Tag: technology

Sumerian Anti-Armageddon Device 4,000 Years Older Than Believed

Drone mappers identified a 19 kilometer (12-mile) long canal in rural Iraq. Built over it, archaeologists excavated what was at first thought to be a bizarre-shaped temple. However, it turns out that ,4,000-years-ago, ancient Sumerians built “a one-of-a-kind anti-drought machine.”

Located near the modern city of Nasiriyah, in southern Iraq, the ancient city of Girsu was occupied by the Sumerian civilization from the 3rd millennium BC. Dedicated to the war and agriculture god Ningirsu, artifacts recovered from the site have illustrated both the religious and political history of early Mesopotamian society.

A recent dig by the British Museum at Girsu revealed “a mysterious structure,” which in the 1920s was interpreted as an unusually shaped temple. However, members of the  museum’s Girsu Project have now announced that the curious discovery was a 4,000-year-old “innovative civilization-saving machine.”

The British Museum describe the ancient lifesaving device as a “flume” that was used to deliver water to distant locations for agriculture. Ebru Torun, an architect and conservationist working with the British Museum archeologists in Iraq, said “no other example of it exists in history, really, until the present day. It’s absolutely one-of-a-kind.”

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New study casts more doubt on JFK assassination’s ‘magic bullet’

A Colorado-based company with an office in Atlanta has released its findings related to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination ahead of that fateful day’s 60th anniversary.

Kennedy was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, while his motorcade passed through downtown’s Dealey Plaza. The Warren Commission was assembled to investigate the shooting; its 1964 report determined Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman, firing a total of three shots that struck Kennedy and Texas Gov. John Connolly, who was riding in the presidential limousine’s front seat.

However, the study from Knott Laboratory combined high-definition laser scans with photographs, films and other evidence to create a digital twin of Dealey Plaza. The accuracy in the tested bullet trajectories shows the exit point on Kennedy and entry point on . Connally to have a significant angle difference.

Stanley Stoll, CEO of Knott Laboratory, said evidence suggests the potential of a fourth shot from another location indicating a second gunman and perhaps a wider conspiracy to kill the president.

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LEXISNEXIS SOLD POWERFUL SPY TOOLS TO U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION

THE POPULAR DATA broker LexisNexis began selling face recognition services and personal location data to U.S. Customs and Border Protection late last year, according to contract documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to the documents, obtained by the advocacy group Just Futures Law and shared with The Intercept, LexisNexis Risk Solutions began selling surveillance tools to the border enforcement agency in December 2022. The $15.9 million contract includes a broad menu of powerful tools for locating individuals throughout the United States using a vast array of personal data, much of it obtained and used without judicial oversight.

Through LexisNexis, CBP investigators gained a convenient place to centralize, analyze, and search various databases containing enormous volumes of intimate personal information, both public and proprietary.

“This contract is mass surveillance in hyperdrive,” Julie Mao, an attorney and co-founder of Just Futures Law, told The Intercept. “It’s frightening that a rogue agency such as CBP has access to so many powerful technologies at the click of the button. Unfortunately, this is what LexisNexis appears now to be selling to thousands of police forces across the country. It’s now become a one-stop shop for accessing a range of invasive surveillance tools.”

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The Intelligence Community’s Latest Novelty, Spy Underwear, Puts Us Closer to the Totalitarian Dystopia Described in Science Fiction Novels

In 1921, just after the Russian Revolution, Yevgeny Zamyatin published a dystopian science fiction novel, We, in which a spacecraft engineer lives in a futuristic city made of glass enabling government authorities to track everything that people do at every moment of the day.

The novel influenced George Orwell and Aldous Huxley who wrote prophetic warnings about state surveillance and totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Brave New World (1932).

Slowly but surely the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies are helping to transform Zamyatin’s worst nightmare into reality—albeit with a twist. Rather than having to build cities full of glass, they have perfected development of sophisticated computer technologies that allow them to spy on everyone without the people knowing when they are doing it.

In late August, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), launched a $22 million program designed to develop computerized clothing, including spy underwear fitted with cameras, sensors and microphones capable of recording audio, video and geolocation data.

According to the Office of the DNI, the newly developed eTextile technology, ideally could assist personnel and first responders in dangerous, high-stress environments, such as crime scenes and arms control inspections without impeding their ability to swiftly and safely operate.[1]

The new technology, however, brings with it a serious dark side, giving the government the ability to insidiously spy on everyone all the time—without them ever knowing it. Journalist Annie Jacobsen told The Intercept that the intelligence agencies “want to know more about you than you.”

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DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY CONSTRUCTING FIRST-EVER ELECTRON-ION COLLIDER TO EXPLORE THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF MATTER

The United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) have signed a “Statement of Interest” to collaborate on the construction of the world’s first-ever Electron-Ion Collider (EIC).

Scheduled to be built in the U.S. at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in partnership with DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab), the agencies say that the ultra-powerful collider will allow researchers an unprecedented ability to “explore the building blocks of matter and the strongest force in nature.”

“The EIC is the only collider planned to be constructed anywhere in the world in the next decade—and the first to collide a beam of high-energy polarized electrons with a counter-circulating beam of high-energy polarized protons or heavier ions,” a statement from the Brookhaven National Laboratory explains. “A sophisticated detector will capture snapshots of these collisions to reveal how the particles and forces at the heart of atomic nuclei build up the structure and properties of everything we see in the universe today—from stars to planets to people.”

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In a first, cryptographic keys protecting SSH connections stolen in new attack

For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a large portion of cryptographic keys used to protect data in computer-to-server SSH traffic are vulnerable to complete compromise when naturally occurring computational errors occur while the connection is being established.

Underscoring the importance of their discovery, the researchers used their findings to calculate the private portion of almost 200 unique SSH keys they observed in public Internet scans taken over the past seven years. The researchers suspect keys used in IPsec connections could suffer the same fate. SSH is the cryptographic protocol used in secure shell connections that allows computers to remotely access servers, usually in security-sensitive enterprise environments. IPsec is a protocol used by virtual private networks that route traffic through an encrypted tunnel.

The vulnerability occurs when there are errors during the signature generation that takes place when a client and server are establishing a connection. It affects only keys using the RSA cryptographic algorithm, which the researchers found in roughly a third of the SSH signatures they examined. That translates to roughly 1 billion signatures out of the 3.2 billion signatures examined. Of the roughly 1 billion RSA signatures, about one in a million exposed the private key of the host.

While the percentage is infinitesimally small, the finding is nonetheless surprising for several reasons—most notably because most SSH software in use—including OpenSSH—has deployed a countermeasure for decades that checks for signature faults before sending a signature over the Internet. Another reason for the surprise is that until now, researchers believed that signature faults exposed only RSA keys used in the TLS—or Transport Layer Security—protocol encrypting Web and email connections. They believed SSH traffic was immune from such attacks because passive attackers—meaning adversaries simply observing traffic as it goes by—couldn’t see some of the necessary information when the errors happened.

The researchers noted that since the 2018 release of TLS version 1.3, the protocol has encrypted handshake messages occurring while a web or email session is being negotiated. That has acted as an additional countermeasure protecting key compromise in the event of a computational error. Keegan Ryan, a researcher at the University of California San Diego and one of the authors of the research, suggested it may be time for other protocols to include the same additional protection.

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WA Judge Rules That Car Manufacturers Can Legally Store Your Texts and Phone Calls Without Explicit Permission

In a move concerning privacy advocates, a federal judge last week ruled against reinstating a collective lawsuit accusing four auto manufacturing giants of contravening privacy protections in Washington state. The companies were alleged to have illicitly intercepted and documented private text messages and call records of customers using their car’s inbuilt infotainment systems.

The judge based in Seattle concluded that this activity did not constitute unauthorized privacy infringements according to state regulations.

The court’s decision favors the automakers Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, and General Motors, who find themselves as defendants in five parallel collective lawsuits revolving around this issue. A similar case against Ford had been earlier dismissed following an appeal.

The complainants from the existing four lawsuits had sought legal redress following a previous dismissal by another judge. In their judgment given Tuesday, the appellate judge asserted that the clandestine capture and logging of mobile phone usage did not violate the provisions of the Washington Privacy Act. According to the act, to be a vulnerable plaintiff, one must demonstrate a threat to “his or her business, his or her person, or his or her reputation.”

To highlight the matters in question, the plaintiffs in one of the five lawsuits launched a legal challenge against Honda in 2021, contending that starting at least in 2014, infotainment systems in Honda’s vehicles have been storing duplicates of all text messages from smartphones once they were connected to the system.

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5 WAYS TO PREPARE FOR THE ONLINE PRIVACY CRACKDOWN

The internet is about to change. In many countries, there’s currently a coordinated legislative push to effectively outlaw encryption of user uploaded content under the guise of protecting children. This means websites or internet services (messaging apps, email, etc.) could be held criminally or civilly liable if someone used it to upload abusive material. If these bills become law, people like myself who help supply private communication services could be penalized or put into prison for simply protecting the privacy of our users. In fact, anyone who runs a website with user-uploaded content could be punished the same way. In today’s article, I’ll show you why these bills not only fail at protecting children, but also put the internet as we know it in jeopardy, as well as why we should question the organizations behind the push.

Let’s quickly recap some of the legislation.

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AC-130 Laser Weapon Test Slip Raises Questions About Its Future

Planned flight testing of a high-energy laser directed energy weapon on a U.S. Air Force AC-130J Ghostrider gunship has been pushed back again to next year. This once looked set to be the service’s first operational airborne laser weapon. However, the future of this project is ever more uncertain and there is now a broader review of the Ghostrider’s armament suite that could see the aircraft lose their 105mm howitzers in the future.

Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) has confirmed to The War Zone that flight tests of the Airborne High Energy Laser (AHEL) on the AC-130J are now set to start in January 2024 and wrap up in June of that year. The goal had originally been for the AHEL to take to the sky on a Ghostrider sometime in the 2022 Fiscal Year. Most recently, the hope had been that this would occur before the end of this year.

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China Unveils Plan To Mass Produce Human-like Robots, Calling It ‘New Engine’ For Growth

China is setting out to mass produce human-like robots in two years, an ambitious plan that, according to a blueprint issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), it hopes will make the regime in Beijing the leader in the field of robotics.

The goal is to establish an innovation framework for humanoid robots and ensure that the country can make core parts of the robots on its own.

The products, under the MIIT plan, will meet advanced international standards in quality, for use in harsh environments, manufacturing, and service sectors, according to the directive. Like smartphones, computers, and new energy vehicles, humanoid robots have the “disruptive” potential to “revolutionize” people’s lives, the document said.

The ministry told local officials to take advantage of China’s market size and its “whole-of-nation system” to accelerate humanoid robot development as a pillar industry to advance China’s manufacturing and digital dominance.

Beijing hopes that by 2025 it will have two to three companies with global influence and will nurture more smaller businesses dedicated to the field. In another two years, the aim is to create a “safe and reliable supply chain” for the technology and make the country competitive globally. At that point, it said, such products will be deeply integrated into the economy and become a “new engine” for economic growth.

The “brain,” “cerebellum,” and “limbs” of the robots should be the focus, and the industry should aim at creating “highly reliable” robots for harsh or dangerous conditions, the guideline said. When monitoring and safeguarding “strategic locations,” robots need to be able to move in “highly complicated terrains,” size up the situation, and make intelligent decisions, it said, adding that robots will need greater ability to protect themselves and work with higher precision in scenarios such as rescue work or where explosives are involved.

Relevant authorities need to deepen international cooperation, encourage foreign companies to create research centers in China, and bring Chinese products to the international market, according to the document.

Eager to partake in setting the global standard for emerging technology, Beijing said it’d like to get “deeply involved in the international rules and standard setting” and “contribute Chinese wisdom” to the industry’s development, the document said.

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