Only
politicians can speak “as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."
Obama
to target foreign nationals’ use of new technologies in human
rights abuses
April 23, 2012 by Dissent
Scott Wilson reports:
President Obama
will issue an executive order Monday that will allow U.S. officials
for the first time to impose sanctions against foreign nationals
found to have used new technologies, from cellphone tracking to
Internet monitoring, to help carry out grave human rights abuses.
Read more on The
Washington Post.
The executive order will be announced
today while around the country, civil libertarians’ irony meters
will be soaring as we think about domestic surveillance-related
abuses. And what will Congress do about American companies that are
supplying the technology to these foreign nationals and entities?
Will they dare limit commerce or will lobbyists prevail again?
Because
we have been unable to do it manually? Now we will auto-magically
match your picture to the barcodes on your boarding
pass, ensuring perfect security! No one will ever fly again!
"Last year, a Nigerian man
boarded a plane from N.Y. to L.A. using an invalid ID and a boarding
pass issued to another person. A week later he was caught again with
10 expired boarding passes. In response to this and similar events,
the Transportation Security Administration has begun testing a new
system at Washington's Dulles International Airport that verifies an
air traveler's identity by matching
photo IDs to boarding passes and ensures that boarding passes are
authentic. The test will soon be expanded to Houston and Puerto
Rico."
[From the article:
CAT/BPSS is
designed to detect fake boarding passes and falsified IDs. The
scanner compares machine-readable and human-readable data [If I can
fake one, I can fake both Bob] from a traveler's ID with
the boarding pass and verifies that neither has been altered. The
system can be used with boarding passes printed on a PC or issued by
the airlines, or paperless boarding passes sent to passengers' mobile
devices.
I always wondered what happened to the
company that advertised “X-Ray Specs!!!” on the back page of
comic books. No doubt TSA will want the 'industrial strength' floor
model for an extra million or so each...
Chip
could let smartphones see through walls -- and clothes
… Scientists from the University of
Texas at Dallas have designed an imaging
chip that measures invisible terahertz light waves that is small
enough to fit on a smartphone and inexpensive enough that normal
people could actually afford to buy one.
Terahertz waves can be detected through
opaque surfaces such as paper, walls and clothing -- enabling a
person with an accurate terahertz measuring device to see beyond what
our visible eye can see.
Nothing to it! We just run down to
Drones-R-Us and grab all the parts we need.
"Iran's military has started
to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year
after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on
Sunday. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards
aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of
decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December
near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported."
Business
is good!
Disappearing
Net Names Hint at Amazon Data Center Expansion
Amazon may be expanding the worldwide
network of data centers underpinning its massively popular cloud
service, adding new facilities in Hong Kong and Sydney, according to
clues hidden in a handful of obscure internet records.
… Currently, it operates computing
facilities near Washington, San Francisco, Portland, San Paolo,
Dublin, Singapore, and Tokyo. But it’s typically tight-lipped
about where it plans to expand next.
… The Amazon subsidiary is now a
billion-dollar business that plays a role in about one
percent of all internet’s traffic. It’s
growing at a rate of 30 percent a year, and all signs
indicate that it will continue to grow by leaps and bounds.
Tools
for web researchers?
Hopper is a very simple website that
does one thing, and it does it in the quickest, easiest way possible.
Basically, it allows users to copy and paste anything into a box,
and save it for later access. You can drag and drop files, or copy
an image, and it will be in your Hopper when you need to come back to
it.
You can try the service out without
doing anything, but if you want your stuff to carry across different
computers, you will need to make an account. [It's
free Bob]
Perspective
… The fact is that an ever
increasing number of people are abandoning “traditional journalism”
in favour of getting their news from online social media. The two
big bad boys in this neighborhood are of course Facebook and Twitter,
who have been responsible for breaking some of the biggest news
stories of the past few years.
Local
“global education” provider... (Boulder)
SparkFun
Electronics Unveils a New Education Site
The folks over at SparkFun
Electronics, one of my favorite go-to places for parts,
inspiration, and cool stuff, have
unveiled a new education website. The site is already stocked
with a great set of materials in the curriculum area with other
areas, such as tutorials and and events, marked as coming soon.
[From the Learn
website:
Our
goal is to create fun and hands-on ways of helping people learn
skills that will last a lifetime. We love to watch people invent
innovative projects and hope our site will offer some help along the
way.
What
would you do with a million dollars?
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/04/kickstarting-education/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29
Kickstarting
Education
… I love that anyone can come up
with an idea and put up a page, explaining their project and asking
for funding. Backers can pick projects based on their own merits
(and personal tastes) rather than relying on what some company exec
has decided people will buy. It allows people to sell to the long
tail, and it helps creative folks figure out whether or not there’s
actually a market for their big idea.
… Of course, Kickstarter is pretty
big business these days. In 2011 nearly $100 million* was pledged,
and I can imagine it’s only going to keep growing, at least in the
immediate future. Musicians, filmmakers, board game designers,
actors, painters, illustrators, writers … the list of folks who
have benefited from Kickstarter is huge. If only we could add
“teachers” to that list.
No comments:
Post a Comment