Ok, it’s not really a virus, but the next time you hear a cyberwar expert warn about the risk of widespread power outages from cyberattack, think about this: critical infrastructure disasters have happened before. Today, for example, RiaNovosti says nearly a half million people in the middle of a Moscow winter are powerless.
Power outrages have left 412,000 people without electricity across several regions in central Russia on Sunday, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told a government meeting.
He urged Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu to “mobilize all units” in order to tackle the “latest weather anomaly,” as meteorologists predict there is little relief in sight.
CBS Local reports that criminals opened a hole through the wall of a home in New York to steal works by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. The culprits also managed to take the security camera recorder. Apparently the recorder did not upload data to a remote site.
Authorities are ramping up their effort to solve a Manhattan mystery: Who drilled a hole into the home of a beef fortune heir and stole a collection of iconic artworks by Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol?
The culprits also made off with surveillance video footage that might have caught them in the act.
“These technologies were developed to help stratospheric balloons land on Venus and communicate with each other without using heavy duty transmission equipment,” says Guell.
Guell says the balloons never made it to Venus for budgetary reasons. But their technology may soon be helping cars find parking spots in Toulouse and other cities in Europe and Canada that are interested in the project.
Supposedly it can tell a car from a truck based on the magnetic profile, and drivers are expected to pay their meter with a wireless chip on their windshield. Above all is the fact that drivers will be able to see in real time if there is parking.
French government studies show that 60 percent of urban pollution in France is due to idling cars searching for a place to park, which translates into 700 million wasted hours a year…
Unless they build a queuing or reservation system, however, it seems that people still will drive around wasting time, but far more anxiously — all trying to get to a spot before others when their phone alerts them. Maybe they can build in a control so drivers more than a few blocks from the spot will not be notified. It certainly sounds like a fun system to try and manipulate. I can imagine sending a false signal that parking is available on the other side of the village and then, while all the other cars race to get there, taking a spot nearby that is left open the old fashioned way.
According to [poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, who served on the prize committee], the environmental challenges which face us in the 21st century make the nature poetry which has always been a feature of Clarke’s work “much more political — as it was, indeed, in the days of John Clare — and her work is becoming more and more important”.
[Her editor at Carcanet, Michael] Schmidt agreed, citing the title sequence in A Recipe for Water, which brings the perils of climate change closer to home through the experience of drought: “You imagine me writing in the falling rain /& But day after day / no huff of rain / on the roof”. Part of Clarke’s appeal lies in her talent for celebration, he continued, even when tackling difficult subjects.
“She seems to be quite happy in the 21st century,” he said. “Many poets tend to be quite elegiac, they tend to lament the state of the present, but Gillian’s very positive.”
The poet herself dismissed the idea she was writing to “an agenda”, arguing instead that the ecological focus of some of her recent work came because “you write about your obsessions”.
“What I’m doing these days is loving the planet rather than moaning about it,” she said. “If we love the planet we might just save it, but if we moan we might not.”
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995