Archive for the 'Technology' Category
And Now, ‘Smart Plates’: California May Issue Digital License Plates
July 19th, 2013Via: CBS: California may become the first state to issue digital license plates that can be registered electronically and record tolls. Privacy advocates are concerned the plates could become tracking devices for law enforcement. Instead of a metal license plate, the digital plate would be a computer screen, slightly larger than an iPad. Registering the […]
Shocker: The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People’s Data Than Previously Revealed
July 18th, 2013Via: The Atlantic Wire: As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously indicated. Chris Inglis, the agency’s deputy director, was one of several government representatives—including from the FBI and the […]
Driving Somewhere? There’s a Government Record of That
July 17th, 2013Via: AP: Chances are, your local or state police departments have photographs of your car in their files, noting where you were driving on a particular day, even if you never did anything wrong. Using automated scanners, law enforcement agencies across the country have amassed millions of digital records on the location and movement of […]
Judge Demands Tech Companies Hand Activist Data Over to Chevron
July 17th, 2013Via: Grist: Chevron is attempting to defend itself against a pesky $18 billion-plus judgment for its dirty dealing in the Ecuador rainforest. In the company’s appeal against the landmark judgment, a federal judge in New York has upheld a subpoena from Chevron seeking IP addresses and identity records of people allegedly tied to the investigation. […]
Microsoft Trying to Create System That Predicts Your Physical Location in the Future
July 17th, 2013Via: Fast Company: Would you like to know how crowded your drive to the beach will be in three weeks? Or where your ex will be on a Friday night next month so that you can avoid him? Adam Sadilek, formerly of Microsoft, now a researcher at Google, and John Krumm, a principal researcher at […]
‘Robots to Revolutionize Farming’
July 16th, 2013Via: AP / Time: On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds. The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a […]
Water Requirements for NSA’s New Facility in Utah
July 15th, 2013“A significant benefit to the city” haha Via: KSL: More secrets, more water? The NSA data center in Bluffdale could require as many as 1.7 million gallons of water per day to operate and keep computers cool. Initial reported estimates suggested the center would use 1,200 gallons per minute, but more recent estimates suggest the […]
In Iraq, the Bomb-Detecting Device That Didn’t Work, Except to Make Money
July 15th, 2013Step right up, step right up, step right up, Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore That’s right, you too can be the proud owner Of the quality goes in before the name goes on One-tenth of a dollar, one-tenth of a dollar, we got service after sales You need perfume? we got perfume, how ’bout an […]
Technical Feasibility of Decrypting HTTPS by Replacing the Computer’s Pseudorandom Number Generator
July 15th, 2013Via: Stack Exchange: Intel has an on-chip RdRand function which supposedly bypasses the normally used entropy pool for /dev/urandom and directly injects output. Now rumors are going on that Intel works together with the NSA… and knowing that PRNGs are important for cryptography is enough to get this news spreading. I personally don’t believe this […]
Experimental Cancer Therapy from Immunocore
July 14th, 2013Rick Simpson Oil See what I did there? Via: Independent: Immunocore has found a way of designing small protein molecules, which it calls ImmTACs, that effectively act as double-ended glue. At one end they stick to cancer cells, strongly and very specifically, leaving healthy cells untouched. At the other end they stick to T-cells. The […]
