Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Missile Defense Staff Warned to Stop Surfing Porn Sites
August 2nd, 2012Via: Bloomberg: The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency warned its employees and contractors last week to stop using their government computers to surf the Internet for pornographic sites, according to the agency’s executive director. In a one-page memo, Executive Director John James Jr. wrote that in recent months government employees and contractors were detected “engaging in […]
‘The Internet Should be Adapted to Allow for Oversight by the National Security Agency’
August 1st, 2012Via: MIT Technology Review: The U.S. Internet’s infrastructure needs to be redesigned to allow the NSA to know instantly when overseas hackers might be attacking public or private infrastructure and computer networks, the agency’s leader, General Keith Alexander, said today. Alexander spoke at the annual Def Con computer hacking conference in Las Vegas. It was […]
Digestible Microchips Embedded in Drugs
August 1st, 2012Via: Nature: Digestible microchips embedded in drugs may soon tell doctors whether a patient is taking their medications as prescribed. These sensors are the first ingestible devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). To some, they signify the beginning of an era in digital medicine. “About half of all people don’t take […]
Portrait of a Drone Killer: ‘I Have a Duty, and I Execute My Duty’
July 31st, 2012Via: Lew Rockwell Blog: One wonders if drone pilot Col. D. Scott Brenton listens to Louis Armstrong in the suburban Air National Guard Base in Syracuse from which he murders people 7,000 miles away. “I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Brenton […]
Company Finds Facebook Advertising Results in Clickthroughs That Are 80% Bots
July 31st, 2012This is some incredibly timely news for me. I just started running an ad campaign on Facebook for my wife’s business two days ago. Just a tiny test, $5 budget per day. I looked at the Google Analytics data for the site to reconcile what Facebook was charging me vs. what was showing up on […]
Cryptocat
July 28th, 2012Out of my 4 DHS interrogations in the past 3 weeks, it’s the first time I’m asked about Cryptocat crypto and my passport is confiscated. —Nadim Kobeissi From what I’ve read so far, Cryptocat looks interesting, mainly because it might be usable by regular computer users. Cryptogon is read by many people with multiple propellers […]
Facebook Slaughter: Down Another 15%
July 27th, 2012Via: CNN: Facebook’s stock opened at an all-time low, after its first earnings report failed to ease worries over slowing sales growth and its plan for mobile advertising. Shares of Facebook (FB) tumbled nearly 15% to below $23 on Friday, 40% below the company’s initial offering price from May.
Controlling Monkey Brains and Behavior with Light
July 26th, 2012Via: PhysOrg: Researchers reporting online on July 26 in Current Biology have for the first time shown that they can control the behavior of monkeys by using pulses of blue light to very specifically activate particular brain cells. The findings represent a key advance for optogenetics, a state-of-the-art method for making causal connections between brain […]
Skype Makes Chats and User Data More Available to Police
July 26th, 2012Via: Washington Post: Skype, the online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other user information available to police, said industry and government officials familiar with the changes. Surveillance of the […]
Spoofing Eye-Scanners
July 26th, 2012Via: Wired: Remember that scene in Minority Report when the spider robots stalk Tom Cruise to his apartment and scan his iris to identify him? Things could have turned out so much better for Cruise had he been wearing a pair of contact lenses embossed with an image of someone else’s iris. New research being […]
