Futurist

There are 396 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 21 of 40).

Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer | Reuters

I have no problem with NSA working to crack every commercial cypher out there. That’s what they’re supposed to do. However, I cringe when I read of yet another backdoor put in at the behest of the NSA to weaken data security.

Once upon a time the NSA held a near-monopoly on the ability to exploit data security. Those days are gone. Every backdoor the NSA finagles into the technology that keeps us secure in the hopes of exploiting it against our foes, our foes (and potential foes) exploit it, too. The result turns us all into sitting ducks (witness the Target data breach of 40 million credit card numbers).

As a key part of a campaign to embed encryption software that it could crack into widely used computer products, the U.S. National Security Agency arranged a secret $10 million contract with RSA, one of the most influential firms in the computer security industry, Reuters has learned.

Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a “back door” in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.

via Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer | Reuters.

One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths

Chew on this for a moment. Our galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions, harbors at least 10 billion Earth-like, habitable planets. This isn’t just an estimate, this is a calculation from NASA.

Ten billion Earth-like planets in our corner of the universe. Still believe there’s no other life in the universe?

One out of every five sun-like stars in the Milky Way galaxy has a planet about the size of Earth that is properly positioned for water, a key ingredient for life, a study released on Monday showed.The analysis, based on three years of data collected by NASA’s now-idled Kepler space telescope, indicates the galaxy is home to 10 billion potentially habitable worlds.

via One in five Milky Way stars hosts potentially life-friendly Earths: study – Yahoo News.

Meeting Daylight Saving Time half-way

Clock Radio

Clock Radio

Since I am not yet Dictator of America and unable to dispatch with this silly notion of Daylight Saving Time, I have decided to meet the time-switch halfway. I will change all of my clocks to Standard Time again but will adjust my bedtime/waking time by a half-hour. Rather than awakening an hour later than I did during the summer, I’m waking only a half-hour later. Bedtime comes a just a half-hour earlier, too, rather than a whole hour. My daily routine in-between matches that of the rest of the world.

To summarize:

EDT wake time: 5:30 AM -> EST wake time: 5:00 AM
EDT bedtime: 10:30 PM -> EST bedtime: 10:00 PM.

This is the same routine I did a few years ago. We’ll see how long I choose to keep it up.

Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It

Interesting take on DST. While I agree that DST is a bad, bad idea, I think the solution offered here is equally dumb, if not more so.

I believe local time should be coordinated as closely as possible to solar time. That’s how our bodies’ circadian clocks work. Trying to squeeze everyone into two time zones simply for convenience’s sake (and ignoring solar time) is stupid.

Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii and residents of 78 other countries including Canada but not Saskatchewan, most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour. It’s a controversial practice that became popular in the 1970s with the intent of conserving energy. The fall time change feels particularly hard because we lose another hour of evening daylight, just as the days grow shorter. It also creates confusion because countries that observe daylight saving change their clocks on different days.

It would seem to be more efficient to do away with the practice altogether. The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions. But I propose we not only end Daylight Saving, but also take it one step further.

via Daylight Saving Time Is Terrible: Here’s a Simple Plan to Fix It – Allison Schrager – The Atlantic.

ISS sails over Raleigh

ISS_Flyby_2013-10-27
Tonight was another spectacular viewing night for the International Space Station. It flew to an apogee of 83 degrees – almost directly overhead! It made it across about 60% of the sky before traveling into the Earth’s shadow. It was enough time to get some good photos.

The ocean is broken | Newcastle Herald

This is a depressingly sad report from a sailor who reports that our ocean appears to be very, very sick.

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he’d had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

“There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn’t catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice,” Macfadyen recalled. But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two.

No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all.

“In years gone by I’d gotten used to all the birds and their noises,” he said.

“They’d be following the boat, sometimes resting on the mast before taking off again. You’d see flocks of them wheeling over the surface of the sea in the distance, feeding on pilchards.”

But in March and April this year, only silence and desolation surrounded his boat, Funnel Web, as it sped across the surface of a haunted ocean.

via The ocean is broken | Newcastle Herald.

911 slowly gets smart phone-savvy

My friend Tarus thought that using smartphones to summon emergency services would be a good idea. AT&T apparently thinks otherwise (hint: follow the money).

Durham County is among a handful of emergency dispatch centers in the state that will soon be capable of receiving 911 emergency calls as text messages or streaming video.

Dispatchers across the state are updating their local emergency networks to be compatible with smart phones, but there’s no guarantee that the public will be able to send text or images to 911 dispatch centers anytime soon.

via 911 slowly gets smart phone-savvy | Technology | NewsObserver.com.

Time to get moving on public transportation

R-Line-BikeOnBus
As I was weaving my way along East Raleigh streets taking my daughter to school this week, I realized what was missing from Raleigh streets: frequent, reliable public transportation. No offense to Capital Area Transit which is doing the best with what it has, but this city has taken a half-assed approach to public transportation for far too long. It has to start with the top: city leaders must be committed to making this happen. That includes proper planning and funding.

Truly great cities have great public transportation. Heck, even Charlotte has great public transportation. Raleigh strives to be a destination city but we don’t have the basic amenity of workable public transportation.

Raleigh (as well as Wake County) needs to get on the bus and improve its public transportation or it will be left hopelessly (and possibly irredeemably) behind. I’m hopeful the city council and new city manager Ruffin Hall can make this happen.

BBC News – Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab

We’re getting closer to nuclear fusion energy!

Researchers at a US lab have passed a crucial milestone on the way to their ultimate goal of achieving self-sustaining nuclear fusion.

Harnessing fusion – the process that powers the Sun – could provide an unlimited and cheap source of energy.

But to be viable, fusion power plants would have to produce more energy than they consume, which has proven elusive. Now, a breakthrough by scientists at the National Ignition Facility NIF could boost hopes of scaling up fusion.

NIF, based at Livermore in California, uses 192 beams from the world’s most powerful laser to heat and compress a small pellet of hydrogen fuel to the point where nuclear fusion reactions take place.

The BBC understands that during an experiment in late September, the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel – the first time this had been achieved at any fusion facility in the world.

via BBC News – Nuclear fusion milestone passed at US lab.

Flares over Raleigh attract no 911 calls

After learning from the Raleigh Fire Department that the flares I saw on the night of September 28th didn’t belong to them, I thought I’d reach out to the Raleigh-Wake 911 center to see if any calls had come in about the flares.

I got a response today from deputy director Walt Fuller who checked the records for downtown calls and turned up nothing:

I went back and looked into CAD and I saw several calls in the downtown area but they mostly security checks, traffic stops and other normal incidents. I saw no calls of the nature you mentioned.

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