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John Lemke

Lawsuit Claims Accidental Google Search Led To Years Of Government Investigation And Ha... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...nvestigation-harrassment.shtml

lawsuit google government investigation search yourrignts law legal litigation yourrights surveillance security spying stalking

shared by John Lemke on 14 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Jeffrey Kantor, who was fired by Appian Corporation, sued a host of government officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry in Federal Court, alleging civil rights violations, disclosure of private information and retaliation… He also sued Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Rand Beers, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, EPA Administrator Regina McCarthy and U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta.
  • "In October of 2009, Kantor used the search engine Google to try to find, 'How do I build a radio-controlled airplane,'" he states in his complaint. "He ran this search a couple weeks before the birthday of his son with the thought of building one together as a birthday present. After typing, 'how do I build a radio controlled', Google auto-completed his search to, 'how do I build a radio controlled bomb.'" From that point on, Kantor alleges coworkers, supervisors and government investigators all began "group stalking" him. Investigators used the good cop/bad cop approach, with the "bad cop" allegedly deploying anti-Semitic remarks frequently. In addition, his coworkers at Appian (a government contractor) would make remarks about regular people committing murder-suicides (whenever Kantor expressed anger) or how normal people just dropped dead of hypertension (whenever Kantor remained calm while being harassed)
  • Kantor also claims he was intensely surveilled by the government from that point forward.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 14 Dec 13
       
      Our story begins with auto-complete and, once suspected, always monitored. has an interesting loophole. 
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the law says that the timeline is based on when the citizen had a reasonable chance to discover the violation. Since the PRISM program was only declassified in July of 2013, these earlier violations should not be time-barred.
  • All in all, the filing doesn't build a very credible case and comes across more as a paranoiac narrative than a coherent detailing of possible government harassment and surveillance. Here are just a few of the highlights.
  • John Lemke on 14 Dec 13
     
    Wait till you see how many and who are involved.
John Lemke

Online Community Building and the Secret Sauce | Spin Sucks - 0 views

www.spinsucks.com/...e-of-online-community-building

2011 secret sauce online community online building community spin sucks

shared by John Lemke on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • the real juice is in the content.
  • I read a blog post he wrote about community. He said (I’m paraphrasing) that you don’t have a community until people begin talking to one another without your participation. Until then, it’s just comments. And he’s right. You know you’ve hit community mecca when people come to your site to talk to one another, with your content as the conversation starter.
John Lemke

Japanese company proposes to build solar power cells on the Moon to provide clean energ... - 0 views

spaceindustrynews.com/...4187

2014 japanese solar power energy earth space Moon indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • the 11,000 mile Lunar equator
  • will beam microwave and laser energy to giant energy conversion facilities on Earth. These beams will travel to semiconductors and inverters which will convert that energy to clean electricity to the grid that will power households, businesses and factories.
  • Shimizu’s plan uses Earthly materials, ceramics, water, glass, concrete, oxygen and solar cells. They would not ship water from Earth, they will make user of the Moon’s own resources and reduce the lunar soil using hydrogen shipped from our planet and then extract the water for use in construction.
John Lemke

Petition Launched To Get The White House To Open Source Healthcare.gov Code | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...ource-healthcaregov-code.shtml

2013 indienationnews code gov healthcare source politics yourrights waste

shared by John Lemke on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Of course, there are a few issues with this. First of all, while things created by government employees is automatically public domain, works created by contractors is not. So while conceptually we can argue that the code should be open sourced, it's not required by law. Second, and more importantly, it's a lot harder to take proprietary code and then release it as open source, than it is to build code from the ground up to be open source (and it's even more difficult to make sure that code is actually useful for anything). Indeed, if the code had been open sourced from the beginning, perhaps they wouldn't make embarrassing mistakes like violating other open source licenses.
  • By this point, open sourcing the code isn't going to fix things, but if more attention is put on the issue of closed vs. open code in government projects, hopefully it means that government officials will recognize that it should be open source from the beginning for the next big government web project.
  • After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. At that link, there's a good discussion from On the Media, with Paul Ford, discussing what a big mistake it was that the government decided not to open source the code and be much more transparent about the process. It discusses the usual attacks on open source and why they almost certainly don't apply to this situation.
John Lemke

Robot hummingbird passes flight tests (w/ Video) - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...-hummingbird-flight-video.html

robot hummingbird passes flight 2011 technology writeabout

shared by John Lemke on 28 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 28 Feb 11
     
    The Hummingbird's bird-shaped body is removable but it gives the bot an uncanny resemblance to a real hummingbird. The vehicle can hover and maneuver just like the bird. The ornithopter can fly into buildings under the control of an operator flying the spybot with the help of a feed from its tiny video camera. The prototype is capable of flying at speeds of up to 18 km/h (11 mph) and weighs 19 grams, which is about the same as an AA battery.
John Lemke

Quadruped CHEETAH robot to outrun any human - 0 views

www.gizmag.com/...18048

writeabout wroteatindienation technology tech 2011 robots robotics cheatah BostonDynamics military fast running

shared by John Lemke on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 08 Mar 11
     
    It would be scary to be chased by a military robot. It would also be scary to be chased by a cheetah. So, imagine what it would be like to have a military robotic cheetah sprinting after you. Such a scenario could one day be possible, as robotics company Boston Dynamics recently announced that America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded it a contract to design and build such a ... critter. The contract also includes the creation of an agile, bipedal humanoid robot. It's hard to say which one might ultimately be creepier.
John Lemke

The Land Walker: the world's first 340cm bipedal exoskeleton - 0 views

www.gizmag.com/4004

walker technology tech robotics robots writeabout 2011

shared by John Lemke on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 08 Mar 11
     
    Japanese machinery and robotics manufacturer Sakakibara-Kikai has released the first genuine bi-pedal exoskeleton - a landmark event and one which is certain to attract a lot of attention for the company. Mechanatrons and BattleMechs have long been the subject of scifi books, comics and movies with the promise of cyborg technology popularised by the smash sixties television series "The Six Million Dollar Man." We've previously seen some celebrated exoskeletons in films such as Alien (Sigourney Weaver's Ripley takes out the Queen alien in an exoskeleton), Star Wars (the AT-ST Imperial Scout Walker) and RoboCop (the ED209), but until now, the nearest thing we've seen in the metal was the 3.5 metre superhero exoskeleton Enryu from Tmsuk in Japan. Sakakibara-Kikai's Land Walker is just a tad shorter than Enryu at 3.4 metres, weighs 1000kg and shuffles along at 1.5kmh. Enryu is a lot faster than Land Walker but uses caterpillar-like tracks rather than legs to perform its chores - the strapping 3.5 metre Enryu will be called upon to rush into burning buildings, lift heavy objects and rescue people.
John Lemke

Teaching robots to move like humans (w/ Video) - 0 views

www.physorg.com/...11-03-robots-humans-video.html

teaching AI interaction mimic GeorgiaTech wroteatlockergnome robot 2011 writeabout technology tech robotics robots

shared by John Lemke on 11 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • John Lemke on 11 Mar 11
     
    "It's important to build robots that meet people's social expectations because we think that will make it easier for people to understand how to approach them and how to interact with them," said Andrea Thomaz, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech's College of Computing. Thomaz, along with Ph.D. student Michael Gielniak, conducted a study in which they asked how easily people can recognize what a robot is doing by watching its movements.
John Lemke

Google has poached an expert scientist to build a quantum computer | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...omputer-hired-expert-scientist

2014 indienationnews quantum computer google scientist technology tech

shared by John Lemke on 05 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • the next step in computing technology
  • But the technology took a hit earlier this year when tests on the world's first commercially available quantum computer — the D-Wave 2, priced at around $15 million — appeared to show that it was no faster than a standard computer.
John Lemke

Foxconn worker riot closes factory | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...onn-worker-riot-closes-factory

2012 worker indienationnews riot China Foxconn factory civil

shared by John Lemke on 24 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Early Monday morning, Foxconn released a statement indicating that the riot started as a personal disagreement between factory workers in a dormitory and was eventually brought under control by police, but this clashes with reports trickling in from users of China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. Much like with the situations in Egypt and other Arab Spring countries earlier this year, microbloggers are painting a different picture than the one presented by official sources; numerous Weibo posts indicate that the riots were started not by a fight between workers in off-campus housing, but instead by security guards beating one or more workers nearly to death. Regardless of the cause, pictures leaking out from the scene show some destruction, including broken windows and a toppled guard post building.
John Lemke

The Internet Isn't Broken; So Why Is The ITU Trying To 'Fix' It? | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...-is-itu-trying-to-fix-it.shtml

InternetAccess regulation government politics TNN IN law legal international indienationnews technology ITO Internet 2012

shared by John Lemke on 04 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any "help" from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn't been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.
  • And that's the thing. The internet works just fine. The only reason to "fix" it, is to "break" it in exactly the way the ITU wants, which is to favor a few players who have done nothing innovative to actually deserve it.
John Lemke

Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ | World news | theguardi... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...a-webcam-images-internet-yahoo

2014 spying yahoo cam images indienationnews law legal technology

shared by John Lemke on 27 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
  • between 2008 and 2010
  • Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year.The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.
John Lemke

Apple CarPlay debuts with Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo | Technology | theguardian.com - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ay-ferrari-mercedes-benz-volvo

2014 apple ferrari volvo technology automobiles iOS software indienationnews tech

shared by John Lemke on 03 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo as the first partners to build it into their vehicles.
  • connect iPhones into in-car information and entertainment systems
  • in-car equivalent to Apple’s AirPlay technology in the living room.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The company said today it also has deals with 13 more manufacturers to integrate CarPlay in the future: BMW Group, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai Motor Company, Jaguar Land Rover, Kia Motors, Mitsubishi Motors, Nissan Motor Company, PSA Peugeot Citroën, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota Motor Corp.
John Lemke

Cutting the cord: Brazil's bold plan to combat the NSA | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...t-cable-to-avoid-us-nsa-spying

2013 brazil nsa technology security legal indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 25 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • "The real danger [from] the publicity about [NSA surveillance] is that other countries will begin to put very serious encryption – we use the term 'Balkanization' in general – to essentially split the internet and that the internet's going to be much more country specific," Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said at an event in New York this month. "That would be a very bad thing, it would really break the way the internet works, and I think that's what I worry about."
John Lemke

Microsoft Announces Windows 10 | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...microsoft-announces-windows-10

microsoft 2014 indienationnews tech Windows OS

shared by John Lemke on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Starting tomorrow, Microsoft will launch a Windows Insider Program that will give users who are comfortable with running very early beta software access to Windows 10. This first preview will be available for laptops and desktops. A build for servers will follow later.
  • The company went on to detail that its new operating system will have a tailored user experience between different screen sizes — that’s to say that if you are on a smaller device, you will see a different sort of user interface. The code will run across all device categories: “One product family. One platform. One store.”
  • Put more bluntly, the company is going for the enterprise crown.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • bringing back a few features of Windows 7
  • ncluding a redesigned start menu that combines the basic Windows 7 menu with the (resizable) tiles of the Windows 8 start screen. Windows 8 Metro apps can now also open in a windowed mode on the desktop, so you aren’t taking into the full-screen mode by default and you can use a “modern” Windows 8 side by side with a standard Windows desktop app.
  • multiple desktops
  • command line, too, which has also been improved quite a bit.
  • John Lemke on 01 Oct 14
     
    "the last 943 people to cover the operating system got the name wrong."
John Lemke

Scientists May Have Decoded One of the Secrets to Superconductors | Science | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...the-secrets-to-superconductors

technology 2014 superconductors indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • “In the same way that a laser is a hell of a lot more powerful than a light bulb, room-temperature superconductivity would completely change how you transport electricity and enable new ways of using electricity,” said Louis Taillefer, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.
  • ripples of electrons inside the superconductors that are called charge density waves. The fine-grained structure of the waves, reported in two new papers by independent groups of researchers, suggests that they may be driven by the same force as superconductivity. Davis and his colleagues directly visualized the waves in a study posted online in April, corroborating indirect evidence reported in February by a team led by Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.
  • Taken together, the various findings are at last starting to build a comprehensive picture of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity. “This is the first time I feel like we’re making real progress,” said Andrea Damascelli, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia who led two recent studies on charge density waves. “A lot of different observations which have been made over decades did not make sense with each other, and now they do.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The community remained divided until 2012, when two groups using a technique called resonant X-ray scattering managed to detect charge density waves deep inside cuprates, cementing the importance of the waves. As the groups published their findings in Science and Nature Physics, two new collaborations formed, one led by Damascelli and the other by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, with plans to characterize the waves even more thoroughly. Finishing in a dead heat, the rival groups’ independent studies appeared together in Science in January 2014. They confirmed that charge density waves are a ubiquitous phenomenon in cuprates and that they strenuously oppose superconductivity, prevailing as the temperature rises.
  • y applying Sachdev’s algorithm to a new round of data, Davis and his group mapped out the structure of the charge density waves, showing that the d-wave distribution of electrons was, indeed, their source.
  • The waves’ structure is particularly suggestive, researchers say, because superconducting pairs of electrons also have a d-wave configuration. It’s as if both arrangements of electrons were cast from the same mold. “Until a few months ago my thought was, OK, you have charge density waves, who cares? What’s the relevance to the high-temperature superconductivity?” Damascelli said. “This tells me these phenomena feed off the same interaction.”
  • In short, antiferromagnetism could generate the d-wave patterns of both superconductivity and its rival, charge density waves.
John Lemke

'Solid' light could compute previously unsolvable problems - Princeton Engine... - 0 views

www.princeton.edu/...archive

2014 indienationnews light engineering princeton physics cryatalization

shared by John Lemke on 11 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • The researchers are not shining light through crystal – they are transforming light into crystal. As part of an effort to develop exotic materials such as room-temperature superconductors, the researchers have locked together photons, the basic element of light, so that they become fixed in place.
  • The results raise intriguing possibilities for a variety of future materials. But the researchers also intend to use the method to address questions about the fundamental study of matter, a field called condensed matter physics.
  • To build their machine, the researchers created a structure made of superconducting materials that contains 100 billion atoms engineered to act as a single "artificial atom." They placed the artificial atom close to a superconducting wire containing photons. By the rules of quantum mechanics, the photons on the wire inherit some of the properties of the artificial atom – in a sense linking them. Normally photons do not interact with each other, but in this system the researchers are able to create new behavior in which the photons begin to interact in some ways like particles. "We have used this blending together of the photons and the atom to artificially devise strong interactions among the photons," said Darius Sadri, a postdoctoral researcher and one of the authors. "These interactions then lead to completely new collective behavior for light – akin to the phases of matter, like liquids and crystals, studied in condensed matter physics."
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