Archive for February, 2018
Trump: “Take the Guns First, Go Through Due Process Second”
February 28th, 2018Via: USA Today: President Trump said Wednesday he favors taking guns away from people who might commit violence before going through legal due process in the courts, one of many startling comments he made in a rambling White House meeting designed to hash out school safety legislation with a bipartisan group of lawmakers. “I like […]
The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin’s Doomed Meteorologist
February 28th, 2018Via: Atlas Obscura: AN ARCTIC FOX, A HEN, wild berries, a reindeer, a single candle glowing in the darkness, glaciers floating at sea, and an aurora borealis. These are some of the subjects of delicate, precise illustrations created by a man imprisoned in a Soviet gulag during the 1930s. The man’s drawings and letters, teeming […]
Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology
February 28th, 2018Via: The Verge: The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago […]
Trump Announces Re-Election Campaign and Campaign Manager
February 27th, 2018It’s a bit like the Christmas shit appearing in stores in October. Hmm. I wonder if They’ll fit Hillary with a powered exoskeleton suit this time? Via: CBS: President Donald Trump announced that he’s running for re-election in 2020, and Brad Parscale, who served as the Trump campaign’s 2016 digital guru, has been named campaign […]
California to Allow Testing of Self-Driving Cars Without a Driver Present
February 27th, 2018Thinking about the security side of this sends a chill down my spine. We’ve all heard of botnets. We’re probably not more than a couple of years away from the first botnet consisting of thousands of autonomous vehicles. I have roughly zero confidence that the security around autonomous vehicles will be sufficient to prevent this […]
Norway Will Spend $13 Million to Upgrade Its Doomsday Seed Vault
February 26th, 2018Via: The Verge: Norway will spend 100 million Norwegian Crowns ($12.7 million) to upgrade the doomsday seed vault it built 10 years ago. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was constructed in an abandoned Arctic coal mine to store and safeguard the world’s crops and plants from global natural or man-made disaster. If nuclear war or […]
Kids Use Tech So Much They Can’t Hold A Pencil Anymore, Doctors Say
February 26th, 2018Swipetarded parents. Swipetarded children. This should be a boon for the public school to private prison gravy train. Via: Guardian: Children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology, senior paediatric doctors have warned. An overuse of touchscreen phones and tablets is preventing children’s finger muscles […]
Apple Confirms It Uses Google’s Cloud for iCloud
February 26th, 2018Via: CNBC: A file that Apple updated on its website last month provides the first acknowledgment that it’s relying on Google’s public cloud for data storage for its iCloud services. The disclosure is fresh evidence that Google’s cloud has been picking up usage as it looks to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the […]
CDC Epidemic Intelligence Officer Left Work Feeling Ill, Hasn’t Been Seen Since
February 25th, 2018Update: Body of CDC Worker Who Mysteriously Disappeared in February Found in a River Via: Business Insider: The mystery surrounding the February disappearance of a 35-year-old Centres for Disease Control and Prevention worker ended tragically this week, with the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department finding the CDC commander’s body in a river late Tuesday evening. The […]
China Sets Stage for Xi to Stay in Office Indefinitely
February 25th, 2018Via: Reuters: China’s ruling Communist Party on Sunday set the stage for President Xi Jinping to stay in office indefinitely, with a proposal to remove a constitutional clause limiting presidential service to just two terms in office.
