Hundreds of soldiers from 3rd battalion The Parachute Regiment spent last week learning how to contain and arrest “rioters” in a series of exercises mirroring last summers violence.

Includes original interviews with a number of dissident scholars including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Peter Phillips (“Project Censored”), John Stauber (“PR Watch”), Christopher Simpson (“The Science of Coercion”) and others.

The Pentagon plans to fork over $32 million to develop “fun to play” computer games that can refine the way weapons systems are tested to ensure they are free from software errors and security bugs, according to a Defense Department solicitation.

The goal is to create puzzles that are “intuitively understandable by ordinary people” and could be solved on laptops, smartphones, tablets and consoles. The games’ solutions will be collected into a database and used to improve methods for analyzing software, according to the draft request for proposals put out by the military’s venture capital and research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

As weapons systems have become complex, the military’s methods for verifying that the software running on them is glitch-free and secure against hackers has fallen short. Formal verification is the process analysts use, through the application of mathematical theories, to determine if software code is free from bugs. Crowdsourcing this complicated task would help the Pentagon cut costs while it grapples with a shortage of computer security specialists.

“Formal verification has been too costly to apply beyond small, critical software components,” the document said. “This is particularly an issue for the Department of Defense because formal verification, while a proven method for reducing defects in software, currently requires highly specialized talent and cannot be scaled to the size of software found in modern weapon systems.”

DARPA’s three-year experiment, known as Crowdsourced Formal Verification, will address the question: How can developers translate formal verification problems into compelling puzzles people will want to solve?

The agency estimates that it will spend $4.7 million on the project this year.

The games will be released for testing by the public at the end of the program’s two research phases. Researchers must provide programming tools that allow robots to play the games. “However, some problems are expected to remain beyond any robot’s ability to solve,” the solicitation notes. DARPA did not respond to requests for an interview.

The use of crowdsourcing and games to tackle complex, real-world problems has gained traction since players of Foldit, a protein-folding computer game that analyzes possible protein combinations, recently deciphered an AIDS-related enzyme that had baffled scientists for more than a decade. The creation of Foldit by the University of Washington was funded in part by DARPA.

Another game, EteRNA, allows players to design RNA — or ribonucleic acid — molecules, creating genetic blueprints that scientists could build on to influence what happens inside living cells and possibly treat diseases in new ways.

“One of the really exciting things is that when we inject a new kind of problem in the world and provide tools to solve that problem, experts at the task just emerge,” said Adrien Treuille, an assistant computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who has been involved in developing both games.

Security professionals, while intrigued by the potential of DARPA’s idea, have reservations about whether the program will meet the ambitious goals.

It would be more cost-effective for the government to focus efforts on ensuring that software is secure while it’s being engineered rather than after it has been deployed in systems, said Gary McGraw, chief technology officer at Cigital, a Dulles, Va.-based security consultancy. “It’s easier to build something right than to build a broken thing and then have to fix it.”

If players know a game is mapped to a weapons system’s software, there’s the alarming possibility that they could rig its results. “They could collude and play the game to show there are no security problems,” said Nasir Memon, director of the Information Systems and Internet Security Laboratory at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. “How can you trust results from that?”

Source: nextgov.com

“Top Secret America” is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked – with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government’s national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site’s revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.
We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies’ own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations.

Our maps show the headquarters buildings of the largest government agencies involved in top-secret work. A user can also see the cities and towns where the government conducts top-secret work in the United States, but not the specific locations, companies or agencies involved.

Within a responsible framework, our objective is to provide as much information as possible, so readers gain a real, granular understanding of the scale and breadth of the top-secret world we are describing.

Source: MapsOfWar.com

If you are worried the world will end next year based on the Mayan calendar, relax: the end of time is still far off.

So say Mayan experts who want to dispel any belief that the ancient Mayans predicted a world apocalypse next year.

The Mayan calendar marks the end of a 5,126 year old cycle around December 12, 2012 [sic] which should bring the return of Bolon Yokte, a Mayan god associated with war and creation.

Author Jose Arguelles called the date “the ending of time as we know it” in a 1987 book that spawned an army of Mayan theorists, whose speculations on a cataclysmic end abound online. But specialists meeting at this ancient Mayan city in southern Mexico say it merely marks the termination of one period of creation and the beginning of another.

“We have to be clear about this. There is no prophecy for 2012,” said Erik Velasquez, an etchings specialist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “It’s a marketing fallacy.”

The National Institute of Anthropological History in Mexico has been trying to quell the barrage of forecasters predicting the apocalypse. “The West’s messianic thinking has distorted the world view of ancient civilizations like the Mayans,” the institute said in a statement.

In the Mayan calendar, the long calendar count begins in 3,114 BC and is divided into roughly 394-year periods called Baktuns. Mayans held the number 13 sacred and the 13th Baktun ends next year.

Sven Gronemeyer, a researcher of Mayan codes from La Trobe University in Australia, who has been trying to decode the calendar, said the so-called end day reflects a transition from one era to the next in which Bolon Yokte returns.

“Because Bolon Yokte was already present at the day of creation … it just seemed natural for the Mayan that Bolon Yokte will again be present,” he said.

Of the approximately 15,000 registered glyphic texts found in different parts of what was then the Mayan empire, only two mention 2012, the Institute said.

“The Maya did not think about humanity, global warming or predict the poles would fuse together,” said Alfonso Ladena, a professor from the Complutense University of Madrid. “We project our worries on them.”

Source: Reuters

Durham Crematorium wants to install turbines in two of its burners, which would use the heat generated during the cremation process to provide the same amount of electricity as would power 1,500 televisions.