Archive for the 'Technology' Category
World Changing Technology Enables Crops to Take Nitrogen from the Air
August 12th, 2013Via: University of Nottingham: A major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham, which enables all of the world’s crops to take nitrogen from the air rather than expensive and environmentally damaging fertilisers. Nitrogen fixation, the process by which nitrogen is converted to ammonia, is vital for plants to survive and grow. […]
‘A Cookie for the Real World’: Devices Hidden in London’s Recycling Bins Track Smartphones
August 11th, 2013Via: Wired: The unique identifying numbers of over half a million smartphones have been recorded by a network of recycling bins in central London. Hundreds of thousands of pedestrians walking past 12 locations unknowingly had the unique MAC address of their smartphones recorded by Renew London. Data including the “movement, type, direction, and speed of […]
Connections Between Michael Hastings, Edward Snowden and Barrett Brown — The War With the Security State
August 10th, 2013Via: WhoWhatWhy: At the time of his death in a mysterious one-car crash and explosion, journalist Michael Hastings was researching a story that threatened to expose powerful entities and government-connected figures. That story intersected with the work of two controversial government critics—the hacker Barrett Brown and the on-the-run surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden. Any probe into […]
A Material That Could Make Solar Power ‘Dirt Cheap’
August 10th, 2013Via: MIT Technology Review: A new type of solar cell, made from a material that is dramatically cheaper to obtain and use than silicon, could generate as much power as today’s commodity solar cells. Although the potential of the material is just starting to be understood, it has caught the attention of the world’s leading […]
China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem
August 9th, 2013Via: Network World: The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. […]
Lavabit Shuts Down
August 9th, 2013Via: Lavabit: My Fellow Users, I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with […]
Anonymouth to Combat Stylometry
August 7th, 2013Via: I-Programmer: An open source project to combat “stylometry”, the study of attributing authorship to documents based only on the linguistic style they exhibit, is proving that it is possible to change writing style so as to evade detection. Artificial Intelligence techniques are routinely used to detect plagiarism and recently were employed to reveal that […]
Android App: DronePatrol
August 7th, 2013Looks like fun for the whole family! Via: DronePatrol: DronePatrol is a citizen-based government watchdog organization which reports on domestic surveillence drones flying over the United States and its territories. DronePatrol.org features a database of drone sightings submitted by citizens throughout the U.S. just like you.
Feds Are Suspects in New Malware That Attacks Tor Anonymity
August 5th, 2013Update: Phoned Home to NSA Really?! I find it very hard to believe that this is some sort of screw up. If you don’t know much about this type of thing, you might think, “Oh the government is incompetent, so someone made a mistake and used one of their own IPs for this attack.” No […]
Britain: Companies Give GCHQ Unlimited Access to Data on Undersea Fiber Optic Cables
August 3rd, 2013Via: Guardian: Some of the world’s leading telecoms firms, including BT and Vodafone, are secretly collaborating with Britain’s spy agency GCHQ, and are passing on details of their customers’ phone calls, email messages and Facebook entries, documents leaked by the whistleblower Edward Snowden show. BT, Vodafone Cable, and the American firm Verizon Business – together […]
