Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Copyright Industry Calls for Broad Search Engine Censorship
January 29th, 2012Via: Torrent Freak: At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The […]
DARPA-Funded Hacker’s Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides In Offices, Drops From Drones
January 29th, 2012Via: Forbes: Even more embarrassing than a student discovering your GPS tracking device on his car, as the FBI found out last year, is having to ask him to give the expensive piece of equipment back. So security researcher Brendan O’Connor is trying a different approach to spy hardware: building a sensor-equipped surveillance-capable computer that’s […]
New Military Budget: Fewer Conventional Forces, More Special Forces and Terminator Robots
January 28th, 2012Via: Wired: About 80,000 Army soldiers and 20,000 Marines are getting downsized. Half of the Army’s conventional combat presence in Europe is packing up and ending its post-Cold War staycation. Replacing them, according to the $613 billion budget previewed by the Pentagon on Thursday: unconventional special-operations forces; new bombers; new spy tools; new missiles for […]
Twitter to Censor Content in Some Countries
January 27th, 2012Via: Montreal Gazette: Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in specific countries, renewing questions about how the social media platform will handle issues of free speech as it rapidly expands its global user base. Until now, Twitter had to remove a tweet from its global network if it received a takedown request […]
Britain: Wave Powered Pistons Will Pump Sea Water Into Reservoirs for On-Demand Electricity Generation
January 27th, 2012My guess is that pigs will fly before this is built out on any meaningful scale, but it looks like an interesting idea. Via: BBC: A Devon inventor’s electricity from seawater generator could be sited at 200 points around the UK coastline. Energy firm Ecotricity wants to develop a commercial Searaser for testing off Falmouth […]
The Death of Used Video Games
January 27th, 2012Via: Kotaku: Microsoft will upgrade its disc technology for its next Xbox from DVDs to Blu-Ray discs, catching up to rival Sony, games industry sources tell Kotaku. Sony’s PlayStation 3 currently supports Blu-Ray, which can contain 25 or 50GB of data compared to DVD’s 9GB. But that disc detail could be far less impactful to […]
Britain: National Patient DNA Database?
January 26th, 2012The document to which he’s referring is here: Building on Our Inheritance: Genomic Technology in Healthcare. Via: Kevin Townsend: You have to look long and hard, but eventually you find it. There, on page 51 of ‘Building on our inheritance – Genomic technology in healthcare’ is the one and only mention of the national whole […]
And Now… Precrime Red Spot Lights
January 25th, 2012Via: AP: The police department in the city of East Orange, New Jersey is installing red spotlights to remotely shine on those police believe are about to commit a crime.
Google Admits It Will Track Everything Its Users Do, No Opt Out
January 25th, 2012In other words, Google now admits doing things that Cryptogon readers have known it has been doing for about a decade: Tracking everything. Via: Washington Post: Google said Tuesday it will follow the activities of users across e-mail, search, YouTube and other services, a shift in strategy that is expected to invite greater scrutiny of […]
The Secret Facebook of Power
January 24th, 2012Via: Register: “It wasn’t secret, we just didn’t need to tell anyone about it” said Sid Heaslip, Programme manager at Opentext discussing the TOP SECRET FACEBOOK OF POWER that his company made for the G20 summit in 2010, exclusively for the leaders of the world’s most powerful nations to network with. Despite keeping the network […]
