74112895
submission
coondoggie writes:
According to the 2014 Wiretap Report, released today by the Administrative Office of the United States Courts a total of a total of 3,554 wiretaps were reported as authorized, with 1,279 authorized by federal judges and 2,275 authorized by state judges. Compared to the applications approved during 2013, the number approved by federal judges decreased 13% in 2014 and the number approved by state judges increased 8%. One state wiretap application was denied in 2014, the report stated.
74086597
submission
coondoggie writes:
Electricity consumption has slowed while the use of natural gas, wind, and solar have become larger portions-- with coal and nuclear becoming less — of the nation's electricity generation between 2001-2013. That was one observation of an interesting report issued by the Government Accountability Office this week that looked at the changing ways in which the US generates and uses electricity.
73984951
submission
coondoggie writes:
NASA will by the end of July get a birds-eye view of meteors and asteroids from a special camera mounted on the inside of the International Space Station. The Meteor investigation camera is programmed to record known major meteor showers during its two-year orbit and could also spot unpredicted showers. The Meteor study will help scientists better understand the asteroids and comets crossing Earth’s orbit and could help protect spacecraft and Earth from potential collisions with this celestial debris., NASA said.
73933767
submission
coondoggie writes:
As the sad and sometimes scary examples of the scam known as ransomware propagates, the FBI this week said the CryptoWall variant is rapidly becoming the swindle of choice by criminals. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said between April 2014 and June 2015, it received 992 CryptoWall-related complaints, with victims reporting losses totaling over $18 million. And its not just user PCs that are being targeted, a growing number of victims are being hit with ransomware that locks down mobile phones and demands payments to unlock them.
73909409
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Air Force is looking for cybersecurity technology that can deceive attackers but also help its network’s survive in case any online invaders are successful. The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) issued two contracts valued at about $98 million to give the agency a variety of cybersecurity technologies that would go a long way towards foiling a range of threats.
73881429
submission
coondoggie writes:
It’s not often you see a button-down organization like NASA call something “wild” but that’s what the space agency is calling six concepts – ranging from adding artificial intelligence to unmanned aircraft to using electricity for propulsion — it has picked to study to revolutionize the aviation world.
73604601
submission
coondoggie writes:
In a nutshell, in the face of billions in stolen money, the industry and government groups agreed to work together to identify new steps to validate taxpayer and tax return information at the time of filing. There will be standardized sharing of suspected identity fraud information and analytics from the tax industry to identify fraud schemes and locate indicators of fraud patterns. And there will be collaboration in the future.
73579827
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week announced a program called “Inter-Satellite Communication Links (ISCL)” it hopes will see the development of lightweight, low-power, and low-cost inter-satellite communications technology that could be used in a wide range of small Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Specifically, this program seeks to develop ISCLs with the highest practical data rates while having a per-link average weight of less than 2 pounds and an orbit-average power dissipation of less than 3 watts, DARPA stated.
73552635
submission
coondoggie writes:
The National Transportation Safety Board this week said it wants to see auto collision avoidance technology implemented in cars more quickly and recommended that such equipment become standard on all new passenger and commercial vehicles.
73497799
submission
coondoggie writes:
After years and many setbacks the Planetary Society’s test spacecraft deployed its 344 square foot solar sail in space over the weekend. The society’s LightSail is a cubesat whose initial flight will begin to test the feasibility of using much larger solar sails for space voyages. The Solar sails use the sun’s energy or rather its light photons as a method of propulsion. The Planetary Society says that while photons have no mass, a photon traveling as a packet of light has energy and momentum.
73429647
submission
coondoggie writes:
Officials of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) this week awarded two contracts worth a total of nearly $24 million to develop new networking and security technologies at the WAN edge. Raytheon BBN Technologies and Vencore Labs’ Applied Communication Sciences research program pretty much evenly divided the money which DARPA expects will develop technologies that “bolster the resilience of communication over IP networks solely by instantiating new capabilities in computing devices within user enclaves at the WAN edge.”
73376629
submission
coondoggie writes:
This week the space agency said it invested $2.3 million for eight research projects that will address sonic booms and high-altitude emissions from supersonic jets. NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology Project, which picked the new projects, focuses on developing sonic boom reduction methods and defines the necessary approaches or techniques for objectively assessing the levels of sonic boom acceptable to communities living in the vicinity of future commercial supersonic flight paths.
73344395
submission
coondoggie writes:
If additive manufacturing technologies like 3D printing are to become mainstream for complex engineering tasks – think building combat fighter aircraft wings or complete rocket engines – there needs to be a major uptick in the reliability and trustworthiness of such tools. That’s what researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) aim to do with its Open Manufacturing program which this week announced new labs and other facilities that will be used to develop these additive technologies and prove whether or not they can be trusted for widespread use in complicated applications.
73238021
submission
coondoggie writes:
Researchers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) think so and were so impressed with their first crowdsourced flaw-detecting games, they announced an new round of five games this week designed for improved playability as well as increased software verification effectiveness.
73219083
submission
coondoggie writes:
The Federal Communications Commission could soon clear a path to help in the ongoing battle to fight unwanted and in many cases illegal robocalls and text messages.
