Bismillah (993337) writes The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia has started unboxing and installing its new upgraded ‘Magnus’ supercomputer, which could become the largest such system in the southern hemisphere, with up to one petaFLOPS performance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From Truck Yeah! : The US Marines have been planning up the “Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC) to replace their beach-storming hovercrafts since 2008. They started building this one in 2012, and have finally brought out of the garage for a little test drive. Read more…
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US Marines Turned A Ship Into A Truck, Watch It Be An Absolute Beast
itwbennett (1594911) writes “The Social Security numbers of roughly 18, 000 California physicians and health-care providers were inadvertently made public after a slip-up at health insurance provider Blue Shield of California, the organization said Monday. The numbers were included in monthly filings on medical providers that Blue Shield is required to make to the state’s Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). The provider rosters for February, March and April 2013 included the SSNs and other sensitive information and were available under the state’s public records law.” Ten copies were requested under the public records law. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Blue Shield Leaks 18,000 Doctors’ Social Security Numbers
mpicpp (3454017) writes with this excerpt from Ars: “The first man to be arrested in Chicago based on facial recognition analysis was sentenced last week to 22 years in prison for armed robbery. … In February 2013, Pierre Martin robbed a man at gunpoint while on a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) train. After taking the man’s phone, Martin jumped off the train. However, his image was captured by CTA surveillance cameras and was then compared to the Chicago Police Department’s database of 4.5 million criminal booking images. Martin, who already had priors, had a mugshot in the database. He was later positively identified by witnesses. At trial, Martin also admitted to committing a similar robbery also on the Pink Line in January 2013—his face was captured during both robberies.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Chicago Robber Caught By Facial Recognition Sentenced To 22 Years
Despite the billions upon billions of dollars funneled into the hungry maw of the military over the past 70 years, some technology has remained the same since World War II—including the smoke grenade. Now, the Army is choosing a new version that, in theory, will be slightly less toxic than the “classic” model. Read more…
Excerpt from:
The Army Is Redesigning Its Smoke Grenade For the First Time Since WWII
Remember that crazy-looking helicopter-drone-truck we showed you a few months ago? Now it is real and it is here . Advanced Tactics has released the very first video showing the Black Knight Transformer flying through the desert. Read more…
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First video of the US Army flying truck in action
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes “Sean Gallagher writes that the government built facilities for the Minuteman missiles in the 1960s and 1970s and although the missiles have been upgraded numerous times to make them safer and more reliable, the bases themselves haven’t changed much and there isn’t a lot of incentive to upgrade them. ICBM forces commander Maj. Gen. Jack Weinstein told Leslie Stahl from “60 Minutes” that the bases have extremely tight IT and cyber security, because they’re not Internet-connected and they use such old hardware and software. “A few years ago we did a complete analysis of our entire network, ” says Weinstein. “Cyber engineers found out that the system is extremely safe and extremely secure in the way it’s developed.” While on the base, missileers showed Stahl the 8-inch floppy disks, marked “Top Secret, ” which is used with the computer that handles what was once called the Strategic Air Command Digital Network (SACDIN), a communication system that delivers launch commands to US missile forces. Later, in an interview with Weinstein, Stahl described the disk she was shown as “gigantic, ” and said she had never seen one that big. Weinstein explained, “Those older systems provide us some, I will say, huge safety, when it comes to some cyber issues that we currently have in the world.”” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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US Nuclear Missile Silos Use Safe, Secure 8" Floppy Disks
House numbers on Google Street View can turn up as blobby, blurry things, so its engineers built a pretty crazy neural network to decipher them. Except this algorithm also turns out to be very very good at deciphering other blobby, blurry texts—like CAPTCHAs, which it cracks with 99 percent accuracy . Take that, human. Read more…
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Google Street View Accidentally Made an Algorithm That Cracks CAPTCHAs
Let’s take rooftop farming to a whole new level—a microscopic level. Unveiled at Expo Milan this week, the Urban Algae Canopy is a living, breathing alternative to our inert roofs and facades. Could algae be the next hip trend in urban agriculture? Read more…
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This Photosynthetic Algae Roof Filters the Neighborhood Air
An anonymous reader writes “In an unprecedented total disruption of a fully operational GNSS constellation, all satellites in the Russian GLONASS broadcast corrupt information for 11 hours, from just past midnight until noon Russian time (UTC+4), on April 2 (or 5 p.m. on April 1 to 4 a.m. April 2, U.S. Eastern time). This rendered the system completely unusable to all worldwide GLONASS receivers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Russian GLONASS Down For 12 Hours