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๐Ÿ”— Acoustic Kitty

๐Ÿ”— United States/U.S. Government ๐Ÿ”— United States ๐Ÿ”— Espionage ๐Ÿ”— Cats

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur.

This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation. Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, said Project Acoustic Kitty cost about $20 million.

The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately. However, this was disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former Director of the CIA's Office of Technical Service, who said that the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and "the equipment was taken out of the cat; the cat was re-sewn for a second time, and lived a long and happy life afterwards". Subsequent tests also failed. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss. However, other accounts report more success for the project.

The project was cancelled in 1967. A closing memorandum said that the CIA researchers believed that they could train cats to move short distances, but that "the environmental and security factors in using this technique in a real foreign situation force us to conclude that for our (intelligence) purposes, it would not be practical." The project was disclosed in 2001, when some CIA documents were declassified.

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๐Ÿ”— The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

๐Ÿ”— Books ๐Ÿ”— Computer Security ๐Ÿ”— Computer Security/Computing

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier is a work of nonfiction by Bruce Sterling first published in 1992.

The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987โ€“1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of "Knight Lightning" (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The book also profiles the likes of "Emmanuel Goldstein" (publisher of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly), the former assistant attorney general of Arizona Gail Thackeray, FLETC instructor Carlton Fitzpatrick, Mitch Kapor, and John Perry Barlow.

In 1994, Sterling released the book for the Internet with a new afterword.

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๐Ÿ”— Game Oriented Assembly Lisp

๐Ÿ”— Video games

Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, made for video games developed by Andy Gavin and the Jak and Daxter team at the company Naughty Dog.

It was written using Allegro Common Lisp and used in the development of the entire Jak and Daxter series of games.

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๐Ÿ”— Obesity in US 1985-2006

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๐Ÿ”— Smoothening complex polygons - Ramerโ€“Douglasโ€“Peucker algorithm

The Ramerโ€“Douglasโ€“Peucker algorithm, also known as the Douglasโ€“Peucker algorithm and iterative end-point fit algorithm, is an algorithm that decimates a curve composed of line segments to a similar curve with fewer points.

๐Ÿ”— Heilmeier's Catechism: questions for every startup, every project.

๐Ÿ”— Biography ๐Ÿ”— Biography/science and academia ๐Ÿ”— University of Pennsylvania

George Harry Heilmeier (May 22, 1936 โ€“ April 21, 2014) was an American engineer, manager, and a pioneering contributor to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Heilmeier's work is an IEEE Milestone.

๐Ÿ”— The Price of Anarchy

๐Ÿ”— Game theory

The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a concept in economics and game theory that measures how the efficiency of a system degrades due to selfish behavior of its agents. It is a general notion that can be extended to diverse systems and notions of efficiency. For example, consider the system of transportation of a city and many agents trying to go from some initial location to a destination. Let efficiency in this case mean the average time for an agent to reach the destination. In the 'centralized' solution, a central authority can tell each agent which path to take in order to minimize the average travel time. In the 'decentralized' version, each agent chooses its own path. The Price of Anarchy measures the ratio between average travel time in the two cases.

Usually the system is modeled as a game and the efficiency is some function of the outcomes (e.g. maximum delay in a network, congestion in a transportation system, social welfare in an auction, ...). Different concepts of equilibrium can be used to model the selfish behavior of the agents, among which the most common is the Nash equilibrium. Different flavors of Nash equilibrium lead to variations of the notion of Price of Anarchy as Pure Price of Anarchy (for deterministic equilibria), Mixed Price of Anarchy (for randomized equilibria), and Bayesโ€“Nash Price of Anarchy (for games with incomplete information). Solution concepts other than Nash equilibrium lead to variations such as the Price of Sinking.

The term Price of Anarchy was first used by Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou, but the idea of measuring inefficiency of equilibrium is older. The concept in its current form was designed to be the analogue of the 'approximation ratio' in an approximation algorithm or the 'competitive ratio' in an online algorithm. This is in the context of the current trend of analyzing games using algorithmic lenses (algorithmic game theory).

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๐Ÿ”— Communication with Submarines

๐Ÿ”— Technology ๐Ÿ”— Military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory ๐Ÿ”— Military history/Maritime warfare

Communication with submarines is a field within military communications that presents technical challenges and requires specialized technology. Because radio waves do not travel well through good electrical conductors like salt water, submerged submarines are cut off from radio communication with their command authorities at ordinary radio frequencies. Submarines can surface and raise an antenna above the sea level, then use ordinary radio transmissions, however this makes them vulnerable to detection by anti-submarine warfare forces. Early submarines during World War II mostly traveled on the surface because of their limited underwater speed and endurance; they dove mainly to evade immediate threats. During the Cold War, however, nuclear-powered submarines were developed that could stay submerged for months. Transmitting messages to these submarines is an active area of research. Very low frequency (VLF) radio waves can penetrate seawater a few hundred feet, and many navies use powerful VLF transmitters for submarine communications. A few nations have built transmitters which use extremely low frequency (ELF) radio waves, which can penetrate seawater to reach submarines at operating depths, but these require huge antennas. Other techniques that have been used include sonar and blue lasers.

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