text:
A Wisconsin toddler found in the trunk of a car likely died of hyperthermia due to the heat, authorities said Friday.
The Polk County Sheriff's Department released a brief statement summarizing preliminary findings from an autopsy on 2-year-old Isaiah Theis. The examination showed the boy was normally developed and well-nourished. It revealed no sign of any diseases, traumatic injuries or broken bones.
The statement listed the cause of death as probable hyperthermia, a condition where body temperature spikes. The manner of death is still under investigation. Toxicology tests are still pending.
Sheriff Peter Johnson called the boy's death "a terrible" conclusion to the long search for him, WCCO-AM of Minneapolis reported.
"Obviously this is pretty much the worst ending we could have come to," Johnson said Friday at the end of a news conference, where he read a statement about the autopsy but did not take questions. "The only thing worse would have been if we would have never found him."
The boy's mother told investigators he disappeared Tuesday evening while playing with his 7-year-old brother at their home near Centuria, Wis., about 60 miles northeast of St. Paul, Minn.
The sheriff's department launched an exhaustive all-day search Wednesday amid blistering heat. A deputy finally found the boy's body late Wednesday evening in the trunk of a locked car parked outside the boy's home. His father runs an auto shop on the property, and the discovery was made when the car's owner came to retrieve it.
Searchers had looked inside the car and checked the area around it several times, the sheriff said in an earlier statement, but no one looked in the trunk.
Chief Deputy Steve Moe told reporters at a news conference Thursday that, in hindsight, he wished they had. But he said searchers were operating under the assumptions that Isaiah had wandered off, which he had a tendency to do, and that all the cars were locked so he couldn't get in them. He said deputies didn't have access to the keys, and that he's not certain whether the keys were on the property.
"Would we liked to have forced entry to the car? Yeah, from my personal perspective," Moe said.
He declined to speculate on how the boy ended up in the trunk and wouldn't say whether investigators consider his death an accident or the result of foul play.
Isaiah's maternal grandfather, Paul Krey, told KARE-TV that the car belonged to one of his son-in-law's customers. Krey said the car was parked there and waiting to be fixed. All the Theis children were comfortable hanging around the shop and spent plenty of time around the vehicles while their father worked, the grandfather said.
Krey did not immediately return a phone message Friday that The Associated Press left at a number believed to be to his residence in St. Paul. The voice mailbox for the boy's parents, Justin and Shawn Theis, was full on Friday and would not take any more messages.
About 2,450 civilian volunteers helped search the fields and woods surrounding the family's home throughout the day Wednesday, the sheriff said.
Debbra White, 51, of Milltown, Wis., left a teddy bear and a wind chime at a makeshift memorial near the scene. White told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that she lost her 8-year-old son more than 20 years ago when he drowned in the St. Croix River.
"There's nothing I can say to bring their son back," White said.


text:
- no detail
- some detail
- full detail
Adaptation to Current and Future Climate in Pastoral Communities Across Africa
Edna Wangui
Pastoralists around the world are exposed to climate change and increasing climate variability. Various downscaled regional climate models in Africa support community reports of rising temperatures as well as changes in the seasonality of rainfall and drought. In addition to climate, pastoralists have faced a second exposure to unsupportive policy environments. Dating back to the colonial period, a lack of knowledge about pastoralism and a systemic marginalization of pastoral communities influenced the size and nature of government investments in pastoral lands. National governments prioritized farming communities and failed to pay adequate attention to drylands and pastoral communities. The limited government interventions that occurred were often inconsistent with contemporary realities of pastoralism and pastoral communities. These included attempts at sedentarization and modernization, and in other ways changing the priorities and practices of pastoral communities.
The survival of pastoral communities in Africa in the context of this double exposure has been a focus for scholars, development practitioners, as well as national governments in recent years. Scholars initially drew attention to pastoralists' drought-coping strategies, and later examined the multiple ways in which pastoralists manage risk and exploit unpredictability. It has been learned that pastoralists are rational land managers whose experience with variable climate has equipped them with the skills needed for adaptation. Pastoralists follow several identifiable adaptation paths, including diversification and modification of their herds and herding strategies; adoption of livelihood activities that did not previously play a permanent role; and a conscious decision to train the next generation for nonpastoral livelihoods. Ongoing government interventions around climate change still prioritize cropping over herding. Sometimes, such nationally supported adaptation plans can undermine community-based adaptation practices, autonomously evolving within pastoral communities. Successful adaptation hinges on recognition of the value of autonomous adaptation and careful integration of such adaptation with national plans.
Adaptive Governance
Ronald D. Brunner and Amanda H. Lynch
Adaptive governance is defined by a focus on decentralized decision-making structures and procedurally rational policy, supported by intensive natural and social science. Decentralized decision-making structures allow a large, complex problem like global climate change to be factored into many smaller problems, each more tractable for policy and scientific purposes. Many smaller problems can be addressed separately and concurrently by smaller communities. Procedurally rational policy in each community is an adaptation to profound uncertainties, inherent in complex systems and cognitive constraints, that limit predictability. Hence planning to meet projected targets and timetables is secondary to continuing appraisal of incremental steps toward long-term goals: What has and hasn't worked compared to a historical baseline, and why? Each step in such trial-and-error processes depends on politics to balance, if not integrate, the interests of multiple participants to advance their common interest—the point of governance in a free society. Intensive science recognizes that each community is unique because the interests, interactions, and environmental responses of its participants are multiple and coevolve. Hence, inquiry focuses on case studies of particular contexts considered comprehensively and in some detail.
Varieties of adaptive governance emerged in response to the limitations of scientific management, the dominant pattern of governance in the 20th century. In scientific management, central authorities sought technically rational policies supported by predictive science to rise above politics and thereby realize policy goals more efficiently from the top down. This approach was manifest in the framing of climate change as an "irreducibly global" problem in the years around 1990. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to assess science for the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The parties negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that attempted to prescribe legally binding targets and timetables for national reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But progress under the protocol fell far short of realizing the ultimate objective in Article 1 of the UNFCCC, "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system." As concentrations continued to increase, the COP recognized the limitations of this approach in Copenhagen in 2009 and authorized nationally determined contributions to greenhouse gas reductions in the Paris Agreement in 2015.
Adaptive governance is a promising but underutilized approach to advancing common interests in response to climate impacts. The interests affected by climate, and their relative priorities, differ from one community to the next, but typically they include protecting life and limb, property and prosperity, other human artifacts, and ecosystem services, while minimizing costs. Adaptive governance is promising because some communities have made significant progress in reducing their losses and vulnerability to climate impacts in the course of advancing their common interests. In doing so, they provide field-tested models for similar communities to consider. Policies that have worked anywhere in a network tend to be diffused for possible adaptation elsewhere in that network. Policies that have worked consistently intensify and justify collective action from the bottom up to reallocate supporting resources from the top down. Researchers can help realize the potential of adaptive governance on larger scales by recognizing it as a complementary approach in climate policy—not a substitute for scientific management, the historical baseline.
Climate and Health across Africa
Benjamin F. Zaitchik
Humans have understood the importance of climate to human health since ancient times. In some cases, the connections appear to be obvious: a flood can cause drownings, a drought can lead to crop failure and hunger, and temperature extremes pose a risk of exposure. In other cases, the connections are veiled by complex or unobserved processes, such that the influence of climate on a disease epidemic or a conflict can be difficult to diagnose. In reality, however, all climate impacts on health are mediated by some combination of natural and human dynamics that cause individuals or populations to be vulnerable to the effects of a variable or changing climate.
Understanding and managing negative health impacts of climate is a global challenge. The challenge is greater in regions with high poverty and weak institutions, however, and Africa is a continent where the health burden of climate is particularly acute. Observed climate variability in the modern era has been associated with widespread food insecurity, significant epidemics of infectious disease, and loss of life and livelihoods to climate extremes. Anthropogenic climate change is a further stress that has the potential to increase malnutrition, alter the distribution of diseases, and bring more frequent hydrological and temperature extremes to many regions across the continent.
Skillful early warning systems and informed climate change adaptation strategies have the potential to enhance resilience to short-term climate variability and to buffer against negative impacts of climate change. But effective warnings and projections require both scientific and institutional capacity to address complex processes that are mediated by physical, ecological, and societal systems. Here the state of understanding climate impacts on health in Africa is summarized through a selective review that focuses on food security, infectious disease, and extreme events. The potential to apply scientific understanding to early warning and climate change projection is also considered.
Climate Change Adaptation Strategies of Local Governments in Japan
Kenshi Baba, Masahiro Matsuura, Taiko Kudo, Shigeru Watanabe, Shun Kawakubo, Akiko Chujo, Hiroharu Tanaka, and Mitsuru Tanaka
The latest climate change adaptation strategies adopted by local governments in Japan are discussed. A nationwide survey demonstrates several significant findings. While some prefectures and major cities have already begun to prepare adaptation strategies, most municipalities have yet to consider such strategies. This gap must be considered when studying the climate adaptation strategies of local governments in Japan, as municipal governments are crucial to the implementation of climate adaptation strategies due to high diversity in climate impacts and geographical conditions among municipalities within each prefecture in Japan. Key challenges for local governments in preparing adaptation strategies are the lack of expert knowledge and experience in the field of climate change adaptation, and compartmentalization of government bureaus. To address these issues, an interview study of six model prefectures in the SI-CAT (Social Implementation Program on Climate Change Adaptation Technology) project by the MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) was conducted in order to understand the details of challenges raised by adaptation among local governments in Japan. The survey results reveal that local government officials lack information regarding impact projections and tools for evaluating policy options, even though some of them recognize some of the impacts of climate change on rice crop, vegetable, and fruit production. In addition, different bureaus, such as agriculture, public health, and disaster prevention, focus on different outcomes of climate change due to their different missions. As this is the inherent nature of bureaucratic organizations, a new approach for encouraging collaboration among them is needed. The fact that most of the local governments in Japan have not yet assessed the local impacts of climate change, an effort that would lay the groundwork for preparing adaptation strategies, suggests the importance of cyclical co-design that facilitates the relationship between climatic technology such as climate models and impact assessment and local governments' needs so that the technology developments clarify the needs of local government, while those needs in turn nurture the seeds of technology.
Climate Change and Geopolitics
Simon Dalby
Historic discussions of climate often suggested that it caused societies to have certain qualities. In the 19th-century, imperial representations of the world environment frequently "determined" the fate of peoples and places, a practice that has frequently been used to explain the largest patterns of political rivalry and the fates of empires and their struggles for dominance in world politics. In the 21st century, climate change has mostly reversed the causal logic in the reasoning about human–nature relationships and their geographies. The new thinking suggests that human decisions, at least those made by the rich and powerful with respect to the forms of energy that are used to power the global economy, are influencing future climate changes. Humans are now shaping the environment on a global scale, not the other way around. Despite the widespread acceptance of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate-change action, numerous arguments about who should act and how they should do so to deal with climate change shape international negotiations. Differing viewpoints are in part a matter of geographical location and whether an economy is dependent on fossil-fuels revenue or subject to increasingly severe storms, droughts, or rising sea levels. These differences have made climate negotiations very difficult in the last couple of decades. Partly in response to these differences, the Paris Agreement devolves primary responsibility for climate policy to individual states rather than establish any other geopolitical arrangement. Apart from the outright denial that humanity is a factor in climate change, arguments about whether climate change causes conflict and how security policies should engage climate change also partly shape contemporary geopolitical agendas. Despite climate-change deniers, in the Trump administration in particular, in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement, climate change is understood increasingly as part of a planetary transformation that has been set in motion by industrial activity and the rise of a global fossil-fuel-powered economy. But this is about more than just climate change. The larger earth-system science discussion of transformation, which can be encapsulated in the use of the term "Anthropocene" for the new geological circumstances of the biosphere, is starting to shape the geopolitics of climate change just as new political actors are beginning to have an influence on climate politics.
Climate Change and Migration
Silja Klepp
The topic of climate change and migration attracts a strong following from the media and produces an increase in academic literature and reports from international governmental institutions and NGOs. It poses questions that point to the core of social and environmental developments of the 21st century, such as environmental and climate justice as well as North–South relations.
This article examines the main features of the debate and presents a genealogy of the discussion on climate change and migration since the 1980s. It presents an analysis of different framings and lines of argument, such as the securitization of climate change and connections to development studies and adaptation research. This article also presents methodological and conceptual questions, such as how to conceive interactions between migration and climate change. As legal aspects have played a crucial role since the beginning of the debate, different legal strands are considered here, including soft law and policy-oriented approaches. These approaches relate to questions of voluntary or forced migration and safeguarding the rights of environmental migrants.
This article introduces theoretical concepts that are prompted by analyzing climate change as an "imaginative resource" and by questioning power relations related to climate-change discourses, politics, and practices. This article recommends a re-politicization of the debate, questions the often victimizing, passive picture of the "drowning" climate-change migrant, and criticizes alarmist voices that can trigger perceived security interests of countries of the Global North. Decolonizing and critical perspectives analyze facets of the debate that have racist, depoliticizing, or naturalizing tendencies or exoticize the "other."
Climate Change Policy in the European Union
Tim Rayner and Andrew Jordan
The European Union (EU) has long claimed, with some justification, to be a leader in international climate policy. Its policy activities in this area, dating from the early 1990s, have had enormous influence within and beyond Europe. The period since ca. 2000 in particular has witnessed the repeated emergence of policies and targets that are increasingly distinct from national ones and sometimes globally innovative. They encompass a wide array of instruments (e.g., market-based, informational, voluntary, as well as regulatory). Policy development has been motivated by a mixture of concerns: to avoid national differences in policy causing distortions of the EU's internal market; to enhance the domestic legitimacy of the wider project of European integration; to improve energy security; and to increase economic competitiveness through "ecological modernization." Climate policy has also offered a means to enhance the standing of the EU as a global actor. The EU has, in general, been influential in international negotiations, for example, in its promotion of the 2°C warming limit and advocacy of emission reduction "targets and timetables." In turn, its own policy has been shaped by developments at global level, as with the surprisingly enthusiastic adoption of the "flexible mechanism" of emissions trading. However, it is becoming increasingly apparent that acute challenges to policy coherence and effectiveness—applying to emerging policy on adaptation, as well as mitigation—lie ahead in a Europe that is more polarized between its more environmentally conscious Member States and those in central and eastern Europe who have extracted significant concessions to protect their fossil fuel–intensive sectors. Although the Paris Agreement of 2015 offers an important opportunity to "ratchet up" the ambition of EU policy, it is proving to be a difficult one to seize.
The Climate Change Regime
Philipp Pattberg and Oscar Widerberg
In 1992, when the international community agreed on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the science of climate change was under development, global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were by and large produced by developed countries, and the concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere had just surpassed 350 ppm. Some 25 years later, climate change is scientifically uncontested, China has overtaken the United States as the world's biggest emitter of CO2, and concentrations are now measured above 400 ppm. Against this background, states have successfully concluded a new global agreement under the UNFCCC, the 2015 Paris Agreement. Prior to the Paris Agreement, the climate regime focused on allocating emission reduction commitments among (a group of) countries. However, the new agreement has turned the climate regime on its feet by introducing an approach based on Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Under this approach, states decide their ambition levels independently instead of engaging in negotiations about "who does what." The result is a more flexible system that for the first time includes all countries in the quest to reduce GHG emissions to keep temperature increase below 2°C compared to preindustrial levels. Moreover, the international climate regime has transformed into a regime complex, denoting the broad activities of smaller groups of states as well as non-party actors, such as cities, regions, companies, and non-governmental organizations along with United Nations agencies.
Climate Multilateralism
Eduardo Viola and Joana Castro Pereira
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.
The signing of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by 154 nations at the Rio "Earth Summit" in 1992 marked the beginning of multilateral climate negotiations. Aiming for the "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system," the Convention divided parties according to different commitments (developed countries with heavier mitigation and financing responsibilities on one side, and developing nations with fewer commitments on the other) and established the Common But Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) principle. In 1997, parties to the Convention adopted the Kyoto Protocol, which entered into force in 2005; the Protocol set internationally binding emission reduction targets based on a rigid interpretation of the CBDR principle. Different perceptions on a fair distribution of climate change mitigation costs hindered multilateral efforts to tackle the problem; climate change proved a "super wicked" challenge (intricately linked to security, development, trade, water, energy, food, land use, transportation, etc.) and this fact led to a lack of consensus on the distribution of rights and responsibilities among countries. Indeed, since 1992, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased every year, and the Kyoto Protocol did not reverse the trend. In 2009, a new political framework, the Copenhagen Accord, was signed; although parties recognized the need to limit global warming to < 2 °C to prevent dangerous climate change, they did not agree on a clear path toward a legally binding treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, whose first commitment period would end in 2012. A consensus would only be reached in 2015, when a new, legally binding treaty—the Paris Climate Agreement—committing all parties to limit global warming to "well below 2 °C," was finally signed; it came into force in November 2016. Described in many political, public, and academic contexts as a diplomatic success, the agreement suffers, however, from several limitations to its effectiveness: the voluntary nature of the commitments on curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (the Nationally Determined Contributions [NDC]), the weakness of the system established for monitoring the implementation of NDCs, the absence of established dates by which parties must achieve their GHG emissions peaks, the very small size of the Green Climate Fund to support developing countries in their mitigation and adaptation efforts, and the fact that many developing countries have made their NDCs dependent on international financial and technological support. NDCs presented thus far have a > 50% chance of exceeding 3 °C by 2100, placing the Earth at a potentially catastrophic level of climate change. The recent carbon dioxide emissions trajectory and foreseeable future emissions of major climate powers demonstrate the low level of climate commitment in the international system; forces that resist the profound transformations necessary to stabilize the Earth's climate dominate climate change governance. Climate multilateralism under the UNFCCC has failed thus far—throughout 25 years of international negotiations, global carbon emissions have increased substantially and at a rapid pace, and climate change has worsened significantly.
Climate Policy and Governance across Africa
Opha Pauline Dube
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Please check back later for the full article.
Africa, a continent with the largest number of countries falling under the category of Least Developed Countries (LDCs), remains highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture that suffers from low intake of water, exacerbating the vulnerability to climate variability and anthropogenic climate change. The increasing frequency and severity of climate extremes impose major strains on the economies of these countries. The loss of livelihoods due to interaction of climate change with existing stressors is elevating internal and cross-border migration. The continent is experiencing rapid urbanization, and its cities represent the most vulnerable locations to climate change due in part to incapacitated local governance. Overall, the institutional capacity to coordinate, regulate, and facilitate development in Africa is weak. The general public is less empowered to hold government accountable. The rule of law, media, and other watchdog organizations, and systems of checks and balances are constrained in different ways, contributing to poor governance and resulting in low capacity to respond to climate risks.
As a result, climate policy and governance are inseparable in Africa, and capacitating the government is as essential as establishing climate policy. With the highest level of vulnerability to climate change compared with the rest of the world, governance in Africa is pivotal in crafting and implementing viable climate policies.
It is indisputable that African climate policy should focus first and foremost on adaptation to climate change. It is pertinent, therefore, to assess Africa's governance ability to identify and address the continent's needs for adaptation. One key aspect of effective climate policy is access to up-to-date and contextually relevant information that encompasses indigenous knowledge. African countries have endeavored to meet international requirements for reports such as the National Communications on Climate Change Impacts and Vulnerabilities and the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs). However, the capacity to deliver on-time quality reports is lacking; also the implementation, in particular integration of adaptation plans into the overall development agenda, remains a challenge. There are a few successes, but overall adaptation operates mainly at project level. Furthermore, the capacity to access and effectively utilize availed international resources, such as extra funding or technology transfer, is limited in Africa.
While the continent is an insignificant source of emissions on a global scale, a more forward looking climate policy would require integrating adaptation with mitigation to put in place a foundation for transformation of the development agenda, towards a low carbon driven economy. Such a futuristic approach calls for a comprehensive and robust climate policy governance that goes beyond climate to embrace the Sustainable Development Goals Agenda 2030. Both governance and climate policy in Africa will need to be viewed broadly, encompassing the process of globalization, which has paved the way to a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The question is, what should be the focus of climate policy and governance across Africa under the Anthropocene era?
- no detail
- some detail
- full detail

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Wine barrels are generally toasted, not charred. Whiskey barrels are usually charred. I don't know what they do for tequila. I don't know that anyone sells barrels that are not at least lightly toasted.
I've never heard toast referred to as light char, but maybe that's just me. Light, Medium, Heavy toast, and some degrees in between. If they are talking about light char, it is burnt black - the degree of char refers to the extent of the char in the wood, how far it penetrates, that kind of thing. You can light different degrees of char just like with toast.


text:
A mish-mash of security issues came up this week, everything from how to protect virtualized environments to a system that protects copper in utility sites from robbery and a story about digital certificate thefts.
First though, this week brought news that hackers broke into the Kernel.org website that is home to the Linux project, according to Kernel.org's owners. With the barbarian hordes of the Internet having breached this bastion of Linux, Kernel.org's owners say they have contacted law enforcement in the U.S. and Europe as they try to figure out what happened.
Linux lovers should be asking how well the crown jewels of open source are being guarded and whether the best possible security controls are in place.
Other hacking incidents became public last week as well. WikiLeaks, which collects and disseminates information it gets from those who hack places like businesses and government, admitted it was hacked and a large cache of information it thought it held secret was disclosed, according to The Wall Street Journal. Just proves when you live by the sword you often die by the sword.
REPORT: Top cybersecurity concerns: Malicious code, employees run amok
And it's becoming increasingly obvious that hackers are prying open the door of older security technologies, such as certificates used for authentication, as it was discovered last week occurred when certificate authority DigiNotar, which is owned by Vasco Data Security, admitted a large number of its certificates had been stolen.
DigiNotar said it's halting sales of its certificates as browser makers Google, Mozilla and Microsoft seek to revoke the stolen ones. Does this make certificates once again look like a broken system?
VMworld: Security has to get virtual
If there was ever a disruptive force, it's virtualization. It's becoming clear to both the security industry and enterprise managers that it's not sufficient to exist with the same old security stuff used in the non-virtualized networks. At VMworld, the annual conference put on by VMware, which has the lion's share of the virtualization software market right now, a number of announcements related to security.
Not only were new products on display, but VMware, which has struggled with trying to bring security vendors into its vShield development efforts, got new backing from McAfee, Symantec, Kaspersky Lab, Lumension, Sophos and BitDefender. But there's still a lot of debate over whether agentless anti-malware is really going to fly, with Symantec saying it has doubts a fully agentless approach will work.
Kaspersky Lab says it expects to have at least one product specific to VMware ready by early next year. So far, Trend Micro has been the most aggressive in developing vShield-based anti-malware products for vSphere.
VMware, with help from Cisco, unveiled what's called "virtual extensible LANs (VXLAN)" that seek to retain the benefits of VLANs while also adding a virtual machine on the fly, according to VMware Chief Technology Officer Allwyn Sequiera, who says it will be supported in vSphere in the near future. Citrix points out this not just a VMware thing but that VXLAN is intended to be an IETF standard.
Meanwhile, many of the same security problems still arise. A annual survey on cybersecurity that asked more than 3,000 IT professionals what their biggest problems are found it's not just malicious code but also employees running amok. The human being is still the wild card in any security project.
U.S. Department of Energy devises security system to thwart rampant copper thefts
The U.S. Department of Energy and its Oak Ridge National Laboratory said this week they have built a security system that is aimed at thwarting at least some of the copper thefts that plague utilities and other large facilities.
Specifically, "ORNL, DOE, the utility and several subcontractors installed a comprehensive perimeter security system consisting of energy efficient lighting, surveillance cameras that operate in a high voltage environment and an anti-cut, anti-climb fence system with integral intrusion detection cable. The complete system protects a perimeter area of 3600 linear feet."
"This security system will deter future vandalism attempts, allow security officers to conduct surveillance remotely and will automatically alert security officers of an attempt to breach the perimeter so the officers can enact a proper response," project manager Brigham Thomas of ORNL's Global Nuclear Security Technology Division said in a release. The security system installation, calibration and performance testing were completed in early 2011. Since the implementation, the substation has not reported any security issues.
ORNL said the development of the anti-theft system came in response to a 2009 attempted theft of copper cable at a one of the DOE's Power Marketing Administration substations which sparked an explosion and fire that tripped three transmission lines offline. Although the utility recovered by rerouting the substation's power, other power providers have experienced blackouts and loss of service from similar copper theft attempts. The 2009 incident resulted in more than $1 million in damages, ORNL stated.
Copper thefts continue to rise as the metal's value remains high. A press release from Freemont Insurance this week noted there is a direct correlation between the number of thefts and the current selling price of copper. Recently copper traded between $4.50 and $5.00 per pound. This is up almost 60% since 2007.
The FBI has said in the past that the rising theft of the metal is threatening the critical infrastructure by targeting electrical substations, cellular towers, telephone land lines, railroads, water wells, construction sites and vacant homes for lucrative profits. Copper thefts have increased dramatically since 2006, and they continue to disrupt the flow of electricity, telecommunications, transportation, water supply, heating and security and emergency services, and present a risk to public safety and national security, the FBI stated.
Microsoft accused of collecting Windows Phone location data
PC World reports that a Windows Phone 7 user has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that the software maker collects data from mobile phone users without their knowledge.
Data, including location information, is collected from Windows Phone 7 devices such as the HTC 7 Mozart and Samsung Omnia 7 when a phone's camera is turned on, even if a user has chosen not to have data recorded, alleges the lawsuit filed in federal district court in Seattle by Rebecca Cousineau.
Cousineau is asking for both an injunction to stop Microsoft from collecting the data, and punitive damages to punish the company for collecting the information in the first place.
The lawsuit also contends that Microsoft misled Congress this year when it said that it did not collect data from mobile users without their permission, Reuters reported.
In a letter responding to queries from several members of the House of Representatives, Microsoft admitted that it "collects limited information necessary to determine the approximate location of a device," but added that "collection is always with the express consent of the user and the goal of our collection is never to track where a specific device has been or is going."
Microsoft collects location data from users to deliver "useful and relevant experiences to users, such as local movie options, directions to a nearby coffee shop or to find a meeting of nearby friends," the letter said.
Microsoft, Apple, Google and Nokia appeared at a congressional hearing this year on data collection practices by mobile operating system makers. That forum followed revelations by researchers that Apple was collecting location data from iPhone users without their knowledge. Researchers found that the data, gathered from cellphone towers, was being placed in an unprotected file on the user's phone and copied to the user's computer when that individual synchronized data between the handset and Apple's iTunes program.
Mac OS X can't properly revoke dodgy digital certificates
A programming glitch in Apple's OS X operating system is making it hard for Mac users to tell their computers not to trust digital certificates, exacerbating an ongoing security problem with a Dutch certificate authority that was recently hacked.
Mac users began reporting problems Tuesday when they tried to revoke digital certificates issued by DigiNotar, a Dutch company whose servers were compromised last month and used to issue fraudulent digital certificates. Mac users revoked the certificates on their computers, but still saw some sites that used those certificates being marked as trustworthy.
Digital certificates are an important part of the way the Internet works, and are essential whenever two computers try to connect using the HTTPS protocol. The problem is that Apple's operating system does not allow users to revoke DigiNotar certificates properly, and marks some websites as trustworthy when it shouldn't.
Seth Bromberger noticed the issue Tuesday afternoon. After reading a news report about DigiNotar being compromised, he decided to take matters into his own hands and revoke DigiNotar's certificates on his Mac, using Apple's Keychain software. That meant that any time he tried to visit a site signed by DigiNotar or one of its intermediaries, he should have received a warning.
He didn't. A visit to DigiNotar's website soon confirmed that all kinds of HTTPS material on the page that should have been marked by his browser as untrusted looked exactly as it had before he'd revoked the certificate. "I just wanted to validate that the solution that was proposed fixed the problem. And it didn't."
Most users don't revoke digital certificates themselves; they let the browser makers handle it. Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer have all blocked DigiNotar certificates, but Apple hasn't said what it plans to do with its Safari browser. That means that, for now, Mac Safari users will have a hard time solving the problem.
Hackers may have stolen more than 200 SSL certificates
Computerworld writes that hackers may have obtained more than 200 digital certificates from a Dutch company after breaking into its network, including ones for Mozilla, Yahoo and the Tor project.
The count is considerably higher than DigiNotar has acknowledged. Earlier this week, a company spokesman said that "several dozen" certificates had been acquired by the attackers.
"About 200 certificates were generated by the attackers," said Hans Van de Looy, principal security consultant and founder of Madison Gurka, a Dutch security company, citing a source he said wished to remain confidential.
Among the certificates acquired by the attackers in a mid-July hack of DigiNotar, Van de Looy's source said, were ones valid for mozilla.com, yahoo.com and torproject.org.
Tor is a system that lets people connect to the Web anonymously, and is often used in countries where governments monitor their citizens' online activities. Looy's number is similar to the tally of certificates that Google has blacklisted in Chrome.
An entry in the Chromium bug-tracking database lists 247 certificates that the project blacklisted yesterday. Chromium is the open-source project that feeds code to the Chrome browser and Chrome OS.
"Were these all issued by DigiNotar? It is difficult to tell," said Chet Wisniewski, a security researcher with U.K.-based Sophos, in a blog post Tuesday. "However, considering only 10 were blocked previously, this is a strong indication that these additional blacklisted certificates were most likely part of this incident."
DigiNotar, a Dutch firm that was acquired by U.S.-based Vasco earlier this year, discovered the network breach on July 19, and has confirmed intruders issued themselves valid certificates for a number of domains.
Read more about wide area network in Network World's Wide Area Network section.