Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Two US Senators on Intelligence Committee: Thousands of Annual Violations by NSA of Its Own Restrictions Were ‘The Tip of The Iceberg’
August 17th, 2013Via: Guardian: Two US senators on the intelligence committee said on Friday that thousands of annual violations by the National Security Agency on its own restrictions were “the tip of the iceberg.” “The executive branch has now confirmed that the rules, regulations and court-imposed standards for protecting the privacy of Americans’ have been violated thousands […]
Area 51: Nothing to See Here, Move Along
August 16th, 2013Swamp gas, weather balloons, U2 spy planes… Via: BBC: The CIA has officially acknowledged the secret US test site known as Area 51, in a newly unclassified internal history of the U-2 spy plane programme. The document obtained by a US university describes the 1955 acquisition of the Nevada site for testing of the secret […]
Intel’s New Optical Server Interconnect: 1.6 Terabits Per Second
August 15th, 2013Via: PC World: Intel is looking to use light and lasers to shuffle data faster among servers, and is proposing a new optical interconnect, MXC, that could change the way servers are implemented in data centers. The chip maker is pitching MXC as a “next-generation optical connector” that could be a big step in standardizing […]
Encryption Is Less Secure Than We Thought
August 14th, 2013Via: MIT News: Information theory — the discipline that gave us digital communication and data compression — also put cryptography on a secure mathematical foundation. Since 1948, when the paper that created information theory first appeared, most information-theoretic analyses of secure schemes have depended on a common assumption. Unfortunately, as a group of researchers at […]
Google: If You Use Gmail, You Have ‘No Legitimate Expectation Of Privacy’
August 14th, 2013Via: Business Insider: If you happen to be one of the 400 million people who use Google’s Gmail service for sending and receiving emails, you shouldn’t have any expectation of privacy, according to a court briefing obtained by the Consumer Watchdog website. In a motion filed last month by Google to have a class action […]
X-47B Lands on U.S. Aircraft Carrier
August 14th, 2013Via: Wired: The Navy’s X-47B drone completed its newest round of tests off the Virginia shore last week, making it the first pilotless unmanned jet in history to land aboard a moving aircraft carrier — one of aviation’s most challenging maneuvers. The Navy heralded the achievement as the future of warfare. “It isn’t very often […]
The Forgotten Cold War Plan That Put a Ring of Copper Around the Earth
August 14th, 2013Via: Wired: During the summer of 1963, Earth looked a tiny bit like Saturn. The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project […]
Democracy Now On Amazon and Jeff Bezos
August 14th, 2013Disclosure: I have an affiliate relationship with Amazon. The Democracy Now discussion below contains some legitimate gripes about Amazon, which I’ve covered on here in the past. The most disturbing thing about Amazon (to me) is their work with CIA to build the agency’s new cloud computing infrastructure (news circa March 2013). That’s bad. But […]
‘The Era of Ubiquitous Listening Dawns’
August 13th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review: The Moto X, the new smartphone from Google’s Motorola Mobility, might be remembered best someday for helping to usher in the era of ubiquitous listening. Unlike earlier phones, the Moto X includes two low-power chips whose only function is to process data from a microphone and other sensors—without tapping the main […]
Increased TV Viewing by Children Associated with Subsequent Decreases in Vocabulary and Math Skills, Classroom Engagement
August 12th, 2013Via: Nature: Background: Using a large population-based sample, this study aims to verify whether televiewing at 29 mo, a common early childhood pastime, is prospectively associated with school readiness at 65 mo. Methods: Participants are a prospective longitudinal cohort of 991 girls and 1,006 boys from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development with parent-reported […]
