HARD TIMES TOKENS

Posted on 2013/03/29 by secret santa

& ‘MINT DROPS’

http://exonumismatics.com/survey/private.html#htt

The “Hard Times”, strictly speaking, referred to the “recession” of 1837-1838, when 90% of the factories and the United States closed following a banking crisis which was credited to Andrew Jackson. At the heart of this period, these large cent sized tokens became necessary substitutes for the government issued coins, which were to a large extent hoarded. This rich and varied series has achieved a substantial following, with some pieces commanding thousands of dollars. The series includes politically oriented tokens, commercial advertising tokens, and anonymous monetary tokens. Perhaps the most enduring result of this series is emergence of the donkey as the symbol of the Democratic Party.”

http://www.limunltd.com/numismatica/articles/hard-times-tokens.html

“The event that defines this era was the veto of the renewal of the charter of the Bank of the United States by Andrew Jackson in 1832. The BUS was slated to close in 1836, but Jackson didn’t wait. He withdrew Treasury money from the BUS. (Interestingly, the Treasury had an embarrassment of riches. The US was without debt.) However, when the BUS closed, credit collapsed. ”I take the responsibilty”, says Andrew Jackson, standing in an empty treasure chest. Martin Van Buren’s ship of state has tattered sails on the obverse of a coin; the reverse shows Henry Clay’s sails billowing. “I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor”, says the jackass on the obverse while the reverse shows a treasure chest being borne off by a turtle. “Good for shinplasters” refers to worthless paper money used as stuffing in boots. Some, to avoid charges of counterfeiting bear the slogan “Millions for defense NOT ONE CENT for tribute.”

These tokens were about the size of a US Large Cent, just under 3 cm across, hefting over 10 grams. They were an east coast phenomenon, since metals, dies, etc., were found near industry. (Twenty five years later, Civil War tokens were issued from Michigan, Indiana, etc.) The fact that they are found today in middle grades around Fine indicates that they actually circulated in trade. America eventually recovered from the Panic of 1837. The debt rose. Finances moved from Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to Wall Street in New York. Hard times tokens retired to dressers and chests as government cents (soon smaller) circulated again.”

Hard Times Token, 1834

http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/tokens_merge_politics_with_business_need

“One of the more interesting aspects of American numismatics is the study of those tokens which served in place of coins. The best known of these were made in the late 1830s and today are called Hard Times Tokens because of the economic problems that affected the United States during that era. Prior to 1837 tokens were little used in the American marketplace but a series of events that began in 1834 was to change everything. In that year, after many years of debate, Congress finally reformed the gold coinage by lowering the weights. During the 1820s most coined gold had left the United States, leaving only silver and bank notes to conduct commercial affairs.

The act of June 1834 was meant to bring United States gold coins into line with the international ratio between gold and silver. The law of 1792 had set the ratio at 15 to 1 (i.e. one ounce of gold was worth 15 ounces of silver) but by the 1820s the world markets used ratios closer to 16 to 1. The result of the 1834 law was that gold flowed heavily into the United States because the ratio had been set a little too high, at 16 to 1. During 1835 and 1836 Mint and Treasury officials became concerned that the influx of gold was having the unwanted effect of driving out the silver coinage of the United States; foreign silver still arrived in considerable quantities, however. To solve this latest problem, Mint Director Robert M. Patterson prepared a comprehensive coinage bill that included a provision that slightly lowered the ratio, to about 15.9 to 1. The revised law was passed in January 1837 and proved beneficial. U.S. silver stopped leaving the country while gold continued to arrive.

During early 1837 the United States was perhaps the best supplied with gold and silver coins than had ever been the case in its history up to that time. But all of this would soon end, due to a series of blunders made by the states, as well as the federal government. The early 1830s witnessed a great expansion of business and with this came a call for roads and canals so that goods could be gotten to market and raw materials brought from the interior to the coastal manufacturing plants. All of this initiated massive borrowing by the states for these internal improvements. This spending created inflation and increased issues of paper money. The expansion of the roads and canals played out against another backdrop, the attack by President Andrew Jackson on the Bank of the United States. This bank, which had been chartered in 1816 for 20 years, served the nation well in forcing private banks to honor their paper currency with specie, usually silver but after 1834 in gold if desired.

The strong position of the Bank of the United States, however, inevitably led to political involvement and the bank leadership was openly against the Jackson Administration. This President felt the same about the bank and was determined to destroy it. The early 1830s saw a bitter struggle between the bank and Jackson. The bank lost. One of the strategies used by the President to undermine the bank was the removal of federal deposits (gold and silver coin). Such funds were placed in private banks friendly to the administration, called “pet banks” by Jackson’s enemies. These banks were sometimes poorly managed and the influx of hard money led them to issue loans to politically connected individuals without the proper collateral.

Hard Times Token, 1834

The federal government had also stepped in to make matters worse, much worse. Jackson had long felt that paper money, in particular that was issued by private banks, was holding back the economic expansion of the United States; the President believed that bank notes of less than $20 in value ought not to be issued. The problem with this was that was a large number of notes of less than $5 value in daily use, an unintended result of the monies going to pet banks. The disaster waiting to happen was politely termed the Specie Circular and had been issued by Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury on July 11, 1836. It required that land purchases on the frontier be made strictly in gold or silver coin. Some exceptions were made for the use of paper money on a temporary basis but the intent was clearly to force paper money out of daily use. At the same time, the massive influx of gold into the United States from 1834 through 1836 caused problems in Europe, especially England. The Bank of England responded to the loss of gold by raising the discount rate to 5 percent in September 1836. This caused a reverse flow of gold to Great Britain although on a limited basis at first. By the spring of 1837 gold was leaving for England at a growing rate. The cumulative effect of the Specie Circular, funds to pet banks, and the English discount rate came crashing down in May 1837. On May 10 the New York banks suspended specie payments for their notes, triggering a run on banks throughout the United States. The financial upheaval forced many businesses to fail and a large number of workmen were laid off. The Panic of 1837, as it came to be known, was a severe recession but not a depression. Gold and silver were now rarely used in commerce, their place being taken by bank notes as well as scrip for values as low as a few cents. The government had meant well but failed to foresee what would happen by acting too quickly.

As in all such situations a number of people saw the opportunity not only to make money, but score political points against their enemies at the same time. It is hard to say which aim was the most important. The token coinage which resulted succeeded very well in both aims, much to the irritation of the supporters of Andrew Jackson and his hand-picked successor, Martin Van Buren. Van Buren had taken the oath of office as President on March 4, 1837, just in time to reap the whirlwind caused by the earlier mistakes. On the eve of the token explosion in 1837 the United States Mint had no idea of what would happen. But it did have a vested interest in seeing to it that the tokens were neither issued nor used in the marketplace. The reason was purely economic in that the Mint derived a considerable profit from issuing copper coins to the public. There was, however, a difficult problem that the Mint had in dealing with the token outbreak. Copper coins were not legal tender and not convertible into gold or silver except at the so-called exchanges, where copper cents could be converted to silver for a fee of several percent. Merchants had to pay their bills in specie (until the banks suspended specie payments) so the accumulation of United States copper coins was not exactly a blessing. (Legal tender status was not given to minor coins until 1864.) Just when the first Hard Times Tokens began to be seen in the marketplace is uncertain, but distribution of these pieces was well under way by the summer of 1837, perhaps as early as mid July. They apparently first appeared in New York City but this is also not quite certain and is based on the fact that more varieties of tokens are known for this area.

Whatever the exact sequence of events, they were unknown to Mint Director Robert M. Patterson until the fall of 1837. He noticed, in a local newspaper, an advertisement offering tokens for sale at a price well under the official value of a cent. Considering that the Mint needed the profit on copper coinage to offset other expenses, he was less than pleased at what he saw. Dr. Patterson sent a Mint employee to purchase a few of the tokens that had been advertised and then visited the United States district attorney, whose name was Reed. Patterson told Mr. Reed that the tokens in question were “spurious” and that the 1825 anti-counterfeiting statute was applicable in this case. Patterson testified before a federal grand jury and that body agreed with him; federal officials now ordered the local merchant to stop selling tokens on pain of prosecution. At first the Mint director believed that the token episode was an isolated one. However, he soon learned that he had witnessed but a small part of the business and that it was widespread throughout New England and New York State. Patterson then began writing letters to friends asking them to investigate the matter and report back to him. By late November Patterson had learned how much of a nuisance the tokens had become, at least in his mind. On Dec. 2, 1837, he wrote Treasury Secretary Woodbury on what he viewed as a worsening situation as the Mint’s profits on copper coinage were being eroded. Patterson began his letter by recounting the incident with the Philadelphia merchant and the grand jury. Patterson noted that similar problems were encountered at Baltimore but that the major problem was in New York City where the tokens were not only manufactured but used widely in ordinary business transactions. One friend of the director’s in New York had picked up 10 different kinds of tokens and sent them to the Mint for examination. The Mint director found that at least three of the tokens had been made at the same private mint because the design was similar. In particular Patterson mentioned the following tokens (or “store cards” as we might term them now): New York Joint Stock Exchange Company, Robinson, Jones & Company, and Ezra Sweet. He went on to note that a newspaper, the New York Observer, was reporting numerous kinds of such pieces in daily use throughout the city. According to the newspaper account, the tokens were sold for about 62 cents per hundred pieces, a nice profit when passed on for a cent.

“In its issue of Nov. 23, 1837, the Emancipator ran an advertisement offering the Female Slave tokens at $1 per hundred. Made of good copper and with a device on reverse similar to legal U.S. cents, they sold well. The ad also said that it was proposed to issue Kneeling Male Slave tokens as well, and this accounts for the few pattern pieces of HT 82, which were never produced for circulation.”
http://www.hardtimestokens.com/ht81details.html

According to Patterson, an anti-slavery newspaper, the Emancipator, reported that pieces similar to a cent of a “new emission” were being sold at the offices of the Anti-Slavery League on Nassau Street. The paper described the devices as being anti-slavery in nature. There is one anti-slavery token listed by Lyman Low (No. 54), in his study of Hard Times Tokens, which seems to fit the given conditions except that it is dated 1838. Perhaps the issuers felt that it would be coming out so late in 1837 that it ought to be given the next year’s date. The listing made by Dr. Patterson show another interesting aspect of the Hard Times Tokens in general. The date, if prior to 1837, may well mean nothing more than some important year connected with the business that issued them. The Robinson, Jones, & Company piece, for example, uses an 1833 date to show that it received a medal that year for a button display. Patterson also noted that tokens were well used in Boston though he did not give any names. The Boston tokens, as with most of the others, were lightweight compared to the genuine cent, averaging perhaps 70 percent of the weight. He thought that manufacturing costs were about 50 cents, or a bit more, for a hundred pieces which gave a decent profit when they were later sold at about 62 cents per hundred. The dies were crude and cheaply made, which helped hold costs down. Not only did the merchants get “cents” at a strong discount but most of these tokens had the added advantage of advertising their businesses. As far as they were concerned it was a win-win situation. Dr. Patterson, however, had a slightly different opinion.

In the meantime Treasury Secretary Woodbury had taken Patterson’s letter under consideration. On Dec. 4 he replied, noting that he had just written the federal attorneys at New York and Baltimore; he did not mention Boston but this was probably done as well. The attorneys were instructed to take such steps as to eradicate the problem. December 6 saw Patterson writing Woodbury again, this time to report that he had seen another 11 tokens, primarily from New York. His list included token issuers Henry Anderson, H. Crossman, Maycock & Company, Merchants Exchange, and Abraham Riker. These later tokens were somewhat heavier, though still light by as much as 32 grains below the legal standard of 168 grains. In an 1849 letter discussing these tokens Dr. Patterson mentioned that the legal attacks by federal attorneys had put a stop to the business. It is not clear from the letter, however, if the political tokens were interdicted by the same methods since no names appeared on these as issuers. It is believed that very few merchant tokens were struck after the spring of 1838. At the same time as the merchant pieces were issued, political opportunists saw the chance to not only attack Presidents Jackson and Van Buren but make a tidy profit in the process. Quite a few varieties of the political tokens were issued and are collected today by specialists.

It is of interest to note that the tokens of 1837-1838 are known as Hard Times Tokens, but this is a little less than accurate. The recession that started in May 1837 was essentially over within a year; New York banks resumed specie payments in May 1838. In June 1839, however, matters suddenly got worse and this time it was a full-blown depression with large numbers thrown out of work. The underlying cause of this second round of economic bad news was primarily the English discount rate, as too much gold had again left the island kingdom. This time the problem lasted until 1842, when important discoveries of gold in Russian Siberia provided massive quantities of the yellow metal for world markets. Hard Times Tokens are but a footnote in the numismatic history of the United States yet played a key role in the marketplace for a few months. They deserve to be better known.”

http://www.hardtimestokens.com/fordintro.html

“Hard Times tokens represent an unusual period in the financial history of the United States. President Jackson, in his campaign of 1832, was vehemently opposed to the Second Bank of the United States. This central bank in Philadelphia was said by opponents to control the money supply in favor of the wealthy merchants. Populist Jackson vowed to abolish it. The bank issued its own currency, which quickly became the most stable paper money in the land. It exercised considerable control over credit and interest rates throughout the country. When Jackson was reelected, he tried to abolish the bank. Finally, in 1837 he succeeded in accomplishing his goal. In the meanwhile, the president of the bank, Nicholas Biddle, tightened the money supply, which then lead to a financial panic. Other banks issued paper money with little or no gold or silver backing and quickly folded. By 1837 over 100 banks had gone under. The small change necessary for commerce began to disappear. Tokens were issued to solve the needs of the public. They were frequently political or satirical in nature. The tokens of the period 1832-1844, when Van Buren became president, are classified as the Hard Time issues.”

Mint Drop Token, 1837

“”Bentonian Currency” was hard money as opposed to paper. The crash of 1837 and the Hard Times which followed were by no means solely due as the Wing leaders would have it believed–to the overthrow of their policy and the “mint drops” or hard money of Jackson and Van Buren: they were only the culmination of evils which had long been threatening disaster. The Panic of 1837 resulted in hoarding of coins in circulation. The withdrawal of public funds from the banks led to a contraction of the currency and great changes in apparent values, which were the apparent causes of “Hard Times.” To fill the need for small change in circulation, a wide variety of copper tokens appeared in 1837.”

Illustrious Predecessor Token, 1837

http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/2008/11/13/martin-van-buren-and-the-hard-times/

“Because Van Buren was a supporter of Jackson — going so far as to state his intent to follow in Jackson’s footprints during his inaguration — Van Buren was a solid target for people’s resentment due to the failing economy. The Hard Times tokens were minted in cheap copper and bronze blends by private businesses and infividuals, and enthusiastically decorated with political satire of all kinds. Van Buren’s face didn’t adorn many (if any) of these tokens, although caricatures of Jackson were quite common. Mostly, Van Buren was mentioned as Bad Things To Come, represented by things such as the ship “Experiment” seen to the left, breaking up in stormy seas, representing the attempt to do without banks, despite the lack of previous evidence that it works. Van Buren’s inauguration statement, “I follow in the footsteps of my illustrious predecessor” stuck with him — but were combined with a picture of a jackass to show just what his opponents thought of him. That donkey, originally used as a visual ersatz Andrew Jackson, eventually became the way the public saw the Democrat party, and was revised to be a donkey for today’s Democrat logo. These Hard Times Tokens were some of the first lasting representations of the Democrats as a donkey.

These tokens weren’t exactly currency, although some businesses accepted them in lieu of actual monies, seeing that due to the bank’s actions and Jackson’s opposition to federal currency these Hard Times tokens had just about as much monetary value as the so-called ‘real thing’. Mostly, they were passed around like political buttons today, demonstrating political affiliation and making a statement against the government at the time.”

“I take the responsibility,” says Andrew Jackson, standing in an empty treasure chest. Martin Van Buren’s ship of state has tattered sails on the obverse of a coin; the reverse shows Henry Clay’s sails billowing. “I follow in the steps of my illustrious predecessor,” says the jackass on the obverse while the reverse shows a treasure chest being borne off by a turtle. “Good for shinplasters” refers to worthless paper money used as stuffing in boots. Many, to avoid charges of counterfeiting, bear the slogan “Millions for defense NOT ONE CENT for tribute.” In 1834, an economic downturn on the English stock market brought “hard times” to both Canada and the United States. However, the event that defines the start of this era in the USA was a clash between the Bank of the United States and President Andrew Jackson in 1832.

The BUS was a semi-private institution, the invention of Alexander Hamilton, and precursor to the Federal Reserve. It was slated for renewal in 1836, but Jackson didn’t wait. He withdrew US Treasury money from the BUS and deposited it in local banks. Interestingly, the Treasury had an embarrassment of riches, about $17 million in surplus gold and silver. Also, the US government was without debt. However, when the BUS closed, credit collapsed. Political activists and merchants created these 1-cent tokens to take up the slack. They were an East Coast phenomenon, since metals, dies, etc., required industry. (Twenty five years later, Civil War tokens were issued from Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin in the West.) The fact that most types of Hard Times Token can be found today in grades from Fine down to Good indicates that they actually circulated in trade.

The standard reference manual for this series is Hard Times Tokens 1832-1834 by Russell Rulau. His work is based on a book from the 1899 by Lyman H. Low. Rulau includes the Low numbers in his catalog. He estimates retail price. He has added many new items over the years with each new addition. The book also approximates the rarity, R1 (common) to R8 (perhaps unique). Some of these coins are objectively rare and highly valued outside the world of numismatics. “Am I not a Woman” is the motto on an Abolitionist token. “Am I not a Man” is its companion piece. Professional Afro-Americans and full- time liberals have bid these up to about $80 in better grade and perhaps over $10,000 in uncirculated. These two are difficult to find in low grade because they have been popular with collectors for over 150 years.

You can find common Hard Times Tokens in almost any dealer’s inventory. You will find them priced all over the range depending on the dealer’s willingness to own them. You will have to use basic numismatic principles to grade them. Although they rate a general entry in The Red Book, not all services will slab them. Commons in low grade are no more than a $5 item, or about $15 below uncirculated. America eventually recovered from the Panic of 1837. The Federal Debt rose. Finances moved from Chestnut Street in Philadelphia to Wall Street in New York. Hard Times Tokens retired to dressers and chests as government cents (soon smaller) circulated again. If you really love American History and really treasure the values that define our nation, you will find a wealth of pride in these artifacts.

Matthew Hincman coins.
“Pomme de Terre, Pomme en l’Air.” Coins by Matthew Hincman

MAKE YR OWN
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/10/hard_times_coins.html
Coins For Hard Times: Artist Makes His Own Money
by David Kestenbaum / October 05, 2009

I ran into artist Matthew Hincman last week, who has decided that things have gotten bad enough that it’s time to create your own money. Hincman designed the coin above and had 1,200 minted in copper, which he plans to leave on the ground at random locations for people to pick up and puzzle over. He says he modeled the coins after the Hard Times Tokens that circulated in the 1800′s, many of them satirical. Hincman has no plans to control the money supply at large. In fact, he’s trying to stay out of trouble. For one recent project, he installed an unusual version of the standard park bench — it was impounded by the authorities, though they liked it so much, it’s now back in place. Hincman figures there’s no law against leaving coins around. He says sometimes drops to one knee and pretends to be tying his shoe, then casually deposits one on the sidewalk.

PROPOSED BARTER TOKEN (ONGOING)
https://internationaldrinkticket.wordpress.com/
DESIGN CONTEST WINNER (ANONYMOUS) : 1st EDITION 2009

IDTfront
IDTback
Glow-in-the-Dark to prevent ‘counterfeiting’

Open Call for Entries: “The ‘producers’ of the International Drink Ticket herein announce a design contest for proposals to replace the current ‘Spanglish’ face of the Ticket, not pictured. The winning designer will get a small share (percentage) of any future known-universe profit. The winning design will be used to create the mold that is used to emboss one side of the IDT (the ‘Chinglish’ side will remain the same). The ‘Spanglish’ side may include a picture, as on a coin, such as Obama or a bird etc, but at minimum must include (English or Spanish) impressions that read “Int’l Drink Ticket” + “Brooklyn Mint” + the current year: “2009″.”

“The International Drink Ticket, printed in editions, is a currency alternative sincerely offered to replace the collapsed dollar (should the US dollar irrevocably fail). All over the world, even if one abstains, everyone knows someone who drinks: one International Drink Ticket is worth one drink, that is to say, one 4-count pour (using a pour spigot) of bottom shelf liquor (non-well), or a bottled beer. Everything else is negotiable. The IDT also easily gets used as barter coin. Common bartender uses are 2 cans of beer for one IDT, or sometimes two 2-count shots. One IDT currently is worth around USD$5 in NYC but this value fluctuates regionally. Design entries should be big enough to 3-D print, and fully detailed.” [Please post proposal editions below as comments.]

design by Pamela G. Parker

ILLEGAL INTERNET CENSUS

Posted on 2013/03/22 by secret santa

http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html
http://census2012.sourceforge.net/images.html

Research Botnet Uses Default Passwords to Conduct “Internet Census”
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/50-million-potentially-vulnerable-upnp-flaws-012913
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/31343/carna-botnet-an-interesting-amoral-and-illegal-internet-census/
Carna botnet – an interesting, amoral and illegal internet census / 20 March 2013

It started from a joke – we should try root:root to log on to random IP addresses. But it evolved from that into a botnet of port scanners able to port scan the entire IPv4 internet in very short order: a complete IPv4 internet census. The hacker/researcher concerned says he had no malicious intent, just a positive purpose. In reality, his motivation was pure old-school hacker: “I saw the chance to really work on an Internet scale, command hundred thousands of devices with a click of my mouse, portscan and map the whole Internet in a way nobody had done before, basically have fun with computers and the internet in a way very few people ever will. I decided it would be worth my time.” In other words, his ultimate drive was his own curiosity and because he could. The binaries he developed and deployed – it’s difficult to call them malware since they had no mal-intent; but it’s difficult not to call them malware since they were installed without invitation – were designed to do no harm, to run at the lowest possible priority, and included a watchdog to self-destruct if anything went wrong. He also included a readme file with “a contact email address to provide feedback for security researchers, ISPs and law enforcement who may notice the project.”

The results from the project are worrying but perhaps not surprising to other security researchers: “insecure devices are located basically everywhere on the Internet.” He does note, however, that his unofficial census shows that people are cavalier in what they attach to the internet. “If you believe that ‘nobody would connect that to the internet, really nobody’, there are at least 1000 people who did. Whenever you think ‘that shouldn’t be on the Internet but will probably be found a few times’ it’s there a few hundred thousand times. Like half a million printers, or a Million Webcams, or devices that have root as a root password.” He concludes that “while everybody is talking about high class exploits and cyberwar, four simple stupid default telnet passwords can give you access to hundreds of thousands of consumer as well as tens of thousands of industrial devices all over the world.” Whether the results he has made available to other researchers is of any real value, however, is a different matter. “The actual research itself is noteworthy in that it is the most comprehensive Internet-wide scan,” comments Mark Schloesser, a security researcher at Rapid7. “I’m still reviewing the findings, but so far nothing ‘mind-blowing’ has leapt out at me.” Nevertheless, he adds, “Generally this kind of research raises awareness of the real security and configuration issues affecting people, and hopefully helps them identify areas for action.”

http://www.zdnet.com/illegal-botnet-census-finds-1-2m-devices-with-default-passwords-7000012871/
Illegal botnet census finds 1.2m devices with default passwords
by Michael Lee / March 20, 2013

A common “script kiddie” technique to find vulnerable online computer systems is to attempt to scan a range of IP addresses for responsive known services, such as Telnet or SSH, and then attempt to log in using the default username and password. A crude physical analogy would be a burglar who walks from house to house in a neighbourhood, checking to see whether anyone has forgotten to put a lock on their door. With an opportunistic attack, given enough “neighbourhoods” and enough time, one could potentially gain an insight into how poorly protected people are. However, with the burglar being a single person, doing so would take them a prohibitively long time — unless, theoretically, they were able to recruit vulnerable households and send them to different neighbourhoods to do the same. That was the idea behind the Internet Census 2012 and the Carna botnet, an illegal project that, in addition to answering the big question of how many IPv4 addresses are in use, highlighted just how many people left their metaphorical front doors unlocked by using default passwords and user logins. In an author-less paper published on Bit Bucket, the Carna botnet outsourced the task of port scanning millions of IP addresses to vulnerable machines, beginning with a scan of about 100,000 IP addresses. ”With 100,000 devices scanning at 10 probes per second, we would have a distributed port scanner to port scan the entire IPv4 internet within 1 hour,” the paper said.

The botnet itself did not spread using any sophisticated techniques, instead trying the username/password combinations of admin/admin, root/root, and both usernames with blank passwords. Between March and December 2012, the Carna botnet consisted of 420,000 clients. Despite having control of such a large network, the botnet remained relatively benign, as its intent was to collect data for research. The paper states that the author had “no interest to interfere with default device operation” and made no permanent changes to machines it infected. Removal of any uploaded files was a simple matter of rebooting the device, and a number of precautions were made to ensure that they would not interfere with normal device usage. ”Our binaries were running with the lowest possible priority, and included a watchdog that would stop the executable in case anything went wrong. Our scanner was limited to 128 simultaneous connections, and had a connection timeout of 12 seconds,” the paper said. ”We also uploaded a readme file containing a short explanation of the project, as well as a contact email address to provide feedback for security researchers, ISPs, and law enforcement who may notice the project.”

While the census found that the majority of vulnerable devices were consumer routers, the paper notes that a few vulnerable devices included industrial control systems and border gateway protocol routers responsible for assisting in finding country-wide routes for the wider internet. In simplistic terms, the latter routers help ISPs to find optimal routes through which to direct, at times, country-wide traffic, making it possible to cut entire nations off from the rest of the world. This protocol has been subject to attack in the past, such as when Syria was knocked off the internet last year, or when 15 percent of the world’s traffic was routed through China in 2010.

Hilbert map of the 420 Million IP addresses that responded to ICMP ping requests at least two times between June and October 2012. The IP space is mapped to a 2-dimensional Hilbert Curveas inspired by xkcd. For a zoomable, clickable version of this image as well as other data projected in a Hilbert curve take a look the Hilbert Browser.

Although Carna spread to 420,000 devices, it does not represent the total number of vulnerable ones; technical limitations, such as insufficient space for Carna’s binaries, meant that it could not run on certain devices. From the unique hardware addresses (MAC addresses) the botnet collected from vulnerable devices, the paper suggests that there were about 1.2 million unprotected devices in its census, and many more devices that were simply unable to report their hardware address. ”A lot of devices and services we have seen during our research should never be connected to the public internet at all. As a rule of thumb, if you believe that ‘nobody would connect that to the internet, really nobody’, there are at least 1,000 people who did. Whenever you think, ‘that shouldn’t be on the internet, but will probably be found a few times’, it’s there a few hundred thousand times. Like half a million printers, or a million webcams, or devices that have root as a root password.” As insecure as these systems were, and the significant consequences that their exploitation may have brought, the paper chose to ignore all traffic going through them that was not relevant to its study in order to respect users’ privacy.

A twist in the study came in the form of another botnet that Carna discovered during its first initial scan of a few thousand devices. It discovered another bot called Aidra that the paper’s author said was “clearly made for malicious actions”. After examining what targets Aidra was looking at, Carna’s author decided to close the telnet service that it was using to spread on machines that it infected. In this manner, if Carna infected a machine it knew was being targeted by Aidra, it would gather its research data, then “auto-immunise” itself against the impending Aidra attack, therefore protecting the victim from being abused. ”We figured that the collateral damage as a result of this action would be far less than Aidra exploiting these devices.” However, Carna’s policy of ensuring that no changes were ever made permanent meant that restarting the device would remove Carna as well as any protection it offered against Aidra.

The big question of the census, however, was how many 3.6 billion or so non-reserved IPv4 addresses are actually in use? “That depends on how you count. 420 million pingable IPs plus 36 million more that had one or more ports open, making 450 million that were definitely in use and reachable from the rest of the internet. 141 million IPs were firewalled, so they could count as ‘in use’. Together, this would be 591 million used IPs. 729 million more IPs just had reverse DNS records. If you added those, it would make for a total of 1.3 billion used IP addresses. The other 2.3 billion addresses showed no sign of usage.” As for the rest of the data, the author has made it available for anyone who’s willing to download the 568GB compressed package. Uncompressed, the total data represents 9TB of raw logfiles, covering results from ping, reverse DNS, port scan, traceroute, and TCP IP fingerprint tests. “We hope other researchers will find the data we have collected useful, and that this publication will help raise some awareness that while everybody is talking about high-class exploits and cyberwar, four simple stupid default telnet passwords can give you access to hundreds of thousands of consumer as well as tens of thousands of industrial devices all over the world.”

REMEMBER WIRES?

Posted on 2013/02/07 by secret santa

CROWD-FUNDING ERIC DOLLARD (as in BUILD HIM a LAB)
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/270537/
for $120 Donation = Aether Mage Training Kit (41 of 50 claimed)

“A collection of 5 books Eric has deemed essential to the understanding of working with the etheric formative forces, the type of electricity that Tesla discovered being one of these lost forces. These books are volumes of lost technology. One is over 1500 pages long and combined these books are almost 400 years old. Eric told me ‘Don’t bother talking to me about this stuff until you have read these’”

“Here are some amazing experiments proving Tesla’s work we did at Borderland labs in the late 1980′s.
* The One-Wire Electrical Transmission System
* The Wireless Power Transmission System
* Transmission of Direct Current through Space
* A novel form of electric light powered by a single wire which attracts material objects but repels a human hand!
Also presented is a longitudinal ground broadcast from our lab to a nearby beach, using the Pacific Ocean as an antenna. These experiments can be reproduced by any competent researcher, there are no secrets here!”

http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/resources/

As a fifteen year old he got his first job with Americas biggest Radio corporation RCA, as a 16 year old he graduated high-school as a full fledged engineer and began working for Bell Labs and then went on to conquer every technical challenge the US Navy threw at him. Eric Dollard is without a doubt the Greatest Hacker Alive, much as Tesla was the greatest Hacker who ever lived. Eric Dollard has dedicated his life to discovering scientific truth to better humanity. He succeeded beyond all expectations and even surpassed Nikola Tesla. His reward has been tyranny and poverty. The work of Eric Dollard was the very pinnacle of any available material. As I got closer to his work I began to wonder what he was up to. I was shocked and horrified to learn that he was now homeless. His last lab having been destroyed and all his work stolen. There are active agents of suppression working against people like Eric Dollard and Tesla before him. These agents are shadowy and have great power. They can shatter the best laid plans of the individual. My hope is that we the people working together can triumph over them. Those that don’t believe that such powers exist should look for another worthy campaign to aid. Those looking at this as an investment, look elsewhere as this is not a mere charity campaign but a bold declaration of defiance to the powers that be.

All the funds will go to Eric Dollard. If we do not meet the goal all the funds also go to Eric Dollard. The goal is just my humble estimation of how much the legal proceedings will be for a few months and hopefully to get Eric off the street. The more we get the closer we can get Eric back his lab or setup a new lab. One of the most respected venture capitlists in this field said that “Eric has done more on foodstamps than all my other investments” This is what caught my eye and it is very true. Eric can make do with very little but I estimate it will take around $200,000 to set him up with a functioning bare bones lab again.

SUPPRESSED TECHNOLOGIES
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/the-work-of-eric-dollard-by-tom-brown/
The Work Of Eric Dollard
by Tom Brown / 09-09-1988

Eric Dollard is a scientist of the type found in America around the turn of the century. He is an electrical engineer of the old school relying on experience with equipment rather than acceptance of mathematical considerations. He has studied the works of Nikola Tesla and Charles Proteus Steinmetz extensively and has applied their principles to his research. He has advanced the mathematical works of the early electrical pioneers to the stage of pragmatic industrial engineering. This was only possible by bypassing all modern relativistic theories and concepts of electrons flowing through wires, and instead maintaining the ether theories from which modern electrical equipment originally emerged. Eric’s work is a direct continuation of the works of Tesla, Steinmetz, Oliver Heaviside, Philo Farnsworth II, and other energy pioneers whose work can be reproduced and used.

Eric has written over 30 notebooks of material covering his years of research. Five of these notebooks have been published by Borderland Sciences Research Foundation: Condensed Intro To Tesla Transformers; Dielectric & Magnetic Discharges In Electrical Windings; Symbolic Representation of Alternating Electric Waves; Symbolic Representation of the Generalized Electric Wave (In Time); and The Theory of Wireless Power. These books are all practical and engineering oriented. The Alternating Electric Waves paper, presenting Eric’s Four Quadrant Theory of Electricity, was written after his discovery of how to generate excess magnetizing power in an industrial situation (using synchronous motors in a huge shipyard) and make the KVAR (Kilo Volt Amperes Reactive) meter turn backwards. Eric discovered that these industrial meters are pinned so that they will not turn backwards, but they can be stopped, creating readily realizable savings for the industrialist.

Further development of Eric’s ideas has been presented at the U.S.P.A. Conference in 1987 in his talk, Representations of Electric Induction, which also included a demonstration of the Tesla One-Wire Transmission of Electricity. The One-Wire Electric Transmission has direct commercial applications in the realm of real full spectrum incandescent lighting, which could be used in operating rooms, highway lighting, schoolrooms, offices, etc. In Eric’s talk at the 1988 International Tesla Symposium he presented the engineering mathematics to continue work on Tesla’s oscillating coils while shedding the misconceptions attached by modern physics which have brought real research into Tesla to a dead halt. The engineering mathematics developed by Eric will allow researchers to manufacture coils with practical uses rather than just making sparks.

The broadcasting of electricity, distortion free worldwide radio transmission, and single element full-spectrum incandescent lamps are just a few of the spinoffs taken from the realm of abstraction and brought to the reality of the lab bench by Eric’s work, but perhaps the most commercial of all is what Eric terms, “The Ultimate Sound System”. Eric has developed the principle and the first prototypes of distortion free audio amplification. This discovery, if properly applied, has the potential to revolutionize the entire audio industry, as well as the reality of related spinoffs into the communications and power transmission industries. In Borderland’s videotape, Transverse & Longitudinal Electric Waves, Eric presents practical uses of Tesla’s theories for power transmission, and in the process opens up, through the use of clear, reproducible experiments, aspects of electricity which have only been partially theorized in the past. Extensions of his industrial power work are presented with practical applications for increased power efficiency in industrial situations.

In brief, Eric Dollard has single-handedly carried the works of the early electrical pioneers to a stage where they can be applied to everyday uses. There is no false promise of “free energy” sometime in the future, just a better technology we can use NOW!

Eric made an excellent video about the truth of the Tesla Marconi radio station and why it was shut down. When this video was made Eric still did not know the full extent of the suppression. The books of Gerry Vassilatos, Secrets of Cold war Technology and the Vril Compendium, showed him just how far RCA and the shadowy organizations funded by the central banking cartel went to suppress Tesla’s longitudinal wave technology.

TESLA ROUND 2
http://ericdollard.com/
http://ericdollard.com/sample-page/
http://www.jinnwe.com/quest.php?id=1002
The Case of Eric Dollard

Nikola Tesla single handedly gave us the technology that has created our entire power grid and communications systems. As the pinnacle of the evolution of the Victorian scientists Tesla aspired to create a system that would light up the entire world without wires. In the end a combination of his own wreck less decisions and the agenda of the moneyed elite brought upon his downfall and banishment. Undaunted by this, Eric’s set out to recreate all of Tesla’s technology and to design a system of self powering, faster than light and lossless communication. Eric was successful in rediscovering Tesla’s core work, yet he is now living out in the desert. His laboratory and all of his possessions taken were from him. Eric’s story is the story of all those who fight for truth in defiance of power. How his story ends is up to us.

As a fifteen year old Eric was granted free access to RCA’s great Bolinas Radio Facility. RCA, America’s biggest Radio station at the time was happy to grand the young prodigy complete access to all of their facilities for his research into high frequency alternating current. Eric wasn’t on the payroll for legal reasons but those in the know were aware of how how great a competitive advantage Eric Dollard could give them. Bell Telephone quickly snatched him up right out of High School and also gave him free reign to persue his experiments, while not officially on the payroll. Eric was still only sixteen. Eric left high school with three certifications as a full fledged engineer at the age of sixteen. Bell Labs called him their “Golden boy” and “Angel of Electricity”.

To pursue true science is to pursue truth and all truth seekers are to tested. Eric learned this a hard way at an early age when his parents wrecked his garage laboratory and kicked him out of the house. This was to be the first time his laboratory and work would be deliberately destroyed. In desperation he enlisted in the US Navy. They gladly accepted the young recruit and after aptitude testing referred to him as “God’s gift to the Navy”. He solved their “impossible problems” with ease and later returned to RCA to save their network from the rapidly advancing threat of satellite communications.

Eric was happy to be back at the massive Bolinas station as he was beginning to see just how special it was among radio facilities. The great Bolinas Radio station, also called KPH was one of the oldest in the world and it held a secret that had been covered up for decades. He began to see that much was being hidden about how radio really worked. With his free time he began peering into the forbidden history of radio. Then one day he read a copy of John O’Neill’s book Prodigal Genius. The suppressed history of Nikola Tesla was laid before him. Eric began to see how the radio system as it was now was merely a shadow of what it was intended to be and once was.

Eric began reading all of Tesla’s patents and lectures. What he discovered was that after reinventing alternating current in the 1890′s Tesla then discovered an entirely new kind of electricity that was not electro magnetic in origin, hence completely different from the system we use today. This was confirmed by reading the court transcripts from the patent trial between Tesla and Marconi, where Tesla stated many times that his technology was not electro magnetic, a statement that at the time fell on deaf ears. Eric, however, heard him loud and clear. If Tesla’s discovery did not use electro magnetic waves then what kind of waves where they and how was it different? Eric did not turn to the false path of theorizing with nebulous mathematics as our modern day physics would but to experimentation, as Tesla himself always did. From his lab in California and working the salvage business Eric managed to recreate all of Tesla’s key experiments. What he discovered would come as a surprise to even the most learned Tesla fan.

Most scientists associate Tesla’s work with Frankenstein movies the same way children do. Even the most avid Tesla fans build Telsa Coils for Halloween entertainment and completely miss the point of his invention.
* Tesla’s system of wireless transmission of power and communications was not through the sky, but through the earth, as in the actual ground. While it did naturally reach out into the atmosphere, the earth itself was the main conductor.
* Tesla discovered a completely new kind of electrical energy, one that was faster than the speed of light and did not lose strength as it was transmitted. hence it was NOT electro magnetic. It has come to be called scalar waves by some but the proper term is longitudinal waves. Eric calls this energy in electrical form “dielectricity”
* This new energy could send power through the earth and the earth amplified this energy as it traveled, meaning that one transmitting station could send one million volts through the ground and 5 receiving stations whether around the neighborhood or around the world could each receive one million volts, for a total of five million volts of power!
* This energy could be used to send communications as well as power, and this was the case from 1900 to the 1919′s until RCA refitted the landmark Bolinas plant and suppressed the Tesla longitudinal technology.

Tesla’s secret project was about far more than simply transmitting electricity without wires. It was about all communications at faster than light speeds and giving energy away to all humanity for nothing. Tesla figured it all out in theory and tested it at Colorado Springs but did not complete his system at Wardenclyffee. Eric Dollard has figured out how to implement the core of these ideas into a viable system. The first major radio installation in the USA was at Bolinas California. The same station where Eric got his start as a fifteen year old engineer working for RCA. Bolinas was first built by Italian inventor Marconi in California in 1913. Marconi used 17 of Tesla’s patents to build this system and it worked. This station used massive plates in the ground, one buried in the ocean near the fault lines, to transmit radio waves that ALSO carried power, not enough to power homes but certainly enough to power radios. This is why the old crystal radio sets of the 20′s and 30′s had bright clear sound with NO BATTERY or WIRE to the WALL OUTLET! You can still make radio wave powered radios using bottles and wires that work with no batteries our wall outlet. The science is very real.

This old crystal radio set from the 20s used to work LOUD and clear using the radio signals sent in that era, no wall outlet. Those radio stations have long since been taken down…

KPH
The Bolinas Tesla/Marconi radio station is also known as KPH by those old timers who still know of it’s significance. The secret this facility holds is the key to unlocking faster than light radio, wireless power transmission and free energy synthesis. Eric has dedicated 2/3rds of his life trying to save this secret and resurrect it for the benefit of mankind. Thus we can now see that the first radio stations in the USA were leading back to Tesla’s free power transmission system that sent radio waves using Tesla’s method. Marconi did not go all the way and build it as Tesla envisioned which was to broadcast power to a network of such stations worldwide. The Tesla Marconi station sent out radio waves using Tesla’s longitudinal wave technology. These waves provided enough power to amplify the signals it sent without any external electricity, even worse the existence of such technology left the door wide open for others to naturally pursue the transmission of energy via radio. This was far too threatening for the energy industry and they had Marconi’s station shut down and replaced with an inferior system of electro magnetic waves, which is what we use today.

The Alexanderson Antennas MTA’s hold the secret to electrostatic non wave length radio technology. Faster than light, lossless and long suppressed.

Ernest Alexanderson was the protege of Charles Steinmetz. His generators based on Tesla tech are extremely advanced even today.

This plant was further augmented with the technology of another brilliant radio engineer by the name of Alexandersson. It became such a prized jewel into crown of the military industrial complex that it’s secret had to be hidden away. The true value of the Bolinas Radio station can now be seen.Not only did RCA bury it;s significance but other shadowy NGO’s such as Commonwael of Bolinas, California made it there prime directive to literally bury the facility under a pile of dirt and garbage. Commonwael poses as a harmless NGO but this belies it’s true purpose as a front of the central banking cartel to suppress forbidden technologies.

the TESLA MYSTIQUE
Tesla is now wrapped within the cloak of a deep mystique as a flawless genius who invented AC current, radio, electricity and pretty much everything else. Tesla was indeed a magnificent genius but he was far from perfect. People blame J.P. Morgan for crushing his dream at Wardenclyffe but they fail to do their research, read the book Empire of Lights, and see that Tesla had received monies from Morgan to develop telegraphic radio and from Astor for the florescent light bulk yet Tesla in his own idealistic way spent the money instead to further his own theoretical research, which lead not to the promised deliverables but to a lack of confidence amongst him and his investors instead. The mystique buries Tesla under a mountain of sugar and keeps his admirers from seeing the true and revolutionary nature of his work.

Eric Dollard claims that the vast majority of Tesla societies are dis-information fronts funded and controlled by the very same interests that suppressed Tesla’s work. Eric gave several long and deep presentations on the truth of Tesla’s work at the San Francisco Tesla Society. To this day these video presentations and even a book that Eric had written are being withheld from the Public by the San Francisco Tesla Society, a now revealed to be a front for the Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Those who wish to know the truth about radio and Tesla’s real work should connect Eric Dollard with an attorney willing to sue the San Francisco Tesla Society in court to retrieve the videos and book.

POLITICS of AETHER
After Eric confirmed and double checked all these findings he was left to accept a very painful political truth. All of Tesla’s work with this new type of electricity and wave form had been actively suppressed. Despite this new type of energy wave being far more cost efficient and effective it was banned from all commercial use and banished from textbooks as well. The scientific community has disavowed any knowledge of it, why? This original form of transmission, called dielectric wave forms, if allowed to proliferate through the industry would have naturally lead to the transmission and synthesis of energy at no cost. The very intellectual admission of the existence of this type of energy was the admission that there was energy all around us. Victorian scientists up until the twentieth century called this energy field that permeated the entire universe, the aether. Tesla believed that his system of longitudinal electricity worked because of the aether. The aether was a dangerous concept to the energy barons such as Rockefeller, Morgan and the central bankers that funded them such as the Rothschilds. It was not enough to destroy Nikola Tesla, and to tear down any trace of such technology such as the Marconi radio plants built with Tesla and Alexandersson dielectric technology. The powers that be had to completely destroy the very idea of the aether and ensure that free energy would never again threaten their monopoly.

Physics was hijacked and turned into a religious cult of personality. Nebulous theories and quirky characters were constructed to misinform all generations afterwards. Eric Dollard has not been shy in his writings and named The Theory of Relativity and Einstein as the main constructs to this end. Many other scientists support him and there is a growing movement to liberate physics from pseudo psychics and the high priests of nebulous pseudoscientific banker funded dogma. Time magazine, The NY Times and many other publications have recently published articles citing the evidence that Einstein was wrong. Einstein was proven wrong the moment he introduced his theory and has been proven wrong countless times since, yet we still hail him as a saint of science. The suppression is inter generational and Einstein was only the first pillar of the deception. Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and most recently Michio Kaku have taken up the flag of obfuscated mysticism in a desperate effort to suppress aether theory. All this at the bidding of the same central banking giants which sprang from the Rothchilds and Rockefellers. Knowing this and knowing the fate of Tesla and all those that tried after him to recreate his work was not enough to stop Mr. Dollard. Eric went about his work and peered even more deeply into the past.

BACH & ORGANIC ELECTRICITY
Science and logic alone were not enough to comprehend the aether and how energy flowed through it and from within it. Eric looked to the legendary mathematician Charles P Steinmetz and to Oliver Heaviside for answers. Their censored writings revealed that they too had taken this battle for truth upon themselves and were met with the same resistance. In their mathematics and Tesla’s experiments lie the key to unlocking the aether but there was one element missing to decipher the riddle. Johannes Sebastian Bach and his music held the answer. The multi-dimensional organ music of Bach began to reveal an organic matrix to Eric. He began to see the work of Bach as a culmination of the same thread of natural science exposed by Pythagoras of Samos. The aether and the energy it produced was not some mechanical construct and thus pure mechanics and mathematics alone could not represent it. The aether was an organic energy matrix and it was as responsible for the static electricity in the air as it was for the plants that grow from the ground and the animals that walk the earth. Eric had begun to step out of the world of pure science and into the metaphysical.

Eric noticed in his experiments that when he ran this special electricity of Tesla’s through wood or other organic matter that it would burn tree like etchings into it. They looked like the branches of trees and their dimensions reflected the golden ratio. Going a step further Eric noticed that when this energy was transmitted within vacuum bulbs that galactic formations and cosmic arrangements would form within the bulbs. It was as if he was looking through the Hubble telescope through a light bulb on his lab bench. Further experiments revealed the fractal organic nature of all matter. The aether theory became all the stronger the more one compared the cosmic and organic. Eric would progress even further into the study of the ether. The more he experimented with channeling dielectricty through various enclosed spaces the more he uncovered the truth behind the “Theory of Creation” The Big Bang was a big Hoax and Einstein, Darwin and the whole lot of them were crushed by his experiments. Eric Dollard now became a very dangerous man to the establishment as his scientifically proven and tested research could destroy the web of lies which they had carefully built for over the past three hundred years. The aether was ever present and could project it’s formative powers to any proportions. The deeper he went into true science the more that he saw that science and spirituality were one and the same. He began to see quantum physics as a misinformation campaign for true aetheric science. The mystics of the past knew more of true science than the quantum physics of today.

The shape on the left has been burned into wood by a Tesla coil. The right is the special kind of electricity Tesla discovered in its pure raw form. Notice the organic shape.

GROUND RADIO
A retired aerospace technician named Walter J De-Roche, who would die under suspicious circumstances, left Eric a facility which was once used for Ionospheric and Telluric research. This was the last research laboratory Eric had and was located at Landers California. A wealthy investor in the alternative science scene once commented that “Eric Dollard has done more with food stamps than you all have with millions” This kind of praise was not an understatement as Eric single handedly transformed the long abandoned Landers facility into a radio base to serve the country of San Bernadino and the 29 Palms Marine Corp Base as a civil defense station and earthquake warning system. On a shoestring budget Eric had taken Telluric ,relating to the study of electricity within the earth, research to new heights and his facility could even detect underground nuclear blasts from North Korea. The Landers plant could be scaled to serve the entire country with free, loss less, faster than light radio, save lives via earth quake detection and potentially far more. Upon the completion of this modern day wonder, the powers that be swooped, shut it down and destroyed it. A certain Roy McGee and Olin Bates worked together to cheat Eric out of the property and even confiscated all his notes, gear and work.

After losing this, his last laboratory and being so close to implementing a system that would revolutionize communication for the community, Navy and possibly the entire country Eric has realized that his work shall always be marked for destruction. Eric wants those that truly desire the advancement of science to step forward and support a campaign to sue the guilty parties in court and get back his life’s work. The potential for the advancement of humanity is tremendous.

Eric inherited a radio station in Landers, CA from a friend. He spent years building it up and turned it into the an advanced ground radio station that could detect earthquakes before they occur, transmit faster than light radio with no losses and potentially far more. The “far more” part sent the powers that be scrambling to destroy it and they did.

Eric, now in his sixties has had to endure more hardship than most humans and even rebel scientists can imagine. He has been assaulted many times and suffered serious injuries. He has had his home and lab’s raided repeatedly and been driven to homelessness. All of his friends have betrayed him, all of his possessions taken from him and worse still all of his notes and work burned. In this last scenario they even took his pet dog away from him. While Eric has had to face off with the men in Black many times, it was the women in white that the powers that be choose to send after him this time. An NGO posing as a charitable foundation but in actuality being a front of the energy brokers was what did him in this time. They knew he was close to releasing something monumental and they swooped in and took everything but his life.

Eric has not given up. While he has rebuilt his lab many times and rallied to the finish line alone, this time it is different. Now in his sixties, black listed and without a penny to his name we cannot ask this man to try and bless the human race with the gift of free natural energy yet again, not without our help. There are three things you can do right now to help Eric P Dollard and his mission.
1. Believe in abundance, believe that energy for all humanity at no cost is as natural as a seed in the ground producing fruit. This is the hardest thing but it only takes a second.
2. Send this article to your friends and spread the word about The Mission of Eric P Dollard.
3. Write Eric a letter! Not an email, a real paper letter, in the mail! Eric is old fashioned. analog only and homeless but he does have a PO Box. It would help his spirits immensely to know he had believers. Eric has not given up, he is still trying to pass on his knowledge so that others might recreate his work and Tesla’s work.

Eric Dollard
General Delivery
Lone Pine, CA 93545

LOST SCIENCE
http://www.energeticforum.com/renewable-energy/1631-peter-whatever-happened-eric-p-dollard.html
http://research.borderlands.com/wiki/Category:Nikola_Tesla
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/personal-notes-on-energy-defined/
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/energy-defined/
http://www.gestaltreality.com/energy-synthesis/eric-dollard/the-theory-of-anti-relativity-by-e-p-dollard/

“The monophasic dielectric forces developed thru the work of Nikola Tesla nullify relativistic relations. Tesla, thru a unique space-time hysteresis electrically “grounded” to a zero order Galilean coordinate system. It is also the cathode ray projector tubes utilized by Tesla in his atomic studies also nullify relativistic relations. Tesla’s remarks about “radiant matter” indicate the existence of cosmic rays of immense penetrating power moving fifty (50) times faster than the velocity of light (Le Sage particles).”

RADIO-POWERED
http://blog.makezine.com/2012/07/13/explore-the-airwaves-with-weekend-projects/
Explore the Airwaves with Weekend Projects
by Nick Normal / 2012/07/13

In just a few hours you can make a completely batteryless AM radio receiver with a range of around 25 miles. Built with a small assortment of components, some scrap wood, and a beverage bottle tightly wound with magnet wire, we call this project Bottle Radio. Similar to other “crystal radio” projects, the crystal in this build is contained inside a germanium diode, which rectifies incoming audio signal. The radio operates on the power from radio waves, and receives signal from a long wire antenna. When this signal enters the diode, it contains positive and negative peaks, however the diode, only allowing signal to pass in the forward direction, converts the alternating current of the signal into direct current. That current then vibrates a diaphragm inside a crystal earphone, allowing you to hear the radio without any visible power source!

If it sounds difficult, it’s not. In fact once you have your parts in hand, this project will only take a couple hours to assemble. Watch the video below to see how the entire circuit works, and we also provide some tips on the project page for extending the range of your receiver using a loop antenna and RF amplifier.

PREVIOUSLY
http://spectrevision.net/2009/05/14/designated-superfun-site/
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/204900
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum

DISASTER SOLAR

Posted on 2012/11/09 by secret santa

MOBILE SOLAR GENERATORS
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/11/14/mobile-solar-generators-one-mans-odyssey-to-bring-power-back-to-new-york/
One Man’s Odyssey to Bring Power Back to New York
by Peter Kelly-Detwiler / 11/14/2012

Shortly after Superstorm Sandy smashed in to the East Coast, Chris Mejia of Consolidated Solar decided to do something about it. Chris’s company is a distributor for portable solar generators out of Harrisburg, PA.. He leases trailers with a solar unit/battery combination made by DC Solar Solutions in California. On a normal day, he leases the units for somewhere around $500 to folks who need power someplace where it’s hard to get. He does pretty well with construction sites, where it’s a lot cheaper to lease a solar generator than string lines to a site. Construction workers only need limited juice for charging power tools and perhaps a cellphone power, pretty much the same thing disaster survivors require immediately after impact.

So as soon as the storm hit, Chris was on the phone trying to help. He called the emergency management agencies including the state units and FEMA. They were too busy to call back. He tried City Hall and the mayors of small towns. For a while, it looked like he would be teaming up with a cell phone company, but they finally said no thanks. He recalled thinking to himself “You need power. I have power. Why is this so tough?” Finally he Googled “Sandy Relief” and identified the relief agencies working in the region. But they all wanted Chris to donate the unit outright, which he couldn’t do since he was just starting his business and leasing the units from DC Solar Solutions. Finally, he chanced on the organization Solar One, NY city’s “first green energy, arts, and education center.” They were developing a solar-based emergency response as well, The Solar Sandy Project. They turned him onto SolarCity, who volunteered to pick up the leasing costs for his units.

Since then, Chris said, he’s moved three 10 kW units to the area, driving the trailers to where they are needed. At the moment, all three are in the Rockaways, which the Long Island Power Authority still has not brought on line, with two more to be located there shortly. Chris notes they are extremely simple to set up. “You fold the panels out so they are pointed at the sun, press a few buttons on the inverter, and that’s it. It’s on.” With the battery back-up, they provide an independent source of power to 6 three-prong outlets, with up to 50 amps. “The moment we set up the first one, a guy ran over to it in order to recharge his flashlight. Word was spreading quickly as we drove off to set up the other unit.”

As the Sandy post-mortem analysis turns to talk of resiliency and hardening the electric grid, resources that do not depend on fuel at all deserve a place in the conversation. Solar/battery combinations are likely to play a critical part in a community’s effort to survive the immediate and perilous aftermath. These units may not provide all of the benefits of the more extensive and powerful micro-grid (micro-grids are isolated mini systems that can be disconnected from a dead power grid), but they are mobile, independent, quick to set up, can be daisy-chained to increase power output, and don’t require a huge infrastructural commitment. And they are relatively cheap. For communities that may not be able to commit resources to a full micro-grid, or may take years to set one up, this type of resource is worth considering. As Chris Collins, Executive Director of Solar One stated “Solar generators should be in the emergency preparedness plan of every community. After a storm, people need safe places to go.” In fact, he commented that after the flooding, his own building on the East River “lost everything. But we set up our solar panels the day after Sandy and we had lights and power.”

Micro-grids are an important solution: a combination of a generator and hardened distribution system can supply reliable and larger quantities of electricity to a small circuit of users including emergency services, shelters, gas stations and grocery stores. But once you build a micro-grid, you are committed to what you have built. Mobile solar generators – though not nearly as powerful – can be reconfigured according to need, and can be daisy chained together to provide sufficient power to do more than charge cell phones and batteries.

This concept of solar power in disaster relief is not new. In the aftermath of 1989’s Hurricane Hugo, a portable solar generator supplied as community center for six weeks after the storm. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, PV systems were brought in to provide power to shelters and streetlights. In the California Northridge earthquake in 1994, PV kept some communications links open. More recently California-based Mobile Solar freighted 6 units to Japan immediately after the Fukushima disaster, providing communications and battery charges to workers struggling to rebuild. And a project is underway today to create a solar-powered water purification system to supply the needs of 750-1500 people per day.

In the aftermath of Sandy, it is clear that we have much work to do to plan for prevention, resiliency, and recovery. Micro-grids will be a critical piece of this puzzle. But solar generators can play a key and reliable role in disaster recovery and getting communities back on their feet. They are doing so today in some of the hardest hit areas of the East Coast, and they merit serious consideration.

PORTABLE EMERGENCY SOLAR
http://www.cleanenergyauthority.com/solar-energy-news/greenpeace-brings-solar-power-to-sandy-victims-110612
by Amanda H. Miller / November 06, 2012

A week after sub tropical storm Sandy made landfall in New York, thousands are still without power in their Rockaway Beach neighborhood homes. Greenpeace has been doing what it can to help and rolled into the neighborhood Oct. 31 with its Rolling Sunlight solar truck. The truck’s 256 square feet of solar panels produce 50 kilowatt hours of electricity a day, enough to power a typical household, said Jesse Coleman, a Greenpeace researcher who is manning the truck. Parked at a storefront at the corner of Rockaway Beach Boulevard and 113^th Street, the solar truck is the only spot with electricity for several blocks. “It’s become a major hub,” Coleman said. “The entire area is without power and probably will be for a couple weeks.”

Many residents in the neighborhood have lost everything, Coleman said. Their homes are filled with mud and they have to clean them out with nothing more than light from the sun and flashlights. “It’s a major problem,” he said. “People’s whole lives were destroyed.” While the Rolling Sunlight truck can’t fix all of that, it does give some of the New York residents a place to charge their cell phones so they can call each other, communicate and ask their neighbors for help. It’s also created a warm, lighted gathering place for the community. “People who are now, literally homeless, are out there cooking food for the community and giving it out,” Coleman said.

Greenpeace has set up seven locations throughout the city to help residents, though the Rolling Sunshine truck is the only solar power the organization brought with it. Greenpeace is helping to coordinate donation efforts and process items in a nearby gymnasium. Coleman said they received some box generators that they’re giving out to people who need them. This is not the solar truck’s first appearance. It’s more than 10 years old, Coleman said. And it has brought portable power to people in Mexico, powered the Seattle Space Needle and electronics at events like Occupy New York and Occupy Washington, D.C. Coleman said he plans to stay until the weekend and will likely spend this week on helping residents transition.

FEMA’s HURRICANE SANDY RUMOR CONTROL SAYS NOTHING ABOUT SOLAR
http://www.fema.gov/hurricane-sandy-rumor-control

There is a lot of misinformation circulating on social networks regarding the response and recovery effort for Hurricane Sandy. Rumors spread fast: please tell a friend, share this page and help us provide accurate information about the types of assistance available. Check here often for an on-going list of rumors and their true or false status.

http://www.solarover.com/

Calling 1-800-621-FEMA
Due to the large volume of calls, individuals trying to register with FEMA may experience long wait times. We ask for your patience as FEMA is increasing its capacity at call centers to address long wait times. For individuals with internet access, you can register with FEMA for disaster assistance by visiting www.disasterassistance.gov orhttp://m.fema.gov on your mobile phone. The websites and 1-800-621-FEMA request identical information.

EXAMPLE RUMOR: Cash Cards / Food Stamps
There are message boards and traffic on social media sites related to FEMA and/or the American Red Cross distributing cash cards to individuals affected by Hurricane Sandy. This is FALSE.

MEANWHILE: OCCUPY SANDY GIFT REGISTRY
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/occupy-sandy-hacks-amazons-wedding-registry-in-a-good-way/264543/
A group takes advantage of Amazon’s gift registry to get donations to storm victims / Nov 5 2012

Occupy Sandy isn’t getting married. But it would like a gift all the same. The volunteer group – an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, focused on helping victims of the storm — is using an especially clever hack of an existing system: Amazon’s gift registry service. Those displaced by the storm, the group realized, need blankets. They need flashlights. They need hygiene products. They need a bunch of things that are orderable — with that famous one-click efficiency — through Amazon. Now, anyone who uses Amazon can buy them those things, and have them shipped to the area hardest hit by the storm. Victims need stuff; people want to give them stuff; Occupy Sandy, via Amazon, is bringing them together. The registry started, coordinator John Heggestuen told me, with a particularly frustrating phenomenon: a thwarted attempt at volunteering. Heggestuen and two of his friends — Alex Nordenson and Katherine Dolan — went to a shelter on Friday in an attempt to volunteer there. “They didn’t have anything for us to do,” Heggestuen said in an email, “so we went to the Occupy Sandy location at 520 Clinton Ave (Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew).” And “there was a tremendous effort there.”

As the friends were walking to a store to buy some food that they could donate, Heggestuen says, they talked about how they might improve the donation system. “My friend Alex said something to the effect of, ‘we need something like a wedding registry.’ I thought it was a great idea and my gears started turning. When we got to the store, I was so excited that I gave my friends my money for groceries and ran back to the church to start to set this up.” Heggestuen asked Sam Corbin, who was was helping to oversee the effort at the church, if the location could serve as a shipping address for out-state-donations. And “she said it was a great idea.” With that in place, the friends worked on setting up the registry over the weekend — an effort helped along by the fact that both Nordenson and Dolan work in social media. “Right now,” Heggestuen says, “we are setting up an inventory management team at the church to keep track of the donations when they arrive.”

As for the people who have decided to use the registry to assist Sandy’s victims? “We are still trying to get clear numbers,” Heggestuen says. “We know it’s a lot from emails we have received, but Amazon’s registry is not updating quickly enough to accurately reflect what has been bought. We need some help getting their attention and we are asking twitter users to tweet @amazon for free shipping and tech support for the Sandy Wedding Registry.” Despite the lag time, though, gifts are being bought. Thanks to the effort, Sandy victims will have blankets — and flashlights, and toothbrushes — that they didn’t before. “It is really inspiring how much support has poured out for Sandy victims,” Heggestuen says. “I have never seen a volunteer effort like Occupy Sandy, everyone is so motivated to help. I’m humbled.”

http://votesolar.org/2012/11/guest-post-deploying-solar-in-sandy%E2%80%99s-harrowing-aftermath/

Even two weeks later, the air quality in the hardest hit areas of New York City is still extremely poor. There is an enormous amount of dust, human waste, and previously buried pollution in the air. The stench of gasoline is also pervasive. Since the storm hit, you can smell gas all over parts of Rockaway and Staten Island, as people line up in cars or on foot waiting for to get what little gas is being rationed each day. It’s ironic that gas is so scarce yet, due to all the emergency gas generators and stoves, our lungs are filled with the stuff.

In the hardest hit places like Rockaway and Gerritsen Beach, people have two choices each day: (1) go get some food for the day, maybe find someone to fill a prescription, or inquire about FEMA assistance; or (2) do none of those things, and wait in a four-hour gas line so they can have some heat that night.

It is in this bleak context that the Solar Sandy Project was conceived. First, our company SolarCity partnered with Consolidated Solar to deploy five solar generating units (equipped with battery storage) as quickly as possible. To date these generators have served four areas in Rockaway, with one more scheduled this week. We partnered with NYC-based solar advocacy group Solar One to help spread the word, do community outreach, and host a match making website for areas of further need. These solar generators can provide power for warmth, cooking, electronics charging, and whatever else people need. And they do all this without burning gas that (a) might be better put to use in cars right now, and (b) would preferably not be burned anyway.

SOLAR GENERATORS
http://www.solar1.org/solar-sandy-project/

Solar One, SolarCity, Consolidated Solar and NYSERDA are partnering to connect communities rebuilding from Sandy to mobile solar generators so that they can get much-needed temporary electricity. So far, we have installed five 10kw solar generators deployed in the Rockaways. We will be installing units in other parts of the city in the coming days. These units are installed in community gathering places where folks are already getting warm clothes, a bite to eat, and some basic medical services.

With solar generators, we can provide clean, quiet power hubs that don’t need refueling. People can charge phones, power tools, and laptops; heat food; and run other critical equipment. Not an installer? Donate to the project!

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
From Installers/Equipment Providers

Plug and play mobile generators that can easily be setup for these communities.
Individuals with the right skill set (solar installers, electricians, etc) who can help with deployment, installation, and maintenance of the systems
If you have off-grid solar experience with battery storage, this can be particularly useful.
If you can assist in any way, fill out the Installer/Equipment Sign-Up below.

From Community Organizations:

We are trying to figure out the best places to deploy these generators. Ideally they would be in already existing community gathering spots that have cropped up since the storm.
If you would like to be considered, please fill out the Deployment Area Sign-Up below.

Installer/Equipment Sign-Up

Deployment Area Sign-Up

OTHER WAYS to HELP

Voltaic systems have personalized, mobile emergency solar charging kits. They are pledging that for every one that is purchased they will donate one.
Donate directly to Power Rockaways Resillience who are working in the field to set up solar charging and communications centers in the Rockaways.
We encourage the solar community to donate other needed items such as blankets, flashlights, AAA batteries, mops, masks, gloves, duct and scotch tape, hydrogen peroxide and personal hygiene and baby supplies. Occupy Sandy is doing a great job of organizing these kinds of donations, and is posting updates on which items are most needed.
If you’d like to donate to the Solar Sandy Project directly, please use our secure online donation system HERE.

CONTACT
Want to sign up to get more info, help out in another way, or donate? Email volunteer[at]solar1[dot]org using the subject line Solar Sandy.

PRESS INQUIRIES
Check out our Press Release and contact the person listed.

WHERE SOLAR HAS BEEN DEPLOYED SO FAR
Here’s a map of where the current solar installations can be found in Staten Island and the Rockaways(use the arrows to scroll left and right to see where the installations are):

KEY: The systems that we have deployed by the Solar Sandy Project are in Blue. Systems that have been deployed by friends and affiliates are in Purple.

View Solar Sandy Project in a larger map

ROGUE GEO-ENGINEERING EXPERIMENTS

Posted on 2012/10/19 by secret santa

Russ George Dumping Iron Ore into the Ocean

‘SALMON RESTORATION’
http://www.hsrc1.com/history/our-story/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/10/15/bc-iron-sulfate-dumping-haida-gwaii.html
“The $2-million project, initiated by the Haida Salmon Restoration Corp., is intended to raise nutrient levels offshore in hopes of reviving salmon populations, according to corporation president John Disney. Disney said earlier reports that iron sulphate was used in the dump were incorrect, and that a finely ground dirt-like substance with trace amounts of iron was actually used. ”The results were just spectacular, like we created life where there wasn’t life,” Disney said.”

Geoengineering with bloom : high concentrations of chlorophyll in the Eastern Gulf of Alaska
Yellow and brown colours show relatively high concentrations of chlorophyll in August 2012, after iron sulphate was dumped into the Pacific Ocean as part of a controversial geoengineering scheme. {Photograph: Giovanni/Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center/NASA}

WORLD’s LARGEST GEO-ENGINEERING EXPERIMENT? (NOT EVEN CLOSE)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/17/canada-geoengineering-pacific
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/15/pacific-iron-fertilisation-geoengineering
World’s biggest geoengineering experiment ‘violates’ UN rules
by Martin Lukacs / 15 October 2012

A controversial American businessman dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean as part of a geoengineering scheme off the west coast of Canada in July, a Guardian investigation can reveal. Lawyers, environmentalists and civil society groups are calling it a “blatant violation” of two international moratoria and the news is likely to spark outrage at a United Nations environmental summit taking place in India this week. Satellite images appear to confirm the claim by Californian Russ George that the iron has spawned an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometres. The intention is for the plankton to absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean bed – a geoengineering technique known as ocean fertilisation that he hopes will net lucrative carbon credits.

George is the former chief executive of Planktos Inc, whose previous failed efforts to conduct large-scale commercial dumps near the Galapagos and Canary Islands led to his vessels being barred from ports by the Spanish and Ecuadorean governments. The US Environmental Protection Agency warned him that flying a US flag for his Galapagos project would violate US laws, and his activities are credited in part to the passing of international moratoria at the United Nations limiting ocean fertilisation experiments Scientists are debating whether iron fertilisation can lock carbon into the deep ocean over the long term, and have raised concerns that it can irreparably harm ocean ecosystems, produce toxic tides and lifeless waters, and worsen ocean acidification and global warming. “It is difficult if not impossible to detect and describe important effects that we know might occur months or years later,” said John Cullen , an oceanographer at Dalhousie University. “Some possible effects, such as deep-water oxygen depletion and alteration of distant food webs, should rule out ocean manipulation. History is full of examples of ecological manipulations that backfired.”

George says his team of unidentified scientists has been monitoring the results of the biggest ever geoengineering experiment with equipment loaned from US agencies like Nasa and the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. He told the Guardian that it is the “most substantial ocean restoration project in history,” and has collected a “greater density and depth of scientific data than ever before. We’ve gathered data targeting all the possible fears that have been raised [about ocean fertilisation],” George said. “And the news is good news, all around, for the planet.”

The dump took place from a fishing boat in an eddy 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, one of the world’s most celebrated, diverse ecosystems, where George convinced the local council of an indigenous village to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation to channel more than $1m of its own funds into the project. The president of the Haida nation, Guujaaw, said the village was told the dump would environmentally benefit the ocean, which is crucial to their livelihood and culture. “The village people voted to support what they were told was a ‘salmon enhancement project’ and would not have agreed if they had been told of any potential negative effects or that it was in breach of an international convention,” Guujaaw said.

International legal experts say George’s project has contravened the UN’s convention on biological diversity (CBD) and London convention on the dumping of wastes at sea, which both prohibit for-profit ocean fertilisation activities. “It appears to be a blatant violation of two international resolutions,” said Kristina M Gjerde, a senior high seas adviser for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “Even the placement of iron particles into the ocean, whether for carbon sequestration or fish replenishment, should not take place, unless it is assessed and found to be legitimate scientific research without commercial motivation. This does not appear to even have had the guise of legitimate scientific research.”

George told the Guardian that the two moratoria are a “mythology” and do not apply to his project. The parties to the UN CBD are currently meeting in Hyderabad, India, where the governments of Bolivia, the Philippines and African nations as well as indigenous peoples organizations are calling for the current moratorium to be upgraded to a comprehensive test ban of geoengineering that includes enforcement mechanisms. “If rogue geoengineer Russ George really has misled this indigenous community, and dumped iron into their waters, we hope to see swift legal response to his behavior and strong action taken to the heights of the Canadian and US governments,” said Silvia Ribeiro of the international technology watchdog ETC Group, which first discovered the existence of the scheme. “It is now more urgent than ever that governments unequivocally ban such open-air geoengineering experiments. They are a dangerous distraction providing governments and industry with an excuse to avoid reducing fossil fuel emissions.”

http://isisconsortium.org/

OCEANIC IRON SEEDING
http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2008-07/carbon-discredit
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/companies/RussGeorge/RussGeorge.shtml
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=02963d59-385a-4a30-8828-424fd53d7012
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2008/02/11/daily49.html
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/project-to-harness-plankton-puts-to-sea/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/19/geoengineering-canada
US businessman defends controversial geoengineering experiment
by Martin Lukacs / 19 October 2012

The American businessman who dumped around 100 tonnes of iron sulphate into the Pacific Ocean has become a lone defender of his project, after a storm of criticism from indigenous peoples, the Canadian government and a UN biodiversity meeting in India. Russ George, who told the Globe and Mail that he is the world’s leading “champion” of geoengineering, says he has been under a “dark cloud of vilification” since the Guardian broke news of an ocean fertilisation scheme, funded by an indigenous village on the Haida Gwaii islands, that aimed to make money in offset markets by sequestering carbon through artificial plankton blooms. ”I’m not a rich, scheming businessman, right,” he said. “That’s not who I am … This is my heart’s work, not my hip pocket work, right?”

A US agency that loaned George’s company 20 expensive ocean buoyssaid they had been “misled,” and the Canadian National Research Council that provided funding said they “were not made aware” of plans for ocean fertilisation. The Council of the Haida Nation, which represents all Haida, issued a statement condemning George. ”The consequences of tampering with nature at this scale are not predictable and pose unacceptable risks to the marine environment,” it read. “Our people along with the rest of humanity depend on the oceans and cannot leave the fate of the oceans to the whim of the few.”

The Canadian government announced on Thursday that they did not “approve this non-scientific event” and enforcement officials were continuing an investigation they launched on 30 August. ”This government takes very seriously our commitment to protect the environment and anyone who contravenes environmental law should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” Canada’s environment minister, Peter Kent, said in parliament, after a Guardian article revealed that the environment department had known that George was planning an iron dump but had not done anything to prevent it.

According to the department, officials met in May with the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, of which George was “chief scientist,” and gave them “fact sheets” explaining that commercial ocean fertilisation is prohibited under Canadian law and United Nations rules. ”It is critical that full enforcement action is taken by the Canadian authorities. Canada will be aware that this very serious matter will be addressed at a meeting in London at the end of this month,” said Duncan Currie, an international lawyer specialising in sea law who is attending the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meetings in Hyderabad, India, which closes today.

In a binding decision due to be agreed today, representatives from 192 states underlined the existing international moratoria on geoengineering and ocean fertilisation and stressed the need for precaution, noting that no single geoengineering technique “meets basic criteria for effectiveness, safety and affordability”, and “may prove difficult to deploy or govern”. The decision of the CBD also requires that countries begin reporting on how they are implementing the moratoria, a first step towards global monitoring and enforcement against geoengineering.

EXPERIMENTING IN-SITU
http://isisconsortium.org/page.do?pid=52316
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/report-iron-fed-plankton-slow-to-remove-co2-4020/
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/05/06/ocean-carbon-iron/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fertilizing-ocean-with-iron-sequesters-co2
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/10/04/204747/nature-geoengineering-ocean-fertilization/
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/neurotoxic-geoengineering/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528744.100-geoengineering-with-iron-might-work-after-all.html
Geoengineering with iron might work after all
by Michael Marshall / 18 July 2012

If you want to help stop climate change, try tipping some iron into the sea. For years, this geoengineering idea has been considered a busted flush, but new results suggest it really can work. Tiny floating algae called phytoplankton pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. When they die, the plankton sink to the seabed, taking the carbon with them. Over thousands of years, this strips CO₂ from the air, lowering temperatures. But many ocean regions are short of iron, which plankton need to grow, so the process does not occur. Adding iron should stimulate plankton growth in these areas. That was the theory, at least. In practice, it is charitable to say the results have been mixed. For many people, the idea died in 2009, when a field trial called Lohafex failed in the South Atlantic. The iron triggered a bloom, but it was eaten by crustaceans before it could sink.

However, another trial, called Eifex, was carried out in the Southern Ocean in 2004. The results have finally been published – and they are promising. The Eifex ship found an ideal testing ground: a slowly rotating eddy 60 kilometres across and 4 kilometres deep, which was more or less isolated from the surrounding waters. Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany, and colleagues dumped iron sulphate into the eddy’s core and studied the resulting bloom. The water was rich in silicic acid, so the bloom was dominated by phytoplankton called diatoms. These algae build silica cell walls, which makes them harder to eat and more likely to sink than plankton with calcium carbonate shells. “They are not the pastures of the ocean, they are the thistles,” Smetacek says. The diatom bloom grew for three weeks, then died and sank. At least half of it sank far below 1 kilometre, and probably reached the sea floor (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature11229).

No other study has tracked a sinking bloom. “This confirms what we expected to happen,” says Richard Lampitt of the UK’s National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, who was not involved in the study. Lampitt says Lohafex failed because the trial site was low in silicon, so the bloom contained few diatoms. Eifex’s success is far from a green light for iron fertilisation, though. At most, a global programme could mop up about 1 gigatonne of carbon per year, about a tenth of our current emissions, according to a modelling study by Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, California (Climatic Change, DOI: 10.1007/s10584-010-9799-4). “It’s too little to be the solution,” agrees Smetacek, “but it’s too much to ignore.”

Fertilised patches create algal food sources but burn through ocean nutrients. This could be a boon to some threads of the food web, but it could suppress diatom formation elsewhere to the detriment of other marine species. All those contacted by New Scientist agreed that any tests should be run as a public good, not for profit. Some firms had planned to use iron fertilisation to accrue carbon credits which they could sell on, but in 2008 the London Convention and Protocol – an international treaty – ruled that the practice should not be allowed.

Iron fertilisation and the whales
Iron fertilisation is mainly seen as a way to engineer the climate (main story), but it could also help boost whale populations by restoring their natural ecosystem, says Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany. Many Southern-Ocean whales feed on Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba). This krill is one of the few species that eat algae called diatoms in large quantities, but krill numbers have been plummeting for decades. Increasingly, ecologists suspect that declining krill numbers are linked to humanity’s over-hunting of whales. Whale faeces are rich in the iron that helps fuel diatom growth. This in turn benefits the krill – and ultimately the whales. “Whales might be effectively fertilising their own foods, and a reduction in whale populations would impact on that food resource,” says David Raubenheimer of Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. There is no guarantee that the boosted diatoms would end up being eaten by krill, though, or that the resulting increased krill would be eaten by whales. ”There are many other competitors in the ecosystem,” notes Ian Boyd at the University of St Andrews in the UK.

{photo: Kevin Dooley/Creative Commons}

U.N. MORATORIUM on GEO-ENGINEERING (2010)
http://royalsociety.org/news/governance-geoengineering/
http://royalsociety.org/policy/publications/2009/geoengineering-climate/
http://web.archive.org/web/20110517023252/http://www.etcgroup.org/upload/publication/pdf_file/ETC_geopiracy_4web.pdf
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2010/10/28/un-agrees-moratorium-on-geoengineering-experiments/
Geoengineering Moratorium at UN Ministerial in Japan / 29 October 2010

In a landmark consensus decision, the 193-member UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will close its tenth biennial meeting with a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects and experiments. “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus,” stated Silvia Ribeiro, Latin American Director of ETC Group.

The agreement, reached during the ministerial portion of the two-week meeting which included 110 environment ministers, asks governments to ensure that no geoengineering activities take place until risks to the environmental and biodiversity and associated social, cultural and economic impacts risks have been appropriately considered as well as the socio-economic impacts. The CBD secretariat was also instructed to report back on various geoengineering proposals and potential intergovernmental regulatory measures.

The unusually strong consensus decision builds on the 2008 moratorium on ocean fertilization. That agreement, negotiated at COP 9 in Bonn, put the brakes on a litany of failed “experiments” – both public and private – to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in the oceans’ depths by spreading nutrients on the sea surface. Since then, attention has turned to a range of futuristic proposals to block a percentage of solar radiation via large-scale interventions in the atmosphere, stratosphere and outer space that would alter global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

“This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs,” said ETC Group Executive Director Pat Mooney. “This decision is a victory for common sense, and for precaution. It will not inhibit legitimate scientific research. Decisions on geoengineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving ‘voluntary guidelines’ on climate hacking. What little credibility such efforts may have had in some policy circles in the global North has been shattered by this decision. The UK Royal Society and its partners should cancel their Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative and respect that the world’s governments have collectively decided that future deliberations on geoengineering should take place in the UN, where all countries have a seat at the table and where civil society can watch and influence what they are doing.”

Delegates in Nagoya have now clearly understood the potential threat that deployment – or even field testing – of geoengineering technologies poses to the protection of biodiversity. The decision was hammered out in long and difficult late night sessions of a “Friends of the chair” group, attended by ETC Group, and adopted by the Working Group 1 Plenary on 27 October 2010. The Chair of the climate and biodiversity negotiations called the final text “a highly delicate compromise.”

“The decision is not perfect,” said Neth Dano of ETC Group Philippines. “Some delegations are understandably concerned that the interim definition of geoengineering is too narrow because it does not include Carbon Capture and Storage technologies. Before the next CBD meeting, there will be ample opportunity to consider these questions in more detail. But climate techno-fixes are now firmly on the UN agenda and will lead to important debates as the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit approaches. A change of course is essential, and geoengineering is clearly not the way forward.”

A harmful algal bloom in the waters of La Jolla, San Diego County, California. {Photo credit: Kai Schumann, NOAA}

U.S. NOT PARTICIPATING
http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/why-the-un-moratorium-on-geoengineering-is-a-good-thing-maybe.html
by Mat McDermott / November 1, 2010

At the Convention on Biodiversity a resolution was adopted which places a moratorium on geoengineering unless it can be proven that the method in question can be shown to not have an adverse effect on biodiversity. Opponents of geoengineering cheered, TreeHugger’s John Laumer loudly jeered, and Fred Pearce, writing in New Scientist shrugs his shoulders. Who’s right? And is the ban really even a ban at all?

Research Still Permitted, Deployment Requires Precaution
Let’s look at the crucial part of the text:

Climate-related geo-engineering activities [should not] take place until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities and appropriate consideration of the associated risks for the environment and biodiversity and associated social, economic and cultural impacts.

Furthermore, “small-scale scientific research studies” are specifically exempted from the ban. So, no one is saying you can’t do basic research on any geoengineering method, no matter how potentially risky or benign, effective or ineffective it might be, but if you want to take that research beyond that small-scale you have to be able to prove you’re not going to radically screw up the environment that previous human activity is already screwing up. Perhaps that’s too glib a phrasing of the precautionary principle, but it frankly doesn’t seem an unreasonable standard to set for activities design to affect the global climate.

Impact of Ban, What Methods Get Approval, Unclear
In practice the impact of all this isn’t exactly clear–though it’s not, as my colleague alleges, an anti-science eco-moralist crusade straight out the 1600s, playing into the hands of libertarian small government proponents. As Pearce points out the definition of geoengineering here includes pretty much everything under the sun, anything that reduces solar heating or increases carbon capture from the atmosphere. Under that banner are a wide range of methods, with varying degrees of efficacy and risk. He’s also right in that almost any activity that humans do can affect biodiversity, including (prominently) not taking action to stop climate change. Complicating matters, as Mongabay points out, the moratorium doesn’t apply in the United States, as it is not a member of the Convention on Biodiversity.

International Oversight & Cooperation Essential
When it comes down to it though (vague wording aside), is something that is both critically important and agreed upon by vocal anti-geoengineering activists and the more sober voices of the Royal Society alike: There needs to be international oversight of geoengineering schemes.

It’s Getting Hot In Here quotes ETC Group executive director Pat Mooney:

This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs…Decisions on geoengineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving ‘voluntary guidelines’ on climate hacking.

Perhaps the most important issue in all this is, as the Royal Society pointed out in their assessment of geoengineering, the first and foremost thing we have to do to stop climate change is radically limit greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity–stopping burning fossil fuels and stopping deforestation are at the top of list for how to do that.

Engineer Stephen Salter’s design for an unmanned ship designed to generate clouds and reflect sunlight away from the earth.

FIELD TRIALS (ONGOING)
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2009/10/04/204747/nature-geoengineering-ocean-fertilization/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/18/geo-engineering
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128294.000-geoengineering-trials-get-under-way.html
by Michael Marshall / 14 September 2011

Field trials for experiments to engineer the climate have begun. Next month a team of UK researchers will hoist one end of a 1-kilometre-long hose aloft using a balloon, then attempt to pump water up it and spray it into the atmosphere. The water will not affect the climate. Rather, the experiment is a proof of principle to show that we can pump large quantities of material to great heights. If it succeeds, a larger-scale version could one day pump sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, creating a sunshade that will offset the greenhouse effect. The trial, led by Matthew Watson of the University of Bristol, UK, is part of a £2 million project called Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE). Funded by two UK research councils, it also aims to find out the ideal particles to use in an atmospheric sunshade and will attempt to model their effects in greater detail than ever before. The test is not alone: a string of other technologies that could be used to “geoengineer” our environment are being field-tested.

In his blog, The Reluctant Geoengineer, Watson argues that we need to investigate the effects of sulphate aerosols as a last-resort remedy should the climate start to change rapidly. Researchers contacted by New Scientistagreed with Watson that such research should continue, if only to find out whether the techniques are feasible. “I’d say there’s a 50-50 chance we’ll end up doing it, because it’ll get too warm and people will demand the planet be cooled off,” says Wallace Broecker of Columbia University in New York. But there was less enthusiasm for SPICE’s approach to the problem. There are “large gaps” in our understanding of geoengineering, says Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern in Switzerland. Stocker helped to organise an expert meeting on geoengineering in June for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It identified key unanswered questions that should be a focus for research. However, it is not clear that field trials like Watson’s will provide the answers.

One area of doubt over injecting aerosols into the stratosphere is whether it will change the behaviour of high-altitude clouds. That could in turn affect the climate in ways beyond what was intended – and for now, we don’t know how, or how much. Aerosols could also deplete the ozone layer, contribute to air pollution and may alter visibility in the same way as large volcanic eruptions can. The SPICE test won’t answer any of these questions, says David Keith of Harvard University. “I think it’s a little reckless.” The most interesting result will be how the public reacts, he says.

What’s more, Keith adds, in the long run delivering sulphates to the stratosphere with a hose would be a bad idea. Spraying aerosols locally allows the particles to clump together, making them less effective at reflecting sunlight and more likely to be swept down by rain (Environmental Research Letters, DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/4/4/045108). Keith’s own studies suggest that if we were ever forced to try to screen out some of the sun’s rays globally, it would be more effective to spray sulphuric acid from aircraft (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2010GL043975). It would also be cheaper, costing a few billion dollars a year according to a study by Aurora Flight Sciences, an aeronautical firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Such figures are tiny compared to the trillions that the consequences of climate change could cost the global economy if emissions continue to rise at current rates. The point, says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, is that experiments like Watson’s, which test relatively simple delivery systems, address the issue of cost. But, since the Aurora study has shown that cost is not a critical factor – a sunshade will be relatively inexpensive – the critical questions relate to potential risks. More importantly, since a stratospheric sunshade is intended to have a global impact, all countries must agree to such a project and to its precise extent, which is unlikely to happen.

One possibility that may help countries agree is that the sunshade need not be applied evenly across the globe. Caldeira has created, in a climate model, a sunshade with much larger quantities of aerosols above the poles than above the tropics. This produced a temperature distribution much closer to the pre-industrial climate than could be achieved with a uniform sunshade (Environmental Research Letters, DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/5/3/034009). Caldeira and others are now toying with the idea of regional geoengineering, or “geoadaptation”. Some techniques, such as making clouds over the seas more reflective, should have localised effects, so countries could in theory tinker only with their own climate. But here too uncertainties need to be resolved. Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York points out that changes in one area will have a knock-on effect on the other side of the planet. “What happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas,” he says. We could perhaps predict these long-range effects, but we cannot eliminate them. Schmidt says that what we need is not field tests, but better modelling studies. Most simulations of geoengineering are “naive”, he says, and cannot model all the possible side effects. “People are not doing the right kinds of experiments to assess these effects.”

Coping with emissions
The pipe-to-the-sky experiment is not the only geoengineering method that is being tested. In 2009, a team of Russian scientists sprayed a small amount of sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere and found that they blocked between 1 and 10 per cent of incoming solar radiation (Russian Meteorology and Hydrology, DOI: 10.3103/S106837390905001X). Iceland is testing a less contentious technique to deal with our carbon emissions: turning them into rock. The CarbFix project aims to capture carbon dioxide from a local geothermal power plant, dissolve it in water and inject it into basalt rock, where it will react with magnesium, calcium and iron to form carbonates. If it works, the CO₂ should stay put even in an earthquake. It is the safest way of storing CO₂, according to project leader Sigurður Reynir Gíslasonof the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. The team plans to start the gas injections later this month.

Adding iron to the ocean can trigger plankton blooms that suck up CO₂, but a 2009 field test gave mixed results. That’s because the test site was unsuitable, says Richard Lampitt of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK. He and colleagues hope to repeat the trial. Elsewhere, Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, has permission to add sodium hydroxide – an alkali – to a small patch of ocean to see if it can reverse the effects of ocean acidification. Finally, California-based engineer Armand Neukermans is building a nozzle that will spray seawater into clouds, making them whiter and better able to reflect sunlight into space.

LISTENING IN

Posted on 2012/07/06 by secret santa

“Typically constructed with a laptop, hard drive (to handle the encryption tables), and a cell phone or commercial cell radio with an external antenna.”

WARRANTLESS SPOOFING
http://privacysos.org/node/737
Your phone may not be safe at protests / 07/05/2012

Ever wondered why your cell phone reception suddenly becomes terrible at protests? Ever worried that police could use electronic spoofing devices to suck up your mobile data because you are in the streets exercising your rights? You might have been onto something. Mobile “IMSI catchers”, currently on the market and being pushed to police and intelligence agencies worldwide, enable these creepy, stealth spying tactics. And if they build it and hawk it, history tells us police will buy it and deploy it.

On Tuesday, July 3, 2012, electronic privacy advocate and technology researcher Chris Soghoian tweeted a link to a photograph of a talk he gave at TED in Scotland in late June. Behind him in the photograph is another image, this one taken by privacy researcher Eric King at a surveillance trade show. (King’s Twitter bio contains a quote from a representative of the notorious ISS World – a global surveillance trade firm that often hosts such trade shows: the rep called him an “Anti-lawful interception zealot blogger.” High praise.) Look at the slide behind Soghoian; that’s the photo in question. It shows an IMSI catcher strapped onto a model, under the model’s shirt.

IMSI stands for “International Mobile Subscriber Identity”. The technology is essentially a mobile phone tower with “a malicious operator”. It mimics the behavior of a cell tower and tricks mobile phones into sending data to it, instead of to the tower.

As such it is considered a Man In the Middle (MITM) attack. It is used as an eavesdropping device used for interception and tracking of cellular phones and usually is undetectable for the users of mobile phones.

Once it has made a connection with the phone and tricked it into thinking it is a mobile tower, the IMSI catcher forces the phone to drop its encryption, enabling easy access to the contents of the device. The tool then lets the attacker listen in on mobile conversations and intercept all data sent from a mobile phone, remaining undetected. In some cases the tool also allows the operator to manipulate messages.

Here’s a creepy video that a purveyor of IMSI catchers made to advertise its product:

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Police in the United States claim they do not need a warrant to use an IMSI catcher or other spoofing device to track your location. A case to determine whether or not the courts agree is working itself through the system. Privacy International’s Eric King took the photo on the slide behind Soghoian at a surveillance trade show, where he says the tool was “pitched to me as being perfect for covert operations in public order situations.” In other words, at protests.

The FBI uses IMSI catchers and claims it does so legally, even though it says it doesn’t need a warrant to deploy them. The Electronic Privacy Information Center is currently pursuing FOIA litigation to find out exactly how the bureau uses the “Stingray” (a brand name IMSI catcher); unsurprisingly, the FBI wasn’t forthcoming with documents to reveal its legal standard or other information about how it uses the tool. Stay tuned for more information as that case makes its way through the courts.

Meanwhile, how can you protect yourself against IMSI catchers? Unfortunately, you probably can’t. And the threats are not just from government. As Soghoian and others warned in a friend of the court brief,

Finally, the communications privacy of millions of law-abiding Americans is already threatened by the use of this and similar interception technologies by non-US government entities, such as stalkers, criminals, and foreign governments engaged in espionage. As such, the public interest is best served by greater public discussion regarding these tracking technologies and the security flaws in the mobile phone networks that they exploit, not less.

Yet again, we are faced with a situation in which our technology has outpaced our law reform. It’s time for Congress to change that.

To get a more detailed sense of how the technology actually works, watch this excellent talk from DefCon 2011, with Chris Paget: “Practical Cellphone Spying”. He spoofs the phones of the people in the audience during the talk; it’s well worth watching if you have some time.

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For more on IMSI catchers and the state of the law, click here.

CONTACT
Christopher Soghoian
http://www.soghoian.net/

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/11/30/the-spy-files-how-safe-are-your-emails-and-phone-calls/

AMICI CURIAE FILED
http://www.christopher-parsons.com/blog/privacy/surveillance/amici-curiae-on-imsi-catchers/
by Christopher Parsons / February 4, 2012

Security, surveillance, and privacy researchers alike have been watching how authorities exploit cellular communications devices – often in secret, or absent sufficient oversight – for years. Research to-date has been performed by security researchers and hackers, social scientists, advocates, activists, and the curious, with contributions spanning hundreds of discreet investigations into technical capabilities and their social implications. Of late, a considerable amount of attention has been devoted to IMSI Catchers, which are devices that establish false mobile phone towers for the purpose of monitoring and tracking mobile phones without their users’ awareness.

Given the use of IMSI catchers by American authorities, a group of researchers and academics submitted an Amici Curiae (in their individual capacities) January 17, 2012 concerning the catchers. Specifically, the brief is in support of a defendant’s motion for disclosure of all relevant and helpful evidence withheld by the government based on a claim of privilege. The government, in this particular case, has admitted that the surveillance technologies used simulated a cell site but have refused to provide specific details of how this surveillance was conducted. We argue that a substantial amount of information surrounding IMSI catchers is already public and that, as a result, the secrets that the government is attempting to protect are already in the public domain. Moreover, the public interest is best served by “greater public discussion regarding these tracking technologies and the security flaws in the mobile phone networks that they exploit, not less.”

I want to thank the primary draftees of the brief for their (as always) excellent work and for the opportunity to sign on to it. Bringing transparency to government surveillance systems – especially when the government tries to limit public attention after information about these systems is publicly available – is critical if we are to foster serious and critical discussions about authorities’ capacity, and potential, to monitor and track citizens. Democratic systems work best when all branches of government – including law enforcement – cannot inappropriately hide their actions from the public. With an awareness of their government’s actions, the public can drive how their government functions as opposed to things happening the other way around.

I would note that IMSI catchers are of particular importance to Canadians. If forthcoming lawful access legislation is passed, in a format similar or identical to its last drafting, then Canadian police, intelligence, and security officers would be permitted to collect IMSI numbers, using catchers, and subsequently compel subscriber information from Canadian mobile phone providers. All of this would happen without a warrant. It cannot be stated enough that legalizing this level of unsupervised surveillance would have significant chilling speech and association implications. Moreover, it would significantly expand what constitutes ‘legitimate’ government surveillance while simultaneously undermining key privacy rights and expectations. Thus, while this particular Amici Curiae was sent to an American court, citizens in the Canada and UK would all be well served if our respective governments were transparent about their (stated and intended) usage of surveillance equipment, such as IMSI catchers, to surreptitiously monitor citizens.

To download the Amici Curiae, click here.

A directional antenna is set up for a demonstration by security researcher Chris Paget, center. (Photo: Dave Bullock)

DIY ISMI CATCHER
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/intercepting-cell-phone-calls/
Hacker Spoofs Cell Phone Tower to Intercept Calls
by Kim Zetter / July 31, 2010

LAS VEGAS — A security researcher created a cell phone base station that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls in the clear. The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they’re routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP. The low-cost, home-brewed device, developed by researcher Chris Paget, mimics more expensive devices already used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies – called IMSI catchers – that can capture phone ID data and content. The devices essentially spoof a legitimate GSM tower and entice cell phones to send them data by emitting a signal that’s stronger than legitimate towers in the area. “If you have the ability to deliver a reasonably strong signal, then those around are owned,” Paget said.

Paget’s system costs only about $1,500, as opposed to several hundreds of thousands for professional products. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system. Doing this kind of interception “used to be a million dollars, now you can do it with a thousand times less cost,” Paget said during a press conference after his attack. “If it’s $1,500, it’s just beyond the range that people can start buying them for themselves and listening in on their neighbors.” Paget’s device captures only 2G GSM calls, making AT&T and T-Mobile calls, which use GSM, vulnerable to interception. Paget’s aim was to highlight vulnerabilities in the GSM standard that allows a rogue station to capture calls. GSM is a second-generation technology that is not as secure as 3G technology.

Encrypted calls are not protected from interception because the rogue tower can simply turn it off. Although the GSM specifications say that a phone should pop up a warning when it connects to a station that does not have encryption, SIM cards disable that setting so that alerts are not displayed. “Even though the GSM spec requires it, this is a deliberate choice on the cell phone makers,” Paget said. The system captures only outbound calls. Inbound calls would go directly to voicemail during the period that someone’s phone is connected to Paget’s tower. The device could be used by corporate spies, criminals, or private investigators to intercept private calls of targets. “Any information that goes across a cell phone you can now intercept,” he said, except data. Professional grade IMSI catchers do capture data transfers, but Paget’s system doesn’t currently do this. His setup included two RF directional antennas about three feet long to amplify his signal in the large conference room, a laptop and open source software. The system emitted only 25 milliwatts, “a hundred times less than your average cell phone,” he said.

Paget received a call from FCC officials on Friday who raised a list of possible regulations his demonstration might violate. To get around legal concerns, he broadcast on a GSM spectrum for HAM radios, 900Mhz, which is the same frequency used by GSM phones and towers in Europe, thus avoiding possible violations of U.S. regulations. Just turning on the antennas caused two dozen phones in the room to connect to Paget’s tower. He then set it to spoof an AT&T tower to capture calls from customers of that carrier. “As far as your cell phones are concerned, I am now indistinguishable from AT&T,” he said. “Every AT&T cell phone in the room will gradually start handing over to my network.” During the demonstration, only about 30 phones were actually connecting to his tower. Paget says it can take time for phones to find the signal and hand off to the tower, but there are methods for speeding up that process.

To address privacy concerns, he set up the system to deliver a recorded message to anyone who tried to make a call from the room while connected to his tower. The message disclosed that their calls were being recorded. All of the data Paget recorded was saved to a USB stick, which he destroyed after the talk. Customers of carriers that use GSM could try to protect their calls from being intercepted in this manner by switching their phones to 3G mode if it’s an option. But Paget said he could also capture phones using 3G by sending out jamming noise to block 3G. Phones would then switch to 2G and hook up with his rogue tower. Paget had his jammer and an amplifier on stage but declined to turn them on saying they would “probably knock out all Las Vegas cell phone systems.”

VIRUS POWERED

Posted on 2012/05/25 by secret santa

Genetically engineered virus has electrical poles at each end that generate a voltage potential when deformed. {Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Labs}

VIRUS GENERATES ELECTRICITY when SQUISHED
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/sheets-of-virus-generate-electricity-when-squished/
by Mellisae Fellet / May 15 2012

Squishing a stack of virus sheets generates enough electricity to power a small liquid crystal display. With increased power output, these virus films might one day use the beating of your heart to power a pacemaker, the researchers behind them say. Piezoelectric materials build up charge when pushed or squeezed. These materials may be familiar to you: they generate the spark in a gas lighter, and motors powered by such materials vibrate some cell phones. Piezoelectric materials made of metals or polymers require large inputs of energy to build up a charge. Bone, DNA, and protein fibers are weakly piezoelectric, but it’s hard to efficiently organize these materials on a large scale to yield electricity.To handle this organizational issue, Seung-Wuk Lee, of the University of California in Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and his colleagues looked for a biomaterial that had intrinsic order and was easy to make. They settled on the M13 bacteriophage, a rod-shaped virus that only infects bacteria. One bacterium can produce one million copies of the virus within four hours, so starting material isn’t a problem. And the virus neatly arranges itself in stacked rows when spread on a surface.

The researchers first tested the virus to see if it was piezoelectric. Instead of pushing on the virus and measuring a current, they looked for the opposite effect. They electrified a film made with the virus and watched for mechanical motion. The scientists saw the helical proteins covering the virus twist. To understand why the virus is piezoelectric, we need to look at its structure. About 2700 copies of a helical protein stretch along the length of the virus, tipping out from that central axis about 20°. Each helix has a positively charged end and a negatively charged end. The amount of this charge difference and the distance between the two charged areas sets up an electric dipole, which runs along each helix.

Normally these dipoles cancel each other out because the proteins are symmetrically arranged around the outside of the virus—the amount of negative charge around the virus surface balances out the amount of positive charge. But when the virus is squished from above, its rod shape elongates into an oval, and the dipole moments become uneven. One area of the virus coat can now hold negative charges while another builds positive charge. Establishing that charge difference causes current to flow along the virus. Since the structure of the coat proteins is well known, the researchers engineered the virus to increase its piezoelectric properties. They added four extra negatively charged amino acids, specifically a string of glutamates, to one end of the helical surface protein. That increased the charge difference between the positive and negative ends of the helix, thus raising the amount of electrical energy it produced when squished. Next, the scientists sandwiched sheets of engineered virus between two gold electrodes about the size of a postage stamp. When pushed with a thumb, the virus stack produces 6 nA of current with 400 mV of potential. That’s about one-quarter the voltage of an AAA battery. Combining two of these stacks provides enough energy to bring up a “1” on a small liquid crystal display.

Lee is working to increase the amount of current that these viral particles can produce by tweaking the viral coat proteins and playing with their arrangement on the electrode surface. In five to ten years, he estimates, viral piezoelectric films in your shoes could be personal electricity generators to power your iPod as you run. Or they could use the thumping of your heart to power a pacemaker, Lee says. Though the current produced now is small because only a thin layer of the virus deforms, virus-based devices could still be useful for small scale applications, writes S. Michael Yu, of Johns Hopkins University, in the News and Views article accompanying the paper. This flexible film has a “self-assembling capability that no other piezoelectric materials can even dream about,” he writes. That reliable self-organization forms tidy structures gives the material its piezoelectric activity, Yu writes.

Nature Nanotechnology, 2012. DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.69

CONTACT
http://leelab.berkeley.edu/

Pressing a virus-filled device can generate power. The gloves protect the virus, which only infects bacteria, from us.

Berkeley Lab Scientists Generate Electricity From Squeezing Viruses
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/viruses-harnessed-as-molecular-building-materials/2925?tag=content;siu-container
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/05/13/electricity-from-viruses/
by Dan Krotz / May 13, 2012

Imagine charging your phone as you walk, thanks to a paper-thin generator embedded in the sole of your shoe. This futuristic scenario is now a little closer to reality. Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a way to generate power using harmless viruses that convert mechanical energy into electricity. The scientists tested their approach by creating a generator that produces enough current to operate a small liquid-crystal display. It works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge. Their generator is the first to produce electricity by harnessing the piezoelectric properties of a biological material. Piezoelectricity is the accumulation of a charge in a solid in response to mechanical stress. The milestone could lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.

It also points to a simpler way to make microelectronic devices. That’s because the viruses arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work. Self-assembly is a much sought after goal in the finicky world of nanotechnology. The first part of the video shows how Berkeley Lab scientists harness the piezoelectric properties of a virus to convert the force of a finger tap into electricity. The second part shows the “viral-electric” generators in action, first by pressing only one of the generators, then by pressing two at the same time, which produces more current. “More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics,” says Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division and a UC Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering. He conducted the research with a team that includes Ramamoorthy Ramesh, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and a professor of materials sciences, engineering, and physics at UC Berkeley; and Byung Yang Lee of Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division.

The first part of the video shows how Berkeley Lab scientists harness the piezoelectric properties of a virus to convert the force of a finger tap into electricity. The second part shows the “viral-electric” generators in action, first by pressing only one of the generators, then by pressing two at the same time, which produces more current.

The piezoelectric effect was discovered in 1880 and has since been found in crystals, ceramics, bone, proteins, and DNA. It’s also been put to use. Electric cigarette lighters and scanning probe microscopes couldn’t work without it, to name a few applications. But the materials used to make piezoelectric devices are toxic and very difficult to work with, which limits the widespread use of the technology. Lee and colleagues wondered if a virus studied in labs worldwide offered a better way. The M13 bacteriophage only attacks bacteria and is benign to people. Being a virus, it replicates itself by the millions within hours, so there’s always a steady supply. It’s easy to genetically engineer. And large numbers of the rod-shaped viruses naturally orient themselves into well-ordered films, much the way that chopsticks align themselves in a box. These are the traits that scientists look for in a nano building block. But the Berkeley Lab researchers first had to determine if the M13 virus is piezoelectric. Lee turned to Ramesh, an expert in studying the electrical properties of thin films at the nanoscale. They applied an electrical field to a film of M13 viruses and watched what happened using a special microscope. Helical proteins that coat the viruses twisted and turned in response—a sure sign of the piezoelectric effect at work.

The bottom 3-D atomic force microscopy image shows how the viruses align themselves side-by-side in a film. The top image maps the film’s structure-dependent piezoelectric properties, with higher voltages a lighter color.

Next, the scientists increased the virus’s piezoelectric strength. They used genetic engineering to add four negatively charged amino acid residues to one end of the helical proteins that coat the virus. These residues increase the charge difference between the proteins’ positive and negative ends, which boosts the voltage of the virus. The scientists further enhanced the system by stacking films composed of single layers of the virus on top of each other. They found that a stack about 20 layers thick exhibited the strongest piezoelectric effect. The only thing remaining to do was a demonstration test, so the scientists fabricated a virus-based piezoelectric energy generator. They created the conditions for genetically engineered viruses to spontaneously organize into a multilayered film that measures about one square centimeter. This film was then sandwiched between two gold-plated electrodes, which were connected by wires to a liquid-crystal display. When pressure is applied to the generator, it produces up to six nanoamperes of current and 400 millivolts of potential. That’s enough current to flash the number “1” on the display, and about a quarter the voltage of a triple A battery. “We’re now working on ways to improve on this proof-of-principle demonstration,” says Lee. “Because the tools of biotechnology enable large-scale production of genetically modified viruses, piezoelectric materials based on viruses could offer a simple route to novel microelectronics in the future.”

MEANWHILE

http://www.microbialfuelcell.org/www/index.php/Tutorials/Building-a-two-chamber-MFC.html

MICROBIAL FUEL CELLS
http://www.geobacter.org/press-links
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn4761-plugging-into-the-power-of-sewage.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21639-modified-bacteria-could-get-electricity-from-sewage.html
by Phil McKenna / March 2012

A fuel cell powered by naturally occurring bacteria has successfully converted 13 per cent of the energy in sewage to electricity – and cleaned the waste water at the same time. It’s hoped genetic engineering could make this much more efficient. Treating sewage and other liquid waste uses roughly 2 per cent of the US energy supply, at a cost of $25 billion a year, yet this carbon-rich material harbours nine times the energy needed to render it environmentally benign. Microbiologists believe they can drastically cut the cost and power consumption by using genetically modified bugs to treat the waste and produce electricity. “It’s a substantial energy resource that we just end up landfilling,” saysOrianna Bretschger, of the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, California. “If we could recover the energy we could do waste water treatment for free.” Bretschger described a 380-litre microbial fuel cell at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego this week. It uses naturally occurring microbes to break down organic waste and produce electrons and protons. The electrons are collected by an anode while the protons pass through a permeable membrane to a cathode. The resulting voltage between the two electrodes enables the fuel cell to produce an electric current.

Major improvement
The announcement represents a significant improvement over the institute’s earlier fuel cell, a 75-litre device able to harvest only 2 per cent of the waste’s potential energy. Further improvements will be needed, however, for the technology to compete with conventional waste water treatment techniques, which can rapidly process huge volumes of water. By genetically modifying microbes to enhance their ability to consume organic waste, and better shuttling electrons to an electrode, Bretschger hopes to harvest 30 to 40 per cent of the available energy. Genetically modified organisms aren’t currently used in either municipal or commercial waste water treatment facilities. Their potential use in a fuel cell would be regulated in the US by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has yet to determine how to govern such applications.

Natural competition
Conventional waste water treatment, however, already has ways of killing microbes before water gets back into the environment, including the use of chlorine, ozone and ultraviolet light. The EPA also recently granted permission for a pilot study in which genetically modified microbes were used as tracers to find leaks from sewers. Roland Cusick, an environmental engineer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, says genetically engineered microbes may boost efficiency, but it may be difficult to control the bug population. “Waste water has millions of microbes in it. Any time you are adding waste water, you are adding competition to your system,” Cusick says.