Tag: science

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#SCIENCE

#Star Trek: Deep Space Nine accidentally predicted the 2020s by writing about the 1990s
Income inequality, homelessness, and other social ills of the 2020s — predicted by TV writers looking out their windows in 1995. By Emily VanDerWerff Feb 16 2021
<https://www.vox.com/culture/22273263/star-trek-deep-space-nine-past-tense-prediction-2024>

3D-Printed Guns Are Getting More Capable and Accessible
By Ari Schneider Feb 16 2021
<https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/3d-printed-semi-automatic-rifle-fgc-9.html>

A new roadmap for hardware for Quantum Interconnects (QuICS) has been published.
https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.017002
PlRX is an open access journal. This is a very hardware-oriented roadmap, focusing on components, but at a glance it’s an incredibly useful resource. It is the output of a two-day NSF workshop, held Oct. 31-Nov. 1, 2019. Earlier draft available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.06642

New paper (though not yet peer reviewed) from TU Delft, the leading experimental group using solid state qubit memories connected via single photons:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04471
And this interested Nature enough that they have a news article on it, quoting Rod Van Meter 
This is important because it’s the first time that coupling entanglement across more than one hop has been done using solid state memories.
Treasury Watchdog Warns of Government’s Use of Cellphone Data Without Warrants
Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies may be on shaky legal ground in purchasing the data, report says
EXCERPT:

A new Treasury Department watchdog report warns that law-enforcement agencies may not be on firm legal footing when they use cellphone GPS data drawn from mobile apps without obtaining a warrant first.

In a review of the Internal Revenue Service’s use of a commercial platform that allowed the agency to track cellphones, the Treasury Department inspector general for tax administration said that a landmark 2018 Supreme Court case might preclude the warrantless tracking of criminal suspects through location data generated by weather, game and other apps. The report encouraged stricter controls on use of the data.

Many government lawyers have concluded that the decision in Carpenter v. United States doesn’t apply because it addresses data held by cellphone carriers that contain a subscriber’s personally identifying information, rather than GPS location data drawn from apps, which doesn’t.

The watchdog’s report is only a recommendation, and its interpretation of the law hasn’t been blessed by any court. Yet it is the first known government analysis to raise serious doubt about the legality of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies purchasing highly revealing information generated by U.S. cellphones and other digital services.

The audit, requested by Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), examined the IRS Criminal Investigation division’s use of a commercial software platform provided by Venntel, a company that sells to the government access to GPS data gathered from apps. Venntel’s parent company, Gravy Analytics, caters to corporate clients. The IRS experimented with Venntel’s platform as an investigative tool in 2017 and 2018 but stopped using the software.

Mr. Wyden’s office provided a copy of the inspector-general report to The Wall Street Journal.

“I’m troubled agency lawyers were so cavalier about American’s privacy rights that they green-lit the warrantless purchase of location data with such minimal legal analysis. This shows again that Americans need strong new laws protecting our 4th Amendment rights to ensure government credit cards don’t replace court orders,” Mr. Wyden said in a statement. He has been working on legislation to address the issue.

In approving the agency’s project, IRS lawyers had maintained “that data obtained from marketers of information like Venntel is not subject to a warrant because the data is collected by apps loaded on cellphones to which the phone users voluntarily granted access,” the inspector general found.

But in the Carpenter case, the court rejected a similar argument about location data collected by cellphone carriers.

Cellphone-location records are an “exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers,” the Supreme Court said, and therefore law enforcement must get a warrant to access the data.

“The court’s rationale was that phone users do not truly voluntarily agree to share the information given the necessity of phones in our society,” the IRS inspector general concluded. “Courts may apply similar logic to GPS data sold by marketers.”

The IRS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for the IRS’s Criminal Investigation division previously said it “takes the privacy of citizens very seriously and follows all laws and regulations surrounding that privacy while administering the very important law-enforcement mission of protecting our nation’s tax system.” After a year of experimenting with Venntel, the spokesman added, “it was determined that this tool did not benefit CI investigations and its use was discontinued.”

The president of Venntel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Harvesting cellphone-location data from apps accessed by customers—used to understand consumer behavior, make investment and real-estate decisions, target advertising and more—is a multibillion-dollar industry. Unlike cell-tower data kept by carriers, these data sets identify individual users only by an alphanumeric code, which the marketing industry says cloaks the identities of phone users. However, in practice, users’ identities can be gleaned based on things like the address where the device is usually located in the evening. This data also pinpoints a phone’s location more precisely than the data held by carriers…

[…]

ECP NetHappenings Newsletter 12-12-2020 Job Money Science K12Education

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!!!!!!!!!!!! Supreme Court Rejects Texas Suit!!!!!!!!!!

Electoral College vote will secure Biden presidency

Rethuglicans can’t cancel the Electoral College

@USChamber @LEGALREFORM @RepublicanAGs and
LINDSEY GRAHAM ARE all #neoconfederate #treasonweasels
Call them at 202-463-5724 #democracy comes first.

Lawmakers Who Backed Texas should not be seated in the house 
In 1861, 11 senators and 3 representatives were expelled for supporting the Confederacy and not acknowledging Lincoln’s legitimate election.

Twitter has put new restrictions on@realDonaldTrump It is now not only labeling his false claims but it is making it impossible to like or comment on two he just posted. It is a new level of shutting down this monster.

Blue states send more tax dollars to Washington than they get back. Red states get back more than they contribute. So if red states want to secede — as the Texas GOP chairman suggests — blue states will be able to keep our money. We’ll be far better off financially.

It’s pretty clear Trump’s team is going to keep filing lawsuits. As long as they’re filing lawsuits, Trump can raise hundreds of millions of dollars for them that actually go to his political group that can then spend the money at his properties. It was a grift all along.

 

The Biden White House will have a private contractor provide “disinfectant misting services” to clear the air of lingering droplets after Trump moves out and before Biden moves in.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/09/biden-covid-safety-transition-444040

JOB: Senior Cyber Threat Hunter

I’m looking for a motivated individual to join my team as a Sr Cyber Threat Hunter who will be responsible for identifying advanced adversary activity! Come help protect a company on the frontlines of creating breakthroughs that change patients’ lives!
https://pfizer.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/PfizerCareers/job/United-States—Pennsylvania—Collegeville/Senior-Cyber-Threat-Hunter_4801101-1

MONEY

Mission Creep or Creepy Mission: The New York Fed’s Trading Desk Has
Ballooned to $6.59 Trillion Today from $576 Billion in 2008
https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/12/mission-creep-or-creepy-mission-the-new-york-feds-trading-desk-has-ballooned-to-6-59-trillion-today-from-576-billion-in-2008/

While many are questioning Bitcoin’s foundations, perhaps even more importantly, Bitcoin is questioning the foundations of the central banks.
https://twitter.com/BlockBytch_/status/1337816189930770441

New Research Shows ‘Pandemic Profits’ of Billionaires Could Fully Fund $3,000 Stimulus Checks for Every Person in US 

GOP Admits That Handing Out Free Money Creates Jobs

CRYPTO

Insurer MassMutual scoops up $100 million worth of Bitcoin,
Billionaire Mike Novogratz highlighted the insurer’s Bitcoin purchase as the most important news in the crypto space in 2020. The investment represents 0.04% of MassMutual’s $235 billion general investment account.

SCIENCE

Man frozen to death after Google Maps wrong turn. “A teenager froze to death in brutal -50C weather after his sat nav told him to take a wrong turn on Russia’s notorious Road of Bones. The Google Maps instructions sent him on a disused shortcut across the world’s coldest inhabited region, according to reports.”

Chemicals to Avoid: Groundbreaking Database of Illnesses from Pesticide Exposure Launched. “Beyond Pesticides’ relational Pesticide-Induced Diseases Database further serves the purpose of demonstrating how pervasive pesticides exposure and how exposure can impact human health with numerous adverse health outcomes. Those exposed to pesticides do not only develop one symptom or disease, but can develop multiple, interconnected diseases. Studies find that pesticide exposure can cause oxidative stress leading to various illnesses, including neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, or oncological diseases.”

K12 EDUCATION

U.S. Schools Are Buying Phone-Hacking Tech That the FBI Used to Investigate Terrorists
In May 2016, a student enrolled in a high-school in Shelbyville, Texas, consented to having his phone searched by one of the district’s school resource officers. Looking for evidence of a romantic relationship between the student and a teacher, the officer plugged the phone into a Cellebrite UFED to recover deleted messages from the phone. According to the arrest affidavit, investigators discovered the student and teacher frequently messaged each other, “I love you.” Two days later, the teacher was booked into the county jail for sexual assault of a child.
The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.
In March 2020, the North East Independent School District, a largely Hispanic district north of San Antonio, wrote a check to Cellebrite for $6,695 for “General Supplies.” In May, Cypress-Fairbanks ISD near Houston, Texas, paid Oxygen Forensics Inc., another mobile device forensics firm, $2,899. Not far away, majority-white Conroe ISD wrote a check to Susteen Inc., the manufacturer of the similar Secure View system, for $995 in September 2016.
Gizmodo has reviewed similar accounting documents from eight school districts, seven of which are in Texas, showing that administrators paid as much $11,582 for the controversial surveillance technology. Known as mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), this type of tech is able to siphon text messages, photos, and application data from student’s devices. Together, the districts encompass hundreds of schools, potentially exposing hundreds of thousands of students to invasive cell phone searches. < – >
https://gizmodo.com/u-s-schools-are-buying-phone-hacking-tech-that-the-fbi-1845862393

Senate overwhelmingly advances defense bill that will rename Confederate bases, squashing Trump’s chances of a veto

SCIENCE: Water on Moon, Turbine Blades, Moon, Swordfish, DDT

Water on the Moon

The business of Moon Water.
So now you own the moon crater where they have located the water. Your little Moon Water business will bottles it, and sell it to NASA for $9000.00 a bottle so that it won’t cost NASA $10,000.00 a bottle to put it on the rocket for the astronauts. Banda bing!

Turbine Blades do not kill the birds

Painting Wind Turbine Blades Black Help Birds Avoid Deadly Collisions | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

Swordfish  are killing sharks on a regular basis

Swordfish are killing sharks on a regular basis, apparently

DDT Dumped off Catalina pollution for years

How the waters off Catalina became a DDT dumping ground

Trump made money from the beauty pageant in Russia.

“The Trump Organization has never disclosed how much it was paid to hold the beauty pageant in Russia. But Trump’s lawyers told the Senate Judiciary Committee  that the Trump Org made $12.2 million from foreign sources that year, and a “substantial portion” came from the Moscow event.

 

Who told the vendors not to send PPE equipment and supplies?

CyberPlayGround NetHappenings©1989Who told the vendors not to send PPE equipment and supplies?

FACT CHECK JUDY MIKOVITS #JudyMikovits #JudyMikovitz 
SHE IS A TOTAL BULLSHIT SCAM ARTIST SELLING AND MAKING MONEY OFF YOUR IGNORANCE. DO NOT BUY HER BOOK OR SEND HER LINKS TO ANYWHERE. DO NOT TWEET HER BULL

Jarad Kushner Airbridge Program Medical Supply Chain“Project Airbridge,” the White House’s much-touted program to airlift medical supplies from other countries, has little to show for the tax dollars spent.

At least 100 million Americans can move around again. Public health experts warn this increased activity is likely to cause a surge of new infections. Cases are continuing to rise in many of the states where governors have been most aggressive in opening public spaces and businesses that rely on close personal contact, like salons and gyms. None have met the federal government’s core recommendation of a two-week decline in reported cases.

U.S. Turned Down Offer To Manufacture Millions Of N95 Masks As Coronavirus Spread. After the first COVID-19 case was detected in January, a company offered to make millions of N95 masks. A federal agency said no.
Michael Bowen, the owner of medical supply company Prestige Ameritech, told the Department of Health and Human Services that he could begin producing 1.7 million N95 masks a week, only to be denied, The Washington Post first reported.
Laura Wolf, director of the agency’s Division of Critical Infrastructure Protection, responded that the government wasn’t “anywhere near answering those questions for you yet” in response to Bowen’s offer.
“We are the last major domestic mask company,” Bowen emailed the next day. “My phones are ringing now, so I don’t ‘need’ government business. I’m just letting you know that I can help you preserve our infrastructure if things ever get really bad. I’m a patriot first, businessman second.”

11/07/2019 When the EPA and the FDA fail to work together
For decades a chemical used to sterilize medical devices and surgery tools has been the only option to ensure safe devices for billions of critical health care procedures.
But the chemical, ethylene oxide, has been shown to cause cancer, and growing panic among people living near plants that sterilize medical devices has led to a major crackdown and the shutdown of the factories in several states.

Who told the vendors not to send equipment and supplies?

Michigan Governor Claims Federal Government Told Vendors ‘Not to Send Stuff Here’

Trump ‘Criminal negligence’:
Trump officials ignored offer of 7 million N95 masks per month in early days of pandemic.

TRUMP

“We’re really a second line of attack.  The first line of attack is supposed to be the hospitals and the local government and the states, the states themselves,” Trump said.  “You have to understand, this has to be managed by local government and by the governors, it can’t be managed by the federal government,” Trump later said.

(Again,federal law requires the federal government to manage the so-called “strategic national stockpile” of medical supplies.  Trump vaguely referenced the stockpile without naming it by saying there was a “broken chain” of “monster warehouses” and that he was “filling it up very strongly.)

SUE TRUMP FOR CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE
The federal law requires the federal government to manage the so-called “strategic national stockpile” of medical supplies.