Monday

Monday Macrocosm magniloquent (And World Urgency)

A rather large drone has been flying above my neighborhood around 11:30 PM every night lately.

It sounds like a giant mosquito.

When I go outside to check it out I can easily see it way up in the sky because it has red leds on the bottom of it and one blinking green led on the side of it.

My wife called our local police dept because she says, "it gives her the creeps."

The desk Sargent told her because, "it is a "grey area" we really can't do anything about it, besides we won't be able to fine who is remote controlling it on the ground."

 Retailing giant Walmart has submitted an application to the Federal Aviation Administration requesting permission to run drone trials. 

The tests are to include not only home delivery — with the permission of residents within the 'flight path' — but also inventory-checking procedures at Walmart parking lots.

 It only costs $5 to make an application of this nature to the FAA, and until some hint of concrete legislation comes to light from the newly-formed UAS task force on November 20th, that's probably about as much as any company would want to spend on speculative drone-delivery research.

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The Guardian reports that the use of stingray technology — devices that simulate cell towers in order to gather phone data — is not limited to intelligence agencies and law enforcement. 

It turns out the Internal Revenue Service owns some of the devices as well. It's unknown how or why the tax agency uses the stingray devices. 

The only reason The Guardian figured it out was that they happened to see an IRS invoice from when they paid a company to upgrade one of their devices and provide training on its use.

 It's thought they're being used when the IRS collaborates with other agencies to knock down money laundering operations. 

"... there are currently between 2,000 and 3,000 "special agents" in the IRS who form the criminal investigation division (CID).

 They have the ability to get PEN register orders – the only authority needed to use Stingray devices."

***

Scotland Yard says police have arrested a 15-year-old boy in connection with the recent hack on UK phone and internet provider TalkTalk.

 Authorities are in the process of questioning him and conducting a search of the house he lives in. TalkTalk now says the breach was smaller than it thought, and full credit card details are not at risk. 

"Dido Harding said any credit card details taken would have been partial and the information may not have been enough to withdraw money 'on its own.' 

Card details accessed were incomplete — with many numbers appearing as an x — and 'not usable' for financial transactions, it added." 

In other news, businesses leaders are calling on the government to take "urgent action" against cyber-criminals, because somehow the security of their online systems is the government's responsibility, not theirs.

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Lately, here on the Pacific west coast we are seeing more and more Hammerhead sharks because of the extremely hot water coming from down south.

Just the other day a pod of them was spotted in San Francisco waters.

Even if you're a frequent ocean swimmer, you're much more likely to die in a car accident than from a shark attack — and yet sharks strike fear into people's hearts in ways that directly affect the economies of surf paradises like Australia. 

That's why the Australian government is working on a host of techologies to detect shark incursions on popular beaches, including drones and smart buoys (PDF) that can identify potential predators (PDF).

***

 Human and technical mistakes have nearly led to the accidental or mistaken launch of nuclear weapons.

 This is totally insane!!!

Especially in light of what just one nuclear warhead is capable of...32 Nukes were almost launched from Okinawa.

Aaron Tovish is calling on the U.S. government to release documents pertaining to one of the scarier incidents of the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

 According to an Air Force airman, the system designed to prevent an accidental launch of nuclear weapons failed as the codes ordering a launch were given in each of the three transmissions required for a launch: 

"By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead.

 Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches -- and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued."
 ***
The Norwegian rocket incident was a few minutes of post-Cold War nuclear tension that took place nearly four years after the end of the Cold War. 

While not as well known an incident as the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 (nor the Stanislav Petrov Incident, which was still classified information), the 1995 incident is considered to be one of the most severe.

 The 1995 incident occurred in the post-Cold War era, where many Russians were still very suspicious of the United States and NATO. In contrast, the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had a much longer build-up.
***

The Norwegian rocket incident, also known as the Black Brant scare, occurred on January 25, 1995, when a team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII four-stage sounding rocket from the Andøya Rocket Range off the northwestern coast of Norway.

 The rocket, which carried scientific equipment to study the aurora borealis over Svalbard, flew on a high northbound trajectory, which included an air corridor that stretches from Minuteman III nuclear missile silos in North Dakota, all the way to the Russian capital city of Moscow.



During its flight, the rocket eventually reached an altitude of 1,453 kilometers (903 mi), resembling a U.S. Navy submarine-launched Trident missile.

As a result, fearing a high altitude nuclear attack that could blind Russian radar, Russian nuclear forces were put on high alert, and the nuclear weapons command suitcase was brought to Russian president Boris Yeltsin,who then had to decide whether or not to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States.
***

 The Russian "Who saved the world."

Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (Russian: Василий Александрович Архипов) (30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet Navy officer. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he prevented the launch of a nuclear torpedo and thereby prevented a nuclear war. Thomas Blanton (then director of the National Security Archive) said in 2002 that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world".

Soviet submarine B-59, in the Caribbean near Cuba.

On 27 October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of eleven United States Navy destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph located the diesel-powered nuclear-armed Soviet Foxtrot-class submarine B-59 near Cuba.

Despite being in international waters, the Americans started dropping practice signaling depth charges, explosives intended to force the submarine to come to the surface for identification.

 There had been no contact from Moscow for a number of days and, although the submarine's crew had earlier been picking up U.S. civilian radio broadcasts, once B-59 began attempting to hide from its U.S. Navy pursuers, it was too deep to monitor any radio traffic.

 Those on board did not know whether war had broken out or not.

 The captain of the submarine, Valentin Grigorievitch Savitsky, decided that a war might already have started and wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo.

Unlike the other subs in the flotilla, three officers on board the B-59 had to agree unanimously to authorize a nuclear launch: Captain Savitsky, the political officer Ivan Semonovich Maslennikov, and the second-in-command Arkhipov.

Typically, Russian submarines armed with the "Special Weapon" only required the captain to get authorization from the political officer to launch a nuclear torpedo.

 However, due to Arkhipov's position as flotilla commander, the B-59's captain also was required to gain Arkhipov's approval.

An argument broke out, with only Arkhipov against the launch.

Even though Arkhipov was only second-in-command of the submarine B-59, he was in fact commander of the entire submarine flotilla, including the B-4, B-36 and B-130, and equal in rank to Captain Savitsky.

 According to author Edward Wilson, the reputation Arkhipov had gained from his courageous conduct in the previous year's Soviet submarine K-19 incident also helped him prevail.

( This incident is depicted in the American film K-19: The Widowmaker.)

Arkhipov eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface and await orders from Moscow.

This effectively averted the nuclear warfare which probably would have ensued if the nuclear weapon had been fired.

 The submarine's batteries had run very low and the air-conditioning had failed, so it was forced to surface amidst its U.S. pursuers and head home.

Washington's message that practice depth charges were being used to signal the submarine to surface never reached B-59, and Moscow claims it has no record of receiving it either.

1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident

On 26 September 1983, the nuclear early warning system of the Soviet Union twice reported the launch of American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles from bases in the United States.

 Tensions were high between the two countries—the Soviet Union had mistakenly downed a South Korean passenger plane just weeks before—and the officer on duty, Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, had a matter of minutes to respond to the attack.




 With little additional information to go on, Petrov deemed the readings a false alarm, reasoning that “when people start a war, they don’t start it with only five missiles.”

These missile attack warnings were correctly identified as a false alarm by Stanislav Yevgrafovich

Petrov, an officer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.


 This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack based on erroneous data on the United States and its NATO allies, which would have likely resulted in nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

 Later investigations revealed that satellites mistook sunlight reflecting off the tops of clouds for missile launches.

The orbit used by Soviet satellites was designed to minimize the chances of false alerts, but that night, shortly after the equinox, satellites, sun, and U.S. missile fields aligned in a way that maximized the sun’s reflection.

 Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had indeed malfunctioned.
Stanislav Petrov told Danish director Peter Anthony the true story about the incident, which was depicted in the 2014 feature film The Man Who Saved the World.

 But if the satellite data had indicated the launch of a hundred missiles—or if a different officer had been on duty—this false alarm could have easily turned into catastrophe.
 ***

 On November 9, 1979, the unthinkable happened: computers at the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) headquarters indicated that a large-scale Soviet missile attack was underway.

 NORAD immediately relayed the information to high-level command posts and top leaders convened to assess the threat. Their response was swift: crews responsible for launching U.S. intercontinental ballistic missiles were put on the highest alert, nuclear bomber crews boarded their planes to prepare for takeoff, and the Airborne Command Post—the aircraft designed to allow the president to maintain control in the event of an attack—was put in the air, though without the president on board.

Six minutes later, when satellite data failed to confirm any incoming missiles, leaders decided against retaliation.

 It was later discovered that a technician had mistakenly inserted a tape containing a training exercise scenario into an operational NORAD computer, simulating a full-scale attack.

Following the incident, new processes ensured training tapes couldn't run on the main system—though Marshal Shulman, a senior State Department advisor, would later note that “false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence.

There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me.”
 ***

Close calls shouldn’t happen with nuclear weapons

Spanning multiple decades, these close calls and other safety incidents highlight the very real risks of keeping nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert—risks that haven’t gone away.

Hair-trigger alert is the U.S. military policy that enables nuclear missiles to be rapidly launched. It needlessly truncates decision-making time, increasing the risk of a mistaken launch in response to false information.

 Today, the United States keeps nuclear missiles on high alert, ready to be fired in a matter of minutes. Tell President Obama to take our missiles off hair-trigger alert and make us all safer.

 Help prevent a nuclear catastrophe.

 It also makes an accidental or unauthorized launch more likely. By removing missiles from hair-trigger alert—and preventing time-constrained decision-making about launching nuclear weapons—the United States would safeguard against future close calls, while encouraging reciprocity from Russia.

 ***

Is Buying Cuban Software Legal In the US? The Answer is Hazy

 The Treasury Department recently issued new regulations authorizing "the importation of Cuban-origin mobile applications and the employment of Cuban nationals by persons subject to U.S. jurisdiction to develop such mobile applications." 

Great, but that is ambiguous, so I asked Treasury some follow-up questions: why is the rule restricted to mobile apps, what is the definition of a mobile app and can the Cuban developer work for a Cuban cooperative or government enterprise or must it be an individual? 

The answers were mostly "no comment" so the best way to clarify the situation is to try it and see what happens.

***

 

The NY Times reports that the presence of Russian ships near important, undersea internet cables is raising concern with U.S. military and intelligence officials.

 From the article: "The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. 

The alarm today is deeper: 

The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West's governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.
...
Just last month, the Russian spy ship Yantar, equipped with two self-propelled deep-sea submersible craft, cruised slowly off the East Coast of the United States on its way to Cuba — where one major cable lands near the American naval station at Guantánamo Bay. 

It was monitored constantly by American spy satellites, ships and planes. 

Navy officials said the Yantar and the submersible vehicles it can drop off its decks have the capability to cut cables miles down in the sea. 

What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking for vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.

 This is truly scary!

  If Putin’s Russia is rehearsing a “first strike” on the world’s internet communications’ system, it would be a grave disaster for the national defense of many western countries and the United States.

 We aren’t just talking about disrupting Facebook and Twitter here. 

We are talking about silencing vital information and monitoring systems that our nation, and others, have come to rely upon to provide real-time monitoring of several places in the world.

So, the Russians might be contemplating a world financial meltdown as one other possible attack on the west.

Who knows what their real motives might be.  But, it is a serious issue that is part of the growing Russian threat.

The role of the cables is more important than ever before.

They carry more than $10 trillion a day in global business, including from financial institutions that settle their transactions on them every second.

Any significant disruption would cut the flow of capital. The cables also carry more than 95 percent of daily communications.

So important are undersea cables that the Department of Homeland Security lists their landing areas — mostly around New York, Miami and Los Angeles — at the top of its list of “critical infrastructure.”

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A Victory

 Mitch Martinez creates high-resolution stock video footage, and then licenses it out to people who need footage to go along with their creative projects.

 He has written an article at PetaPixel explaining his bizarre interaction with Sony Music Entertainment, and the hassle they put him through to fix it. 

Martinez licensed one of his videos to Epic Records, and they used it as background for a music video on YouTube. Less than two months later, his original video on YouTube was hit with a copyright claim from Sony. 

After figuring out that Epic Records was a subsidiary to Sony, he disputed the copyright claim — which is usually the end of it.

 But after reviewing the videos, Sony rejected it, saying their claim was still valid.

 Martinez then tried to contact the person at Epic Records to whom he issued the license. 

None of his emails got a response. 

Then he had to get in touch with Epic's legal department.

 After a lengthy series of emails, voicemails, and phone calls, he finally got somebody to admit it was his video.

 It still took a few more calls to work out the details, but the company finally released the copyright claim.

 Martinez concludes by offering some tips on how to resolve such claims.
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fatty, salty proteins that no man can resist

OK men I know for a fact your taste buds are salivating when you look upon this wonderous perfection above, BACON!

Miss Bacon

But there are some killjoys among us!

And Mr. Bacon

So, what to do?

 There are few things in this world that do not lead to cancer.

We are not doctors, and offering general medical advice is fraught at best.

Do you need to abstain from processed meats now? 

Probably not.

Is it worth taking a moment to examine your diet and consider where you can exercise a little more moderation?

 Sure. 

But isn't that true of all things?