Archive for the 'Technology' Category
The First Congressman to Battle the NSA Is Dead
February 5th, 2014Via: PandoDaily: Last month, former Congressman Otis Pike died, and no one seemed to notice or care. That’s scary, because Pike led the House’s most intensive and threatening hearings into US intelligence community abuses, far more radical and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings that took place at the same time. That Pike […]
DEA Tactic More Secret Than “Parallel Construction”
February 5th, 2014Via: MuckRock: To reiterate, the DEA redacted the name of a method its trainers and legal auditors deemed not only constitutional but also palatable to the public. As its position on the list suggests, this shielded tactic is “tips and leads paradigm” that is the “primary methodology for protecting [intelligence community] information that is shared […]
Chaos Computer Club Files Criminal Complaint Against the German Government
February 4th, 2014Via: Chaos Computer Club: On Monday, the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and the International League for Human Rights (ILMR), have filed a criminal complaint with the Federal Prosecutor General’s office. The complaint is directed against the German federal government, the presidents of the German secret services, namely Bundesnachrichtendienst, Militärischer Abschirmdienst, Bundesamt für Verfassungschutz, and others. […]
XStat for Gunshot Wounds
February 3rd, 2014Via: Popular Science: When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn’t always work–if […]
U.S. Army Tests Fully Autonomous Convoy
January 31st, 2014Via: Wired: U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous. In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, […]
Google: Lots of Android Phones Taking Video in the Same Area—Alert the Cops?
January 30th, 2014Via: Phandroid: Excerpt from US Patent #20140025755 “When there are at least a given number of video clips with similar time stamps and geolocation stamps uploaded to a repository, it is inferred that an event of interest has likely occurred, and a notification signal is transmitted (e.g., to a law enforcement agency, to a news […]
New 3D Printer Can Print in Carbon Fiber
January 30th, 2014Via: Popular Mechanics: Gregory Mark co-owns Aeromotions, which builds computer-controlled racecar wings. To make those wings both strong and lightweight, they use carbon fiber. No surprise there—it’s the material of choice for many advanced motorsports parts. The problem is that making custom racecar parts out of carbon fiber is daunting. The only real method available […]
Google and DeepMind Technologies
January 30th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: How much are a dozen deep-learning researchers worth? Apparently, more than $400 million. This week, Google reportedly paid that much to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a startup based in London that had one of the biggest concentrations of researchers anywhere working on deep learning, a relatively new field of artificial intelligence research […]
The Very First Porsche Was an Electric Vehicle
January 28th, 2014Via: Cnet: The very first Porsche, an electric carriage, sat untouched in a warehouse for 111 years, but now it’s come home. On June 26, 1898, Ferdinand Porsche’s “Egger-Lohner C.2 electric vehicle,” better known as the “P-1,” rolled on to the streets of Vienna for the first time. In 1899, the P-1 took the gold […]
NSA Targets ‘Leaky Apps Spew Everything’ from Smartphones
January 27th, 2014Via: New York Times: When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents. In their globe-spanning surveillance for terrorism […]
