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Data from Thule Greenland shows we have reached the dawn of the modern cosmic ray maximum! #GrandSolarMinimum #MagneticFieldReversal - Only getting worse from here folks. Twitter link: https://twitter.com/TheRealS0s/status/1014263701032001537/photo/1

Residents of Newfoundland, Canada, were greeted with snow and biting cold winds Tuesday morning despite the fact that July begins in just a few days. Gander, Newfoundland, reported light snow and a wind chill of 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the hours after sunrise Tuesday. The average high temperature in this city of nearly 12,000 people is in the 60s during June and near 70 degrees in July. Photos and videos from Gander and other parts of Newfoundland showed the snow accumulating not only on grassy areas but also on roads. For geographic reference, Newfoundland is a part of Canada's easternmost...

Detroit News: April on track to be the coldest in 143 years A year ago today, on April 19, 2017, it was 78 degrees and sunny, while Thursday's expected high is 48 degrees, said National Weather Service meteorologist Trent Frey. As of Thursday, the average temperature for April is 38.3 degrees, slightly warmer than April 1874, the coldest on record at 37.6 degrees. Chicago Tribune: More spring snow in Chicago, and forecasters call April's start among coldest in 130 years The first half of April marks the second-coldest start to the month since 1881, about when the weather service started...

March 2018 was the least active month for sunspots since the middle of 2009, almost nine years ago. In fact, activity in the past few months has been so low it matches the low activity seen in late 2007 and early 2008, ten years ago when the last solar minimum began

Lead author, Henrik Svensmark, from The Technical University of Denmark has long held that climate models had greatly underestimated the impact of solar activity. He says the new research identified the feedback mechanism through which the sun’s impact on climate was varied. Professor Svensmark’s theories on solar impact have caused a great deal of controversy within the climate science community and the latest findings are sure to provoke new outrage. He does not dispute that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have a warming impact on the climate. But his findings present a challenge to estimates of how...

Stardate 20021005.2128 (On Screen): As I think many of my readers know, I used to work for Qualcomm designing cell phones. Qualcomm is the company which invented CDMA, and made it practical, and made it into a market success, and it now dominates the American market, where Verizon and Sprint both use it. There are two other nationwide cellular systems: AT&T currently uses IS-136 TDMA, which is obsolete and has no upgrade path. Cingular uses GSM, a more sophisticated form of TDMA from Europe. And right now I'm basking in the evil glow of a major case of schadenfreude. The...

Inside Iraqi Corruption Charles R. Smith Tuesday, March 29, 2005 John A. Shaw is a curious example of Washington politics gone mad. Shaw is a veteran government employee who served inside the White House under Presidents Ford, Nixon and Reagan and was an associate deputy secretary in the Department of Commerce. In 2001, Shaw was appointed by Bush Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld to head the newly formed Office of International Technology Security. In this post, Shaw began the difficult task of reforming government controls over the export of sensitive technology to foreign countries. In 2003, Shaw began investigating allegations of...

| 1,755 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment Apple (AAPL) has increased its global shipment goals for the iPhone for the calendar first quarter to 20-21 million units from 19 million units, according to DigiTimes, which citing “sources with Taiwan-based component suppliers.” The company plans to ship 14-15 million of the current version of the phone, with a target of 5-6 million units of the yet-to-be-announced CDMA version of the iPhone that is widely expected to be offered on Verizon Wireless and possibly other carriers early in 2011. The story said December quarter shipments were about 15.5 million units,...

The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy. The Democratic comptroller’s spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack. “If it turns out to be financially feasible and if they can demonstrate an ability to pay off the bonds and comply...

"A security researcher created a $1,500 cell phone base station kit (including a laptop and two RF antennas) that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls in the clear. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate the system. The device tricks the phones into disabling encryption and records call details and content before they are routed on their proper way through voice-over-IP. The low-cost, home-brewed device ... mimics more expensive devices already used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies — called IMSI catchers —...

Cell phone industry group calls the research "illegal"; insists that there is little threatFor 21 years, the same encryption algorithm, A5/1, has been employed to protect the privacy of calls under the Global Systems for Mobile communications (GSM) standard. With the GSM standard encompassing 80 percent of calls worldwide (AT&T and T-Mobile use it within the U.S.) -- far more than the leading rival standard CDMA -- this could certainly be considered a pretty good run. However, someone has finally deciphered and published a complete analysis of the standard's encryption techniques in an effort to expose their weaknesses and prompt...

BLOG: Note: The following blog entry is a quote: http://www.thememriblog.org/iran/blog_personal/en/13152.htm Report: New Iranian Remote-Control Mini-Submarine A report was released in Iran about a mini-submarine operated by remote control, with a GSM system or onboard computer, that can reach a depth of eight meters and carry eight kg of explosives. The submarine's planners say that the sub is invisible to radar, and that the robot on board will sense when a diver approaches the sub and will release hormones to attract schools of fish, thereby concealing it from diver. Source: Fars, Iran, January 21, 2009 Posted at: 2009-01-23

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cingular Wireless, a venture of AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., said on Monday it would start charging customers with older phones an extra $4.99 monthly fee as early as September unless they upgrade their phones as it moves toward using a single network technology. The biggest U.S. wireless service, said the fee would apply to about 4.7 million subscribers, or about 8 percent, of its 57.3 million customer base unless these users upgrade their phones. It is part of Cingular's plan to phase out phones based on older TDMA and analog technology, the technical standard for...

AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs The story of a botched CRM upgrade that cost the telco thousands of new customers and an estimated $100 million in lost revenue. Hard lessons learned. BY CHRISTOPHER KOCH Executive Summary Last fall, AT&T Wireless frantically tried to complete a CRM upgrade to Siebel 7. It had to be done in time to handle the customer service challenges accompanying a Federal Communications Commission deadline for allowing customers to change carriers without changing their phone numbers. The effort was a failure. Systems crashed and stayed down. Customer reps could not keep up, and angry customers abandoned the...

               February 18, 2004 Baghdad's GSM network launched   France's Alcatel and Orascom Telecom (OTH) have launched the first commercial GSM network in the Central region of Iraq including Baghdad, according to an OTH news release. The contract is part of the Global Frame Agreement signed between OTH and Alcatel, further enhancing their ongoing relationship in the Middle East and Africa. In the frame of the contract signed in September, Alcatel is one of the major suppliers of this new network. The first phase of the network installation started in October. OTH is hoping to reach...

Cryptology experts at the Technion in Haifa have managed to crack the code used by 850 million cellular phones, finding faults that could be used by thieves to steal calls and even to impersonate phone owners in the middle of an ongoing call. If the cellular phone companies in 197 countries want to correct the code errors that exposes them to trickery and abuse, they will have to call in each customer to make a change in the cellphone's programming. The researchers -- Prof. Eli Biham of the Technion's computer sciences faculty, doctoral student Elad Barkan and master's degree graduate...

In a region devastated by war, the BBC's Hiwa Osman found the Kurds of northern Iraq surprisingly connected to the wired world, as he reports in the second of four features. In the vibrant city of Sulaymaniyah, I was able to easily check my e-mails and surf the web on a state-of-the-art computer, all for the moderately inexpensive rate of $1.50 per hour. For $50 a month, I can have unlimited access to the internet at home, once we get a digital line, said a student in the centre, who was holding an audio and video chat with his sister...

Iraq war sparks wireless row The widening gulf between the US and European countries opposed to the war has spread to the world of wireless. A band of US politicians are angered over plans to build a communication system in post-war Iraq based upon European wireless standards. Members of the US Congress are adding their names to a letter drafted by Californian republican Darrell Issa objecting to the use of US funds to build a GSM network in Iraq after Saddam has gone. They want the government to use the US-developed CDMA standard instead. Support for US firms Congressman Issa...

Acting on reports that the Defense Department wants to build a wireless communications infrastructure in postwar Iraq that follows the Global System for Mobile Communications standard, a California congressman has launched his own pre-emptive strike. He has introduced a bill that would require American communications technology. GSM, developed in Europe, is the dominant cellular technology there. In the United States, Code Division Multiple Access is the most common type of service, although GSM is growing here.

<p>Texas Instruments breaks new ground with its bundling of three technologies into a single chipset.</p> <p>Back in September, I wrote a column lauding Texas Instruments for its breakthrough designs that reduced from four to one the number of chips needed to operate a cell phone. Looks like the company is at it again.</p>