• Drone Rangers and GPS for Fish: The Tech Weapons U.K. Could Deploy to Stop European Rivals Plundering U.K. Seas Post-Brexit

    Figures from the Pew Research Centre, a U.S. think tank, suggest that one in five fish are caught by breaking the law and the illegal fishing industry is now worth $23.5 billion. As the U.K. prepares to leave the EU’s fishing regime, illegal trawling in British territorial waters is expected to increase. Some think technology can solve the problem of illegal activity, with new solutions in the form of satellites, drones, facial recognition and autonomous boats emerging to tackle the issue of illegal fishing head on. These technologies will need to be deployed quickly.

  • Can Nuclear Power Be Saved?

    Whither nuclear power? That question has become more important as energy policies evolve to emphasize emissions-free “green” energy and an increased electrification of the U.S. economy. Some environmentalists consider nuclear power to be crucial to reducing carbon emissions; others continue to vehemently oppose nuclear power and believe that our energy must come solely from renewable sources.  The public, encouraged into hysteria by dramatizations of nuclear-plant accidents such as the film The China Syndrome and HBO’s Chernobyl, is split. Meanwhile, the nuclear-power industry itself is in a parlous state for a variety of tangled reasons.

  • LEOSU Defeats SPFPA for Representing Paragon Protective Service Officers

    In an impressive victory, the Law Enforcement Security Officers Union (LEOSU) won the representation election and will be representing the protective service officers at Paragon Systems, Inc. The company protects federal facilities throughout Louisville, Kentucky. “LEOSU is the strongest, fastest-growing law enforcement and security police union in America,” stated LEOSU Organizing Director Steve Maritas, “And I promise you that LEOSU will deliver for our new members with Paragon just like we have for our other Paragon PSO members from around the country.”

  • Good for Google, Bad for America

    Google’s decision to start an AI lab in China while ending an AI contract with the Pentagon, is disturbing. Goggle may argue that it operates in a world where “AI and its benefits have no borders,” but Peter Thiel argues that 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,” he writes. In the 1950s, the cliché was that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Google makes no such claim for itself; “it would be too obviously false,” Thiel writes. Instead, Google talks about what is good for the world – but “by now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country.”

  • Foreign-Born PhDs Deterred from Working in Startups Because of Visa Concerns

    Foreign-born Ph.D. graduates with science and engineering degrees from American universities apply to and receive offers for technology startup jobs at the same rate as U.S. citizens, but are only half as likely to actually work at fledgling companies, a study finds.

  • Unlocking Market Forces to Solve Cyber Risk

    Markets have been slow to adjust to the multi-dimensional perils of cyber risk. Even headline-grabbing cyber incidents such as breaches of Equifax, Target, Anthem, Sony and Home Depot—along with NotPetya’s devastation of Merck, FedEx, and Maersk—have thus far had only fleeting impacts on assessments of major corporations’ prospects by investors, credit rating agencies and insurers. This disparity reflects the broader problem of a “cyber risk gap” between corporations’ exposure to cyber risks and the adequacy of their efforts to address it. Investors, insurers, credit rating agencies and others presently face this gap, and have been only slowly waking up to its magnitude.

  • Practicing Cybersecurity Gets Easier

    It’s expensive to train the people who defend us from cyberattacks. When big companies hold a large-scale exercise, they often take several months to prepare for it. Lots of people and computers, routers and other hardware form a complex infrastructure to create an attack that is as realistic as possible. That’s a good approach, but at the same time it is time consuming and expensive. This is where the Norwegian Cyber Range comes in, enabling medium and smaller players to train, too.

  • Nuclear Power Offers an Abundant Supply of Low-Carbon Energy. But What to Do With the Deadly Radioactive Waste?

    The dilemma of how to manage nuclear waste — radioactive materials routinely produced in large quantities at every stage of nuclear power production, from uranium mining and enrichment to reactor operation and the reprocessing of spent fuel — has taxed the industry, academics and governments for decades. Along with accidents, it has been a major reason for continuing public opposition to the industry’s further expansion despite substantial interest in nuclear power’s status as a low-carbon power source that can help mitigate climate change. The race is on to develop new strategies for permanently storing some of the most dangerous materials on the planet.

  • Tech Companies Not Doing Enough to Fight Phishing Scams

    Technology companies could be doing much more to protect individuals and organizations from the threats posed by phishing, according to new research. However, users also need to make themselves more aware of the dangers to ensure potential scammers do not obtain access to personal or sensitive information.

  • Hacking Connected Cars to Gridlock Whole Cities

    In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars. Researchers warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

  • Coping with Climate Change with Forecast-Based Aid

    Traditionally, disaster victims have received assistance after trouble hits. If a region is flooded, say, people in the area may get aid to rebuild. But a new approach to humanitarian giving is flipping the script and offering help in advance of disaster, using in-depth weather forecasting and risk analysis to predict future victims.

  • Johannesburg Power Company Crippled by Ransomware Attack

    City Power, the company supplying Johannesburg, South Africa’s economic hub, with electricity, has been attacked by a ransomware virus. The virus has “encrypted all our databases” representatives of the company said. Some of the company’s services have been crippled; the company said it may not be able to respond to a blackout; and more and more residents complain of loss of power. Johannesburg is not the first municipality to have its network infected by ransomware.

  • FBI Director: China No. 1 Counter-Intelligence Threat to the U.S.

    The FBI has more than 1,000 investigations of U.S. intellectual property theft in all 50 states with nearly all leading back to China, FBI Director Christopher Wray said, calling China the No. 1 counter-intelligence threat to the United States. Wray described the threat as “more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive and more concerning than any counter-intelligence threat that I can think of.”

  • Huawei Secretly Built North Korea’s Wireless Network

    On Monday, the Washington Post reported that Huawei had been secretly working in North Korea on various communication projects, including building and maintaining the country’s wireless network. Huawei’s work has been in direct violation of the sanctions imposed on North Korea because of its nuclear weapons activity. The revelations are going to increase worries in the West about the trustworthiness of the Chinese communication giant, and would provide more evidence to support the conclusions of Western intelligence services that Huawei serves the interests of the Chinese government and China’s intelligence services.

  • “A High Risk to Their Users”: An Analysis of Huawei Devices’ Security Vulnerabilities

    Western intelligence services have long suspected that the Chinese communication giant Huawei was a tool of China’s powerful intelligence services. An analysis of the state of security of Huawei’s gear and equipment has found serious security flaws and vulnerabilities. This is important, because even if we take Huawei’s implausible denials of any relationship to Chinese government at face value, the low quality of security of Huawei’s equipment would allow the Chinese government, and other state actors, to compromise the vulnerabilities of networks built with Huawei’s components. Our “analysis shows that Huawei devices quantitatively pose a high risk to their users,” the report says.