Tag Archives: tech

Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

by tf942pe Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect Tesla’s Q2 results.

Tesla Motors surprised Wall Street this afternoon, announcing second-quarter profits of $26 million on $405 million in revenue. Since it reported its first modest profit in May, the electric-car company cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk already had seen its share price more than double, and you can expect it to soar even higher when the markets open tomorrow. Many analysts, after all, were expecting Tesla to take a hit. But so far, the company’s profits have relied on government subsidies and initiatives.

Tesla’s own accomplishments are impressive. The company, founded in 2004, is selling its all-electric cars as fast as it can produce them, even though the baseline price for a Model S sedan is nearly $70,000. Car and Driver says the Model S is possibly the best car it has ever tested. Musk has built a successful company after years of scraping by low on funds while sinking money into researching and developing amazing cars.

In January 2010, as Tesla was developing the Model S, it received a $465 million dollar loan from the Department of Energy (DOE). That’s not to mention other, less direct subsidies, like the millions of dollars in subsidies in Japan that helped Panasonic develop the lithium-ion batteries that are at the heart of every Tesla car. Tesla’s modest first-quarter profit relied on $68 million from zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) credits it sold to other, less environmentally friendly car companies under a California emissions mandate. There’s also the $7,500 federal tax break for people who buy electric vehicles, which makes its pricey cars more affordable.

As for today’s results. Tesla earned $51 million on ZEV credits, without which it would not have been able to report a profit.

Tesla is a model for how government support can help bring ambitious new technologies to market. But you won’t hear Elon Musk saying that. To the contrary, he has tweeted about how he thinks we’d be better off passing a carbon tax instead of the hefty loan that floated Tesla at a key moment. Musk claims the DOE loan was merely an “accelerant” for Tesla. The company was “bailed in, not bailed out,” Musk quipped during an interview with Popular Mechanics last year.

Could Tesla have made it this far without government support? And will the company—not to mention Musk’s other enterprises, SpaceX and SolarCity—stand alone in the future? Let’s take a look at Tesla’s climb to success.

1. Starting in 2004, Tesla drums up millions in private cash so it can build an electric car from scratch. Musk leads several private financing rounds, and dumps in a substantial chunk of his own cash.

2. By 2008, Tesla has spent years designing its first car, the Roadster, but still has nothing to sell to customers. The car is taking years longer to bring to market, and costing a lot more, than Tesla execs had predicted. Tesla slashes its workforce. Musk takes over as CEO and eventually pushes hard for the federal loan, which Tesla receives in January 2010.

3. The loan helps Tesla get the Model S to market. The car gets (mostly) rave reviews, setting the stage for a successful IPO in June 2010, when Tesla raises $226 million selling stock to the public.

4. The IPO and brisk sales of the Model S (made more affordable by that $7,500 federal tax credit) allow Tesla to pay off its loan years early. In May 2013, thanks to $68 million in revenues from selling California clean-air credits to rival car makers, Tesla posts its first profit, a modest $11 million.

5. Profitability sends Tesla’s stock price soaring. Today’s earnings report may boost it even further.

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the Second Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

by Guadalupe Williams Posted on August 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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“Quantum Leap” was the name of a popular TV show from the early nineties about a quantum physicist who jumps through time inhabiting different bodies with each leap. It is also the name the US Special Operations Command’s DC-area branch gave to an unusual project investigating how to combat crime by exploiting social media. An unclassified document, dated September 2012 obtained by Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy News, reveals that this special ops division met with at least a dozen data mining companies in the last year in an effort to utilize sophisticated tech tools to the exploit the personal information Americans publicly post on the web. The US Special Operations Command now claims that the project has been disbanded—but the report describes QUANTUM LEAP as a success.

The goal of QUANTUM LEAP, according to the report, was to conduct multiple experiments over a period of six months to explore how open source applications could be used to combat a range of crimes, including human and drug trafficking and terrorism. The first experiment, assisting with a money laundering case, involved approximately 50 government and industry participants. “Overall the experiment was successful in identifying strategies and techniques for exploiting open sources of information, particularly social media,” the report notes.

The most heavily used tool in this experiment, according to the report, was Raptor X—which included a plugin called “Social Bubble” that allowed special ops to summon “data via the Twitter API to display Twitter users, their geographic location, posted Tweets and related metadata in the Raptor X geospatial display.” Other tools created by industry partners included one that could “index the internet…as well as collect large quantities of data from the deep web,” and another that performed “real time and automated analysis of publicly available data in all media channels, especially the social media, in many languages.” All in all, during the financial crime scenario alone, the the DC special ops divisions identified more than 200 open-source tools that could be useful.

“This report suggests that a lot can be accomplished…before even taking advantage of clandestine collection capabilities,” says Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “And the prominent role played by industry is striking. Private firms are the ones providing the tools and tactics to the military for data mining open sources.”

Ken McGraw, a spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command, said in a statement that “We cannot confirm the validity of any of the information listed in the After Action Report. The only information we have received so far is the program is no longer in existence and the people who worked on the program are no longer there.”

But Aftergood notes that based on the report, “the initial results were promising. They produced useful leads. So either the initial results did not pan out, or else the subsequent work was moved elsewhere.”

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QUANTUM LEAP: The US Special Ops Project to Exploit Your Twitter Account

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This Solar Backpack Can Charge Your Tech

by Lubomyr21t Posted on August 2, 2013

BirkSun’s Levels backpack comes with a built-in 4.5 watt solar panel. Photo: BirkSun

BirkSun, a new company based in San Francisco, makes solar-powered bags and backpacks that make it possible to charge your small electronics while on-the-go. Earth911 staff writer Katie Sukalich recently had the opportunity to test out BirkSun’s Levels backpack ($150), which features a 4.5 watt solar panel and can charge your phone, music player, iPad and a handful of other gadgets.

My initial observations about the backpack were that it looked attractive and functional. The solar panel isn’t huge like some panels, so if I wore the backpack while walking down the street, people probably wouldn’t stare at my back wondering what I was wearing. The backpack also has pockets for holding a water bottle and laptop and it has a bungee cord on the front, which BirkSun suggests could hold wet items. The Levels backpack’s design makes it versatile, so it could be used in a variety of situations.

Click through to learn more about how the Levels backpack works.

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This Solar Backpack Can Charge Your Tech

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The Onion Predicts Real Life: Republicans Block NASA’s Asteroid Plan

by oe8o7kdg Posted on July 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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President Obama’s plan to have NASA lasso an asteroid, tow it toward Earth, place it into the moon’s orbit, and claim the space rock for the United States of America has hit a congressional snag. The New York Times reports:

NASA wants to launch an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 that would capture a small asteroid — maybe 7 to 10 yards wide — haul it closer to Earth, then send astronauts up to examine it, in 2021 or beyond.

But the space agency has encountered a stubborn technical problem: Congressional Republicans…The science committee in the Republican-controlled House voted to bar NASA from pursuing that faraway rock. In a straight party vote — 22 Republicans for, 17 Democrats against — the committee laid out a road map for NASA for the next three years that brushed aside the asteroid capture plan, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s agenda for space exploration. The plan, instead, included new marching orders, telling NASA to send astronauts back to the Moon, set up a base there and then aim for Mars (and to do so with less money than requested).

Not only would the asteroid-lasso initiative have astronauts travel to the space rock to conduct mining operations and test technology for missions to Mars—it would allow NASA to research strategies for deflecting future, potentially world-ending asteroids.

In a way, the Times got scooped on this story. By the Onion. More than two years ago:

The Onion

The Onion, one of America’s leading satirical news outlets, has predicted the future before. Al Qaeda squabbling with 9/11 truthers, for instance. Or the Onion‘s piece on George W. Bush ushering in an era of war and economic recession…published in January 2001.

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The Onion Predicts Real Life: Republicans Block NASA’s Asteroid Plan

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What if Apple and Google Went to War?

by johnsmith2345as Posted on July 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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What would happen if Apple and Google went to war? Really went to war, that is? I think I resisted getting sucked into this, but it’s pretty amusing. Worth a read over lunchtime.

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What if Apple and Google Went to War?

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The Best Place for Solar Power is… New Jersey?

by 2343b4u4u Posted on July 30, 2013

Solar panels hang over a New Jersey Parking Lot. Photo: Flickr/Armando Jimenez, U.S. Army Environmental Command

Written by John Platt, Mother Nature Network

The Arizona desert may enjoy nearly endless sun, but is it the really best place for solar panels? Maybe not.

A new study suggests that cloudier New Jersey is actually the state that will get the most value from switching to photovoltaics, not because of the amount of sunlight in the Garden State but because adding solar power capacity there would result in the greatest reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and dangerous pollutants.

The same might hold true for wind turbines: the most value could come not from the places with most wind but the areas that have the dirtiest air. “A wind turbine in West Virginia displaces twice as much carbon dioxide and seven times as much health damage as the same turbine in California,” explains Siler Evans, a Ph.D. researcher in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the lead author of the new study, published earlier this month in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A wind turbine in W Virginia displaces 2x the CO2 as the same one in CA.

The difference in West Virginia’s case comes from reliance on coal as its current source of energy. Transitioning from coal to wind in West Virginia would generate electricity while also improving residents’ health and help to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

The Altamont Pass wind farm. Photo: California Energy Commission

In addition to health and climate concerns, the paper also addresses the economic factor. The researchers argue that the federal Production Tax Credit, which subsidizes wind energy, would have a greater social impact if it varied by location, instead of being implemented in the same manner across the country. “It is time to think about a subsidy program that encourages operators to build plants in places where they will yield the most health and climate benefits,” co-author Ines Lima Azevedo, executive director of the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making, said in a press release about the new study.

Outside of federal subsidies, state subsidies have resulted in the rapid growth of solar and wind power in the Southwest and Midwest. The authors argue that these might not be the best places. Using their criteria of providing the most social value, they say the best sites for future wind and solar would be Ohio, West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, all of which rely heavily on coal.

The Carnegie Mellon study is accompanied by a related commentary by authors from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and other organizations who say the “co-benefits” of using solar and wind to reduce CO2 and sulfur dioxide emissions present “a compelling narrative” for policy makers. The authors argue that there are “synergies between renewable energy policy and health and climate protection” that governments could put to good use both in the U.S. and the European Union.

More from Mother Nature Network:
Sebastopol is second Californian city to require solar on new homes
20 amazing wind farm photos
9 ingenious wind turbine designs
Researchers develop world’s most accurate solar potential software

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The Best Place for Solar Power is… New Jersey?

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Will Russian Hackers Cause the Next Financial Crisis?

by Laura Posted on July 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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The US brought criminal charges Thursday against a gang of Russian and Ukrainian programmers in what is the biggest hacking case yet in the United States. The men were indicted for a long-running scheme of stealing and selling 160 million credit card numbers from more than a dozen big American companies. But the case has bigger implications, according to a story in the New York Times today. One of the men was also able to hack into the servers of the Nasdaq stock exchange, raising fears among US and international authorities that the next financial crisis could be caused by rogue programmers.

One of the Russian men, Aleksandr Kalinin, was also charged Thursday in a separate case with having gained access to Nasdaq servers for two years between 2007 and 2010. The indictment reveals that Kalinin, who also went by the names Grig and Tempo, had access to an unknown amount of information on a bunch of Nasdaq servers, where he was able to enter commands to steal, change, or delete data, and at certain points could even perform systems administrator functions. According to the Times, federal prosecutors, international banking regulators, the FBI, and the financial industry are all worried that next time this happens hackers could gain access to even more tightly secured trading platforms and disrupt the financial system.

From the Times:

While Mr. Kalinin never penetrated the main servers supporting Nasdaq’s trading operations—and appears to have caused limited damage at Nasdaq—the attack raised the prospect that hackers could be getting closer to the infrastructure that supports billions of dollars of trades each hour.

“As today’s allegations make clear, cybercriminals are determined to prey not only on individual bank accounts, but on the financial system itself,” Preet Bharara, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in announcing the case.

It is a pivotal moment, just a week after a report from the World Federation of Exchanges and an international group of regulators warned about the vulnerability of exchanges to cybercrime. The report said that hackers were shifting their focus away from stealing money and toward more “destabilizing aims.”

In a survey conducted for the report, 89 percent of the world’s exchanges said that hacking posed a “systemic risk” to global financial markets…

At a Senate hearing on cybersecurity on Thursday, a representative of several financial industry groups, Mark Clancy, said that “for the financial services industry, cyberthreats are a constant reality and a potential systemic risk to the industry.”

The World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) report found that 53 percent of all stock exchanges had experienced a cyberattack in the past year.

My colleague Nick Baumann has reported on how mere programming glitches at the mid-sized financial firm Knight Capital a year ago caused losses at the firm of $10 million a minute, and set off turmoil in the stock market. But an intentional attack could have more drastic effects. Baumann pointed to a 2011 article by John Bates, a computer scientist who has designed software behind complicated trading algorithms. “Fears of algorithmic terrorism, where a well-funded criminal or terrorist organization could find a way to cause a major market crisis, are not unfounded,” Bates wrote at the time. “This type of scenario could cause chaos for civilization.”

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Will Russian Hackers Cause the Next Financial Crisis?

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New Report: The State Department’s Anti-Hacking Office Is a Complete Disaster

by Gwenda Bischof Posted on July 23, 2013

Mother Jones

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The State Department has plenty of important secrets—classified cables, foreign policy directives, embassy plans, and more. It also has a department (with a nine-word name) responsible for protecting those secrets from hackers: the Bureau of Information Resource Management’s Office of Information Assurance. Yet according to an unusually scathing new report from the State Department’s inspector general, this “lead office” for cybersecurity is so dysfunctional and technologically out-of-date that Foggy Bottom may be open to cyberattack.

The IG’s audit of the cybersecurity office, which took place earlier this year, concluded that the office “wastes personnel resources,” is unequipped to monitor $79 million in contracts, “has no mission statement,” and “is not doing enough and is potentially leaving Department systems vulnerable.” The report notes that department employees usually cannot find the head of the bureau because he’s often not in the office, and as a result, they don’t know what their work priorities are. The IG report notes that because of these problems, other parts of the department have to pick up the slack.

“This report reads like a what-not-to-do list from every policy, program, and contracting perspective,” says Scott Amey, the general counsel for the Project On Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group where I used to work. “With stories about foreign entities hacking US government systems and questions about non-authorized access to classified information, this latest IG report causes major concerns about the State Department’s ability to protect government systems.”

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New Report: The State Department’s Anti-Hacking Office Is a Complete Disaster

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Don’t Read This If You’re Afraid of the Dark

by Abe Smith Posted on July 22, 2013

Mother Jones

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A country whose capital, Paris, made history with its “City of Light” glowing streets is suddenly trying to dial them down. Starting this summer, a French decree mandates that public buildings and shops must keep lights off between 1 a.m. and 7 a.m in attempt to preserve energy and cut costs, and “reduce the print of artificial lighting on the nocturnal environment.”

As France’s move suggests, civilization’s ever-growing imprint on the night sky has more than just stargazers concerned. In his new book, The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, writer Paul Bogard bemoans how our last dark spaces are slowly being devoured by the “light trespass” of artificial rays. A team of astronomers recently projected that while the US population is growing at a rate of less than 1.5 percent a year, the amount of artificial light is increasing at an annual rate of 6 percent. It’s more than just a nostalgia for primordial darkness that’s eating at Bogard: Too much light causes animals to go haywire, derails natural cycles, and damages human health.

The greatest sources of light pollution in cities worldwide are street lamps and parking lots, partially because we’ve been bred to believe that public lighting equals safety. Take this recent map of the number one 311 complaint of New Yorkers during the summer of 2012; people wig out when there’s a dark bulb on their block.

But there’s a chance we have it all wrong, argues Bogard. In the late ’70s, a US Department of Justice report found no statistical evidence that street lighting reduced crime. More recently, similar findings—such as this 2008 review by California’s public utilities company—have been largely ignored by the general public.

Optometrist Alan Lewis, former president of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, argues in the The End of Night that the glare of poorly designed street lamps (“probably eighty percent of street lighting”) can even make it harder to see things at night. Our eyes don’t have a chance to adjust to darker areas, and the extreme contrasts make our night vision poor.

It gets much worse than not being able to see in the dark. Scientists have unearthed troubling links between artificial light and our most feared diseases: obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular risk, and cancer. Apart from preventing people from getting adequate shut-eye, electric light at night has been show to suppress the body’s production of melatonin, which is thought to play an important role in keeping certain cancers, such as breast and prostate cancer, from growing. Potent “blue” lights—such as those used in certain energy-efficient LEDs, and on tablets, cellphones, computers, and TVs—may be the worst culprits. “It turns out that the wavelength of light that most directly affects our production of melatonin at night,” writes Bogard, “is exactly the wavelength of light that we are seeing more and more of in the modern world.”

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Don’t Read This If You’re Afraid of the Dark

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FAQ: What You Need to Know About the NSA’s Surveillance Programs

by DorothyUn Posted on June 28, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the ProPublica website.

There have been a lot of news stories about NSA surveillance programs following the leaks of secret documents by Edward Snowden. But it seems the more we read, the less clear things are. We’ve put together a detailed snapshot of what’s known and what’s been reported where.

What information does the NSA collect and how?
We don’t know all of the different types of information the NSA collects, but several secret collection programs have been revealed:

A record of most calls made in the United States, including the telephone number of the phones making and receiving the call, and how long the call lasted. This information is known as “metadata” and doesn’t include a recording of the actual call (but see below). This program was revealed through a leaked secret court order instructing Verizon to turn over all such information on a daily basis. Other phone companies, including AT&T and Sprint, also reportedly give their records to the NSA on a continual basis. All together, this is several billion calls per day.

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FAQ: What You Need to Know About the NSA’s Surveillance Programs

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