A federal appeals court questioned during a hearing Tuesday whether the city of Berkeley is unduly discouraging customers from buying cell phones by requiring retailers to warn them about the possible radiation effects of carrying switched-on phones close to their bodies.

Berkeley’s ordinance, challenged by the cell phone industry, requires dealers to notify customers that the federal government sets radiation standards for the phones and that a user may be exposed to levels above those standards by carrying a cell phone in a pocket or tucked into a bra when the device is connected to a wireless network.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco allowed the law to take effect in January, saying the warning was based on research and guidelines by the Federal Communications Commission.

Continue reading “Court questions whether Berkeley cell phone law goes too far” »

Wow; Europe is growing more nervous.

WASHINGTON: The Russian threat has driven Sweden so close to NATO that the once-neutral nation is becoming an ally in all but name. While the current Swedish government won’t apply for NATO membership — a position it just reiterated Friday — every other kind of collaboration is not only on the table, but actually happening more and more.

Recent agreements are bringing Sweden into NATO policy councils and wargame planning in unprecedented ways. Sweden is building up its forces to keep an ever closer watch on Russia both in the Arctic and the Baltic. A Host Nation Agreement — signed just months after Russia’s annexation of Crimea — makes it easier for NATO to operate in Swedish territory (if invited). Sweden has even sent troops to Afghanistan. With friends like these, who needs formal allies?

Continue reading “Fear Of Russia Drives Sweden Closer To NATO” »

Interesting — imagine now how this can be used in so many areas (legal/ law enforcement, government, etc.)

Because that’s basically what researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech are able to do with a new imaging system that can read individual pages without opening the cover.

So far the system, designed by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been able to distinguish the lines on the first nine pages in a stack of paper.

Continue reading “Scientists Can Now Read Books Without Opening Them” »

China hasn’t kept it a secret for many months now about the Chinese government desire to have an unbreakable quantum communication networks which is why they launched their Quantum Satellite (the QSS program) last month. What the real story is how QSS is enabling the military to have a leading edge through technologies such as the Quantum Radar capabilities, or using Quantum communications to prevent hacking of their systems while having the ability to hack others. And, this is what has actually been published publically to boot.

Hacked recently covered the efforts of the Chinese government to build unbreakable quantum communication networks. According to analysts, quantum communications networks are so expensive that they could have a “recentralizing effect,” enabling states to recover the ground that they have lost to decentralizing digital technologies. But what if ultra-secure quantum cryptography could be made available to everyone at low cost?

European researchers at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), Institució Catalana de Recerca (ICREA), and other research labs, have developed a fast random number generator based on a quantum mechanical process that could deliver the world’s most secure encryption keys in a package tiny enough to use in a mobile device.

Continue reading “Toward Unbreakable Quantum Encryption for Everyone” »

An alliance of technology organizations and conservatives are urging Congress to file suit against the Obama administration to block the transference of control over Internet domain names to an international board. The alliance claims that doing so will give authoritarian regimes power to decide who can and cannot have a presence on the web, Fox News reported Saturday.

Since 1998, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department called the National Telecommunications Information Administration, or NTIA, has issued domain names. But in September the Obama administration is set to allow the U.S. government’s contract to lapse so that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will then be operated by a global board of directors, and the responsibility will fall to it instead.

Critics of the administration’s decision fear that it will allow Russia, China and Iran to then have a stake in governing the Internet, giving them “de facto” power to tax domain names and quash free speech.

Continue reading “Tech groups urging Congress to sue Obama admin to block giving control of Internet to authoritarian regimes” »

OAHU, HAWAI’I — As thousands of government representatives and conservationists convene in Oahu this week for the 2016 World Conservation Congress, international conservation and environmental leaders are raising awareness about the potentially dangerous use of gene drives — a controversial new synthetic biology technology intended to deliberately cause targeted species to become extinct.

Members of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), including NGOs, government representatives, and scientific and academic institutions, overwhelmingly voted to adopt a de facto moratorium on supporting or endorsing research into gene drives for conservation or other purposes until the IUCN has fully assessed their impacts. News of the August 26 digital vote comes as an important open letter to the group is being delivered.

Scientists and environmental experts and organizations from around the globe have advocated for a halt to proposals for the use of gene drive technologies in conservation. Announced today, a long list of environmental leaders, including Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, genetics professor and broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki, Dr. Fritjof Capra, entomologist Dr. Angelika Hilbeck, Indian environmental activist Dr. Vandana Shiva and organic pioneer and biologist Nell Newman, have lent their support to the open letter: “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” The letter states, in part: “Gene drives, which have not been tested for unintended consequences, nor fully evaluated for ethical and social impacts, should not be promoted as conservation tools.”

Continue reading “Genetic ‘extinction’ technology rejected” »

I am glad that more folks are beginning to start to understand the magnitude and depth of the risk & exposure that QC presents even within the next 4 to 5 years. However, what about everyone else? Folks need to understand that the transformation to QC in the infrastructure alone is a substantial investment and timeline. So, as I have highlighted many times; I hope folks have baked in QC into their future state architectures & investments because a transformation (depending on company size and complexity) could span many, many years.

The study purports there is a 50 per cent risk that many of the cybersecurity tools used by financial institutions, online retailers and government agencies will be obsolete by 2031.

September 6, 2016 by Canadian Manufacturing.com Staff.

Additional insights on QSS planned efforts; and (as with any government program) there is more to this program than these insights.

While China’s quantum science satellite (QSS) project is part of the Strategic Priority Programme on Space Science, the country’s first space exploration programme intended purely for scientific research, its experiments have significant military implications.

By Michael Raska

Continue reading “China’s Quantum Satellite Experiments: Strategic And Military Implications – Analysis” »

Predicting an economic “singularity” approaching, Kevin Carson from the Center for a Stateless Society writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010) we can look forward to a vibrant “alternative economy” driven less and less by corporate and state leviathans.

According to Carson, “the more technical advances lower the capital outlays and overhead for production in the informal economy, the more the economic calculus is shifted” (p. 357). While this sums up the message of the book and its relevance to advocates of open existing and emerging technologies, the analysis Carson offers to reach his conclusions is extensive and sophisticated.

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, “increasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will – between them – arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents” (p. 346).

An unrivalled champion of arguments against “intellectual property”, the author believes IP to be nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by talentless corporations to continue making profit at the expensive of true creators and scientists (p. 114–129). The view has significant merit.

Continue reading “'Abolish artificial scarcity': @KevinCarson1” »