October 2011
106 posts
“The London Metropolitan Police Force uses a tracking appliance that can force mobile devices to cough up their unique IDs (IMEIs and IMSIs) and give the Met realtime views into who is where and who they’re with. The devices can also intercept SMSes and effect denial of service attacks on handsets.”
—London cops recording movements & association with mobile tracking device: “blanket & indiscriminate” - Boing Boing
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Just a week ago, two passenger jets landing at West Country airports were targeted. Heathrow and Gatwick are also trouble spots. Last year there were 1,494 recorded cases in the UK, and in the summer of 2010 there were two “very serious near accidents”, where pilots of commercial flights – carrying up to 400 passengers – were forced to hand over control to their co-pilots and receive guidance from air traffic control after being temporarily blinded. Sergeant Richard Brandon of the Metropolitan Police Air Support Unit said: “This is a massive problem… I don’t think people realise the seriousness of the issue.”
Some 80 per cent of incidents occur during landing, where full concentration is required. In September last year Radu Moldovan, a Romanian strawberry-picker in Scotland, was jailed for four months for shining a laser into the cockpit of an RAF Tornado while it was conducting a complicated landing manoeuvre.
Huge rise in cases of pilots being targeted by lasers - Crime, UK - The Independent
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The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Conroe paid $300,000 in federal homeland security grant money and Friday it received the ShadowHawk unmanned helicopter made by Vanguard Defense Industries of Spring. […]
“The aircraft has the capability to have a number of different systems on board. Mostly, for law enforcement, we focus on what we call less lethal systems,” he said, including Tazers that can send a jolt to a criminal on the ground or a gun that fires bean bags known as a “stun baton.”
“You have a stun baton where you can actually engage somebody at altitude with the aircraft. A stun baton would essentially disable a suspect,” he said.
New Police Drone Near Houston Could Carry Weapons - Houston News Story - KPRC Houston
“Wellington, New Zealand - According to a statement, rats are confirmed to be the cause of a telecommunications blackout which lasted for more than four hours in New Zealand. The rats ate through cable crippling the telecommunications services infrastructure, and leaving telephone, mobile, and Internet services offline. Telecom New Zealand says the outages affected about 100,000 customers, and led to the nation’s stock exchange being closed for most of the trading day. According to the company, the rats ate through cable near Wellington, damaging a service pipeline on the North Island. Unfortunately, within hours a power company post-hole digger disabled another pipeline, causing the blackout. Telecom New Zealand is looking into bringing charges against the power company that took out their second pole, to help pay for the losses incurred by the failure.( All Headline News, June 24, 2005)”
—Continuity Systems Report, via Blaine
Hackers interfered with the operation of two U.S. government satellites in 2007 and 2008, according to a report to be released next month from a congressional commission.
The hackers obtained access to the satellites through a ground station in Norway, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
A Landsat-7 earth-observation satellite, managed by NASA, experienced at least 12 minutes of interference in October 2007 and July 2008, and a Terra AM-1 satellite experienced interference for two minutes in June 2008 and again for nine minutes in October that year.
The report doesn’t indicate the nature of the interference, but notes that the hackers “achieved all steps required to command” the Terra AM-1 satellite, but never actually exercised that control.
Hackers Targeted U.S. Government Satellites | Threat Level | Wired.com
Autodesk engineers can look at a building & tell which version was used to design it. #view11
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“The eighteen-year-old soldier was a high school dropout who failed to qualify for the original position in the armed forces he’d applied for. It was suggested he try his hand at drone piloting, and according to Singer, “because of playing on video games, he was already good at it.” So good, in fact, that he was brought back from Iraq to become an instructor at a training academy.”
—Soldier became ace drone pilot by training on video games | Joystiq
Facebook to build server farm on edge of Arctic Circle - Telegraph
“The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers,” said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a ‘Node Pole’, luring in other international computing giants. “If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it’s around 2C [35.6F].”
NODE POLE. The machines live in other environments.
Infra red images taken by a police helicopter during the early hours show that only around 20 of the 200 tents on the encampment actually have people staying in them.
The Daily Telegraph has shot its own video of the St Paul’s camp using thermal imaging equipment which appears to confirm these claims.
The footage, shot at 1230am on Tuesday Oct 25 shows a multitude of darkly coloured tents around the courtyard indicating those that were unoccupied.
Video: Telegraph thermal imaging video at protest camp show most tents are empty - Telegraph
