Burgemeester hackt kritische site | Webwereld.
He used the data he gained to strong arm political opponents.
So if your elected mayor is capable of doing this, then what makes you think all the drones and other political forces sitting on top of huge centralised databases won’t be capable of this… to much larger effect?
Britain’s largest force says it has distributed 350 of the cell phone-sized devices to officers across various parts of London, part of a nationwide rollout championed by Britain’s National Policing Improvement Agency.
via Scotland Yard deploys mobile fingerprint devices.
So will they store all precessed fingerprints? How quickly will they be removed from the physical device?
NASA has contracted this rocket to very carefully approach the ISS for resupply runs. Well done Elon Musk!
SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully • The Register.
It turns out that not only is it a massive privacy invasion, but has a 20% (!!) error rate. Besides that it’s useless, because no border guard system can read the fingerprints on the passport.
Tweede Kamer wil af van vingerafdruk in paspoort – update | Webwereld.
The boat is 39 feet long and can reach a top speed of 28 knots. Using a modified version of the unmanned Shadow surveillance aircraft technology that logged 700,000 hours of duty in the Middle East, the boat can be controlled remotely from 10 to 12 miles away from a command station on land, at sea or in the air, Haslett said.
Farther out, it can be switched to a satellite control system, which Textron said could expand its range to 1,200 miles. The boat could be launched from virtually any large Navy vessel.
Using diesel fuel, the boat could operate for up to 72 hours without refueling, depending upon its traveling speed and the weight of equipment being carried. The fuel supply could be extended for up to a week on slow-moving reconnaissance missions. the boat could be operated in as little as 5 feet of water because of its shallow draft
The CUSV would be hard to sink by accident.
If the boat overturns, it shuts down its engines, rights itself, restarts the engines and resumes the mission. Should the boat lose contact with its command, it’s programmed simply to return to its launching point or another pre-determined location.
It’s not the first unmanned boat. But Haslett said others generally have been boats simply refitted with remote control equipment. The CUSV was designed from the first step not to have a crew.
Phys.Org Mobile: Unmanned vessel could soon be working for Navy.
Wait – what? It BROKE an insulin pump? And it’s supposed to be safe for people to go in? Really?
Not using a credit card is becoming a much more viable method over the internet (22% of the overall e-commerce payments), with iDeal and Paypal, but also many other methods used to pay for porn or gambling. Worldpay has made an interactive map showing the predominance of specific alternative currencies per country.
This is based on this report by worldpay.
Melville ten Cate of ECA, housed in Schiphol, claims to have secured EUR 283 million to finance the business plan I have been harping on about for the last 25 years: he wants to buy 24 light combat aircraft to start an Integrated Opposing Force (IOPFOR) which will be used as an agressor training service for NATO. Eventually he wants to add surface and naval assets to the force.
Melville ten Cate
via ECA secures funds for NATO aggressor aircraft purchase.
Their corporate website is here, where they state they’re looking for EUR 448 m to finance all the aircraft, so he’s a bit short, but able to pay for 14 aircraft.
The Financial Times ran an article which was picked up in august 2010 by other media. In the FT article he is in discussion with Iceland to use an airbase there. In this article he talks about using Sukhoi’s, in other articles he talks about using MiG 35’s, Chengdu J-10’s, Saab Gripen’s.
A Dutch paper that picked up the article and wrote its own tried to contact the company, but the contact address on the old website led to Fokker Aircraft Services, where no-one knew of the company.
In January 2011 it turned out that the Icelandic government had denied permission to use the Keflavik base. Jobs for 45 pilots at EUR 160K per year had been posted, but ECA was unavailable for contact. It turned out that the company wasn’t registered in the Netherlands. No one could contact the ten Cate brothers and no-one knows anything about their financers.
Melville ten Cate has an empty LinkedIn page.
Pprune has picked it up again here but not much activity in that thread.
Scramble has an old thread on the subject here which has been picked up again.
So it’s a mystery.
It turns out that there are pleny of studies out there that debunk the “facts and figures” the industries throw about when talking about IP theft and the costs of piracy. Here is a selection of some interesting other studies.
What Various Studies Really Reveal About File-Sharing – Slashdot.
Last month, marine biologist Luke Tipple, armed with a career in the study of sharks, accepted the request from handheld laser manufacturers, Wicked Lasers, to attach a Wicked Lasers laser beam to a shark’s fin, which he did with success. On a diving trip in the Bahamas, he fit a laser device onto a lemon shark’s dorsal fin and tested the shark’s movements.
Beamed-up lemon shark shows research promise w/ Video.