• California roads to generate renewable energy

    California lawmakers recently passed a bill for a pilot program that would turn road vibrations into energy; the bill proposes using a process called piezoelectric generation that captures energy from cars, trains, or people as they move across surfaces and create vibrations; these vibrations are then harnessed and converted into energy by piezoelectric materials that would be buried beneath the road’s surface; a .6 single lane road can prove as much as forty-four megawatts of energy each year, which is enough to light up more than 30,000 homes

  • CybersecurityResearchers say alarmist rhetoric of cyber doom unrealistic and unhelpful

    Researchers are warning that the government’s increasingly “alarmist rhetoric” regarding “catastrophic cyber threats” is not based on credible evidence and is proving to be problematic; the two say that over the past several years politicians have increasingly discussed cyber threats in hyperbolic language that have no basis in actual reality; they warn that the inflation of this threat can be used to justify increasing government regulation of the internet as well as unwarranted government expenditures on cyber security programs

  • DOJ report finds FBI agents lacks critical cyber security skills

    A recent government report found that the FBI’s cybersecurity experts are incompetent and overly focused on investigating child pornography; the study, conducted by the Department of Justice (DOJ), said that many of the FBI agents trained in cyber security lacked the ability to investigate national security related intrusions and threats; out of the thirty-six agents interviewed, only 64 percent said they had the expertise to handle national security related cyber investigations; the remaining 36 percent “lacked the networking and counterintelligence expertise to investigate national security intrusion cases” ; five agents even admitted that they “did not think they were able or qualified to investigate national security intrusions effectively”