Skip to main content

Home/ Indie Nation/ Group items tagged Army

Rss Feed Group items tagged

John Lemke

Hackers charged with stealing Xbox, 'Call of Duty,' and US Army secrets worth over $100... - 0 views

  • Four hackers have been jointly charged with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, copyright infringement, wire fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, and theft of trade secrets. Individually, they have been charged with counts of aggravated identity theft, unauthorized computer access, copyright infringement, and wire fraud.
  • The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.
  • 18-count superseding indictment
John Lemke

Ain't No Science Fiction, Suspended Animation Is FDA Approved and Heading To Clinical T... - 0 views

  • The Food and Drug Administration has already approved his technique for human trials, and he has secured funding from the Army to conduct the feasibility phase. Dr. Rhee is currently lobbying for funds to conduct a full trial. If he’s successful human trials could begin as early as next year.
  • What Dr. Rhee hopes to test on humans is a method he worked out for the past couple decades on pigs. Patients would be injected with a cold fluid to induce severe hypothermia. Clinically hypothermia is characterized by the drop of a person’s body temperature from its normal 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celcius) to lower than 95 degrees (35 C). Below 95, the heart, nervous system and other organs begin to fail. The strict range is indicative of a metabolic system with strict temperature requirements for proper function (death waits only a few degrees the other way as well). Dr. Rhee’s method involves injecting patients with a cold fluid that would bring the body’s temperature down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 C). Sounds chilling, but when he induced the extreme hypothermia in pigs they came out just fine. Heart function, breathing, and brain function was completely normal.
  • Dr. Rhee is no stranger to high-stakes medicine. The native South Korean was trained at the Uniformed Services University Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland. Following a fellowship in trauma and critical care at the University of Washington’s Harborview Medical Center he served in the US Navy as director of the University of South California’s Navy Trauma Training Center at Los Angeles County. He was then sent to Afghanistan where he was one of the first surgeons at Camp Rhino. Later he started the first surgical unit at Ramadi, Iraq. His cool under fire was on display nationally as he performed surgery on US Representative Gabrielle Giffords after she was shot through the skull in the Tucson shootings this past January. His experience with induced hypothermia came into play the night of the shootings when Dr. Rhee removed part of the congresswoman’s skull. The wound had raised her body temperature and began “cooking the brain.” He used a device to cool Rep. Giffords’ skin.
John Lemke

The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views

  • the report recognized that email privacy is critical
  • one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
  • the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • the danger of discrimination remains due to the very digital nature of big data
  • especially the elderly, minorities, and the poor
  • an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
  • The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
  • metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
    • John Lemke
       
      What is Metadate... then discuss
  • The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
    • John Lemke
       
      Did the report give a strong enough recommendation? "looking into" and doing are much different
  • several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
  • We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
    • John Lemke
       
      I very strongly agree.  The report failed in this area.
  • the White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.”
  • Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
  • While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
    • John Lemke
       
      In other words, it failed at what can be done and it would actually lower standards when compared to what California has in place currently.
  • We were particularly disconcerted
  • the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
    • John Lemke
       
      WTF? how did he get in this group?
  • two big concerns
  • First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
  • Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
  • Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
    • John Lemke
       
      Don't leave this stat out.  More classified documents than LOC documents.  WTF? A "democracy" with more secret documents than public?
  • The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
    • John Lemke
       
      This is the most troubling part perhaps,  isn't the collection without consent where the breech of privacy begins?
    • John Lemke
       
      "notice and consent"
  • An unfortunate premise of this argument is that automatic collection of data is a given
  • While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
  • Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
    • John Lemke
       
      If we ignore it, it will go away?  Did they not just mostly ignore it and accept it as a given for corporations and completely ignore it regarding the government? Pretty gangster move isn't it?
  • Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.
John Lemke

Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female | Tor... - 0 views

  • By studying osteological signs of gender within the bones themselves, researchers discovered that approximately half of the remains were actually female warriors, given a proper burial with their weapons.
  • I'm a historian who studies burial in the early middle ages, and the burial of women with weapons is one of my specialties! I'm in the process of publishing research about a woman buried with a spear in the 6th century, and am excited to see this important topic being discussed here outside the ivory tower at Tor.com.
  • The key thing to note is the word 'settlers': the article is arguing that women migrated from Scandinavia to England with the invading Viking army in the 9th century. Several of these women, the article notes, were buried with weapons, but they are still far outnumbered by the armed men. Most of the women settlers mentioned in the study were buried with 'traditional' female outfits: brooches that held up their aprons.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Archaeologists have been using bones to identify the biological sex of skeletons for the past century, but when burials were found which didn't fit their notions of 'normal,' they tended to assume that the bone analysts had made a mistake. This is not entirely unreasonable, because bones are often so badly decomposed that it is impossible to tell the sex of the person. But I can point to cases where the bones clearly belong to a woman, and the archaeologists insisted that it had to be a man because only men were warriors. That's modern sexism plain and simple, and bad archaeology. But thankfully, archaeologists in recent decades have become aware of this problem, and as a result, more and more women are showing up with weapons!
  • But women with weapons are still a minority, usually fewer than 10% at any given cemetery.
  • First, we're just talking about graves (because that's what survives for archaeologists to dig up). Just because a woman is buried in an apron, does not mean she wasn't a warrior before she died. There was no rule (as far as we know) that warriors had to be buried with their weapons.
  • Second, we can't be sure that everyone buried with a weapon was a warrior. We find infants buried with weapons sometimes; they clearly weren't fighters (though perhaps they would have been had they grown up?). Weapons were powerful ritual objects with lots of magic and social power, and a woman might be buried with one for a reason other than fighting, such as her connection to the ruling family, ownership of land, or role as priestess or magical healer.
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20 items per page