Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Senators Accuse Government of Using ‘Secret Law’ to Collect Americans’ Data
June 29th, 2013Ya think? I was surprised to see them mention the mobile phone location data. I mean, come on, that’s the stuff of lunatic conspiracy theorists! *chortle* Via: Guardian: The senators said they were seeking public answers to the following questions in order to give the American people the information they need to conduct an informed […]
Britain Could Create First ‘Three-Parent Baby’ Through IVF
June 28th, 2013Via: Telegraph: Britain will become the first country in the world to create babies with the DNA of three people under government plans which could see the procedure offered on the NHS by next year. Parents at high risk of having children with severe disabilities such as muscular dystrophy will be offered the controversial new […]
Former Stasi Lieutenant Colonel On NSA’s Mass Surveillance: ‘It Is The Height Of Naivete To Think That Once Collected This Information Won’t Be Used’
June 28th, 2013Via: McClatchy: Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile […]
Foxconn to Speed Up ‘Robot Army’ Deployment
June 27th, 2013Via: IT World: Manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group is on track with its goal to a create a “million robot army”, and already has 20,000 robotic machines in its factories, said the company’s CEO Terry Gou on Wednesday. Workers’ wages in China are rising, and so the company’s research in robots and automation has to […]
License-Plate Readers Let Police Collect Millions of Records on Drivers
June 27th, 2013Via: Center for Investigative Reporting: When the city of San Leandro, Calif., purchased a license-plate reader for its police department in 2008, computer security consultant Michael Katz-Lacabe asked the city for a record of every time the scanners had photographed his car. The results shocked him. The paperback-size device, installed on the outside of police […]
Digital Dementia
June 25th, 2013Digital crackpipes for the children! The younger the better. Via: Digital Journal: South Korean doctors have found that increasing use of smartphones among young Koreans has led to a surge in incidence of “digital dementia” characterized by deterioration of cognitive abilities and symptoms found in people who have suffered head injury. In Other News: Some […]
U.S. Surveillance Best Suited for Gathering Information on Law-Abiding Citizens
June 24th, 2013Via: Bloomberg: The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens. People concerned with online privacy tend to […]
Snowden Leaves Hong Kong on Commercial Flight to Moscow, Seeking Political Asylum in Ecuador
June 23rd, 2013Operation Snowden Has Become the NSA Story Via: Washington Post: We can surmise that the information was leaking anyway, and so the government needed a distraction. Something connected to the NSA, so covering it would still feel like covering the NSA story, but that would divert much of the press from covering the actual programs. […]
Captain Obvious: GCHQ Taps Fiber Optic Cables
June 22nd, 2013Via: Guardian: Britain’s spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National Security Agency (NSA). The sheer scale of the agency’s ambition […]
Russ Tice on Boiling Frogs Podcast
June 21st, 2013What we have here is essentially a computer age, orders-of-magnitude-worse extension of what Curt Gentry laid out in J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Tice said that NSA has turned into a rogue organization, “That’s there to protect its own interests.” That’s nothing new, if you look at bureaucratic politics—all government organizations do […]
