Burning Fossil Fuels Almost Ended All Life on Earth - The Atlantic
extinction
history
geology
permian-era
earth
climate-change
carbon-dioxide
scary
pangaea
july 2017 by jm
“what I like to talk about is ‘the Great Weirding’ and not just the Great Dying because the Great Dying seems to have been a relatively quick event at the very end. But if you just talk about the Great Dying you’re missing all of this other crazy stuff that led up to it,” he said. “The Earth was getting really weird in the Permian. So we’re getting these huge lakes with these negative pHs, which is really weird, we don’t know why that happened. Another thing is that the whole world turned red. Everything got red. You walk around today and you’re like, ‘Hey, there’s a red bed, I bet it’s Permian or Triassic.’ The planet started looking like Mars. So that’s really weird. We don’t know why it turned red. Then you have a supercontinent, which is weird in the first place. Plate tectonics has to be acting strangely when you have all the continents together. Eventually it rifts apart and we go back into normal plate tectonics mode, but during the Permian-Triassic everything’s jammed together. So there has to be something strange going on. And then at the end, the Earth opens up and there’s all these volcanoes. But we’re not talking about normal volcanoes, we’re talking about weird volcanoes.”
july 2017 by jm
The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked | Technology | The Guardian
elections
brexit
trump
cambridge-analytica
aggregateiq
scary
analytics
data
targeting
scl
ukip
democracy
grim-meathook-future
may 2017 by jm
A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities.
Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.
Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America. [....]
This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.
may 2017 by jm
Ethics - Lyrebird
april 2017 by jm
'Lyrebird is the first company to offer a technology to reproduce the voice of someone as accurately and with as little recorded audio. [..] Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else.
By releasing our technology publicly and making it available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future.'
lyrebird
audio
technology
scary
ethics
By releasing our technology publicly and making it available to anyone, we want to ensure that there will be no such risks. We hope that everyone will soon be aware that such technology exists and that copying the voice of someone else is possible. More generally, we want to raise attention about the lack of evidence that audio recordings may represent in the near future.'
april 2017 by jm
Zeynep Tufekci: Machine intelligence makes human morals more important | TED Talk | TED.com
More relevant now that nVidia are trialing ML-based self-driving cars in the US...
nvidia
ai
ml
machine-learning
scary
zeynep-tufekci
via:maciej
technology
ted-talks
april 2017 by jm
Machine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns — and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for. "We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines," she says. "We must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics."
More relevant now that nVidia are trialing ML-based self-driving cars in the US...
april 2017 by jm
Spotify’s Love/Hate Relationship with DNS
april 2017 by jm
omg somebody at Spotify really really loves DNS. They even store a DHT hash ring in it. whyyyyyyyyyyy
spotify
networking
architecture
dht
insane
scary
dns
unbound
ops
april 2017 by jm
Kodak Had a Secret Nuclear Reactor Loaded With Enriched Uranium Hidden In a Basement
may 2016 by jm
non-proliferation? what's that?
kodak
nuclear
safety
non-proliferation
scary
rochester
reactors
Kodak's purpose for the reactor wasn't sinister: they used it to check materials for impurities as well as neutron radiography testing. The reactor, a Californium Neutron Flux multiplier (CFX) was acquired in 1974 and loaded with three and a half pounds of enriched uranium plates placed around a californium-252 core. The reactor was installed in a closely guarded, two-foot-thick concrete walled underground bunker in the company's headquarters, where it was fed tests using a pneumatic system. According to the company, no employees were ever in contact with the reactor. Apparently, it was operated by atomic fairies and unicorns.
may 2016 by jm
A Team of Biohackers Has Figured Out How to Inject Your Eyeballs With Night Vision
Well, that's some risky biohacking. wow
biohacking
scary
night-vision
eyes
chlorin-e6
infravision
sfm
march 2015 by jm
Did it work? Yes. It started with shapes, hung about 10 meters away. "I'm talking like the size of my hand," Licina says. Before long, they were able to do longer distances, recognizing symbols and identifying moving subjects against different backgrounds. "The other test, we had people go stand in the woods," he says. "At 50 meters, we could figure out where they were, even if they were standing up against a tree." Each time, Licina had a 100% success rate. The control group, without being dosed with Ce6, only got them right a third of the time.
Well, that's some risky biohacking. wow
march 2015 by jm
"A reason to hang him": how mass surveillance, secret courts, confirmation bias and the FBI can ruin your life - Boing Boing
february 2014 by jm
This is bananas. Confirmation bias running amok.
confirmation-bias
bias
law
brandon-mayfield
terrorism
fingerprints
false-positives
fbi
scary
Brandon Mayfield was a US Army veteran and an attorney in Portland, OR. After the 2004 Madrid train bombing, his fingerprint was partially matched to one belonging to one of the suspected bombers, but the match was a poor one. But by this point, the FBI was already convinced they had their man, so they rationalized away the non-matching elements of the print, and set in motion a train of events that led to Mayfield being jailed without charge; his home and office burgled by the FBI; his client-attorney privilege violated; his life upended.
february 2014 by jm
Mail from the (Velvet) Cybercrime Underground
july 2013 by jm
Brian Krebs manages to thwart an attempted framing for possession of Silk Road heroin. bloody hell
silk-road
drugs
bitcoin
ecommerce
brian-krebs
crime
framed
cybercrime
russia
scary
law-enforcement
july 2013 by jm
The world’s first 3D-printed gun
july 2012 by jm
I wasn't expecting to see this for a few years. The future is ahead of schedule!
via:peakscale
guns
scary
future
grim-meathook-future
3d-printing
thingiverse
weapons
A .22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper. In other words, the main body of the gun is plastic, while the chamber — where the bullets are actually struck — is solid metal. [...]
While this pistol obviously wasn’t created from scratch using a 3D printer, the interesting thing is that the lower receiver — in a legal sense at least — is what actually constitutes a firearm. Without a lower receiver, the gun would not work; thus, the receiver is the actual legally-controlled part. In short, this means that people without gun licenses — or people who have had their licenses revoked — could print their own lower receiver and build a complete, off-the-books gun. What a chilling thought.
july 2012 by jm
747s using VLANs to secure in-flight access to engine management systems
november 2011 by jm
'I was contracted to test the systems on a Boeing 747. They had added a new video system that ran over IP. They segregated this from the control systems using layer 2 VLANs. We managed to break the VLANs and access other systems and with source routing could access the Engine management systems.' (via Risks)
scary
aviation
flight
security
boeing
747
via:risks
november 2011 by jm
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