Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Three-Parent IVF Babies
April 22nd, 2011Via: New Scientist: A review of technologies that create three-parent embryos to avoid mitochondrial disease has found no evidence that the methods are unsafe, calling for further research. Medical charities have followed up the report with a call to the UK’s health secretary to prepare to regulate the technology in clinics.
Both Apple and Google Receive Smartphone Users’ Locations
April 22nd, 2011Via: Wall Street Journal: Apple Inc.’s iPhones and Google Inc.’s Android smartphones regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively, according to data and documents analyzed by The Wall Street Journal—intensifying concerns over privacy and the widening trade in personal data. Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race […]
iPhone Keeps Secret Record of Everywhere You Go
April 20th, 2011Via: Guardian: Security researchers have discovered that Apple’s iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner’s computer when the two are synchronised. The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone’s recorded coordinates along […]
Michigan Police Copying Smartphone Data During Routine Traffic Stops?
April 20th, 2011Via: Popular Mechanics: In Michigan, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a complaint alleging that Michigan State Police officers used forensic cellphone analyzers to snoop in drivers’ cellphones during routine traffic stops. PM talked to a Fourth Amendment expert to sort through whether that amendment’s protections against illegal search and seizure should stop […]
British Ministry of Defense on Killer Robots: ‘Incremental and Involuntary Journey Towards a Terminator-Like Reality’
April 18th, 2011Via: Guardian: The growing use of unmanned aircraft in combat situations raises huge moral and legal issues, and threatens to make war more likely as armed robots take over from human beings, according to an internal study by the Ministry of Defence. The report warns of the dangers of an “incremental and involuntary journey towards […]
FBI Hijacks ‘Coreflood’ Botnet
April 17th, 2011Alternate headline: FBI Obtains Distributed Denial of Service Capability for Free. Interestingly, in other recent news, the government is stepping up propaganda efforts on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace scheme, which is ‘voluntary‘, of course… Translation: They want you to use NSTIC. They want you to want to use it. There are […]
Intense Light Passing Through Non Conductive Material, ‘Can Generate Magnetic Effects That Are 100 Million Times Stronger Than Previously Expected’
April 15th, 2011Intense light can cause glass to exhibit strong magnetic properties. Wow, this is a weird one. The buzz kill occurs when you read that the light needs to be focused to 10 million watts per square centimeter to realize the effect. The researchers are looking for materials that work at lower intensities. Via: PhysOrg: A […]
ABB FRIDA Concept Robot for Industrial Dual-Arm Assembly Applications
April 14th, 2011Foxconn assembly line workers make about $3480 per year, or $34,800 over a decade. How much will one of those ABB FRIDA robots (and associated systems) cost? My guess is that Foxconn could pay two human factory workers for a decade for less than the cost of one of those robots. Eventually, though, a single […]
Police Increasingly Peeping at E-Mail, Instant Messages
April 14th, 2011This article ignores the existence of the NSA’s large scale, warrantless intercept program that’s running inside the U.S. Via: MacWorld: Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher. Police and […]
How China and Others Are Altering Web Traffic
April 14th, 2011Here’s commentary from, U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators: …When you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet. For example, when you type in cnn.com or google.com, what you see may be quite different from what the rest of the world sees. The military could […]
