Ex-Apple engineer lifts lid on Uncle Sam's top-secret plan to turn customized iPod into 'Geiger counter' A former Apple engineer has spilled the beans on what he's described as a top-secret project Cupertino conducted with the US government in the 2000s. David Shayer, a former engineer with Apple's iPod outfit, this week recounted the yarn of how he came to build a custom bit of kit for the US Department of Energy (DOE) in 2005 …
For sure, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing... wait til idiots accost some poor radiotherapy patient for being a terrorist.
DARPA have a programme looking into the problem of separating natural or mundane sources from those that suggest something more sinister is going on... roving sensors and big data, etc. Not just radionuclides, but precursors to conventional explosive too. High acetone reading, ah, but it's outside a nail salon, likely mundane source.
> Don't see how you can possibly do that without too high a false positive rate.
That is what I was hinting at by including the Acetone / Nail Bar example that the DARPA programme manager gave. False positives are expected. Their plan is is use roving sensors (they talked of cars, but chemical sensors masquerading as smartphones fit this model too) to build a huge real-time data set and then use algorithms to highlight unusual cases. Fertilizer on a farm or agricultural wholesaler = normal. Fertilizer by a government building = worthy of investigation.
I daresay that a similar approach is applied to purchases made online. Gallons of acetone supplied to a nail salon raises fewer flags than if it were supplied to a residential address in a certain area.
Yes, the terrorists choice of champions is ANFO, Ammonia Nitrate (a common fertiliser) mixed with fuel oil, which incidentally was used by the US as the biggest non-nuclear bomb in history for a blast effect test (see https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/35418/this-was-the-largest-conventional-explosion-america-ever-set-off)
Beaten to it by Softbank who launched the Pantone 5 phone with built-in radiation sensor back in 2012...
Obviously, with Fukushima in 2011, Japan was an obvious market for personal/pocket geiger counters - ether standalone or smartphone attached, that uploaded data and so permitted the creation of radiation heat maps.
Spooks can imagine it, geeks can make it work? .... chivo243
I wouldn't be so sure that is the right way round, chivo243, given what one might know what spooks can do and have been doing since forever.
However, that should in no way suggest your question is wrong worded and does not accurately represent the true nature of current developments with future horizons in present events.
What the f*** did you just f***ing say about me, you little b****? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the f*** out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my f***ing words. You think you can get away with saying that s*** to me over the Internet? Think again, f***er. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're f***ing dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little s***. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your f***ing tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will s*** fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're f***ing dead, kiddo.
Lots of woofs
Copypasta the dog
That is pretty much the style of things these days. In the past, the undiagnosed, untreated mentally ill person on the other side of the county, country or world couldn't get to you. Now not only can they harass you online they can also find out where you are in the world to come find you, if they are functional, crazy and wealthy enough to do so.
Thanks. That was hilarious. I'm over-awed to be in the online presence of someone trained in gorilla warfare.
Next time you need to work on being a bit more realistic. Like the Official Secrets Act you made reference to earlier. It's a term only used in England and a few of its former colonies, which kind of makes it difficult to explain why you would then be the Tom Cruise (i.e. top-everything) of the Seals and Marines, both of them being part of the US armed forces.
Me too! but i used the AC tag, clever eh?
So if you cant tell people you've signed it ... then the whole "i'd tell you but id have to kill you " thing is out the window...
where does it end?
"What do you do at BAE?"
"cant tell you"
"Aha! because you've signed the official secrets act! i'm reporting you for admitting that!"
I handed out hundreds of free DVD tails install/boot disks to random members of the public, at a expo, explaining how useful it could be to counter the rising crime threats to internet banking etc. this was of course, preSnowden
Imagine my surprise when a highly privileged member of staff (economist) came and denied/disrupted/destroyed/degraded etc my actions by asking endless meaningless questions, stopping me from handing out further copies....
....but that's the world we live in, where I am subjected to a physical military attack by a trained agent for trying to do something useful for humanity, we later had a few coffees as she was a nice agent
so I suggest you shouldn't search for a runtime boot DVD for The Amnesic Incognito Live System, and remember, finally, that recently "someone" created a whopping new 25% of TOR exit servers overnight. Which were kicked out from TOR as "untrustworthy", but reinstated a whole 24h later as "trusted" - impressive
yeah
Even if you have not signed the Officials' Secret Act you can still be prosecuted for breaking it. ..... Flocke Kroes
Oh? Presumably then would one be being prosecuted by an ass, Flocke Kroes. Not a good look for any sort of justice system practising laws, methinks. However, stranger things have surely happened.
And when an abiding human flaw with myriad vulnerabilities for exploitation, something automatically attractive to the intellectually active? :-) ....... which is really not something anyone would want to be held responsible and accountable for encouraging and activating whenever it may be catastrophically destructive.
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Nobody signs the official secrets act, except perhaps some government official responsible for making laws. If anything, you only sign a scrap of paper confirming that the existence of The Act has been brought to your attention. The Official Secrets Act is an act of parliament and like any such act is part of the law that everyone in the country is subject to.
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