most nerds and geeks would say any one work is irrelevant--the meme's the thing.

So if suitable, common materials and the information to assemble them into weapons are ubiquitous, it would seem the missing ingredient that transforms them into realities is motivation, and the more you motivate someone the more they create the reality you would like to prevent. Food for thought...

"gewg_" writes:

The Orange County Register reports

Gerald Willits was 76 and resided in Buena Park [California] when he died Aug. 14, 2014

[...]It's likely he worked in the plumbing business, according to some of the signage and advertising printed on the sides of some his trucks. He has a daughter, but she lives in another state. [...] Under California law, an original will is needed to transfer assets to the rightful heir and Willits only kept a copy [said Elizabeth Henderson, chief deputy public administrator for Orange County.]

[...]In November, Deputy Public Administrator Investigator Brett Williams found 69 vehicles parked in the front, side, and backyards of the plumber's half-acre Buena Park property [...] Ford Model Ts and Model As, Volkswagen Buses and Beetles, and dozens of other models

Those vehicles were moved to the Public Administrator's lot in Santa Ana, where staff have been attempting to identify them and determine their value ever since.

GNUnymous Coward writes:

The Free Software Foundation's annual conference LibrePlanet is over. Following a tradition two awards are given annually at the conference. The announcement of the event and the winners is here.

The winner of the Award for the Advancement of Free Software in 2014 is Belgian PhD Sébastien Jodogne for his work on medical imaging with his project Orthanc. The winner of the Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2014 is Reglue which gives recycled GNU/Linux computers to underprivileged children and their families in Austin, TX.

wantkitteh writes:

The BBC reports:

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved Amazon's plans to begin testing drones for online deliveries.

The FAA said it had granted Amazon a certificate for people with pilot's licenses to test the unmanned aircraft.

The drones must be flown at 400 feet or below during daylight hours, and must remain within sight of the pilot.

Under US law, operating drones for commercial purposes is illegal.

However, those rules are under revision by the FAA, which is expected to issue new rules regarding the operation of unmanned aircraft for commercial and recreational purposes.

The initial announcement of PrimeAir was made back in December 2013. Many at the time were skeptical of whether the service would get over the legal hurdles in place, a task which appears to have been accomplished.

The letter sent by Amazon to the FAA (PDF) includes some details of Amazon's current plans for the service. The test drones will weigh a maximum of 55lbs, use battery power, travel at over 50mph and will carry a 5lbs payload — enough to cover 86% of Amazon's range of goods. Where and how the testing will take place is not stated beyond mention of "six FAA‐selected test sites" and the supervision of "a designated pilot in command [who] holds a current FAA private pilot certificate".

Although this is the most promising sign yet that Amazon may get their drone delivery service off the ground (sorry) in the US, a listing has also been made on the Prime Air job vacancies page for an Operations Director based in Cambridge, England.

SuperCharlie writes:

The Opera browser has had its ups and downs but had always remained a strong and stable option in the browser wars. In the last few years, Opera took a turn for the corporate side and left Linux users in the cold, but the wait for this venerable browser is over. I am glad to share that the Opera beta 29.0 for Linux is now available for download and bug reporting from http://www.opera.com/download/linux/. Sporting a new and updated interface, functions, and basically a complete overhaul from its predecessor, this new version for Linux is a welcome addition to our Linux browser options.

sigma writes:

Doctors treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone have to work and record medical information while wearing polythene “moon suits,” gloves, face masks, and goggles to protect themselves from infection. With suits that don't let their skin breathe, and local temperatures consistently over 32 degrees Celsius [about 90° F] the medicos become uncomfortably hot, which restricts the time they can work.

To make matters worse, due to the risk of contamination, doctors would take their paper notes, then walk the paper to the edge of the enclosure and shout the information to someone on the other side of a fence. The paper could not be allowed outside the high risk zone. Dr Jay Achar, who was part of a team that traveled to Sierra Leone for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), asked for help, so members of his his support group contacted Google's charitable arm, Google.org, which had already worked with MSF in Haiti.

Google helped develop a polycarbonate-encased tablet that communicates wirelessly with a battery powered server outside the high risk zone. The tablet, which runs a specialised open source medical records tool called OpenMRS, can be dunked in a chlorine-based antiseptic and taken outside for use and maintenance.

While the Ebola epidemic appears to be waning, both the technology and the collaboration techniques used to develop it could be valuable in future emergencies.

http://www.wired.com/2015/03/google-builds-new-tablet-fight-ebola/?mbid=social_twitter