Technology // Current TV

The Hot Dog Stand: How Much Would You Charge?

by Amaterasu Solar Let Us presume a world where free energy is available to all.... more

Amaterasu
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20 days ago
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Was US Spy Drone Captured by Iranian Flying Saucer? - interview with Iranian nuclear engineer Mehran Tavakoli Keshe

An United States advanced militairy drone, spying above Iran territory in no-fly zone,... more

worrg
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1 month ago
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The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla

Phenomenon - The Lost Archives - Episode 14: The Missing Secrets of Nikola Tesla A... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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28 comments

We Just Built Skynet in the Desert, Now What?

Ten years after 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA) is close to putting the finishing touches on what will be the single biggest spy center in the country. According to James Bamford of WIRED, this new one million-square foot spy complex in the Utah Desert will actually be capable of monitoring, intercepting and de-encrypting just about any message sent over any communication network in the country. It will be capable of keeping tabs on any civilian in the U.S. or any foreigner visiting the USA. And it will all be hooked up to federal computers in Washington, giving it access to the records and databases of the most powerful government agencies in the country. If all this is starting to sound a lot like Skynet in the Terminator movies, that’s because, well, it is - minus the Schwarzenegger robots, of course.

The sheer amount of data that the NSA – and by extension the CIA, FBI and Pentagon – will be able to collect on both foreigners and its own civilians is staggering. The $2 billion center, which goes by the disarmingly bland name of the Utah Data Center, is the final piece in the puzzle for the Pentagon, which has been attempting to build a Global Information Grid ever since 9/11. Remember the Total Information Awareness program of 2003? Well, it’s now here in physical form – and it’s heavily guarded. In military parlance, it’s not a “soft” target - the facility has been hardened to the point where a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling at 50 miles per hour couldn't muscle its way inside. At its peak, this new surveillance center will be able to handle so much data that the NSA practically had to coin a new word to describe it: yottabytes. There are so many servers running this system that the annual cooling costs are estimated to be $40 million.

That’s quite an electricity bill for a "data center."

That's because this federal spy center goes far beyond what’s already being collected about us online, to explore the “Deep Web” that’s all but invisible to typical search engines. The spy center will also delve into the world of code-breaking and reverse-encryption. Even things that we think are far beyond any type of cyber-penetration will be readily available to the powers-that-be. That’s where things get downright scary. We assume that spambots and spiders slither behind us everywhere we go online, but what do we really know about all the other information that is being tracked about us? What information is being collected about us by security monitors in the streets and satellites overhead? The scope of what's being collected by the NSA is breathlessly thorough in detail, reaching into every area of our lives:

"Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy."

This digital "pocket litter" that each of us leaves behind us may sound harmless – but that's until all of this highly unstructured data gets dumped into a supercomputing capable of mining all this data and producing patterns and insights. This “pocket litter” is no longer trash once it can be used to construct ever-more precise profiles of everyday civilians and predict future behaviors.

“Cybersecurity” and “the war on terror” are handy little buzzwords for enabling governments to extend their cyber-surveillance over every aspect of our lives. At the end of the day, pure democracy and absolute authoritarianism are really just flip sides of the same coin. This is precisely why dystopian novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We are so terrifying. Authoritarian regimes always start out with a willingness to help - not enslave - its civilians. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. A government that claims to protect its citizens by spying on them is a government that needs to be watched, monitored and held under strict surveillance by its own citizens.

http://bigthink.com/endless-innovation/we-just-built-skynet-in-the-desert-now-whatTen years after 9/11, the National Security Agency (NSA) is close to putting the... more

JRBarilla
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2 months ago
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1 comment

You are not a Facebook CUSTOMER, You are the PRODUCT

There is a reason that Facebook is free. It is because you are not a customer, you are... more

WrapNYC
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5 days ago
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40 Thousand Ultra-Orthodox Jews Rally at Citi Field Stadium to Discuss of 'Filth of Internet'

Interesting to note that the men and women are SEGREGATED! They should have discussed... more

maasanova
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8 days ago
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1 comment

Sound The Alarm

A 2005 shot of Brendan Margison surfing in front of the now-damaged nuclear power... more

covelogibbs
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23 days ago
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5 comments

Disney Researchers Put Gesture Recognition in Door Knobs, Chairs, and Fish Tanks

Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it.

A team of researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition.

Your smartphone works thanks to capacitive coupling. The screen's surface is coated with a transparent conductor that carries an electrical signal, and that signal is redirected when a finger is touching the screen. The phone monitors the change in signal and can determine where a touch occurs.

This is typically a binary configuration, as the screen is either being touched or it isn't. Instead, the team at Disney measures across a wide range of signal frequencies to derive more information. This means that each gesture—a tap, a pinch, a grasp, a flat palm—has a different multi-frequency "capacitive profile" to be recognized.

Plus, different body tissues have different capacitive properties, so monitoring a range of frequencies can also detect a number of different paths that the electrical charge takes through the body.

It's called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (SFCS), and while it means analyzing hundreds of data points at any time, modern microprocessors are now fast enough to handle the data load.

Some of the proof-of-concept applications in the lab include a smart doorknob that knows whether it has been grasped, touched, or pinched; a chair that dims the lights when you recline into it; a table that knows if you're resting one hand, two hands, or your elbows on it; and a tablet that can be pinched from back to front to open an on-screen menu.

The technology can also be shoved in wristbands, so you can make sign-language-style gestures to control the phone in your pocket—two fingers on your palm to change a song, say, or a clap to stop the music. It can also go in liquids, to detect when fingers and hands are submerged in water.

"In our laboratory experiments, Touché demonstrated recognition rates approaching 100 percent," claims Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research in Pittsburgh. "That suggests it could immediately be used to create new and exciting ways for people to interact with objects and the world at large."

Chris Harrison, from Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute says, "devices keep getting smaller and increasingly are embedded throughout the environment, which has made it necessary for us to find ways to control or interact with them, and that is where Touché could really shine."Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a smartphone that can be... more

thetrimsmith
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24 days ago
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2 comments

The 2,000 Page Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman

The 2,000 Page Suicide Note by Mitchell Heisman http://www.suicidenote.info/... more

entropyincarnate
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30 days ago
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3 comments

The Fukushima Nuclear Disaster Is Far From Over

ENE NEWS... . HuffPo: Large amounts of radioactive materials could be deposited... more

EthicalVegan
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1 month ago
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19 comments

BBC News - China's small electric vehicles are gaining ground

The U.S. was once a great innovator ... China is about to kick our a$$ , because THEY... more

artemis6
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1 month ago
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4 comments

New technology allows better extreme weather forecasts

Stronger or more frequent weather extremes will likely occur under climate change,... more

JanforGore
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1 month ago
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‘Google glasses will destroy our society’ – M.O.C. #133 | Scholars and Rogues

Dame Judy Dench sex tape?! Damn, will the glasses help me unsee that image?

hoosierdaddy
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1 month ago
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1 comment

U.S. Navy building a cutting-edge stealth destroyer in Maine - CBS News

BATH, Maine - An enormous, expensive and technology-laden warship that some Navy... more

FreePressTV
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1 month ago
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8 comments

Vagina Dentata? Techno-Gizmos for the Elimination of Rape

In the future, there will be devices that protect women, and deter and punish rapists

googygood
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1 month ago
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Kara is self-aware: technology is climbing out of the “uncanny valley,” but toward what?

With each passing day, it seems we get closer and closer to the point where we will be... more

hoosierdaddy
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1 month ago
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Nicholas Merril Wants to Build a National Privacy-First ISP

From Declan McCullagh of CNET:

This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy first. Always.

Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.

Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.

The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

A decade of revelations has underlined the intimate relationship between many telecommunications companies and Washington officialdom. Leading providers including AT&T and Verizon handed billions of customer telephone records to the National Security Agency; only Qwest refused to participate. Verizon turned over customer data to the FBI without court orders. An AT&T whistleblower accused the company of illegally opening its network to the NSA, a practice that the U.S. Congress retroactively made legal in 2008.

By contrast, Merrill says his ISP, to be run by a non-profit called the Calyx Institute with for-profit subsidiaries, will put customers first. "Calyx will use all legal and technical means available to protect the privacy and integrity of user data," he says.

Merrill is in the unique position of being the first ISP exec to fight back against the Patriot Act's expanded police powers -- and win...

http://theschismatic.blogspot.com/2012/04/nicholas-merril-wants-to-build-national.html

This is a fantastic idea, and if he can launch this it will be yet another significant step towards the Internet fulfilling its mythic expectations as a savior of honest democracy for the world.From Declan McCullagh of CNET: This Internet provider pledges to put your privacy... more

JRBarilla
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1 month ago
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Most tornado warnings can be canceled or have expired with the metro area.

Tornadoes ripped on the Dallas-Fort Worth location Tuesday, putting tractor trailers... more

aewenego
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1 month ago
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Goh arrived for Oikos University Monday morning getting a specific manager, Jordan said.

He was additionally upset that students in earlier times, when he attended the... more

davisbrow
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1 month ago
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What the hell is going on at the Great Ape Trust Bonobo Sanctuary Circus?

The increasingly infamous bonobo research facility, ostensibly being run by executive... more

naturallady
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1 month ago
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