Wednesday, August 05, 2015

Wednesday Wrapup

My city is currently being run by insane people.

They have cut back on police services while suing the police department.

Our police mainly is comprised of young men who have very little in the way of proper training.

After all who in their right mind would want to join a police force that has to fight city hall and have a deduction from their pay to afford legal representation and such.

The city has cut back on fire services while eliminating several EMT jobs.

And they are increasing density in the city by allowing out of control rack em and stack em units to be built all over the city.

The infrastructure can't survive.

Crime is rising.

Traffic is increasing.

I suspect the city council and the mayor have participated in shell Dll's whereby they are profiting from the increased construction all over my city that they are unwisely allowing.

No one can prove it though.

They have tried several times to get a "Charter city" unsuccessfully several times, which would allow them to run unchecked by state laws in many areas.

The Atlantic has a story with some video of a traffic simulator showing just how the roads can be jammed up by people looking for a place to park.

(You can play with the simulator too.)

This has been suspected for a long time by many traffic researchers and city planners, but the simulator shows just how quickly the roads jam up after just a few of the blocks fill up with parked cars.

The good news is that autonomous cars don't need to park-- they just go give someone else a ride. They could change city life forever.

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You mobile phone

Joe Greenwood, of cybersecurity firm 4Armed, recently gave a live demonstration of some of Hacking Team's leaked spyware to the BBC.

Tracking Bitcoin payments, recording audio from the microphone of a locked device, and secretly gaining control of an infected phone's camera are just a few of the software's capabilities.

The BBC reports: "Both Mr Greenwood and 4Armed's technical director, Marc Wickenden, said they were surprised by the sleekness of the interface.

Both point out, though, that customers could be paying upwards of £1m for the software and would expect it to be user-friendly, especially if it was intended for use by law enforcers on the beat.

For the tracked user, though, there are very few ways of finding out that they are being watched.

One red flag, according to Mr Greenwood, is a sudden spike in network data usage, indicating that information is being sent somewhere in the background. Experienced spies, however, would be careful to minimize this in order to remain incognito."

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O come on boys...what was it that I saying?

In Southern California, a legal skirmish between USC and UC San Diego is escalating into into a full-blown fracas, replete with restraining orders, loyalty oaths, and accusations of computer piracy, intimidation, and interference in federal grant awards. T

he two universities are fighting over control of an Alzheimer's program that coordinates about $100 million in research grants.

The lawsuits began after USC recruited scientist Paul Aisen from UC San Diego, where he has been director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study since 2007.

The study has been based at UC San Diego since 1991, and and UCSD expected to retain control.

But Aisen's team took root command of the computer system (including 24 years' worth of clinical trial data) and won't give it back.

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Another reason why drones will face an uphill battle to exist.

A report from CNN about an incident last week at a prison in Mansfield, Ohio, where a brawl broke out after a drone dropped a package of drugs into the prison yard.

Prison staff had no idea at the time what caused ~75 inmates to gather and fight, but surveillance tapes clearly showed a drone hovering over the yard and dropping a package that turned out to contain tobacco, marijuana, and heroin.

A spokesperson for the prison said this was not the first time they've had an incident involving a drone, but they wouldn't go into specifics.

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Next week at the USENIX Security Symposium, researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejon, South Korea, are presenting research into knocking drones out of the sky using directed sound waves.

They target a component crucial to every drone's ability to fly: its gyroscope.

"A gyroscope keeps a drone balanced, providing information on its tilt, orientation and rotation, allowing for micro-adjustments that keep it aloft.

Hobbyist and some commercial drones use inexpensive gyroscopes that are designed as integrated circuit packages."

For some drones, the gyroscope and its housing have a resonant frequency that's within the audible spectrum.

By targeting the drone with sound waves of that frequency, the gyroscope will begin to generate erroneous data, leading to a crash.

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One man Rubicon defeater!

This thing is incredible...

The Swincar Spider is a remarkable tilting 4-wheeler concept that boasts absolutely ridiculous rough terrain capabilities.

Each wheel has its own electric hub motor and is independently suspended on a spider-like limb.

The result is a vehicle that leans into fast turns like a motorcycle, but can also happily go up or down a 70-percent gradient, ride across a 50-percent gradient that puts the left wheels a couple of feet higher than the right ones, or ride diagonally through ditches that send the wheels going up and down all over the place like a spider doing leg stretches.

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