defcon 6/16: solar threats, hack attacks & jet packs

solar threat: minutes to respond;
governments plan blackouts; elites prep contingency plans*
US/uk to cut power in preparation of massive solar storm*
magnetic levels ebb as scientists note missing sunspot activity*
mysterious 'structure' discovered on mars?*
audio satire: nasa finds evidence of humans on moon*
video: closely held 'area 51' secrets revealed in new book*
US faces legal challenge to internet-domain seizures*
obama anti-whistleblower case collapses*
ex-spy agency official strikes plea bargain*
US underwrites internet detour around censors*
pentagon ramps-up cyberwar plans*
notorious hacker group breaks into senate server*
imf breached by sophisticated hack attack*
'anonymous' attacks, shutters spanish police website*
hacker group claims credit for invading cia website*
video: lulzsec hackers inspire rap song*
video: personal jet packs to go on sale by end of 2011, says inventor*
audio satire: government says ignore throbbing love orb*

what will phobos grunt mission uncover?

Russian space probe Phobos Grunt set to launch December 25, 2011. The probe would achieve orbit around Mars, December 2012. Mars Express probe captured images in March 2010 during a flyby at a distance of just 60 miles. The landing site targeted by the Grunt mission to capture soil samples and return pictured here. The images are reported to be invaluable to mission planners. Richard Hoagland discusses Mars Express images on a recent edition of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes. Hoagland believes Phobos is an ancient artificial satellite severely eroded to reveal artificial construction just beneath its surface. Hoagland comments in interview, "think of it as a Titanic exploration [Ballard] on a titanic scale," firmly sees DNA if not bodies recovered from one-third hollow artificial satellite.

The former CBS science adviser notes majority of Mars missions have failed and revisits the controversial Phobos 2 mission. The alien spaceship is a cover story for reported loss of the Russian satellite, according to Hoagland, intended to dissuade inquiry. A previous blog entry covers intense interest in the Martian moon and the abrupt, ill-fated loss of Russian probe in 1989. The departure and destination arrival dates generate interest, as it seems, an occult connection to the dates may exist? Will the mission fail or mysteriously disappear to suffer same fate as the majority of past attempts?

4/28 defcon: guilt trips down the surveillance highway

obama on manning: 'he broke the law' - so much for fair trial*
video: 'pentagon papers' whistleblower daniel ellsberg says bradley manning can't get fair trial after obama's comment*
some fbi cyber agents lack adequate skills, report finds*
tomtom apologies for giving customer driving data to cops*
android data tied to users? some say yes*
facebook looks to cash in on user data*
apple says they 'must have' comprehensive user location data on you - and you will comply*
sony says credit card data at risk in playstation hack*
sony unveils ipad rival tablets*
'a vast, global online network of homeless people'*
miniature drone to drop tracking dust onto people*
cryptogon.com on 'the future where soda cans have screens'*
limewire facing billion-dollar damages trial*
video: ice uses seized domains for 'best anti-piracy video ever'*
spacex aims to put man on mars in 10-20yrs*
seti institute to shut down alien-seeking radio dishes*
alpha magnetic spectrometer to go on endeavour shuttle*
gabrielle giffords can attend husband's shuttle launch*
endeavor shuttle launch: time, where to watch*

april 28th morning planetary conjunction

Adrian West invites readers to rise a half hour before sunrise tomorrow, in order, to get a glimpse of Venus, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars in conjunction. West urges in a Universe Today article, "Planets Party in The Morning April 28-May 1": "Go out and with either a pair of binoculars, a small telescope, or just use your naked eyes and find an unobscured view of the Eastern horizon to see a conjunction (objects near each other in the sky) of the planets Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, below and to the left of the thin crescent moon." The month of May will provide more astronomical sights with details available here.

space x 'falcon heavy' to lift off in 2013

Are launch costs too high and weighing down your bottom line? Elon Musk, Space X founder, pitches his Falcon Heavy booster as right for the job to lift your prospects! In a Discovery News article, Musk says, "...we can realistically start to contemplate missions like a Mars sample return, which requires a tremendous amount of lift capability because you have to send a lander to Mars that still has enough propellant to return to Earth." Planetary Science Blog notes, the Falcon Heavy is second only to the Saturn V rocket in payload and escape velocity. The article adds 20-25 percent of mission cost is in the launch and idea of lowering your costs from $10,000 to $1,000 per pound a major selling point! A debut flight is scheduled for Vandenberg AFB in 2013. You can visit the Falcon Heavy webpage at the Space X website for more details. The sales pitch is a familiar one--"more bang for the buck"-- but will bottomline decisions translate into space exploration success? Do you trust companies and corporations to do the right thing in space?

3/24 defcon: mobile, micro, mystery, messenger

at&t to purchase t-mobile for US$39b;
as strangling of the free internet begins continues*
microsoft, feds pull plug on spam network*
fbook traffic mysteriously passed through chinese isp*
goldman programmer gets 8yrs for code theft*
tracking your wi-fi trail at the airport*
first tweet & other communication firsts*
nasa 'messenger' enters orbit around mercury*
chavez says capitalism may have ended life on mars*
video: 'red' rocker sammy hagar abducted by aliens*

phobos mystery

Why does Martian Moon Phobos generate intense interest? In 1959, Russian Samuilovich Shklovsky, an astronomer, suggested Phobos may be artificial, since he concluded the moon's orbit was decaying and could only be due to a very low density, possibly, even hollow. Buzz Aldrin, former astronaut, touted Phobos to President Obama as key to permanent space settlement. Aldrin also stirred interest with comments about the Phobos monolith. Richard C. Hoagland declares Phobos an artificial satellite that orbits three times a day around Mars just 4,000 miles above the surface. The orbit of Phobos is lower than any other moon in the solar system. Hoagland views grooves detected on Phobos as an object coming apart at the seams due to the pull of gravity.

The fate of the Russian Phobos 2 satellite probe is most astonishing, "the last transmission from Phobos 2 was a photograph of a gigantic cylindrical spaceship -- a huge, approx. 20km long, 1.5km diameter cigar-shaped 'mothership', that was photographed on 25 March 1989 hanging or parked next to the Martian moon Phobos by the Soviet unmanned sonde Phobos 2. After that last frame was radio-transmitted back to Earth, the probe mysteriously disappeared; according to the Russians it was destroyed - possibly knocked out with an energy pulse beam." A You Tube video covers the story of Phobos 1 and 2 here.

canals on mars?

Cecil Adams wrote "Whatever Happened to the Canals of Mars?", as a response to the popular myth.  Adams believes the lines spotted on the planet were an optical illusion.  In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, was first to widely circulate observations of  "canali" which means channels in Italian.  The English translation of Schiaparelli's work became canals, implying a source of higher intelligence however. "This idea was taken up a few years later by the amateur American astronomer Percival Lowell, who had built an observatory near Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell made detailed observations of Mars and published several popular books about the planet, notably Mars and Its Canals (1903), which included elaborate maps of the canals and outlined the theory that they were waterways used for irrigation."

 Lowell is the principal source for the longevity of the myth with Lowell's 1909 map of Mars.  Adams concludes the Mariner 9 satellite, which took close up pictures of Mars in 1971, dispelled once and for all "the canals myth" as an illusion, but at the same time, refers to many channels formed by some liquid that appear to be of natural origin.  Adams, an obvious debunker, brutally concludes his response with throwaway lines, "...the old theory that one of the Martian moons is an artificial satellite is out the window, too. As for that business in recent years about a "face" on Mars … please, let's say no more." 

Pictures taken by telescope of Mars such as this one by the Air Force as recent as 1962 along with a mapping history of the Red Planet can be found at the Planetary Blog.  The pictures would seem to push the idea of canals at least into the sixties as the present writer remembers?  Were the Mariner program pictures air brushed (no Photoshop) and why only map projections shown in this blog, which distort the planet's surface? The blog states the inelegant map projection is great for storing data but makes features far less apparent!  Is the Red Planet really red or a tint added?  Do you trust NASA? 
Please move along there is nothing to see here!

hundred years starship

NASA's Ames Research Center directer Pete Worden presented plans for space exploration mission to Mars at a recent conference in San Francisco, CA. The mission titled "Hundred Years Starship" will be a one way trip as studies show return trip would be too costly. "The strategy of one-way missions brings this goal within technological and financial feasibility." Worden is in negotiations with Larry Page, Google co-founder, to help fund the multi-billion dollar project. The project is out there as Worden contemplates, "...rather than make an environment on Mars like Earth, why don't we modify life ... including the human genome ... so it's better suited to [Mars]?" Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is also involved in turning the mission from science fiction to science fact.

defcon 6/9: wikileaked, registered & artificials

US intel analyst arrested in wikileaks video probe*
bbc: wikileaks site unfazed by arrest of US army 'source'*
video: state dept anxious about diplomatic secrets bradley manning allegedly downloaded*
wikileaks was launched with documents intercepted from tor*
wikileaks & julian paul assange in 'the new yorker'*
wikileaks denies tor hacker eavesdropping gave site its start* at&t leak leaves US apple ipad owners at risk*
bill gives feds 'emergency’ powers to secure civilian nets*
dhs would be cyber power center under lieberman/collins proposal*
nsa chief: US carefully monitoring military computer networks for sabotage*
wireless signals to be jammed in canada for g8 summit*
top US commander in iraq raises internet concerns*
new worries emerge about internet monitoring*
calls increase for govt to regulate net journalists & bloggers*
michigan considers law to register journalists*
lawyers claim google wi-fi sniffing 'is not an accident'*
chinese net addicts stage mutiny at boot camp*
ceo of firm that made $100m selling 'scareware' was a fugitive*
6 astronauts begin 520-day mock flight to mars*
approaching space object 'artificial, not asteroid' says nasa*
more active sun means nasty solar storms ahead*
ancient meteorite discovered in oregon*

stephen hawking warns over making contact with aliens

hawking: extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist;
if we encounter them, chances are we're f*cked
from bbc: Aliens almost certainly exist but humans should avoid making contact, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned. In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was "perfectly rational" to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere.

But he warned that aliens might simply raid Earth for resources, then move on. "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

Prof Hawking thinks that, rather than actively trying to communicate with extra-terrestrials, humans should do everything possible to avoid contact. He explained: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

related: nasa announces wednesday media teleconference about search for extraterrestrial life & ice on asteroid suggests earth's water came from space

defcon 4/15: transhumanism, twitter, radio waves & fireballs

merging man & machine: we are the internet*
youtube goes orwellian:
now requires sms from every new registrant*
how tweet it is!: library of congress acquires entire twitter archive*
russia has no plans to deploy weapons in space*
cyberwar doomsayer mcconnell lands $34m in govt cyberwar contracts for booz*
cyberwar commander survives senate hearing*
mysterious radio waves emitted from nearby galaxy*
video: massive fireball reported across midwestern sky*


update: obama lays out future of US space exploration*

defcon 4/8: hack, talk, listen & panic

uncle scam wants you (to fight hackers)*
federal infotech pros say US at high risk for cyberattack*
security 'guru' richard clarke talks cyberwar*
nasa listens for signs of life from mars lander*
april fool's ufo report sparks panic in jordan*