duh... i think i lost a quarter...

and for some reason, i continue to pile up evidence. or something.

i just read an article from 2002 that was on digg. it basically said that the US government couldn't account for 25% of their military spending. they audit themselves and everything, but in the end, they can't show where the 25% went.
25%.
when this was reported on, in 2002, 25% equaled about $2.3 TRILLION.

$2,300,000,000,000.

Yea..

and that's about the same as $8,000 for each person living in the US.

that is so messed up.

and, more than likely, the military spends way more in 2006 or 2007 than they did in 2001.


source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

world's biggest squid yet

Calamari the size of tractor tires!! a 33-foot long, 990 pound squid was caught near New Zealand in January. look at the size of this thing!! those red things in the top right of the picture are somedude's hands!

it was featured in the February 12, 2007 edition of Newsweek.

source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17506125/site/newsweek/

"chips! Chips!! CHIPS!! CHIPS!!!"

VeriChip Corporation had their IPO recently under the ticker symbol CHIP, and so far they are off to a bad start.
There seems to be a cloud of negative press around them for some reason. VeriChip is the company that brought you such innovative products as the implantable RFID chip.
Might be fun to keep an eye on.

clone a VeriChip for like 20 bux: http://cq.cx/vchdiy.pl

pure powder

consumer electronics giant Hitachi has created a RFID "powder" that is 0.05 x 0.05 mm. you can see in the picture how they compare to a strand of hair. these little chips have a 128-bit ROM, which can store a 38-digit number. and, most likely, this number can be read with some sort of RFID scanner. probably not from too far away, who knows... the original source is in Japanese anyway.

a tag of this size could be used to track anything basically. they made a version of this before which was 9times larger (0.4 x 0.4 mm) called Mu-chips. probably good for paper, printer ink, currency, or even a food-additive. LOL

anyways, it seems that the government of Malaysia has bought the rights to it. i'm sure they'll find some fun use for it.

oh yea, the Mu-chips work @ 2.5GHz if you want to go hunting. dunno what the new ones work @.

sources:
http://www.spychips.com/blog/2007/02/hitachis_weaponized_rfid_powde.html
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/02/hitachi-develops-rfid-powder/
http://www.hitachi.co.jp/Prod/mu-chip/

Microsoft employee missing @ sea

Jim Gray works for microsoft and was half of the inventors of Terraserver, an early satellite mapping software. according to my source, he also did major work on ATM machine & flight reservation software.


source: http://www.nbc11.com/news/10888165/detail.html

how the FBI is watching the net

some details of the FBI's net surveilance technique have been made public last Friday at the Search & Seizure in the Digital Age symposium held at Stanford University's law school.
basically, this is what they are doing:

- if there is a badguy they want to watch, they get a court order and if the Internet Service Provider can tell which IP address the badguy is on, they watch a whole block of IP's.

every time you sign on the internet, you get an IP address. this comes from your ISP, and with always-on connections, rarely changes. but if someone with the same ISP is being bad, the FBI will watch a whole set of IP's to make sure they get 'em. and by watch, i mean record all net activity. email, web requests, etc.

source: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-6154457.html

the NSA in your ASS

this is fairly old news (1999), but new to me and most likely you.
however:

The National Security Agency (NSA), the official codebreakers / digital information gatherers / cryptography department of the United States, might have had access to any Microsoft Windows computer since Windows95.

yea, that's right:
see, there are high-encryption keys in your computer. i would think of these as wicked-good passwords, big-ass passwords that you unlock data with. these basically allow Windows to encrypt information, to an extent. in reality, there is a federal limit on encryption that can be used in or exported by the United States. what that means is that if you encrypt some information, a file, a message, whatever, you can only make it as unbreakable as the NSA said you can.

anywayz...

what i didn't know is that in Microsoft Windows, there is a key that microsoft put in, as well as one that is for use by the NSA. supposedly, these keys could allow the NSA, or maybe even microsoft, to gain full control of your computer.

not that it matters, and as if you care.

source: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html

What's in your wallet?

Reports are just coming in about canadian coins that were embedded with tracking devices. These coins were found on high-security US contractors working in canada. The canadian government is denying any knowledge of them.

Such small transmitters should only be detectable from a few feet away. Who knows tho.

So that's cool.

Source: http://wap.usatoday.com/news.jsp?key=533869