Month: November 2011

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Dolphin: Their Drones, Our Drones, and EMP Rays

Advanced Cyber/IO, Hacking
YARC YARC

Occupy the Skies! Protesters Could Use Spy Drones

Spencer Ackerman

WIRED, 17 November 2011

The proliferation of drones throughout the military — and into civilian law enforcement — can make it feel like we’re living in an airborne panopticon. But flying robots are agnostic about who they train their gaze upon, and can spy on cops as easily as they can spy on civilians.

In the video above, protesters in Warsaw got a drone’s eye view of a phalanx of police in riot gear during a heated Saturday demonstration. The drone — spotted by Wired editor-in-chief and drone-builder Chris Anderson — was a tiny Polish RoboKopter equipped with a videocamera.

As Chris observes, no more do citizens need to wait for news choppers to get aerial footage of a major event. With drones, they can shoot their own overhead video. But the implications run deeper than that.

The Occupy events around the country gained initial notoriety by filming and uploading incidents of apparent police brutality. Anyone with a cellphone camera and a YouTube account could become a videographer, focusing attention on behavior that cops or banks might not want broadcasted or that the media might not transmit. When the New York Police Department cleared out Zuccotti Park on Tuesday, out came the cellphones to document it.

Bzzztttpppow

Getting an aerial view is the next step in compelling DIY citizen video.

Read more.

Phi Beta Iota:  The expensive stupid solution for anti-UAV countermeasures is gattling guns, lasers, and other such military-industrial crap.  Clever people build their own electro-magnetic pulse umbrellas, here is just one of the options, see more at EMP/HERF/Shock Pulse Generators from Information Unlimited.

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David Isenberg: UNESCO Global Open Access Portal

Advanced Cyber/IO
David Isenberg

UNESCO Global Open Access Portal launched “The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) presents a snapshot of the status of Open Access (OA) to scientific information around the world. For countries that have been more successful in implementing Open Access, the portal highlights critical success factors and aspects of the enabling environment. For countries and regions that are still in the early stages of Open Access development, the portal identifies key players, potential barriers and opportunities. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The portal is supported by an existing Community of Practice (CoP) on Open Access on the WSIS Knowledge Communities Platform that has over 1400 members.”

Tip of the Hat to beSpacific
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Seth Godin: Largest Independent Cyber-Content Sites

Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom
Seth Godin

The largest independent content sites

Quantcast makes it easy to see the largest one million sites in the US (by traffic). There's a signficant consolidation going on, with the vast majority of popular sites being owned and controlled by larger, public companies.

Because onine traffic follows, as most things do, a power law curve, the top 100 sites account for a huge amount of overall web traffic–probably more than the next 900 sites combined.

After removing public companies and those that only do commerce, here are the thirty independent companies on the top 100:

facebook.com
twitter.com
wikipedia.org
answers.com
wordpress.com
craigslist.org
tumblr.com
pandora.com
whitepages.com
manta.com
photobucket.com
yelp.com
wikia.com
webmd.com
hubpages.com
metrolyrics.com
inbox.com
squidoo.com
grindtv.com
drudgereport.com
coolmath-games.com
city-data.com
urbandictionary.com
wunderground.com
chacha.com
bleacherreport.com
twitpic.com
deviantart.com
cafemom.com
zimbio.com
typepad.com

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John Robb: Solar Farming, Localized Power Resilience

05 Energy, Blog Wisdom
John Robb

SOLAR FARMING

Photovoltaic (PV) technology (aka solar panels) is advancing steadily.  That advance will occur regardless of whether we have an economic depression or booming prosperity.  This advance means that price of PV modules are dropping at a rate of 7% per year (as it has been doing that for decades). This means that by 2020, the price of a PV module (with micoconverters etc. included) will likely be close to $1 a watt (not including installation, which is also falling).  That puts PV tech within the range of being cost competitive with today's alternatives.  As an added benefit, it's possible that modules that approach this level of cost efficiency might also be locally printable (as in: they could be made in a 3D fab or grown in a bio-lab).

Naam-solar-moore_s-law-5 (1)The implication: for those communities able to deploy it in quantity, it will mean increasingly inexpensive energy for as many years into the future as you want to project.  For those that don't, you will increasingly fall behind.

There is a caveat though. The real potential for this technology isn't going to be found in a large number of big, commercial solar complexes.  Why?  The infrastructure and investment necessary to make this happen on a scale that really matters doesn't exist in the US or EU anymore.  We are broke (and even if we weren't, NIMBY is nearly impossible to overcome as the record of new power line construction over the last 30 years attests to).  So, it should be easy for us to conclude that it won't get built at national/regional level (if you think otherwise, I have a planet I'd like to sell you).

Fortunately, there is a ray of hope.  For those of us building resilient communities, we WILL see this infrastructure deployed.  How?  Through the hard word and dedication of a resilient entrepreneur: the solar farmer.   The solar producer that keeps his/her entire community fed with increasingly inexpensive and bountiful solar energy, 24x7x365 (via energy storage for round the clock production).

A Platform For Local Solar Farming

Continue reading “John Robb: Solar Farming, Localized Power Resilience”

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DefDog: Russia-Europe-China Ignore US Cyber-Fools

02 China, 03 Economy, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Computer/online security, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog

Some background on this old report…..this conference has been going on for some time, fluctuates between Garmisch and Moscow…The US has offered to host it but has been consistently turned down. China showed up two years ago and the next conference (2012) is scheduled to be in Beijing…..if the US cannot, with is efforts in technological development, host a cyber conference it is indicative of what the rest of the world thinks of us….

Russia's Cyber Security Plans

As Washington airs plans for a new “cyber command,” a top Russian official discusses the threat of cyberweapons.

Phi Beta Iota:  The lack of intelligence and integrity in the US Government is chillingly deep, especially within the US secret intelligence, and nowhere more irresponsible than within the National Security Agency/US Cyber-Command – both oxymorons.  The Chinese are all over NSA and Cyber is not a Command.

See Also:

Continue reading “DefDog: Russia-Europe-China Ignore US Cyber-Fools”

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NIGHTWATCH: Chinese Economy – Greece on Steroids

02 China

China: The Ministry of Commerce said on 16 November that China's exports are feeling pressure from global economic uncertainties. A spokesman said the ministry cannot be optimistic about the export situation during the coming period, citing a downshift in global economic recovery, a downgrade of the US credit rating and the expansion of the European debt crisis. He said that frequent protectionist measures and trade disputes have had a “relatively large influence” on China's exports and that these issues, along with rising costs at home, have complicated China's foreign trade outlook.

Comment: The Xinhua report is significant for several reasons. First it disclosed that the Chinese government expects that the credit rating of the United States will be downgraded. Second, the Chinese economists predict a contraction of the global economy. Finally, the Chinese anticipate a contraction of globalization as the result of protectionist policies, in other words, a reassertion of economic nationalism. The Chinese seem to expect that the export markets for cheap Chinese manufactures will shrink and the prices for raw materials will rise.

The apparent Chinese linkage of the US credit rating to the European debt crisis implies that the Chinese know or believe that US banks have much greater exposure to European sovereign debt than they have admitted. The Chinese assessment evidently is that Europe will drag down the US.

One Chinese economist, a professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recently wrote that the Chinese banking system is nearly bankrupt already and China's Gross Domestic Product is declining, but the Chinese are hiding the data. He wrote that “every province in China is Greece.”

This note is a warning to hedge bets in China in 2012.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  Holistic analytics requires a responsible integration of all ten high level threats to humanity and all twelve core policy domains, among which energy and water are the most tangible.  Countries that fail to plan for long-term affordable energy and for the protection and renewal of potable water will inevitably fail.