Cheap thermal imagers can steal user PINs

A British infosec company has found that cheap thermal imaging accessories for smartphones can be used to glean personal identification numbers entered on push-button security devices on bank ATMs..

Thermal imaging devices used to be bulky and expensive, but Sec-Tec told iTnews they can now be bought cheaply as compact iPhone accessories – for instance, the FLIR One, which retails for US$249 (A$340).

The company tested several PIN pads in ATMs, locks and safes with the thermal imagers and found they could “leak” the digits entered by legimate users for longer than a minute after use.
continue http://www.itnews.com.au/News/408178,cheap-thermal-imagers-can-steal-user-pins.aspx

Fort Bragg Soldiers Prepare For Domestic Nuclear Drill

Soldiers currently en route to Fort Bragg will take part in a military exercise to respond to domestic emergencies that involve: chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive emergencies.

Over the next week the soldiers from around the country will head towards Jacksonville, Florida to take part in the surprise exercise, which most were not told about until now.

With these ‘surprise’ exercises and Jade Helm 15 recently – is there more to these drills than we’re being told? We’ll keep you updated.

Fayobserver.com reports:

Col. Jayson C. Gilberti, who is leading a task force that includes soldiers from Fort Bragg, Georgia and Texas, said it was important for the soldiers to be prepared to work together in a complex environment and to be mentally prepared to help their suffering countrymen if needed.

“You can never be ready enough,” said Gilberti, who commands the 20th Engineer Brigade at Fort Bragg. “It’s about Americans helping Americans at the end of the day. We’re one team.”

In all, nearly 750 soldiers are participating in the emergency deployment readiness exercise, or EDRE. The exercise is aimed at honing the skills of the Defense CBRNE Reactionary Force, or DCRF, which is tasked with responding to chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive emergencies anywhere in the United States.
continue http://yournewswire.com/fort-bragg-soldiers-prepare-for-nuclear-domestic-emergency-drill/

DARPA Robots Falling Video

Controlling Emotions With a Brain Implant

Current methods for improving your mood are wildly inefficient. Recreational drugs can make you crazy, pharmaceuticals can erase your personality and damage your organs. Sugar and alcohol make you fat and depressed. Caffeine stresses you out, and cigarettes fill your lungs with death. We don’t welcome these side effects, but we deal with them because these substances have the potential to alter our emotional thermostat.

It would be so much easier if we could bypass the body altogether and go straight to the source: Our brain. What if there were a better way than shoving something in our mouth, forcing it to travel all over our bloodstream, and blindly showering our brains with thousands of chemicals? What if we could, with the push of a button, make microscopic alterations of a few neurons, causing the happy chemicals to ring out in a jackpot celebration, with no side effects? Would we be ready to handle such complete control over our emotional reality?

continue http://www.vice.com/read/there-is-now-a-brain-implant-that-can-control-emotions-wirelessly-253

Can Hypnosis Kill You?

Jason Schneider

The first account linking hypnosis and death in the medical literature was in 1894. Ella Salamon, niece of a Hungarian count, was put into a trance and then “fell from her chair with a hoarse cry,” according to an attending doctor. “There is no doubt that she died in hypnosis,” said Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a noted psychiatrist of the time, “but that she died by hypnosis is questionable.”

Accounts of such fatalities or psychiatric harm from hypnosis have appeared sporadically ever since. In 1979, a stage hypnotist asked a young Israeli mother to regress to childhood—a time when she’d been hiding from the Nazis. She later reported that the newly uncovered memories put her in a state of distress for years. Other reports tell of trance subjects left stuporous and suicidal.

continue http://www.popsci.com/can-hypnosis-kill-you

EPA knew of ‘blowout’ risk for tainted water at gold mine

By MICHAEL BIESECKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — Internal documents released late Friday show managers at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency were aware of the potential for a catastrophic “blowout” at an abandoned mine that could release “large volumes” of wastewater laced with toxic heavy metals.

EPA released the documents following weeks of prodding from The Associated Press and other media organizations. EPA and contract workers accidentally unleashed 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater on Aug. 5 as they inspected the idled Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado.

Among the documents is a June 2014 work order for a planned cleanup that noted that the old mine had not been accessible since 1995, when the entrance partially collapsed. The plan appears to have been produced by Environmental Restoration, a private contractor working for EPA.

“This condition has likely caused impounding of water behind the collapse,” the report says. “ln addition, other collapses within the workings may have occurred creating additional water impounding conditions. Conditions may exist that could result in a blowout of the blockages and cause a release of large volumes of contaminated mine waters and sediment from inside the mine, which contain concentrated heavy metals.”

continue http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150822/us–mine_waste_leak-b78be0620f.html

4 Machine Learning Algorithms That Shape Your Life

Written by Andre Infante August 20, 2015

Software is getting smart. It’s a slow, uneven process — but it’s also seemingly unstoppable. One by one, the hard problems of machine learning are falling to powerful new theoretical tools, letting us build software that can do some truly impressive things.

Some applications, like self-driving cars, are a few years off. What you may not realize, though, is that machine learning is already all around you, and it can exert a surprising degree of influence over your life. Don’t believe me? You might be surprised.

Let’s start with an obvious example.

continue http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/4-machine-learning-algorithms-shape-life/

9 Crazy Body Hacks That Give You Superhuman Powers

Magnets, which are easy to install under the skin, are among the first body hacks that people try.

Muti

Gamers often perform repetitive tasks to improve their character’s skill set, gain rewards, and advance to new levels. The process is known as grinding: Now, an underground movement has taken up that expression, calling themselves grinders, and they’re trying to gain some of those same superskills—only in real life by hacking their bodies.

To cynics, the upgraded-self movement—aka body hacking—can seem a reckless and narcissistic pursuit. After all, treating your body like a home science kit can have serious consequences (scarring, bleeding, pain on the scale of passing out). Yet tinkering with human hardware is a centuries-old pursuit. Bolting titanium plates onto problem spines has become downright common. Today’s transhumanists take it further. They seek to extend the senses and co-mingle them, allowing themselves to do things like detect Wi-Fi, hear colors, sense magnetic north, and see in the dark. Technology is driving the trend. But so are a few renegade surgeons—operating in an ethical gray area—and a growing number of innovative grinders, all of them hoping to one day push the cyborg off the Comic-Con floor and out onto Main Street.

Meet The Borgs

In 1998, U.K. professor Kevin Warwick became the first person to have a transponder chip implanted under his skin, but only after receiving ethical approval to experiment on himself and enlisting a doctor to assist him. It wasn’t until Seattle-based IT consultant Amal Graafstra had a chip implanted in each hand, in 2005, without seeking approval, that the grinder world found a spark. Graafstra uses the chips to open his home and car doors and to log on to his computer. He also sells them to grinders on his website Dangerous Things. Last year, Graafstra became the first to implant a tiny photovoltaic panel in his forearm to learn how much light traveled through the skin and whether it could power internal sensors such as a heart monitor. Though it generated a mere 50 microamps at 3 volts—about a 400th of the current needed to run an LED—he felt elated, saying, “it proves the value of citizen science.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title “Go Hack Yourself. Not Really.”

continue http://www.popsci.com/9-body-hacks-superhuman-powers