Author: m1k3y
Read moreCyberCity has its own train network, a hospital, a bank, a military complex, and a coffee shop complete with–and this is crucial to the exercise at hand–free Wi-Fi. The town is virtually populated by 15,000 people, each with their own data records and electronic hospital files. Much of the model town literally came from a hobby shop, but the technology and systems that make it run are modeled on the real world. The power grid components, for example, are the same ones you’d find in an actual city. “It is lighting tiny little lights inside tiny little buildings,” Skoudis says, “but it’s the same technology with the same vulnerabilities.”
The model has five cameras mounted around it, feeding a live video stream for students who will run through cyber-attack missions from remote locations (this is, Skoudis adds, more like what will happen in the real world, anyway, as officials try to defuse problems caused over networks from thousands of miles away). Scenarios controlled over computers will play out on the board in this tiny town.
In their paper, the Keck team proposes using an Atlas V rocket to launch a craft that once in space would be slow moving, powered by solar heated ions. Once the target is reached, a bag would be opened that would engulf the asteroid – which would likely be no bigger than 7 meters wide – then drag it back and place it into orbit around the moon. Such a mission, the researchers suggest, would likely take six to ten years depending on the distance to the asteroid and cost in the neighborhood of $2.6 billion, which isn’t much more than the Mars Curiosity rover mission. (via NASA considering capturing and placing asteroid into moon orbit)
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It was never really about “the terrorists”. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.
Read more "It was never really about “the terrorists”. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you."Naomi Wolf, Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy – New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent, for the Guardian, December 29, 2012.
WikiLeaks published an assessment report from the Homeland Security Department (DHS) on the Occupy movement that was put together in October 2011. The assessment was attached to a Stratfor email, one of five million or so emails the organization obtained and has been releasing since February 27, 2012. Via.
See also, Honoré Daumier, Tiens peuple, tiens bon peuple, en veux-tu en voilà!
I’m pretty much reposting/tweeting this piece wherever I find it. Because she’s right.
Read moreIf you attach certain molecules to cadmium telluride quantum dots, they will latch onto certain targets, making it possible to detect trace amounts of substances ranging from pesticides to cancer cells.
As versatile as cadmium telluride quantum dots are, however, they’re not easy to make. It’s especially tedious to fashion them so that they’re not toxic to living cells, since both cadmium and tellurium are nasty metals. In the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology, a group of scientists at Kings College London offer a remarkably easy way to make them.
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Earthworms can sense metals in their meals. They immediately respond by making special enzymes. Exposing a worm to cadmium, for example, causes it to produce enzymes called metallothionein in its gut. The metallothionein grabs hold of the cadmium and stores it away in special cavities inside the cells, where it undergoes chemical reactions to make it less dangerous to the worm. Then immune cells attack the cells and engulf them. The worm eventually excretes them safely out of its body.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 