Residents of two northern Russian cities are stocking up on iodine that is used to reduce the effects of radiation exposure after a mysterious accident on a nearby military testing site, regional media reported. Reuters: The Ministry of Defence has given few details of the accident, saying only that two people were killed and six injured by the explosion of a liquid-propelled rocket engine at a test site in Russia's north. Although the ministry initially said no harmful chemicals were released into the atmosphere and radiation levels were unchanged, authorities in the nearby city of Severodvinsk reported what they described as a brief spike in radiation. No official explanation has been given for why such an accident would cause radiation to spike.

"Everyone has been calling asking about iodine all day," one pharmacy was quoted as saying by 29.Ru, a media outlet that covers the Arkhangelsk area. It said the run on iodine had occurred in the northern port cities of Arkhangelsk and Severodvinsk and that several pharmacies had run out. Severodvinsk is the site of a shipyard that builds nuclear-powered submarines.

pgmrdlm shares a report from Reuters: Hackers could crack open high-security electronic locks by monitoring their power, allowing thieves to steal cash in automated teller machines, narcotics in pharmacies and government secrets, according to research to be presented Friday at the annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas. Mike Davis, a researcher with security firm IOActive, discovered the vulnerability last year and alerted government officials and Swiss company DormaKaba Holding, the distributor of multiple brands of locks at issue. In an interview with Reuters, Davis said he used an oscilloscope worth about $5,000 to detect small changes in the power consumption, through what is known as a side-channel attack. The method worked best in older models.

The locks include their own power supply so they function even when an external source of electricity is cut off. Most versions do not consume extra or randomized power to hide what they are doing. That leaves them open to attack if a thief can get physically close enough and has the right tools, Davis said. "I can download that analog signal and parse through the power trace to get ones and zeroes," Davis said. "I know what the lock is doing internally." Inside ATMs, the company's locks typically protect the cash in the more secure, lower compartment. An upper compartment includes the interface with customers and directs the lower compartment to send up money. The upper compartment often has less physical security, and breaking into it might provide access to the lower vault's vulnerable lock. A bigger concern is that another series of DormaKaba locks are used on military bases, U.S. presidential jet Air Force One and elsewhere in the government.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have topped a survey of trusted professions, with adults in the U.S. more confident that they act in the public's best interests than employees from any other line of work studied. The survey found that confidence in scientists has risen markedly since 2016 and more than half of American adults believe the specialists should be actively involved in policy decisions surrounding scientific matters. The upswing in public trust, a rise of 10 percentage points since 2016, led to 86% of U.S. adults expressing at least a "fair amount" of confidence that scientists put the public interest first. The trust rating placed scientists above politicians, the military, business leaders, school principals and journalists. Trust in non-scientific professions has remained largely stable since 2016 with school heads on 77%, religious leaders on 57%, journalists on 47%, business leaders on 46% and politicians earning the lowest mark at 35%, the survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC found.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The New York Times published an anti-Google screed by billionaire Peter Thiel last night but failed to mention a fun fact that readers might find relevant: Thiel sits on the board of Facebook, one of Google's largest competitors. Thiel first blasted Google as "treasonous" last month, saying that the FBI and CIA should investigate the company for working with the Chinese government. The tech investor even asked if Google had been infiltrated by Chinese spies, a highly inflammatory charge that he didn't substantiate. Thiel has now followed up his anti-Google remarks in a new piece for the Times praising President Donald Trump and railing against "globalization."

Thiel's central argument is that anyone helping China to develop artificial intelligence technologies is assisting China's military because, he says, all AI should be seen first and foremost as having military applications: "A.I. is a military technology. Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. Though less uncanny than Frankenstein's monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army -- to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already living amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war." Thiel, who in 2017 sold the majority of his Facebook shares but remains on its board of directors, goes on to characterize Google as "naive" for opening an AI lab in China while deciding to not renew a contract for its work on Project Maven, a U.S. military initiative for which the company was developing an AI system to analyze drone footage, following employee backlash. Thiel also acknowledges that AI can be used for civilian purposes, but he claims that it doesn't matter. He calls Google's actions "shocking": "A.I.'s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America's leading software company, Google -- starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon -- is shocking. As President Barack Obama's defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, 'If you're working in China, you don't know whether you're working on a project for the military or not.'"

He continues: "How can Google use the rhetoric of 'borderless' benefits to justify working with the country whose 'Great Firewall' has imposed a border on the internet itself? This way of thinking works only inside Google's cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called 'cosmopolitanism' is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places -- and incurious about them."

At the end of the op-ed, where it says "Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor," would be a great place to note that Peter Thiel is also on the board of Facebook.

The US military is conducting wide-area surveillance tests across six midwest states using experimental high-altitude balloons, documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reveal. From a report: Up to 25 unmanned solar-powered balloons are being launched from rural South Dakota and drifting 250 miles through an area spanning portions of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Missouri, before concluding in central Illinois. Traveling in the stratosphere at altitudes of up to 65,000ft, the balloons are intended to "provide a persistent surveillance system to locate and deter narcotic trafficking and homeland security threats," according to a filing made on behalf of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, an aerospace and defense company. The balloons are carrying hi-tech radars designed to simultaneously track many individual vehicles day or night, through any kind of weather. The tests, which have not previously been reported, received an FCC license to operate from mid-July until September, following similar flights licensed last year.

The United States formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia Friday, as the US military prepares to test a new non-nuclear mobile-launched cruise missile developed specifically to challenge Moscow in Europe, according to a senior US defense official. From a report: The US withdrawal puts an end to a landmark arms control pact that has limited the development of ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers and is sparking fears of a new arms race. "Russia is solely responsible for the treaty's demise," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Friday announcing the US' formal withdrawal from the Cold-War era nuclear treaty. Pompeo said, "Russia failed to return to full and verified compliance through the destruction of its noncompliant missile system." NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN's Hala Gorani that the treaty's end is a "serious setback."

Dr. Rod Schoonover, who until recently served as a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, writing for The New York Times: Ten years ago, I left my job as a tenured university professor to work as an intelligence analyst for the federal government, primarily in the State Department but with an intervening tour at the National Intelligence Council. My focus was on the impact of environmental and climate change on national security, a growing concern of the military and intelligence communities. It was important work. Two words that national security professionals abhor are uncertainty and surprise, and there's no question that the changing climate promises ample amounts of both. I always appreciated the apolitical nature of the work. Our job in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was to generate intelligence analysis buttressed by the best information available, without regard to political considerations. And although I was uncomfortable with some policies of the Trump administration, no one had ever tried to influence my work or conclusions.

That changed last month, when the White House blocked the submission of my bureau's written testimony on the national security implications of climate change to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The stated reason was that the scientific foundation of the analysis did not comport with the administration's position on climate change. After an extended exchange between officials at the White House and the State Department, at the 11th hour I was permitted to appear at the hearing and give a five-minute summary of the 11-page testimony. However, Congress was deprived of the full analysis, including the scientific baseline from which it was drawn. Perhaps most important, this written testimony on a critical topic was never entered into the official record.

France announced plans on Thursday to develop satellites armed with laser weapons that will be used against enemy satellites that threaten the country's space forces. Popular Mechanics reports: In remarks earlier today, French Defense Minister Florence Parly said, "If our satellites are threatened, we intend to blind those of our adversaries. We reserve the right and the means to be able to respond: that could imply the use of powerful lasers deployed from our satellites or from patrolling nano-satellites." "We will develop power lasers, a field in which France has fallen behind," Parly added.

France also plans to develop nano-satellite patrollers -- small satellites that act as bodyguards for larger French space assets by 2023. Per Parly's remarks, nano-sats could be armed with lasers. According to DW, France is also adding cameras to new Syracuse military communications satellites. Additionally France plans to set up its own space force, the "Air and Space Army," as part of the French Air Force. The new organization will be based in Toulouse, but it's not clear if the Air and Space Army will remain part of the French Air Force or become its own service branch.

Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed quotes the CBC: Weather watchers are focused on the world's most northerly community, which is in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave. "It's really quite spectacular," said David Phillips, Environment Canada's chief climatologist. "This is unprecedented." The weather agency confirmed that Canadian Forces Station Alert hit a record of 21 C [69.8 F] on Sunday. On Monday, the military listening post on the top of Ellesmere Island had reached 20 C [68 F] by noon and inched slightly higher later in the day.
A government report in April found that Canada was warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and this new article points out that recently records have been beaten "not by fractions, but by large margins." For example, the Alert station's average temperature had been a cool 44.6 F, and Environment Canada's chief climatologist says a deviation of this magnitude is like the city of Toronto reaching a high of 107.6 F.

"It's nothing that you would have ever seen."

Todd Austin, a professor at the University of Michigan, is working on an approach known as Morpheus that aims to frustrate hackers trying to gain control of microchips by presenting them with a rapidly changing target. At a conference in Detroit this week organized by the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Austin described how the prototype Morpheus chip works. MIT Technology Review reports: The aim is to make it incredibly difficult for hackers to exploit key software that helps govern the chip's operation. Morpheus does this by repeatedly randomizing elements of the code that attackers need access to in order to compromise the hardware. This can be achieved without disrupting the software applications that are powered by the processor. Austin has been able to get the chip's code "churning" to happen once every 50 milliseconds -- way faster than needed to frustrate the most powerful automated hacking tools. So even if hackers find a vulnerability, the information needed to exploit it disappears in the blink of an eye.

There's a cost to all this: the technology causes a slight drop in performance and requires somewhat bigger chips. The military may accept this trade-off in return for greater security on the battlefield, but it could limit Morpheus's appeal to businesses and consumers. Austin said a prototype has already resisted every known variant of a widely-used hacking technique known as a control-flow attack, which does things like tampering with the way a processor handles memory in order to allow hackers to sneak in malware. More tests lie ahead. A team of U.S. national security experts will soon begin probing the prototype chip to see if they can compromise its defenses, and Austin also plans to post some of Morpheus's code online so that other researchers can try to find flaws in it, too.

President Trump said this week his administration will "take a look" into Google following statements made earlier this week by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. From a report: "Billionaire Tech Investor Peter Thiel believes Google should be investigated for treason," Trump said in a tweet. "He accuses Google of working with the Chinese Government... A great and brilliant guy who knows this subject better than anyone! The Trump Administration will take a look!" On Sunday, Thiel, a Facebook board member, said that the FBI and the CIA should investigate Google to see if it has been infiltrated by Chinese intelligence.

"Number one, how many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated your Manhattan Project for AI (artificial intelligence)?" Thiel said, according to Axios. "Number two, does Google's senior management consider itself to have been thoroughly infiltrated by Chinese intelligence? Number three, is it because they consider themselves to be so thoroughly infiltrated that they have engaged in the seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military and not with the US military," Thiel said during the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens passed away Tuesday evening of complications following a stroke he suffered on July 15. He was 99 years old. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares a lightly edited version of Ars Technica's 2010 story that originally marked his retirement from the Supreme Court: In April 2010, the Supreme Court's most senior justice, John Paul Stevens, announced his retirement. In the weeks that followed, hundreds of articles were written about his career and his legacy. While most articles focus on 'hot button' issues such as flag burning, terrorism, and affirmative action, Stevens' tech policy record has largely been ignored. When Justice Stevens joined the court, many of the technologies we now take for granted -- the PC, packet-switched networks, home video recording -- were in their infancy. During his 35-year tenure on the bench, Stevens penned decisions that laid the foundation for the tremendous innovations that followed in each of these areas.

For example, Stevens penned the 1978 decision that shielded the software industry from the patent system in its formative years. In 1984, Hollywood's effort to ban the VCR failed by just one Supreme Court vote; Stevens wrote the majority opinion. And in 1997, he wrote the majority opinion striking down the worst provisions of the Communications Decency Act and ensuring that the Internet would have robust First Amendment protections. Indeed, Justice Stevens probably deserves more credit than any other justice for the innovations that occurred under his watch. And given how central those technologies have become to the American economy, Stevens' tech policy work may prove one of his most enduring legacies. In this feature, we review Justice Stevens' tech policy decisions and salute the justice who helped make possible DRM-free media devices, uncensored Internet connections, free software, and much more. As the report mentions, Stevens was the Supreme Court's cryptographer. "Stevens attended the University of Chicago, graduating in 1941. On December 6 -- the day before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor -- Stevens enrolled in the Navy's correspondence course on cryptography."

"Stevens spent the war in a Navy bunker in Hawaii, doing traffic analysis in an effort to determine the location of Japanese ships," the report adds. "He was an English major, not a mathematician, but he proved to have a knack for cryptographic work."

New submitter HansiMeier33 shares a report from The Guardian: France's annual Bastille Day parade showcased European military cooperation and innovation on Sunday, complete with a French inventor hovering above Paris on a jet-powered flyboard. The former jetskiing champion and military reservist Franky Zapata clutched a rifle as he soared above the Champs-Elysees on his futuristic machine, which the French military helped to develop. The board, which was first created to fly above water, can reach speeds of up to 190km/h and can run for 10 minutes. The French armed forces minister, Florence Parly, said before the parade that the flyboard could "allow tests for different kinds of uses, for example as a flying logistical platform or, indeed, as an assault platform."

Fun and games on Facebook may have serious consequences for the foolish. That was the message delivered by the US Air Force, who have responded to a Facebook's group's efforts to have 450,000 people storm a top secret military base. From a report: Conspiracy theorists have always believed that Area 51 in Nevada holds information about extra-terrestrial activities on our planet, possibly including actual alien remains and aircraft. That belief spawned a Facebook group suggesting that a wave of humanity could overwhelm the defenses at the base and discover the truth. More than 400,000 people have joined a Facebook event page calling for storming Area 51, with many more indicating interest. The proposed event is scheduled for Sept. 20. "We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry," the event description reads. "If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens."

PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from CNN: Over 300,000 people have signed on to a Facebook event pledging to raid Area 51 in Nevada in a quest to "see them aliens." The event, titled "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," is inviting users from around the world to join a "Naruto run" -- a Japanese manga-inspired running style featuring arms outstretched backwards and heads forward -- into the area. "We can move faster than their bullets," the event page, which is clearly written with tongue in cheek, promises those who RSVP for September 20. The mysterious Area 51 has been the focus of conspiracy theories for decades, and many people think it's where the U.S. government stores its secrets about aliens and UFOs.

Using a robotic sub, a team of investigators has detected traces of radiation leaking from Komsomolets -- a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank 30 years ago in the Norwegian Sea. The recorded radiation levels are unusually high, but scientists say it's not threatening humans or marine life. Gizmodo reports: On April 7, 1989, while cruising at a depth of 380 meters (1,250 feet), a fire broke out in the aft section of Komsomolets, a Soviet nuclear-powered attack submarine out on its first patrol. Its captain managed to bring the beleaguered sub to the surface, but it sank about five hours later. All 42 sailors were killed in the incident, known as the Komsomolets disaster. The 120-meter-long (400-foot) nuclear submarine still rests some 1,700 meters (5,575 feet) below the surface of the Norwegian Sea, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) north of the Norwegian mainland.

And it's leaking radiation, according to a press release issued by Norway's Institute of Marine Research (IMR). The amount of cesium radiation leaking from the wreck is significant, at about 800,000 times the typical reading for the Norwegian Sea, but it "poses no risk to people or fish," according to a collaborative research team involving IMR and the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (DSA). A leaking radioactive sub certainly sounds scary, but this research suggests the wreck is not currently endangering the Norwegian Sea and outlying areas. Normally, radiation levels in the Norwegian Sea are at 0.001 Becquerel (Bq) per liter. Around the wreck, however, they are as high as 100 Bq per liter. For reference, the acceptable amount of radiation in food is 600 Bq per kilogram, as established by the Norwegian government in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster.

A tiny phone, tablet and laptop charger, the first to use gallium nitride rather than silicon chips, has seen sales four times greater than predicted [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], prompting the Chinese company behind it to try to ramp up production. From a report: Anker, a Shenzhen-based company that specialises in computer and mobile phone accessories, unveiled a line of chargers using gallium nitride (GaN), which conducts electrons 1,000 times faster than silicon, in January. The use of GaN allowed Anker to virtually halve the size of its charger, while retaining full-speed charging. Another Chinese-owned company, RAVPower, has also started using GaN in its chargers. "Silicon limits have been pushed almost to the extreme," said Steven Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Anker. "But GaN is at [the next] phase."

The introduction of the new semiconductor into the consumer market came after a series of military and other commercial applications, in everything from electric vehicles to radar systems. Raytheon, the US defence group, said in 2017 that it had spent $300m researching GaN since 1999. Like some of its peers, it uses the material in its active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, which are able to detect stealth fighters at long range. "Once the power technology is out of the box it will be widely adopted around the world and that means everyone can produce power-switching modules," said Stephen Bryen, a former deputy undersecretary of defence and senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. "And that is what is used in the radars -- that's the nexus between commercial and military use."

schwit1 quotes a report from ZDNet: On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said that Yi-Chi Shih, a part-time Los Angeles resident, attempted to secure semiconductor chips used in US military applications in order to transfer them to Chinese associates. The 64-year-old was subject to a six-week trial in a Los Angeles, California federal court. Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed U.S. firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).

The victim company's PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant. Evidence suggested that Shih managed to "defraud the U.S. company out of its proprietary, export-controlled items, including its design services for MMICs." A sentencing hearing is yet to be scheduled. The range of charges could see Shih face a maximum sentence of 219 years in federal prison, and the judge presiding over the case is also considering the prosecution's request for hundreds of thousands of dollars to be made forfeit.

Three dummy bombs have been accidentally dropped over Florida on July 1st. "The incident is suspected to have happened at around 1:15 p.m. about 54 miles southwest of Moody Air Force Base about a mile-and-a-quarter west of Highway 129 near Suwannee Springs," reports The Epoch Times, citing a media release by the Moody Air force Base in Central Georgia. From the report: "During a routine training mission, an A-10C Thunderbolt II assigned to the 23d Fighter Group suffered a bird strike which caused an inadvertent release of three BDU-33s, a small non-explosive training munition," said the 23rd Wing Public Affairs. Authorities are investigating the incidence and no injuries or damages have been reported. The air force base said the dummy bomb released is a 25-pound training munition used to simulate the M1a-82 500-pound bomb.

"It is approximately 22-and-a-half inches long and is blue in color. Although the training munition is inert, it is equipped with a small pyrotechnic charge and should not be handled," it said. The authorities have cautioned people not to touch the munition if they come across it. "If the training munition is found, do not approach it, take note of the location, leave the area and keep others away," said the 23rd Wing Public Affairs. Anybody who sights the munition or has any information about it can contact the 23d Wing Command Post at (229) 257-3501 or their local authorities.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Ahead of its first day in a U.S. federal claims court in Washington DC, Oracle has outlined its position against the Pentagon's award of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract to Amazon Web Services. Big Red's lengthy filing questions the basis of Uncle Sam's procurement procedure as well as Amazon's hiring of senior Department of Defense staff involved in that procurement process. Oracle's first day in court is set for 10 July. The JEDI deal could be worth up to $10 billion over 10 years. The Department of Defense handed the contract to AWS after deciding that only Amazon and Microsoft could meet the minimum security standards required in time.

Oracle's filing said that U.S. "warfighters and taxpayers have a vested interest in obtaining the best services through lawful, competitive means... Instead, DoD (with AWS's help) has delivered a conflict-ridden mess in which hundreds of contractors expressed an interest in JEDI, over 60 responded to requests for information, yet only the two largest global cloud providers can clear the qualification gates." The company said giving JEDI, with its "near constant technology refresh requirements", to just one company was in breach of procurement rules. It accused the DoD of gaming the metrics used in the process to restrict competition for the contract. Oracle also accused Amazon of breaking the rules by hiring two senior DoD staff, Deap Ubhi and Anthony DeMartino, who were involved in the JEDI procurement process. Ubhi is described as "lead PM." A third name is redacted in the publicly released filing. The DoD, which is expected to make an offer to settle the case in late August, said in a statement: "We anticipate a court decision prior to that time. The DoD will comply with the court's decision. While the acquisition and litigation processes are proceeding independently the JEDI implementation will be subject to the determination of the court."

The 50-page filing can be found here (PDF).