Blogger Pre-Note: at least in Prescott residents do know what's going on in planning and development - 50 people showed up to express concerns that consultants were bring Mesa Arizona to Prescott.... and not liking it
Residents react to Deep Well Ranch plans
No ‘cookie- cutter’ homes, reflect Prescott’s qualities
By Cindy Barks Originally Published: July 20, 2017 6:02 a.m
"With as many as 10,000 new homes expected to be built in northeast Prescott over the next five decades, current residents made it clear this week what they don’t want: “Cookie-cutter” neighborhoods... About 50 people turned out at Prescott City Hall Tuesday, July 18, for the second open-house meeting conducted by developers to introduce the Deep Well Ranch multi-use project, which is planned on 1,800 acres along Highway 89 between Prescott and Chino Valley. The plan shows a mixture of single-family, multi-family, business and light industrial uses. Local resident Jerry Stricklin led off the audience comments by maintaining that the preliminary planning for the Deep Well project shows none of Prescott’s unique character.To counteract that, Stricklin urged the developers to “try to make this something that really stands out; do something different; take some chances.” He added: “I’ve seen this plan many times.” Local resident Bob White expressed similar views. “Trying to apply a cookie-cutter approach to Prescott is out of order,” he said, maintaining that the consultants were bringing “Mesa, Arizona, to Prescott.” Here's how it works in Prescott: In response to audience concerns about how the development would proceed, Barger said he expects the first step to be a gas station near the intersection of Willow Creek Road and Highway 89. After that, he said a school could follow, as well as some light industrial development. Read more > The Daily Courier
18 W Main Street, former home of Monsterlandthe long-defunct combination haunted house-and-nightspot, that opened its doors back in 2013 as a Medieval-themed Wedding and Events venue, has posted signs on the front windows that it is going out-of-business. With 12 other catering locations here in downtown Mesa, it's the first to suffer the fall-out from too much competition when it got outclassed by too many other options. 12 W Main Street on the north side right next door might have the same fate.
It's in a good location and a potential 'hot spot' for real estate investment - right across Main Street from 29 W Main, snatched-up by AZ State Senator and would-be downtown land-grabber politician Bob Worley who scooped-up with his cohorts, as rumor has it, 10-12 other "under-performing" properties at the going offer of $100/square foot to control the real estate here in the The New Urban DTMesa. Future plans have not been made public at this point-in-time but there are quite a few people wanting to throw some concrete on the other Main Street blocks... time-and-finance will tell the rest of the story
Now in the sixth decade of his professional life, Herbie Hancock remains where he has always been: at the forefront of world culture, technology, business and music. In addition to being recognized as a legendary pianist and composer, Herbie Hancock has been an integral part of every popular music movement since the 1960’s.
As a member of the Miles Davis Quintet that pioneered a groundbreaking sound in jazz, he also developed new approaches on his own recordings, followed by his work in the 70s – with record-breaking albums such as “Headhunters” – that combined electric jazz with funk and rock in an innovative style that continues to influence contemporary music. “Rockit” and “Future Shock” marked Hancock’s foray into electronic dance sounds; during the same period he also continued to work in an acoustic setting with V.S.O.P., which included ex-Miles Davis bandmates Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams.
[BLOGGER'S NOTE: While Executive Chef for Special Events at The Loeb Boathouse inside Central Park/New York City, it was a pleasure for me and the entire staff to cater Miles Davis' 67th Birthday Celebration - it was his last birthday blow-out on Earth - Members of his band, like Herbie Hancock and other others carry on to evolve musically ]
In honor of his work, Hancock was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in February 2016. Hancock is currently in the studio at work on a new album.
Hancock will be joined at this performance by Vinnie Colaiuta (drums), James Genus (bass), Lionel Loueke (guitar) and Terrace Martin (keyboardist / saxophonist).
Today, July 19th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the CIA contractor Raytheon Blackbird Technologies for the "UMBRAGE Component Library" (UCL) project. The documents were submitted to the CIA between November 21st 2014 (just two weeks after Raytheon acquired Blackbird Technologies to build a Cyber Powerhouse) and September, 11th 2015.
They mostly contain Proof-of-Concept ideas and assessments for malware attack vectors - partly based on public documents from security researchers and private enterprises in the computer security field.
Raytheon Blackbird Technologies acted as a kind of "technology scout" for the Remote Development Branch (RDB) of the CIA by analysing malware attacks in the wild and giving recommendations to the CIA development teams for further investigation and PoC development for their own malware projects.
Wikileaks: CIA tasked Raytheon for analyzing TTPs used by threat actors in the wild*
Wikileaks revealed that CIA contractor Raytheon Blackbird Technologies was tasked to analyze advanced malware and TTPs used by threat actors in the wild.
Wikileaks continues to publish documents from Vault 7 leaks, today the organization has shed light on the collaboration between the US Intelligence agency and tech firms for malware development.
The last batch of documents shows that the CIA contractor Raytheon Blackbird Technologies was tasked to analyze advanced malware and TTPs used by threat actors in the wild as part of the UMBRAGE project.
“Raytheon Blackbird Technologies acted as a kind of “technology scout” for the Remote Development Branch (RDB) of the CIA by analysing malware attacks in the wild and giving recommendations to the CIA development teams for further investigation and PoC development for their own malware projects.”
The experts from the firm also provided proof-of-concept ideas and malware attack vectors to the firm.
The experts speculate the reports were commissioned by the CIA to gather information for the CIA’s Remote Development Branch (RDB) aimed to collect ideas for developing their own advanced malware.
Below the information contained in the reports provided by the Raytheon Blackbird Technologies. Report 1 — Researchers at Raytheon detailed a variant of the HTTPBrowser Remote Access Tool (RAT), used by EMISSARY PANDA. This new variant was built in March of 2015 and is deployed through an unknown initial attack vector. The RAT was used in cyber espionage campaigns by the Chinese APT group called ‘Emissary Panda.’ Report 2 — The report details a new variant of the NfLog Remote Access Tool (RAT), also known as IsSpace, used by the SAMURAI PANDA APT group. The variant analyzed in the report is deployed using a repurposed version of the leaked Hacking Team Adobe Flash Exploit which leverages CVE-2015-5122. This new variant also incorporates the use of the Google App Engine (GAE) hosting to proxy communications to its C2 Server. Report 3 — This report is a high-level analysis of “Regin” espionage platform that was first detected in 2014. The Regin cyber espionage tool is believed to be developed by the NSA intelligence agency.
“This report is a fairly high-level overview of Regin, a very sophisticated malware sample that has been observed in operation since 2013. There are some indications that the malware has been in use since as early as 2008, but most agree that the current iteration of Regin dates to about 2013.” states the report. “Regin appears to be focused on target surveillance and data collection. The most striking aspect of Regin is its modular architecture, which affords a high degree of flexibility and tailoring of attack capabilities to specific targets. Another impressive aspect of Regin is its stealthiness, its ability to hide itself from discovery and portions of the attack are memoryresident only.” Report 4 — The report details the “HammerToss” malware which was discovered in early 2015. The HammerToss is believed to be malicious code developed by Russian State-sponsored hackers that were being operational since late 2014. “HammerToss is an interesting piece of malware because of its architecture, which leverages Twitter accounts, GitHub or compromised websites, basic steganography, and Cloud-storage to orchestrate command and control (C2) functions of the attack.” states the report. Report 5 — This document details the self-code injection and API hooking methods of information stealing Trojan called “Gamker.” “This report details the code injection and API hooking methods of an information stealing Trojan known as Gamker. This August 2015 three-page report from Virus Bulletin contains more technical detail than many 30+ page reports from other sources. We recommend continued review of Virus Bulletin reports going forward.” states the report.
Britain will press ahead with a £150 billion (US$196 billion) deal to buy 138 flawed F-35 fighter jets despite serious concerns over virtually every aspect of their capability, according to an aviation analyst. The warplanes, which will operate from Britain’s new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, have been touted as a keystone of future of UK air and maritime power.
The person featured in this short segment is the recently appointed Co-Chair of the Mayor's IMAGINEMESA digital online campaign to 'engage the community' John Giles now realizes that after 2 years in-office he has failed to engage the community ---- apparently taxpayer-funded and city-owned Mesa Channel 11 cannot even get this MBA's name correct! He is Levi Leyba Published on Jul 18, 2017 Views: 5 Listen to John Giles as guest host with the video upload attracting 5 viewers : Hello! Mesa! We have a problem when the mayor admits he has no ideas of his own, and marches to the tune of what other people TELL HIM TO DO
The researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are hard at work on a lot of cool ideas for reducing pollution and promoting greater energy efficiency. They’re figuring out ways to improve photovoltaics and increase the efficiency of wind energy generation, and are a research leader in integrating these renewable energy sources into utility scale energy systems. The staff are also developing biofuels that could one day replace fossil fuels in transportation and other uses. They have an entire program dedicated to transportation:
NREL research, development, and deployment (RD&D) accelerates widespread adoption of high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies for passenger and freight transportation. Dedicated to renewable energy and energy efficiency, NREL and its industry, government, and academic partners use a whole-systems approach to create innovative components, fuels, and infrastructure for electric, hybrid, fuel cell, and conventional vehicles.
ALL THIS IS JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING POLITICALLY & ENVIRONMENTALLY CORRECT....BUT READ ON > Net zero, provided you ignore what its used for. But there’s one big environmental (and energy) problem with this shiny new structure: It’s an 1,800 space parking garage. Not only that, but (if you’re Don Shoup, please don’t read this) they don’t charge employees anything to use the garage.
The whole thing strikes us as utterly tone deaf and a flat contradiction to the organization’s mission statement. So, in addition to the lab being located in a suburban office park on the fringe of the Denver metro area, its employees are strongly incentivized–nay, subsidized–to drive their private cars to work. And that’s exactly what an overwhelming majority of them do.
A giant, free garage encourages energy consumption and pollution
We contacted the Lab to learn more about commute patterns and parking policies. They shared with use the mode split from their latest (2014) commuting survey.
We asked about parking prices for commuters. Lissa Myers, who is the Lab’s Sustainable Transportation & Climate Change Resiliency Practice Leader told us:
Parking is free on our campus and we have an abundance of it.
That’s the problem, really. We have an abundance of proven technologies that are “high-performance, low-emission, energy-saving strategies”–they include dense cities, cycling, transit, walking and car pooling. But technologies don’t work, or don’t work well if we subsidize people to use energy-wasting alternatives and locate large concentrations of workers in places where they have few alternatives but to drive single-occupancy vehicles.
Location, location, location
And because the lab is located on the urban fringe, rather than in a central, transit served location (like say, downtown Denver) its employees have few nearby housing options that would let them bike, walk or take transit to work.
TAKE-AWAY: Promoting renewable energy is (and energy conservation and greenhouse gas reductions) is a matter of both technology and incentives. An agency that’s supposedly dedicated to these tasks ought to do a better job of aligning its policies with its mission. There’s little hope that people will use a non-polluting bicycle or take transit to work, for example, if they have free use of parking.
The claim that a parking garage can be “zero net energy” requires casting a blind eye to the structure’s central purpose. It’s only zero net energy if you completely ignore the energy used by the cars it’s designed to store, and that you ignore how building garages and subsidizing their use prompts more driving, more energy consumption and more pollution
