Sunday, November 18, 2018

I guess governments do this when they no longer trust anonymous citizens to follow their laws. “We know who you are, we know what you did, and since we know you are guilty, we impose this penalty.”
Angus Berwick of Reuters reports:
  • Venezuela is rolling out a new, smart-card ID known as the “carnet de la patria,” or “fatherland card,” manufactured by Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp.
  • The ID transmits data about cardholders to government computer servers, and is increasingly linked to subsidized food, health, and other social programs most Venezuelans rely on to survive.
  • The fatherland card, critics argue, illustrates how China, through state-linked companies like ZTE, exports technological know-how that can help like-minded governments track, reward, and punish citizens.
Read more on Business Insider.




The start of the 2020 Election disruption?
Suspected Russian Hackers Impersonate State Department Aide
U.S. cybersecurity experts say hackers impersonating a State Department official have targeted U.S. government agencies, businesses and think tanks in an attack that bears similarity to past campaigns linked to Russia.
The "spear phishing" attempts began on Wednesday, sending e-mail messages purported to come from a department public affairs official.
The State Department said: "The Department is aware of the recent malicious cyber event involving the spoofing (impersonation) of a Department employee reported by U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye. No Department networks were compromised by this malicious cyber attempt." [The wording makes me wonder what was compromised. Bob]




Nothing really new here. This is the high end of the “Alexa, turn on the lights” AI spectrum. If I’m not ready to trust a self-driving car, I’m going to really have to be convinced that some mini-Terminator can be trusted.
Are Killer Robots the Future of War? Parsing the Facts on Autonomous Weapons
… The decision to use a lethal weapon in battle against combatants has always been a decision made by a human being. That may soon change. Modern advancements in artificial intelligence, machine image recognition and robotics have poised some of the world’s largest militaries on the edge of a new future, where weapon systems may find and kill people on the battlefield without human involvement. Russia, China and the United States are all working on autonomous platforms that pair weapons with sensors and targeting computers; Britain and Israel are already using weapons with autonomous characteristics: missiles and drones that can seek and attack an adversary’s radar, vehicle or ship without a human command triggering the immediate decision to fire.


(Coincidentally)
YouTube is now showing ad-supported Hollywood movies
Last month, YouTube quietly began showing ad-supported movies for the first time, giving viewers access to Hollywood titles including "The Terminator" and "Legally Blonde" for free.




Global Warming! Global Warming! There haven’t been quite as many stories recently.
NASA warns long cold winter could hit space in months bringing record low temperatures
… “The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” explains Mlynczak.
“We’re not there quite yet,” he said of the record cold, “but it could happen in a matter of months."
The most famous example of a prolonged sunspot minimum is the Maunder Minimum, referring to a period around 1645 to 1715 during which sunspots become exceedingly rare.
Maunder coincided with the middle part of the Little Ice Age, when Europe and North America experienced colder temperatures - fuelling speculation that the two were connected.


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