While a layman like myself can recognise the overall similarity, it takes an expert to fully analyse the evidence contained in the pictures; luckily, at VT we have such an expert in the erstwhile Jeff Smith who provided the following analysis:
Normal people are not trained in what to look at so they simply ignore the obvious. However, once you see enough explosions like this you begin to spot the artefacts in the photos real fast. Unfortunately all of these people that know this stuff usually work for the government. Just like I did.
The big clue is in the ash produced and the exploding radiators on the cars. They show the radiation and the blast patterns the best. All melted rubber, glass, and aluminium but no melted steel? This tells you it is from radiation and not from a gasoline fire. Temps between 1500 degrees C for melting aluminium and less than 3,000 degrees C for melting steel. Everything organic ashes below 450 degrees C.
We all know that eating fish is good for your health, but what about fish shaped robots?
In a study published this month in Advanced Materials, researchers from UC San Diego announced that they’d figured out a way to 3D print tiny microrobots in the shape of fish.
The fish are just 120 microns long and 30 microns thick, much smaller than a human hair. Researchers can 3D print hundreds of the fish in seconds. The fish are printed with tiny particles of platinum in the tail which react with hydrogen peroxide. When the microfish are placed in peroxide, the tails move, propelling the fish along. The scientists can also add other particles to the materials used to print the fish, including chemicals that can detect and absorb toxins like bee venom.
In the study, they showed that the microfish could detoxify a liquid contaminated with a toxin. As the fish work, they glow red, and the swimming motion helps make sure they don’t miss a drop of the contaminant.
These fish are just a proof of concept. They won’t be used outside of a lab for a long time yet, but their creators have very high hopes for the fish.
Stephen Davies, who is missing an arm, received a free prosthetic from Team Unlimbited e-Nable, and soon became a volunteer for the organization. When Davies learned that there was an 8-year-old-girl from Bristol who also needed prosthetic arm, he saw a chance to pay his good fortune forward: he designed an arm for Isabella, and then drove 200 miles to deliver it to her in person.
“The gadget is so bright and bold that she insisted on wearing it to the local supermarket straight after she got it and proudly strutted around wanting the world to see it,” Isabella’s father told Baby Center. “She’s been keen to show it off and explain how it works ever since she got it and to almost anyone that will listen.”
continue http://www.boredpanda.com/3d-printed-prosthetic-arm-stephen-davies-enable-isabella/
By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP.
That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.
Copyright
But back to the Delaware senator’s tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden’s bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.
Sen. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic vice presidential nominee, whose anti-encryption legislation was responsible for the creation of PGP. Biden.senate.gov
A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department “to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks.” Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.
Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)
All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA’s Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are here.)
Now, it’s true that few Americans will cast their votes in November based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law. But these pro-copyright views don’t exactly jibe with what Obama has promised; he’s pledged to “update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.” These are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach.
Unfortunately, Biden has steadfastly refused to answer questions on the topic. We asked him 10 tech-related questions, including whether he’d support rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as part of our 2008 Technology Voters’ guide. Biden would not answer (we did hear back from Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Ron Paul).
In our 2006 Technology Voters’ Guide, which ranked Senate votes from July 1998 through May 2005, Biden received a mere 37.5 percent score because of his support for Internet filters in schools and libraries and occasional support for Internet taxes.
Privacy, the FBI, and PGP
On privacy, Biden’s record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was “persuaded” to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language:
It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.
Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden’s bill as representing the FBI’s visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency’s parallel, but less visible efforts. (Biden was no foe of the NSA. He once described now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the “single most competent man in the government.”)
Biden’s bill — and the threat of encryption being outlawed — is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who’s now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden’s legislation “that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups.”
While neither of Biden’s pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI’s pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed — and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI’s legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)
“Joe Biden made his second attempt to introduce such legislation” in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was also known as the Digital Telephony law, according to an account in Wired magazine. Biden at the time was chairman of the relevant committee; he co-sponsored the Senate version and dutifully secured a successful floor vote on it less than two months after it was introduced. CALEA became law in October 1994, and is still bedeviling privacy advocates: the FBI recently managed to extend its requirements to Internet service providers.
CALEA represented one step in the FBI and NSA’s attempts to restrict encryption without backdoors. In a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush’s administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: “Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime.”
There’s another reason why Biden’s legislative tactics in the CALEA scrum amount to more than a mere a footnote in Internet history. They’re what led to the creation of the Center for Democracy and Technology — and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s simultaneous implosion and soul-searching.
EFF staffers Jerry Berman and Danny Weitzner chose to work with Biden on cutting a deal and altering the bill in hopes of obtaining privacy concessions. It may have helped, but it also left the EFF in the uncomfortable position of leaving its imprimatur on Biden’s FBI-backed wiretapping law universally loathed by privacy advocates. The debacle ended with internal turmoil, Berman and Weitzner leaving the group and taking their corporate backers to form CDT, and a chastened EFF that quietly packed its bags and moved to its current home in San Francisco. (Weitzner, who was responsible for a censorship controversy last year, became a formal Obama campaign surrogate.)
“Anti-terror” legislation
The next year, months before the Oklahoma City bombing took place, Biden introduced another bill called the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995. It previewed the 2001 Patriot Act by allowing secret evidence to be used in prosecutions, expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and wiretap laws, creating a new federal crime of “terrorism” that could be invoked based on political beliefs, permitting the U.S. military to be used in civilian law enforcement, and allowing permanent detection of non-U.S. citizens without judicial review. The Center for National Security Studies said the bill would erode “constitutional and statutory due process protections” and would “authorize the Justice Department to pick and choose crimes to investigate and prosecute based on political beliefs and associations.”
Biden himself draws parallels between his 1995 bill and its 2001 cousin. “I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill,” he said when the Patriot Act was being debated, according to the New Republic, which described him as “the Democratic Party’s de facto spokesman on the war against terrorism.”
Biden’s chronology is not accurate: the bombing took place in April 1995 and his bill had been introduced in February 1995. But it’s true that Biden’s proposal probably helped to lay the groundwork for the Bush administration’s Patriot Act.
In 1996, Biden voted to keep intact an ostensibly anti-illegal immigration bill that outlined what the Real ID Act would become almost a decade later. The bill would create a national worker identification registry; Biden voted to kill an Abraham-Feingold amendment that would have replaced the registry with stronger enforcement. According to an analysis by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the underlying bill would have required “states to place Social Security numbers on drivers licenses and to obtain fingerprints or some other form of biometric identification for licenses.”
Along with most of his colleagues in the Congress — including Sen. John McCain but not Rep. Ron Paul — Biden voted for the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act (which was part of a larger spending bill). Obama voted for the bill containing the Real ID Act, but wasn’t in the U.S. Senate in 2001 when the original Patriot Act vote took place.
At least nine telcos around the world are using so-called super-cookies to secretly monitor citizens’ online behavior, according to a new study.
A super-cookie is a token unique to each subscriber that is injected into every HTTP request made through a telco’s cellphone networks. They can’t be stripped by the user: every time a subscriber visits a website from his or her smartphone, the telco’s system places the super-cookie in the HTTP headers, so that the site’s servers can identify the visitor.
This super-cookie allows ad networks and media publishers to follow people across the internet even if they clear their cookies. It allows the networks to build up profiles on users’ habits, and pitch them targeted advertising, while the telcos take a cut.
When it emerged that Verizon and AT&T in the US were using this technology it caused a storm. AT&T dropped the super-cookies, and Verizon eventually switched to an opt-out approach: if you switched them off, the headers went away.
Now a six-month investigation by digital rights group Access has shown that telcos overseas are using the same super-cookie techniques.
Access set up a website called Amibeingtracked.com, and monitored visits from 180,000 netizens on their phones. The group found that 15.3 per cent of visitors had the tracking headers installed from cellphone owners in Canada, China, India, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Peru, Spain, the US, and Venezuela.
The super-sleuth detectives in TV show CSI have some very nifty tools to help solve crimes. But the need to keep things interesting and wrap the show up in an hour means the technology used in each episode bears little resemblance to the work of real forensic experts. Or does it?
When it comes to computer forensics, today’s tools are becoming more advanced, leaving fewer places to hide information. This tension between fact and fiction took on a whole new dimension when Microsoft’s police-only forensic toolkit was leaked on the internet. Reports say that it has more in common with CSI than The Bill.
We’re going to show you how to mimic Microsoft’s offering using open-source software to unlock Windows accounts, investigate suspicious activity, see any file on a Windows disk and even peruse files that others believe have been permanently deleted.
Forensic toolkit
During November 2009, it was announced that someone had leaked Microsoft’s secret crime-fighting software online.
Described as a collection of programs linked by a sophisticated script, hackers and other cybercriminals had been dying to get their hands on it for some time. Now it’s reportedly available to anyone brave enough to download and install it.
The Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (or COFEE for short) has been available to police forces since at least summer 2007, and is designed to gather forensic evidence at crime scenes and during raids from the still-running PCs of suspects and victims.
COFEE
COFEE reportedly takes the average police officer about 10 minutes to master, and comes supplied on a bootable USB pen drive. It enables trained officers to gather evidence from a running system without the need to call in cybercrime specialists, thereby speeding up investigations.
The USB drive itself is said to contain a package of about 150 forensic programs that enable an investigator to record sensitive information like internet history files and complete practical tasks like deleting Windows passwords. It also enables them to upload the recorded data for further analysis.
By April 2008, it was reportedly in use by over 2,000 law enforcement officers throughout 15 countries. At the time of the leak, Microsoft claimed that COFEE was nothing more than a collection of commercially available programs brought together in a single handy package, which it makes available free of charge (if hitherto secretly) to help combat computer crime.
continue http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/how-to-create-your-own-free-computer-forensics-kit-on-a-usb-drive-680396/1
Tarek Loubani, an emergency room doctor in Gaza, wants to apply the principles of open source software development to out-of-patent medical devices. His first success: A 3D-printed stethoscope head that costs 30 cents to make and, according to his tests, has better sound quality than the industry standard.
Loubani is the head of the Glia project, whose team of hackers and surgeons designed and field-tested the stethoscope. Audio-frequency response curve tests showed the device not only exceeds international standards, but offers superior sound quality compared to the industry-leading Littmann Cardiology 3.
The Littmann retails for $150-200. The Glia stethoscope, including the 3D printed head, tubing and ear piece, will cost around $5 to produce.
Loubani founded the Glia project after the 2012 Israeli invasion of Gaza. “I had to hold my ear to the chests of victims because there were no good stethoscopes, and that was a tragedy, a travesty, and unacceptable,” Loubani told attendees during a presentation at the Chaos Communications Camp in Zehdenick, Germany.
absenteereality 
You must be logged in to post a comment.