givemesomethingtoread:

Inside the rush to recruit, train, and deploy a new generation of cybersecurity experts to protect and defend our digital borders.

(via criminalwisdom)

Hacked Mattel Brain Toy Delivers Painful Electric Shocks for Thinking

• A toy that reads your brain waves to manipulate a foam ball sounds fun — until said toy begins manipulating other things, too. Like your body’s pain receptors. Doesn’t sound too thrilling to us, but a few geeks apparently thought it’d be a great idea.
• According to GeekoSystem, some folks at Harcos Laboratories took Mattel’s Mindflex and hacked it to deliver a painful electric shock to the user. Strap the device on your head, and challenge yourself not to think — not even a little bit. If your brain is a little active, you’ll get a little shock. The more activity inside your head, the more intense of a shock you’ll feel. If you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a step-by-step how-to on the Harcos blog. Attempt at your own risk.

• Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.
• Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.
• The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

(“Your papers, please.”)

• Urgent warnings have been circulated throughout Nato and the European Union for secret intelligence material to be protected from a recent surge in cyberwar attacks originating in China.
• The attacks have also hit government and military institutions in the United States, where analysts said that the West had no effective response and that EU systems were especially vulnerable because most cyber security efforts were left to member states.
• Nato diplomatic sources told The Times: “Everyone has been made aware that the Chinese have become very active with cyber-attacks and we’re now getting regular warnings from the office for internal security.” The sources said that the number of attacks had increased significantly over the past 12 months, with China among the most active players.
• In the US, an official report released on Friday said the number of attacks on Congress and other government agencies had risen exponentially in the past year to an estimated 1.6 billion every month.
• Robert Mueller, FBI Director, has warned that, in addition to the danger of foreign states making cyber-attacks, al-Qaeda could in the future pose a similar threat. In a speech to a security conference last week, Mr Mueller said terrorist groups had used the internet to recruit members and to plan attacks, but added: “Terrorists have shown a clear interest in pursuing hacking skills and they will either train their own recruits or hire outsiders with an eye towards combining physical attacks with cyber-attacks.”
• He said that a cyber-attack could have the same impact as a “well-placed bomb”. Mr Mueller also accused “nation-state hackers” of seeking out US technology, intelligence, intellectual property and even military weapons and strategies…
• Dr Lewis said that neither the US nor any of its Western allies had formed an effective response to the Chinese threat, which has its origins in a massive boost to Chinese technology ordered by Deng Xiaoping, the late Chinese leader, in 1986. The West’s own cyber offensives have so far been directed largely at terrorists rather than nation states, giving China virtually free rein to penetrate Western systems with its own world-class hackers and increasingly popular Chinese-made components. “You almost have to admire them,” Dr Lewis said. “They have been very consistent in their goals.”

Related:

e9/11 Preparation: Bush Officials Plan Simulated Cyber-Attack

Pentagon-Backed Venture Aims for ‘Google Underground’

• The Department of Defense already has omnipresent eyes in the sky, underwater and, of course, on the ground. It’s only when you start going underground that the surveillance powers of the Pentagon begin to wane — at least until now.
• Just last month, the Pentagon’s risk-taking research arm, DARPA, announced plans for a program called ‘Transparent Earth’. They’re spending $4 million this year on preliminary plans for a digital, 3D map that would display “the physical, chemical and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 kilometer depth.”
• But Geospatial Corporation is already doing it. The company, started in 2005 by longtime water-pipeline manufacturer Mark Smith, uses a proprietary gadget called  ‘Smart Probe’ to map deep earth via underground pipes. The company’s probe can be inserted into pipes as small as 1 1/2 inches, and then travel their length while taking super-speedy coordinates — 800 per second — and saving them onto a USB key. The probe is removed, the data extracted, and a 3D map of the underground region is created. The probe can travel through pipes that are empty, or contain fluid or gas.

(nowhere to run to, baby, nowhere to hide!)

• The 11th annual “Mad Scientist” Future Technology seminar from 20 – 23 January 2010 addressed the challenge of blended S&T surprise. Specifically, it brought together a dynamic group of scientists, science fiction writers, futurists, academicians and students from the private sector and government to look into the future and explore ideas about the “blending” of science and technology in ways that might challenge the United States. This executive summary provides an overview of the judgments, insights and implications from that seminar.

Robot wars, out of control nanotech, EMP bombs/guns, dark webs, Mad Scientist futures, all the good stuff.

Unabomber Raises Uneasy Questions for Stanford Scholar

The Unabomber warned that technology had mutated civilization – and French Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès thinks he’s right.

• For Apostolidès, Kaczynski has been a 15-year interest. For most of us, the Unabomber is frozen in the image that gripped America on April 3, 1996: an unkempt, bearded recluse from the Montana wilderness, a man who by all appearances could have been a backwoods yokel or a hermit-saint, arrested following a 17-year spree of deadly bombings (many targeted at universities) that had earned him the tag “Unabomber.”
• Apostolidès, who has a background as a psychologist as well as a playwright and scholar of French classical literature and drama, was not surprised by the profile of the killer – a brilliant, Harvard-educated mathematician who had been a professor at the University of California-Berkeley.
• Apostolidès had become intrigued with the Unabomber’s screed, which critiques the pervasive effect of technology on our world and humanity’s increasing dependence on it. He had already translated Kaczynski’s “audacious” manifesto for the Parisian press a few weeks before the killer’s arrest. (Kaczynski said he would halt the killings if his Industrial Society and Its Future was published; the Washington Post and the New York Times obliged in 1995.)
• Despite some sympathy for Kaczynski’s views on industrial society, Apostolidès embraces technology – “because I think there is no other way. It brings positive and negative things. They cannot be separated.
• “Our global history as animals is to go beyond our animality in order to create something we don’t know. It has been the case since the caveman,” he said.
• “There is a great leap leading God knows where,” he said.
• Inevitably, technology’s takeover has its casualties. Kaczynski created them, and became one of them – a former professor now an inmate of a maximum-security prison. Kaczynski was haunted by the notion of the noble savage, a myth that has echoed through Western thought from Rousseau to today’s blockbuster Avatar. The Unabomber, said Apostolidès, is a direct heir of the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• However, the way back to the wilderness is a fantasy: “There’s no way we can return. No way to go back to the frontier man. Ted Kaczynski is a hundred years too late,” he said.
• In an interview, Apostolidès leaned forward across the desk in his campus office and his voice dropped: “This will shock you. He’s a very nice guy, sweet, open-minded. And I know he has blood on his hands. You cannot be all bad – even if you kill, even Hitler.”
• We would like our villains to be 100 percent evil, psychotic Snidely Whiplashes counting money in the backroom. (Look at the outcry at the portrayal of Hitler in the 2004 film Downfall.) We are uncomfortable when they look even a little bit like us, but such ambiguity is the stuff of life, said Apostolidès.
• The most obvious ambiguity may be centered within Apostolidès himself. He admits he has a longstanding interest in avant-garde ideas – but he writes about radical thoughts from the safe perch of a university professorship and his comfortable home on the Stanford campus. In short, as a part of the petite bourgeoisie Kaczynski despises.
• Kaczynski’s manifesto argues that the leftist liberals who present themselves as rebels are, in fact, obedient servants of the dominant society – a symptom of “oversocialization.” He singles out “university intellectuals” as prime examples.
• Apostolidès, who says he wouldn’t kill a fly, finds the criticism “absolutely appropriate.”
• It’s the problem of scholars, even artists: Our words have no power. We think we are changing the world – particularly on the left,” he said, and paused. “You accept your symbolic castration – that your writing will take time to have a modest influence on your contemporaries.” In other words, he accepts the compromises necessary to live a normal life, with an income, collegial support, home and family.
• Yet Kaczynski’s writings and life have intrigued Apostolidès by emphasizing “the relationship between writing and killing, ink and blood.”
• “From a cynical perspective, I write books without killing anyone – my writing will have no impact. The only way I can be listened to is to associate my writing to something.” That is, “either your own blood or someone else’s.”
• For instance, he cited Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, whose meticulously planned seppuku in 1970 triggered an avalanche of interest in his works.
• Kaczynski is following in these footsteps, rejecting the petit bourgeois alternative that Apostolidès has knowingly embraced and instead “linking blood and ink.”
• If Apostolidès’ contention seems eggheaded, consider a Jan. 8 New York Times article on the Jordanian doctor who killed nine people, including himself and seven CIA officers, in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan: “My words will die if I do not save them with my blood,” he posted pseudonymously on a blog before his death.
• “My articles will be against me if I don’t prove to them that I am not a hypocrite,” the posting read. “One has to die to make the other live. I wish I could be the one to die.”
• That said, aren’t there moral reservations in advancing Kaczynski’s writings? After all, he killed to get an audience.
• “I do not agree with his ideas, let alone his means to spread them,” Apostolidès said. Nevertheless, “The role of a scholar is to go beyond my own emotions and analyze everything.
• “It does not mean we are unaware of the ethical dimension. But we have to go beyond. It is a necessity.”

• Dr. David Lewis Anderson has entered the public arena to widely disclose the existence of nothing less than time control and related technologies (including a time reactor that taps into the “free” energy created by the earth’s frame-dragging through space time).  This may be the most powerful technological development humanity has so far constructed.  He and other groups around the world have been perfecting these technologies for some years now.  An international Time Race has been secretly underway.  Public awareness of such technologies, as well as the governmental, military, and corporate interest in exploiting them, may be the most important issue we deal with as a species since the discovery of atomic power.  Though this might sound like science fiction to most people, on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell, Dr. Anderson has assured the public that it isn’t.

UHM…wha?

azspot:

The Complete UAV Field Guide

• HANOVER, Germany — It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed.
• The survey, by German IT industry lobby group BITKOM, was intended to show how the division between real life and the virtual world is increasingly coming down, one of the main themes of the CeBIT trade fair that kicks off Tuesday.
• In all, 23 percent of around 1,000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits.”
• Around one in six (16 percent) said they would wear an implant to allow emergency services to rescue them more quickly in the event of a fire or accident.
• And five percent of people said they would be prepared to have an implant to make their shopping go more smoothly.
• But 72 percent said they would not “under any circumstances” allow electronics in their body.