Aerial Assault Drone Is Armed With Hacking Weapons

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Part-WAS-Was8951675-1-1-0Hackers’ arsenal was beefed up with a drone armed with weapons to crack into wireless computer networks at close range, whether they be in skyscrapers or walled compounds.

David Jordan of US-based Aerial Assault was at an infamous Def Con hacker gathering on Sunday, showing off a drone that could be dispatched on missions to land atop buildings or hover outside walls and probe for cracks in computer networks . . .

The drone was equipped with software tools used to perform the kind of “penetration testing” done by hackers or computer security professionals who seek vulnerabilities in computer networks.

As with drones previously launched by hackers, the Aerial Assault model scans for unsecured wireless connections to networks, according to Jordan . . .

Hackers at Def Con early on turned to drones for sniffing out unprotected wireless Internet networks, but capabilities Jordan said were built into the Aerial Assault drone raised the ante with automated tools that could be flown past physical defenses. (Read more from “Aerial Assault Drone Is Armed With Hacking Weapons” HERE)

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Tennessee Lesbian Couple Faked Hate Crime and Destroyed Own Home With Arson for This

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arson6n-2-web[Editor’s note: the story about Craig James follows below] By Nicole Hensley. A lesbian couple faked a hate crime that left their home a pile of charred rubble at their Venore, Tenn., property in 2010, local reports said.

An insurance company caught on to the ruse months after the blaze and accused Carol Ann and Laura Stutte of perpetuating a hoax and blaming the fire on their neighbor, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported.

A federal jury ruled in favor of the insurance company’s belief that the couple spray-painted an anti-gay slur on their own garage to spin the fire as a hate crime based on their sexual orientation.

The homeowners intended to bank on an insurance claim of more than $276,000, American National and Casulty Company alleged in court documents obtained by the News Sentinel.

The target of their stunt was Janice Millsaps, a neighbor whom the Stuttes accused in news reports and a lawsuit of threatening to kill them and burn their house down. (Read more from “Tennessee Lesbian Couple Faked Hate Crime and Destroyed Own Home With Arson for This” HERE)

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Sports Analyst Craig James Claims Religious Discrimination

Craig James Senate ImageBy Baptist Press Staff. College football analyst Craig James filed a religious discrimination lawsuit against Fox Sports, alleging he was fired from a broadcasting position because of his Christian belief that homosexuality is sinful.

“This case is much bigger than me,” James said in a public statement from Liberty Institute, the Christian legal organization representing him. “It affects every person who holds religious beliefs. I will not let Fox Sports trample my religious liberty.

“Today, many people have lost their jobs because of their faith. Sadly, countless are afraid to let their bosses know they even have a faith. This is America, and I intend to make sure Fox Sports knows they aren’t above the law.”

After being hired by Fox Sports Southwest in 2013, James, a former NFL running back, worked one game and then was fired. A redacted copy of the lawsuit posted online by Liberty Institute states, “When James asked, defendants identified one—and only one—reason for terminating James: his beliefs about marriage, which are explicitly religious in nature” . . .

In response to James’ firing, a Fox Sports spokesman told the Dallas Morning News in 2013: “We just asked ourselves how Craig’s statements (about homosexuality) would play in our human resources department. He couldn’t say those things here.” (Read more from this story HERE)

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Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency

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GettyImages-555175279-582x388Imagine an election—a close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.

In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”

Epstein’s paper combines a few years’ worth of experiments in which Epstein and his colleague Ronald Robertson gave people access to information about the race for prime minister in Australia in 2010, two years prior, and then let the mock-voters learn about the candidates via a simulated search engine that displayed real articles.

One group saw positive articles about one candidate first; the other saw positive articles about the other candidate. (A control group saw a random assortment.) The result: Whichever side people saw the positive results for, they were more likely to vote for—by more than 48 percent. The team calls that number the “vote manipulation power,” or VMP. The effect held—strengthened, even—when the researchers swapped in a single negative story into the number-four and number-three spots. Apparently it made the results seem even more neutral and therefore more trustworthy.

But of course that was all artificial—in the lab. So the researchers packed up and went to India in advance of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, a national campaign with 800 million eligible voters. (Eventually 430 million people voted over the weeks of the actual election.) “I thought this time we’d be lucky if we got 2 or 3 percent, and my gut said we’re gonna get nothing,” Epstein says, “because this is an intense, intense election environment.” Voters get exposed, heavily, to lots of other information besides a mock search engine result. (Read more from “Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency” HERE)

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The X-37b’s Big Brother Revealed: Boeing Bags $6.6m Contract to Do This

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2B21C16B00000578-3186484-image-a-21_1438815284013Boeing has been awarded a $6.6m contract to design a cheap, reusable mini shuttle that can launch military satellites.

The small, planelike craft is known as the XS-1 program—short for ‘eXperimental Spaceplane 1’, and could blast off in 2019 on its first test mission.

It is hoped the craft could quickly launch small satellites that could defend against the growing threat of Russian and Chinese space weapons.

XS-1 could ‘create a new paradigm for more routine, responsive and affordable space operations,’ according to DARPA, the military research arm heading the project.

The XS-1 is an airplane-like vehicle that can fly to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and quickly boost small satellites into orbit, and then land, refuel, load up another satellite, and take off again within 24 hours. (Read more from “The X-37b’s Big Brother Revealed: Boeing Bags $6.6m Contract to Do This” HERE)

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NYC Police Commissioner: “Weaponized Weed” Triggering Nude, Psychotic Rampages With Superhuman Strength

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Synthetic MarijuanaNYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton warned Tuesday about the rise of what he called “weaponized marijuana” — synthetic pot known as “K2″ or “Spice” on the streets — which makes users psychotic while giving them superhuman strength . . .

“A better term for it might be weaponized marijuana,” Bratton told reporters at a press conference at police headquarters.

“A number of individuals, when under the influence of this drug, are relatively impervious to pain and also have significant enhancement of their physical strength,” he said.

“So our officers encountering these individuals face more significant risk of having to subdue these individuals and potentially receiving injuries.”

Spice users are impervious to traditional takedown methods used by cops, such as tasers and mace, officials said. (Read more from “NYC Police Commissioner: “Weaponized Weed” Triggering Nude, Psychotic Rampages With Superhuman Strength” HERE)

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Grannyball Lecter: Woman Ripper, 68, Murdered, Chopped up and Ate Victims

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269921Tamara Samsonova, 68, is suspected of sawing off their heads and limbs and gouging out their lungs.

The pensioner – likened to the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter – was arrested this week [in Russia] over the murder of her friend Valentina Ulanova, 79.

She was spotted on CCTV footage carrying Ulanova’s body parts in a black plastic bag . . .

In one diary, Samsonova confessed she butchered a lodger in her flat.

She wrote: “I killed my tenant Volodya, cut him to pieces in the bathroom with a knife, put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and threw them away.” (Read more from “Grannyball Lecter: Woman Ripper, 68, Murdered, Chopped up and Ate Victims” HERE)

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Mormons Publish Photos of ‘Seer Stone’ Used by Joseph Smith

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Photo Credit: NY Times The Mormon church for the first time is publishing photos of a small sacred stone it believes founder Joseph Smith used to help translate the story that became the basis of the religion.

The pictures of the smooth, brown, egg-sized rock are part of a new book that also contains photos of the first printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon. Officials with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints unveiled it Tuesday at a news conference in Salt Lake City.

It’s the religion’s latest step in a push to be more transparent about its history and tenets. The church’s effort in recent years to be more open about its past was triggered by the religion’s increasing prominence as its membership tripled over the past three decades to 15 million worldwide today. Questions emerged about the burgeoning faith, with some criticizing it for being secretive about its beliefs and practices. (Read more from “Mormons Publish Photos of ‘Seer Stone’ Used by Joseph Smith” HERE)

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Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day

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[Editor’s note: the below excerpt from Yahoo.com is provided to inform. As with other stories regarding the “transgendered,” the pronouns used below are the author’s choice, not ours] When 18-year-old Cole Carman made the decision to transition from female to male late last year, the San Francisco-area teen knew that she would be in for major surgery and hormone therapy.

That didn’t stop Carman, a recent high school grad set to start college in the fall, from signing on for another potentially risky medical procedure: egg retrieval. It’s a fairly routine (yet still major) surgery, typically undertaken by egg donors and some women undergoing in-vitro fertilization.

But Carman may be the first transgender teen to have her eggs successfully harvested before transitioning — preserving his ability to have children that he’ll be biologically related to, whether he chooses to carry a child himself or turn to a surrogate. “I’ve always known I wanted to have kids of my own, so when my endocrinologist talked to me about it, it was a no-brainer,” Carman told Yahoo Parenting.

The surgery, which was done at the end of May, wasn’t so simple. It required 10 days of hormone shots, and it left her dealing with side effects like bloating and cramping. During the procedure, a doctor used a needle to harvest as many egg follicles as possible, freezing them so they can be thawed and fertilized at some point in the future.

What makes Carman’s situation so groundbreaking is that up until recently, doctors didn’t routinely talk about fertility preservation to transgender teens or adults who were planning to transition. (Read more from “Transgender Teen, 18, Undergoes Rare Surgery so She Can Be a ‘Dad’ One Day” HERE)

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‘Gene Drive’: Scientists Sound Alarm Over Supercharged GM Organisms Which Could Spread in the Wild and Cause Environmental Disasters

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A powerful new technique for generating “supercharged” genetically modified organisms that can spread rapidly in the wild has caused alarm among scientists who fear that it may be misused, accidentally or deliberately, and cause a health emergency or environmental disaster.

The development of so-called “gene drive” technology promises to revolutionise medicine and agriculture because it can in theory stop the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, such as malaria and yellow fever, as well as eliminate crop pests and invasive species such as rats and cane toads.

However, scientists at the forefront of the development believe that in the wrong hands gene-drive technology poses a serious threat to the environment and human health if accidentally or deliberately released from a laboratory without adequate safeguards. Some believe it could even be used as a terrorist bio-weapon directed against people or livestock because gene drives – which enable GM genes to spread rapidly like a viral infection within a population – will eventually be easy and cheap to generate.

“Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for hosting and spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” said David Gurwitz, a geneticist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

A group of senior geneticists have called for international safeguards to apply to researchers who want to develop gene drives, with strict security measures placed on laboratories to prevent the accidental escape of “supercharged” GM organisms that are able to spread rapidly in the wild. (Read more from “‘Gene Drive’: Scientists Sound Alarm Over Supercharged GM Organisms Which Could Spread in the Wild and Cause Environmental Disasters” HERE)

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Canadian Hitchhiking Robot’s Cross-Country Trip Ends Prematurely in the City of Love

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The Canadian researchers who created hitchBOT as a social experiment told The Associated Press that someone in Philadelphia damaged the robot beyond repair on Saturday, ending its first American tour after about two weeks.

The kid-size robot set out to travel cross-country after successfully hitchhiking across Canada in 26 days last year and parts of Europe. It is immobile on its own so gets from place to place by relying on the kindness of strangers . . .

The creators were sent an image of the vandalized robot Saturday but cannot track its location because the battery is dead. They said they don’t know who destroyed it or why. But co-creator Frauke Zeller said many children who adored the robot are now heartbroken. (Read more from “Hitchhiking Robot’s Cross-Country Trip in US Ends Prematurely in Philly” HERE)

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