Michio Kaku Talks About Alien Brains.

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Dr. Michio Kaku returns to Big Think studios to discuss his latest book, The Future of the Mind (http://goo.gl/1mcGeb). Here he discusses the minds of aliens and animals.

Prototype Drone Can Shock You With 80,000 Volts.

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It’s called Cupid. Look for it in a sky near you.

Via Information Liberation:

Cupid was revealed at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin Texas as a concept for how security might be implemented in the future.

“The drone can be deployed when an alarm is triggered. It can find a subject and send live video to the owners phone and ask if you want to authorize the subject or detain them. If you detain them, it drops into fully autonomous mode to detain them until police arrive. If need be stunning them with 80,000 volts of electricity to render them incapacitated,” the firm said in a statement.

The firm said it hopes the drone will “shock the world”, although it wasn’t clear whether they were being ironic.

They also plan to bring out a pepper spray version in the near future.

Chaotic Moon is also developing an EMP drone to knock spying paparazzi drones out of the sky. The EMP drone would fly to within about 2 meters of the intruding drone and blast its electronics with an electromagnetic pulse that would mess up the offending drones electronics and knock it out of the sky.

Source: Disinformation

Could YOU solve the mystery of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight? Satellite images made public to help locate MH370 jet.

The high-resolution satellite images were captured by DigitalGlobe

Over 25,000 people have already signed up to help search for the plane

The popularity of the search has caused the site to repeatedly crash

Approximately 1,300 sq miles of imagery has been uploaded onto the site

More images are being added as and when they become available

One user believes he has found what appears to be a underwater wreckage

Sighting is now being investigated by experts to confirm its authenticity

As police and search crews scour the seas around Malaysia and Vietnam for missing jet MH370, a satellite company is letting web users around the world help in the hunt online.  

DigitalGlobe has spent the last five days uploading high-resolution satellite and aerial images to its Tomnod site that let people explore the seas for clues about the crash, as well signs of a wreckage or oil slick.

Images are then tagged by users and analysed by experts before the most significant sightings are sent to the search teams in Asia.

DigitalGlobe has put its high-resolution satellite images online so people can search for the missing Malaysia flight. User Mike Seberger tagged this image of what appears to be the wreckage of a plane underwater. The sighting is now being investigated by experts

Tomnod user Mike Seberger tagged an image taken on Sunday morning, which appears to show the outline of a plane underwater. 

He is unsure of the exact location but is hoping the sighting will soon be verified.

Seberger told CNN: ‘At first, I skipped past it, thinking, 'Nah. No way I would find anything that  quickly, but then I kept scrolling back to it and thinking to myself, It does resemble a plane.’

The Malaysia Airlines flight went missing on Saturday on its way to China - there were 239 people on board.

About an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the Boeing 777 flew over the south of Vietnam before vanishing from radars.

The last communication the Malaysian authorities received was as the plane crossed the boundary between Malaysian and Vietnamese airspace.

Air traffic control in Malaysia said it was handing the jet over to controllers in Ho Chi Minh city before contact was completely lost.

DigitalGlobe has already uploaded 1,300 square miles (3,200 square kilometres) of imagery on to its crowdsourcing site, Tomnod, and is adding more as and when it becomes available.

Malaysia's Department Civil Aviation Director General, Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, pictured left, with Malaysian Airlines CEO Group Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, pictured right, during a press conference on the new search area

More than 25,000 people have already signed up to help search for the plane, and as a result the site has repeatedly crashed.

Initial search efforts concentrated on waters between Malaysia and Vietnam before being extended to the Malacca Strait and the Andaman Sea.

DigitalGlobe’s imagery is being uploaded to reflect this search area – although it covers approximately 27,000 square nautical miles (92,000 square km), meaning there may be a delay.

To use the site, users zoom in on each satellite image and drop a pin if they spot anything they believe could be related to the crash.

The system additionally has a tool that will search for and automatically flag any overlapping tags, suggesting more than one person has found something significant in that region.

All of these tags are analysed by experts and the top ten most likely and significant spots will be shared with the Malaysian authorities.

DigitalGlobe's Luke Barrington said that before passing any information over to the authorities, the experts are working on being 100 per cent sure its relevant so not to waste the search teams’ time or give anyone false hope.

This is not the first time Tomnod has been used in this way.

Following Typhoon Haiyan in the Phillipines in November, thousands of people signed up to search for and identify missing objects and damaged landmarks. 

‘We are working to best handle an unprecedented level of web traffic and interest in supporting the Malaysia Airlines jetliner search,’ the Colorado company said in a statement.

‘Please check back soon. We have new imagery collections planned for today and hope to make those images available online for the crowd as soon as possible.’

There is still no trace of the plane and a total of nine aircraft and 24 ships have already been deployed to search for the wreckage.

Click this link for video

The search for the missing aircraft has widened considerably after previous prediction of its whereabouts proved fruitless. It remains a mystery how a Boeing 777 could have disappeared without a trace in such relatively shallow seas

Vietnamese military personnel prepare a helicopter for a search and rescue mission for the missing Malaysia Airlines flight

Source: Mail Online

Woman robbed after being placed in a trance.

Police in Germany are hunting two hypnotists in connection with a spate of unusual robberies.

66-year-old Sarah Alexeyeva told officers that she had been standing outside an Aldi supermarket when two women spoke to her and placed her in to a hypnotic trance.

The next thing she knew she was back in her armchair at home, completely unaware of what had happened. She soon discovered however that some of her valuables were missing.

"She claims that the pair put her into a trance in order to rob her," said police spokeswoman Sandra Mohr. "She had no idea how they did it, one minute she was being promised the future and the next she knew she was back home."

Despite the peculiar nature of the crime this isn't an isolated case - several other people are believed to have also been targeted by the same two women under similar circumstances.

"They seem to be able to get the interest of their victims with a promise to see the future," said Mohr. "But the only future they are promising is to rob their victims." 

Source: Mirror

IS THIS REAL OR FAKE? UFO sighting 2014

Rethinking Privacy: Google Glass Harassment & The Coming Age of Sousveillance

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.” – Dalai Lama

A woman was recently accosted at a bar in San Francisco for wearing Google Glass, and while I can sympathize to a certain degree with those disgruntled patrons who had not agreed to be recorded while out in public, I cannot help but wonder:  do these same individuals share a similar sense of outrage over the illegal monitoring and recording of all our digital data by the NSA? Many view Glass as a further intrusion of privacy, and as wearable/recordable tech becomes increasingly ubiquitous we are probably going to start seeing signs like these popping up in stores and restaurants all over the place.

This tech will force us to reconsider previously held notions of “public versus private” and that is not necessarily a bad thing, but another question worth asking might be: could this tech – when used responsibly – potentially help us to regain some sense of equilibrium and empowerment against the current surveillance state? Some companies, like FreedomPop, are hoping to fight back against the NSA by providing phone services which will guarantee “secure and anonymous voice, text and data communications”. This kind of encryption technology definitely seems like a step in the right direction, but what else can we be doing? By turning the cameras around on those who are doing the observing, are we fighting for a world of accountability and transparency or are we simply giving up more of our privacy?

Surveillance vs. Souseveillance

David Bollier has written a fantastic piece about sousveillance here, in which he discusses two new essays by Steve Mann, a “pioneer of wearable computing” and coiner of the term sousveillance. Mann describes sousveillance as such:

We now live in a society in which we have both “the few watching the many” (surveillance), AND “the many watching the few” (sousveillance). Widespread sousveillance will cause a transition from our one-sided surveillance society back to a situation akin to olden times when the sheriff could see what everyone was doing AND everyone could see what the sheriff was doing. We name this neutral form of watching “veillance” – from the French word “veiller,” which means “to watch.” Veillance is a broad concept that includes both surveillance (oversight) and sousveillance (undersight), as well as databeillance, uberveillance, etc.

It follows that: (1) sousveillance (undersight) is necessary to a healthy, fair and balanced society whenever surveillance (oversight) is already being used; and (2) sousveillance has numerous moral, ethical, socioeconomic, humanistic/humanitarian and practical justifications that will guarantee its widespread adoption, despite opposing sociopolitical forces.

Bollier then discusses several other key terms which Mann has also coined: “When surveillance and sousveillance are both treated equally – a more appropriate state – one can say that there is ‘equiveillance.’ More typically, however, there is ‘inequiveillance.’ If there is only one party consenting to the veillance, there is ‘univeillance,’ and if an absentee, non-participant records some or all parties while at the same time forbidding them from recording themselves, there situation can be described as ‘McVeillance’ – the unilateral ‘sensory entitlement’ that many business establishments assert over their premises. Mann also suggests that people may want to start using new ‘counterveillance’ technologies to detect and neutralize surveillance cameras. They could be worn on clothing as ‘spite fashion’ or ‘spitewear,’ if only as a social commentary. The point, he argues, is that we should all have ‘the right to sensory integrity.’ Everyone should have ‘a basic right to the data generated by their own senses.’ “

This last point is incredibly important, and lawyers are already speculating about whether or not the meta-data which is collected by the NSA can be used as evidence in court.

Sousveillance as Social Contract

To formally legalize this right, Mann and a colleague, Wassell, actually drafted a proposed law for the “policy, practice and enforcement of personal sousveillance.” Among the rights that the law would protect: the right of people to “capture video recording of their personal space for self protection and accurate records in any public place (including restaurants); even establishments that ban such practice.”

Mann suggests that the use of veillance technologies ought to follow the norms of contract law. If one party is using a veillance technology, then another party ought to be entitled to use their own counterveillance technology to record an interaction – just as any contract requires two informed, consenting parties. If the surveillance party prohibits or discourages people from sousveillance – which amounts to a copy of the “veillance contract” – then a court of law should regard the surveillance recordings as inadmissible evidence in any future proceeding – just as a contract produced by one party, without a countersigned copy, would be inadmissible.

To make this idea more practical, Mann has actually developed a fully functional “Wearable Wireless Webcam” for sousveillance, also known as “lifeglogging.” While I’m not sure I want all of my life’s interactions recorded like some airliner’s black box, I sympathize with Mann’s complaint that the exclusive right of unilateral veillance should not belong to property owners alone. The idea of a “social contract” must be honored in some meaningful fashion, especially as it becomes clear that one-sided surveillance powers can and will be abused.

Mann also gave a fantastic TED talk called Wearable Computing and the Veillance Contract:

Source: Disinfo

Bizarre: missing Malaysia Airlines passengers' phones ring, but no one answers

Beijing - The mystery surrounding the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 has thickened somewhat as family members of passengers have reported mobile phones ringing, but nobody answering.

International Business Times reports that 19 families have signed a joint statement saying that passengers' cell phones connected after the flight had been reported missing. In each case, the phone would ring, but the call would be hung up. 
The sister of one of the Chinese passengers among the 239 people on board the missing flight rang his phone live on TV twice at 11:40 on Sunday morning and heard it ringing. She called again later that afternoon and heard it ring once more. 

The Mirror reports that she expressed her hope that if the call went through, police could locate the position. 

A man from Beijing also called his missing brother, and reported to the airline that the phone connected three times and rang before appearing to hang up.

Relatives who signed the joint statement have asked Malaysia Airlines to reveal any information they may have been hiding. 

The airline has not released any further details regarding the aircraft, however Malaysian Minister of Transport Hishammuddin Hussein said they were doing everything in their power to locate the plane and that they hope people understand that they are being as transparent as they can.

In the mean time, it has also been reported that the large oil slick spotted in the South China Sea, was found to be bunker fuel  and not that of missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. 

These eerie happenings have, of course, given rise to a number of conspiracy theories, one of which purports that the aircraft may have been hijacked by terrorists bearing fake passports and is now secretly stationed at an abandoned Vietnamese airport at this very moment. 

According to 'citizen news' siteBeforeitsnews.com, the aircraft may have been landed safely by terrorists/hijackers to later be used as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ with passengers and crew now being held as hostages.

New York Daily News reports that other theories suggest that the 100-ton Boeing 777 carrying 239 people simply disintegrated in the air at 35 000 feet, possibly due to an explosion.

According to Scott Hamilton, a US-based aviation expert, the plane had been inspected just 10 days before and found to be in a 'proper condition,' meaning that it was highly unlikely that an explosion would have been caused by an aircraft fault. 

He added that the airplane could only have been torn apart by a completely unexpected catastrophic event or a criminal act. 

Some of the crazier conspiracy theories, cited by examiner.com, suggest that the plane could have been intercepted by a visiting alien UFO or transported to another world via an outer space wormhole.

Laughable to many, but you have to admit that as the days tick by and no conclusive reports on the airplane's fate have been released, the incident is starting to look a lot like an X-Files case. 

Source: News24