Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Surveillance Cameras Made by China Are Hanging All Over the U.S.
November 13th, 2017Via: Wall Street Journal: The Memphis police use the surveillance cameras to scan the streets for crime. The U.S. Army uses them to monitor a base in Missouri. Consumer models hang in homes and businesses across the country. At one point, the cameras kept watch on the U.S. embassy in Kabul. All the devices were […]
TSA Plans to Use Face Recognition to Track Americans Through Airports
November 13th, 2017Via: EFF: The “PreCheck” program is billed as a convenient service to allow U.S. travelers to “speed through security” at airports. However, the latest proposal released by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) reveals the Department of Homeland Security’s greater underlying plan to collect face images and iris scans on a nationwide scale. DHS’s programs will […]
Quantum Computers a Threat to Bitcoin Security
November 12th, 2017Via: MIT Technology Review: A crucial feature of Bitcoin is its security. Bitcoins have two important security features that prevent them from being stolen or copied. Both are based on cryptographic protocols that are hard to crack. In other words, they exploit mathematical functions, like factorization, that are easy in one direction but hard in […]
Hive: CIA Infrastructure to Control Its Malware
November 9th, 2017Via: Wikileaks: Today, 9 November 2017, WikiLeaks publishes the source code and development logs to Hive, a major component of the CIA infrastructure to control its malware. Hive solves a critical problem for the malware operators at the CIA. Even the most sophisticated malware implant on a target computer is useless if there is no […]
BitTorrent Inventor Announces Bitcoin Competitor Chia
November 9th, 2017Via: TechCrunch: A bitcoin transaction wastes as much electricity as it takes to power an American home for a week, and legendary coder Bram Cohen wants to fix that. And considering he invented the ubiquitous peer-to-peer file transfer protocol BitTorrent, you should take him seriously. Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network […]
Big Data Meets Big Brother as China Moves to Rate Its Citizens
November 8th, 2017Behold, the biggest Magic 8 Ball ever. Via: Wired: On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published an ominous-sounding document called “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System”. In the way of Chinese policy documents, it was a lengthy and rather dry affair, but it contained a radical idea. What […]
Support Cryptogon with Your Hashing Power
November 8th, 2017Update: Thanks! Thanks to the person out there running NiceHash for Cryptogon and bringing in NZ$1.17/day. Really cloudy on my end today. I’ve got enough juice to run the hot water cylinder, but not the miners. 😉 — There are a relatively high number of people involved with cryptocurrencies reading Cryptogon, so I thought I’d […]
Las Vegas: Self Driving Shuttle Crashes After Less Than Two Hours On Road
November 8th, 2017*chortle* Via: AP: A driverless shuttle bus has crashed less than two hours after it was launched in Las Vegas. Police say no injuries were reported in the Wednesday crash between the self-operating vehicle and a semi-truck. It’s not yet clear what caused the wreck. Officials had hosted an unveiling ceremony to promote what they […]
Off Topic: Start and Stop E-Coin Miners Based on Solar System Power Output
November 6th, 2017Watching our solar system export so much power to the grid started to drive me a little bit nuts. Since we don’t yet have a Tesla Powerwall to store all of that extra power, it’s essentially going to waste by being exported to the grid. I fired up a couple of instances of a pooled […]
Cobalt, Ontario
October 31st, 2017Via: Bloomberg: Ironically, Cobalt, Ontario—population 1,100—was built on silver. Remnants of a boom that transformed the town more than a century ago are everywhere. A mine headframe still protrudes from the roof of the bookstore, which was previously a grocery. The butcher used to toss unwanted bones down an abandoned 350-foot shaft in the middle […]
