Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Ridgway Banks and the Nitinol Engine
September 10th, 20131980 CNN report by science editor Kevin Sanders: — The Individualist: The Individualist from Zoe Banks on Vimeo. Related: Proceedings of the NITINOL Heat Engine Conference, 26-27 September 1978, Silver Spring, Maryland — Mcdonnell Douglas Scale Up:
NSA Can Access Data on All Smartphones
September 8th, 2013Via: Spiegel: The United States’ National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google’s Android mobile operating system. The documents state […]
Computer Program Uses Twitter to ‘Map Mood of Nation’
September 7th, 2013Via: BBC: British scientists have developed a computer program they say can map the mood of the nation using Twitter. Named Emotive, it works by accessing the emotional content of postings on the social networking site. The team, from Loughborough University, say it can scan up to 2,000 tweets a second and rate them for […]
Is NSA Dropping Its Own Versions of Open Source Encryption Software Onto the Wire As We Download Them?
September 7th, 2013Hijacking the stream and substituting the content? Trivial. I used to do this for fun on wi-fi networks last decade. Definitely trivial. But what I don’t get is how the downloads would pass hash checks? For example, you can check GPG’s SHA-1 values here. What’s SHA-1, you ask? In cryptography, SHA-1 is a cryptographic hash […]
John Gilmore on NSA Meddling in Cryptography Standards
September 7th, 2013Via: Cryptography Mailing List: To this day, no mobile telephone standards committee has considered or adopted any end-to-end (phone-to-phone) privacy protocols. This is because the big companies involved, huge telcos, are all in bed with NSA to make damn sure that working end-to-end encryption never becomes the default on mobile phones. Wikipedia: John Gilmore
Is British Government Decrypting Data Encrypted with TrueCrypt from Hard Drive David Miranda Was Carrying?
September 7th, 2013I did a double take while reading this Reuters article about the Snowden material: Miranda was held and questioned for nine hours before being allowed to resume his trip from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Greenwald has said that Miranda had carried Snowden related material from him in Brazil to […]
Bullrun: The NSA’s Secret Campaign to Crack, Undermine Internet Security
September 6th, 2013If anything is still safe, it’s PGP-type stuff, that is to say, GPG. But who knows… For those of us who never believed in things like SSL/TLS or PPTP vs. NSA… *meh* But clueless Americans are definitely waking up to a weirder reality with this sort of information now entering mainstream awareness. Via: ProPublica: The […]
PayPal Freezes MailPile’s Account, Access to Funds
September 5th, 2013Update: PayPal Releases Funds That move was just too ridiculous, even for PayPal. Via: MailPile: [Update: PayPal have unfrozen the account, for now at least. Thank you for your support!] — Via: Mailpile: The bad news is, PayPal have frozen our PayPal account. This means roughly $45,000 of the $135,000 we have raised so far […]
Amazon Hiring 100 IT Personnel for Positions Requiring Top Secret Security Clearances
September 5th, 2013Via: ComputerWorld: Amazon has more than 100 job openings for people who can get a top secret clearance, which includes a U.S. government administered polygraph examination. It needs software developers, operations managers and cloud support engineers, among others. Amazon’s hiring effort includes an invitation-only recruiting event for systems support engineers at its Herndon, Va., facility […]
Custom Video Game Helped Improve Cognitive Function in Elderly
September 5th, 2013Via: New York Times: There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians. Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show […]
