The Deutsche Welle says the French city is installing public parking spot sensors under the pavement

“These technologies were developed to help stratospheric balloons land on Venus and communicate with each other without using heavy duty transmission equipment,” says Guell.

Guell says the balloons never made it to Venus for budgetary reasons. But their technology may soon be helping cars find parking spots in Toulouse and other cities in Europe and Canada that are interested in the project.

Supposedly it can tell a car from a truck based on the magnetic profile, and drivers are expected to pay their meter with a wireless chip on their windshield. Above all is the fact that drivers will be able to see in real time if there is parking.

French government studies show that 60 percent of urban pollution in France is due to idling cars searching for a place to park, which translates into 700 million wasted hours a year…

Unless they build a queuing or reservation system, however, it seems that people still will drive around wasting time, but far more anxiously — all trying to get to a spot before others when their phone alerts them. Maybe they can build in a control so drivers more than a few blocks from the spot will not be notified. It certainly sounds like a fun system to try and manipulate. I can imagine sending a false signal that parking is available on the other side of the village and then, while all the other cars race to get there, taking a spot nearby that is left open the old fashioned way.

According to CVE-2010-4573, also known as VMSA-2010-0020, a VMware ESXi 4.1 system upgraded from ESXi 3.5 or ESXi 4.0 may allow open authorization.

The flaw is related to the Small Footprint Common Information Model Broker (SFCB). If the SFCB daemon is running (on by default) or the configuration file (/etc/sfcb/sfcb.cfg) was changed before the upgrade, system authentication fails and any username and password combination is allowed. Detection of the flaw is trivial — just look in the configuration file:

Find the line with basicAuthLib, your deployment of ESX 4.1 is affected if the value for the parameter is basicAuthLib: sfcBasicAuthentication. Your system is not affected if the value for the parameter is listed as sfcBasicPAMAuthentication.

The official VMware workaround is thus to change “basicAuthLib: sfcBasicAuthentication” to “basicAuthLib: sfcBasicPAMAuthentication”.

The BBC says a senior Israeli army officer is calling a war with Gaza “a question of when, not if”. The rearmament of Hamas is held up as evidence of new and greater concerns.

The Israeli-developed active protection system (APS) known as Trophy is designed to destroy missiles like the Russian-made AT-14 Kornet, one of which hit a Merkava Mk3 tank on 6 December.

The laser-guided missile – which carries 10kg (22lb) of high explosive – penetrated the tank’s armour, but did not injure its crew.

“Fortunately, it did not explode within the tank. It is a heavy missile that is among the most dangerous that we have seen on this front and was not used even during the Lebanon war,” [emphasis added] Israeli Chief-of-Staff Lt-Gen Gabi Ashkenazi told a closed-door parliamentary session on Tuesday.

My first thought is we now might have another clue related to the large shipments of small arms and explosives uncovered by police in Nigerian ports.

Nigeria’s secret service said on Tuesday it had intercepted 13 containers of weapons from Iran in what Israeli defense sources believe may be part of a new smuggling route from Iran to Hamas in Gaza.

Rocket launchers, grenades and other explosives camouflaged as building material were seized in the Nigerian port of Lagos after being unloaded from an Iranian ship.

That news story suggests Sudan or the Sinai might be involved in a land route but I would say it’s going through Eritrea, especially since Eritrea has been ordering Kornets for themselves since 2005. Ah, but before I fire up my usual anti-proliferation on the Horn of Africa line I have to check the Israeli reports on weapons used in the Lebanon war.

Apparently the Kornet was not only found there, but it saw active and successful use with guidance systems against Israeli tanks. It was blamed for Israel’s initial losses and the slow pace of advance into Lebanese territory.

You can read all about it and even look at pictures of the captured evidence in part two of the Human Shields document from the Terrorism Info site in Israel (Subtitle: PROOF OF THE LOCATION OF THE HEZBOLLAH’S MILITARY INFRASTRUCTURE AND OPERATIONAL ACTIVITIES CARRIED OUT FROM WITHIN THE CIVILIAN POPULATION.)

pg 33

“…the massive deployment of anti-tank squads armed with advanced Kornet missiles…”

[…]

pg 34

“Various arms and ammunition were seized in the village of Ghandouriyeh:

a. Eight complete kits of advanced Kornet anti-tank missiles (including heat-seeking devices, the missiles themselves, and shipping certificates)”

The report points out that the Kornet missiles were buried in homes, usually unknown to the residents, and were moved around the villages by men dressed in civilian clothing with motorbikes sometimes even waving white flags.

The BBC or the Israeli army must be trying to say something has changed about the Kornet missiles fired from Gaza (supplied by Iran via the Horn?), but it’s not clear from their story.