Data-wiping algorithm cleans your cellphone

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

Mailing your cellphone to a recycling company might make you a few pounds, but it can leave you at risk of identity theft. The deletion techniques recycling companies use are meant for hard discs, and so don't work on the solid-state flash memory used in mobile phones. That means personal data like banking info, texts, contacts and pictures can end up in the hands of, well, anyone the phone ends up with.  

To remedy the problem, British company BlackBelt Smartphone Defence of Skelmersdale, Lancashire claims to have developed a software algorithm that can securely delete data on cellphone memory chips. The trouble with data in a flash memory chip is that it is protected by an on-chip protection algorithm called the wear leveller. This hard-coded routine does its best to ensure the chip's lifetime is maximised so that each memory cell's ability to store charge is not worn out.

"The problem is that the wear-levelling algorithm ends up working
against the data wiping technique used for hard drives, which tries to
overwrite all the data,"
says the company's Ken Garner.

What the firm has done is write their own algorithm, called BlackBelt DataWipe, that works with,
rather than against, the leveller routine to render data
irrecoverable. "It is like having a shredder for personally identifiable
data," says Garner.

However, they don't yet know if their method is proof against sophisticated, nation-state level attacks - which might use electron microscopes
to read the last vestiges of the zeros and ones on a memory chip. "I imagine
if you're GCHQ you'll probably have technology that could get around
this and recover it in some way," says Garner.

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India parliament attack plotter to hang: official

NEW DELHI: A fruit seller sentenced to death for taking part in the plot to attack India's parliament in 2001 is to be executed on Saturday after his final mercy plea was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee.

Asked to comment on reports that Mohammed Afzal Guru would hang on Saturday, Home Secretary R K Singh told AFP: "Yes, but not as yet."

Guru was found guilty of conspiring with and sheltering the militants who attacked the parliament in December 2001 and of being a member of banned Islamist group Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Jaish-e-Mohammed fights against Indian rule in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, where a separatist conflict has cost up to 100,000 lives since the insurgency began in 1989, according to rights' groups.

Five armed rebels stormed India's parliament in New Delhi on December 13, 2001, killing eight police officers and a gardener before they were shot dead by security forces. A journalist wounded in the attack died months later.

Sources in the intelligence wing of the Indian army said they had been instructed to prepare for a possible backlash in Kashmir after Guru's execution.

"We were informed that Afzal Guru will be hanged on Saturday and therefore we must tighten security," a senior army official told AFP.

Executions are only carried out for the "rarest of rare" cases in India and Guru's would be only the second since 2004.

The sole surviving gunman from the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Pakistani-born Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, was executed on November 21 last year.

- AFP/xq

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Security fears to bring back CISPA, trigger move by Obama, say reports

Recent reports of cyberespionage and hacking against important U.S. targets have triggered cybersecurity rumblings in Washington, with the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee reportedly planning to bring back the controversial CISPA -- Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act -- and President Obama reportedly readying his own executive order on the issue.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) say they plan to re-introduce CISPA -- unaltered -- next week during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, according to Beltway tech blog The Hill.

"American businesses are under siege," Rogers said in a statement cited by the blog. "We need to provide American companies the information they need to better protect their networks from these dangerous cyberthreats. It is time to stop admiring this problem and deal with it immediately."

Despite an outcry over privacy concerns by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, CISPA passed the House last year but stalled in the Senate because the upper house was working on its own cybersecurity legislation. The White House had also threatened to veto CISPA if it landed on the president's desk.

The recent reports of cyberspying on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, however, along with attacks on the Federal Reserve's Web site and on several U.S. banks -- not to mention comments about an imminent "cyber 9/11" -- have brought the issue back to the fore.

A move from Obama?
According to a report from Bloomberg -- which cited "two former White House officials briefed on the administration's plans" -- President Obama will issue an executive order on cybersecurity after his February 12 State of the Union Address.

The order, Bloomberg said, would create a "voluntary program of cybersecurity standards for companies operating vital U.S. infrastructure." It also "directs federal agencies to consider incorporating the cybersecurity standards into existing regulations [and]...directs the government to share more information about computer threats with the private sector and issue more security clearances allowing industry representatives to receive classified information."

Obama-backed legislation involving voluntary cybersecurity standards for companies died in the Senate last year, with Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce saying it would be ineffective and would create de facto rules that would slow down business, Bloomberg noted.

Critics of the different proposed cybersecurity measures are concerned that increased cooperation between Internet businesses and U.S. intelligence agencies could erode user privacy. And some have gone so far as to say that hasty regulation of things like the Denial of Service attacks used against U.S. banks could hamper legitimate forms of protest.

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

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  Solar Dragon

  Image courtesy SDO/NASA

  Resembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.

  Most of the electrically charged gas, imaged in extreme ultraviolet light, was unsuccessful in its escape attempt and fell back into the sun.

  Filaments form when magnetic field lines push out of the sun in loops, holding dense gas above the surface of the sun. (Read about a huge solar filament that erupted in August 2012.)

  —Jane J. Lee and Christine Dell'Amore

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Aurora On The Road

  Photograph by Marcel Mivelaz, My Shot

  Northern lights writhe behind a thin cloud layer above a road on Ringvassoya Island, Norway, in this picture submitted to National Geographic's My Shot photography community on January 31.

  Born of violent eruptions of plasma from the sun's surface, auroras occur when the ejected gas slams into the protective bubble of Earth's magnetic field. (Watch a video about the birth of auroras.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Celestial Seagull

  Image courtesy ESO

  Like a parrot perched on a pirate's arm, the Seagull Nebula resides in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

  This new image, released by the European Southern Observatory on February 6, shows a closeup of one of the "wings" of the Seagull Nebula. Red clouds of hydrogen gas glow from the intense ultraviolet radiation given off with the birth of stars.

  The entire nebula is actually comprised of three large gas clouds arranged in the shape of a bird. (See pictures of other nebulae.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Saturn's North Pole

  Image courtesy Caltech/SSI/NASA

  Saturn's hexagon-shaped north pole is lit by the sun now that spring has come to the planet's northern hemisphere, as seen in a NASA picture released this week.

  The 15,000-mile-wide (25,000-kilometer-wide) cloud formation, captured by the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera in November, was initially spied during the Voyager missions in the 1980s. (See another Cassini picture of the hexagon.)

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Martian Avalanches

  Image courtesy U. Arizona/NASA

  A 2011 frost avalanche kicks up dust on Mars in a picture released this week by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera team.

  Frost avalanches usually occur at the onset of the Martian spring, when layers of carbon dioxide frost warm, causing ice and dust to cascade off of cliffs.

  "While HiRISE has captured other frost avalanches before, they never cease to amaze, since it demonstrates that there are indeed active processes on the red planet," according to the HiRISE website. (Related: "First Mars Avalanches Seen In Action.")

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Luminous London

  Photograph courtesy NASA

  London gleams in a nighttime picture taken from the International Space Station on February 2.

  Expedition 34 Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield captured the English city while flying about 240 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  











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  Illustration courtesy Foster and Partners/ESA

  Published February 8, 2013

  
  

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Great Energy Challenge Blog

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Northeast Shuts Down as Blizzard Batters Millions

A blizzard of possibly historic proportions began battering the Northeast today, and could bring more than two feet of snow and strong winds that could shut down densely populated cities such as Boston and New York City.

A storm from the west joined forces with one from the south to form a nor'easter that will sit and spin just off the East Coast, affecting more than 43 million Americans. Wind gusts were forecast to reach 50 to 60 mph from Philadelphia to Boston.

Cape Cod, Mass., could possibly see 75 mph gusts. Boston and other parts of New England could see more than two feet of snow by Saturday.

The storm showed the potential for such ferocity that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency Friday afternoon and signed an executive order banning vehicular traffic on roads in his state effective at 4 p.m. ET. It was believed that the last time the state enacted such a ban was during the blizzard of 1978. Violating the ban could result in a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $500 fine.

"[It] could definitely be a historic winter storm for the Northeast," said Adrienne Leptich of the National Weather Service in Upton, N.Y. "We're looking at very strong wind and heavy snow and we're also looking for some coastal flooding."

Airlines began shutting down operations Friday afternoon at major airports in the New York area as well as in Boston, Portland, Maine, Providence, R.I., and other Northeastern airports. By early evening Friday, more than 4,300 flights had been cancelled on Friday and Saturday, according to FlightAware. Airlines hoped to resume flights by Saturday afternoon, though normal schedules were not expected until Sunday.

The snow fell heavily Friday afternoon in New York City and 12 to 14 inches were expected. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said clearing the roads was his main concern, and the city readied 1,700 snow plows and 250,000 tons of salt to clear the streets.

Hurricane Sandy Victims Hit Again, Survivors Prepare for Worst Watch Video

Weather Forecast: Blizzard Headed for Northeast Watch Video

New York City was expecting up to 14 inches of snow, which started falling early this morning, though the heaviest amounts were expected to fall at night and into Saturday. Wind gusts of 55 mph were expected in New York City.

"Stay off the city streets. Stay out of your cars and stay at home while the worst of the storm is on us," Bloomberg said Friday.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy declared a state of emergency, deploying National Guard troops across the state to assist in rescues and other emergencies. Schools and state courthouses were closed, and all flights after 1:30 p.m. at Bradley Airport, north of Hartford, Conn., were cancelled. The state's largest utility companies planned for the possibility that 30 percent of customers -- more than 400,000 homes and businesses -- would lose power.

Malloy also directed drivers to stay off the state's major highways.

"Please stay off of 95, 91, 84, Merritt Parkway and any other limited-access road in the state," he said Friday evening.

PHOTOS: Northeast Braces for Snowstorm

Boston, Providence, R.I., Hartford, Conn., and other New England cities canceled school today.

"Stay off the streets of our city. Basically, stay home," Boston Mayor Tom Menino warned Thursday.

On Friday, Menino applauded the public's response.

"I'm very pleased with the compliance with the snow emergency," he said. "You drive down some of the roadways, you don't see one car."

As of 4:30 p.m. Friday, according to the Department of Defense, 837 National Guard soldiers and airmen under state control had been activated in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York in anticipation of the storm -- 552 in Massachusetts, 235 in Connecticut and 50 in New York. The extra hands were helping with roadways, transportation, making wellness checks on residents and other emergency services.

Beach erosion and coastal flooding is possible from New Jersey to Long Island, N.Y., and into New England coastal areas. Some waves off the coast could reach more than 20 feet.

Blizzard warnings were posted for parts of New Jersey and New York's Long Island, as well as portions of Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, including Hartford, New Haven, Conn., and Providence. The warnings extended into New Hampshire and Maine.

To the south, Philadelphia was looking at a possible 4 to 6 inches of snow.

In anticipation of the storm, Amtrak said its Northeast trains would stop running this afternoon.

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Robot inquisition keeps witnesses on the right track

MEMORY is a strange thing. Just using the verb "smash" in a question about a car crash instead of "bump" or "hit" causes witnesses to remember higher speeds and more serious damage. Known as the misinformation effect, it is a serious problem for police trying to gather accurate accounts of a potential crime. There's a way around it, however: get a robot to ask the questions.

Cindy Bethel at Mississippi State University in Starkville and her team showed 100 "witnesses" a slide show in which a man steals money and a calculator from a drawer, under the pretext of fixing a chair. The witnesses were then split into four groups and asked about what they had seen, either by a person or by a small NAO robot, controlled in a Wizard of Oz set-up by an unseen human.

Two groups - one with a human and one a robot interviewer - were asked identical questions that introduced false information about the crime, mentioning objects that were not in the scene, then asking about them later. When posed by humans, the questions caused the witnesses' recall accuracy to drop by 40 per cent - compared with those that did not receive misinformation - as they remembered objects that were never there. But misinformation presented by the NAO robot didn't have an effect.

"It was a very big surprise," says Bethel. "They just were not affected by what the robot was saying. The scripts were identical. We even told the human interviewers to be as robotic as possible." The results will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.

Bilge Mutlu, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, suggests that robots may avoid triggering the misinformation effect simply because we are not familiar with them and so do not pick up on behavioural cues, which we do with people. "We have good, strong mental models of humans, but we don't have good models of robots," he says.

The misinformation effect doesn't only effect adults; children are particularly susceptible, explains the psychologist on the project, Deborah Eakin. Bethel's ultimate goal is to use robots to help gather testimony from children, who tend to pick up on cues contained in questions. "It's a huge problem," Bethel says.

At the Starkville Police Department, a 10-minute drive from the university, officers want to use such a robotic interviewer to gather more reliable evidence from witnesses. The police work hard to avoid triggering the misinformation effect, says officer Mark Ballard, but even an investigator with the best intentions can let biases slip into the questions they ask a witness.

Children must usually be taken to a certified forensic child psychologist to be interviewed, something which can be difficult if the interviewer works in another jurisdiction. "You might eliminate that if you've got a robot that's certified for forensics investigations, and it's tough to argue that the robot brings any memories or theories with it from its background," says Ballard.

The study is "very interesting, very intriguing", says Selma Sabanovic, a roboticist at Indiana University. She is interested to see what happens as Bethel repeats the experiment with different robot shapes and sizes. She also poses a slightly darker question: "How would you design a robot to elicit the kind of information you want?"

This article appeared in print under the headline "The robot inquisition"

It's all about how you say it

When providing new information, rather than helping people recall events (see main story), a robot's rhetoric and body language can make a big difference to how well it gets its message across.

Bilge Mutlu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison had two robots compete to guide humans through a virtual city. He found that the robot which used rhetorical language drew more people to follow it. For example, the robot saying "this zoo will teach you about different parts of the world" did less well than one saying "visiting this zoo feels like travelling the world, without buying a plane ticket". The work will be presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Tokyo next month.

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Golf: Scotland's Knox shares lead at Pebble Beach

PEBBLE BEACH, California: Russell Knox matched his career low on the PGA Tour on Thursday by firing a six-under par 64 to seize a share of the first-round lead at the Pebble Beach National Pro-Am.

Knox, who birdied four of his final eight holes on the Shore Course on Thursday, shares the lead at six-under with American Hunter Mahan, who played the Pebble Beach Golf Links course.

The 156-player field rotates between three courses in the first three rounds, comprising Spyglass Hill, Shore and Pebble Beach, while playing with amateurs. Pebble Beach will host the final round.

The 27-year-old Scotsman Knox played the back nine first on Thursday, making birdie at 11 and 12.

After a bogey on No. 14, he rolled in another birdie on No. 15 and then made it two in a row as he also birdied the par-four No. 16.

Knox moved to five under by making birdie at the sixth, and his final birdie of the day came at the par-four eighth.

Five-time PGA Tour winner Mahan needed a two-put for birdie on the 18th to grab a share of the lead.

"I enjoyed playing Pebble. I look forward to playing Monterey (Shore course on Friday)," Mahan said.

"Pebble isn't long, so you can attack some holes out here, and I was able to do that and I was able to get some short clubs and able to take advantage of the par-fives.

"I hit a lot of good quality shots and hit a lot of good quality putts that didn't go in."

South Korea's Noh Seung-Yul bogeyed his final two holes for a five-under 67. He was joined at minus-five by England's Greg Owen, Japan's Ryuji Imada and three others.

Lee Westwood and Brandt Snedeker, who has finished runner-up at the last two tour events, are among nine players that are two strokes off the lead at minus-six. Westwood is making his first PGA Tour start of the year.

Defending champ Phil Mickelson is tied for 57th after shooting a pair of late bogeys en route to a one-under 69.

Mickelson is coming off a victory last week in Phoenix.

- AFP/xq

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BlackBerry 10 smartphones won't be sold in Japan

BlackBerry Z10 won't be launching in Japan.

(Credit:
Josh Miller/CNET)

As BlackBerry rolls deeper into the smartphone world with the launch of BlackBerry 10, it looks like some countries will be left off of the map.

The device maker confirmed today that it has no plans to launch any
BlackBerry 10 smartphones in Japan.

"We are in the process of launching BlackBerry 10 globally in key markets and we are seeing positive demand for the
BlackBerry Z10 in countries where it has already launched," a BlackBerry spokesperson told CNET in an e-mail. "Japan is not a major market for BlackBerry, and we have no plans to launch BlackBerry 10 smartphones there at this time."

Although Japan is a major consumer of smartphones, BlackBerry devices are not among the country's favorites. According to research firm ComScore,
Android took 64 percent of Japan's smartphone market share and Apple's iOS grabbed a 32 percent share in August. That left Microsoft's Windows Phone in third place with 3 percent, and BlackBerry OS and Nokia's Symbian combined eked out less than half a percentage point.

It's unclear if BlackBerry will forgo selling its smartphones in other countries also. Despite the company's decision not to launch BlackBerry 10 in Japan, its spokesperson did say, "we will continue to support BlackBerry customers in Japan."

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Cop Shooting Rampage: Dorner's Truck Found

The truck owned and driven by suspected cop killer Christopher Dorner during his alleged rampage through the Los Angeles area was found deserted and in flames on the side of Bear Mountain, Calif., this afternoon -- with tracks in the snow leading away from the vehicle.

The San Bernadino Sheriff's Department confirmed the car was Dorner's, but said at a news conference this evening that the tracks did not lead to him. Personnel from several departments and teams of dogs continued to search the area near Big Bear Lake, about 80 miles east of Los Angeles, including door-to-door searches of cabins located there, officials said.

Dorner, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, remained on the loose.

"He could be anywhere at this point, and that's why we're searching door to door," San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon said.

He said the search would continue as long as it was possible. However, a snowstorm was forecast for the area.

Dorner was believed to have killed one police officer and injured two others early this morning in Riverside, Calif. He was also accused of killing two civilians on Sunday after releasing a scathing "manifesto" alleging grievances committed by the police department while he worked for it and warning of coming violence toward cops.

Read More About Chris Dorner's Allegations Against the LAPD

Heavily armed officers spent much of Thursday searching for signs of Dorner, investigating multiple false leads into his whereabouts and broadcasting his license plate and vehicle description across the California Highway System.

Christopher Dorner: Ex-Cop Wanted in Killing Spree Watch Video

Engaged California Couple Found Dead in Car Watch Video

Missing Ohio Mother: Manhunt for Ex-Boyfriend Watch Video

Around 12:45 p.m. PT, police responded to Bear Mountain, where two fires were reported, and set up a staging area in the parking lot of a ski resort. They did not immediately investigate the fires, but heavily armed SWAT team members eventually descended onto Bear Mountain from a helicopter manned with snipers to investigate.

Also today, CNN's Anderson Cooper said Dorner had sent him a package at his New York office that arrived on Feb. 1, though Cooper said he never knew about the package until today. It contained a DVD of court testimony, with a Post-It note signed by Dorner claiming, "I never lied! Here is my vindication."

It also contained a keepsake coin bearing the name of former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton that came wrapped in duct tape, Cooper said. The duct tape bore the note, "Thanks, but no thanks Will Bratton."

Bratton told Cooper on his program, "Anderson Cooper 360," that he believed he gave Dorner the coin as he was headed overseas for the Navy, Bratton's practice when officers got deployed abroad. Though a picture has surfaced of Bratton, in uniform, and Dorner, in fatigues, shaking hands, Bratton told Cooper he didn't recall Dorner or the meeting.

PHOTOS: Former LAPD Officer Suspected in Shootings

Police officers across Southern California were on the defensive today, scaling back their public exposure, no longer responding to "barking-dog calls" and donning tactical gear outdoors.

Police departments have stationed officers in tactical gear outside police departments, stopped answering low-level calls and pulled motorcycle patrols off the road in order to protect officers who might be targets of Dorner's alleged rampage.

"We've made certain modifications of our deployments, our deviations today, and I want to leave it at that, and also to our responses," said Chief Sergio Diaz of the police department in Riverside, Calif., where the officers were shot. "We are concentrating on calls for service that are of a high priority, threats to public safety, we're not going to go on barking dog calls today."

Sgt. Rudy Lopez of the Los Angeles Police Department said Dorner is "believed to be armed and extremely dangerous."

Early Thursday morning, before they believe he shot at any police officers, Dorner allegedly went to a yacht club near San Diego, where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.

He aborted the attempted theft when the boat's propeller became entangled in a rope, law enforcement officials said. It was then that he is believed to have headed to Riverside, where he allegedly shot two police officers.

"He pointed a handgun at the victim [at the yacht club] and demanded the boat," said Lt. David Rohowits of the San Diego Police Department.

Police say the rifle marksman shot at four officers in two incidents overnight, hitting three of them: one in Corona, Calif., and the two in Riverside, Calif.

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