Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Napolitano on Internet Surveillance
June 20th, 2010Via: AP: Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday. As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, […]
The Strange and Consequential Case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
June 18th, 2010This is a lengthy meditation on the Manning/Lamo/WikiLeaks situation. It’s very worth going through, but don’t expect to come away with any clear conclusions as to what actually happened here. Via: Salon: From the start, this whole story was quite strange for numerous reasons.
Pentagon Zombie-Maker’s New Project: Suffocate, Freeze, Reanimate
June 18th, 2010Via: Wired: The scientist responsible for some of the Pentagon’s wildest research has devised a method that could one day save trauma patients, and even extend the shelf life of transplant organs. Step one: Suffocate the wounded. Step two: Put ‘em on ice. Mark Roth, a biochemist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, has been […]
NSA Whistleblower Used Hushmail to Communicate with Reporter
June 16th, 2010Absolutely no surprises here. At best, Hushmail is useless for communications where a state is the privacy attacker. At worst, it’s a purpose built honeypot. See this one from 2007: Hushmail: Encrypted Email Provider Turns Over Clear Text Messages to Feds. Via: Weekly Standard: To communicate covertly with the Sun reporter, Drake opened up a […]
GCHQ by Richard Aldrich
June 16th, 2010GCHQ by Richard Aldrich on amazon.com and amazon.co.uk. Via: Register: If information indeed is power, then GCHQ is undoubtedly the closest thing the British government has to the Death Star. As the historian Richard J Aldrich notes in the introduction to his excellent new history of the Cheltenham-based agency it represents by far our largest, […]
Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price
June 8th, 2010Via: New York Times: When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up. […]
No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency
June 7th, 2010This is a very interesting piece about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Via: The New Yorker: He had come to understand the defining human struggle not as left versus right, or faith versus reason, but as individual versus institution. As a student of Kafka, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn, he believed that truth, creativity, love, and compassion are […]
Investment Firms Grab Stock Data First, and Use It Seconds Before Others
June 4th, 2010This is an easy to understand piece about high frequency trading. Via: Wall Street Journal: Some fast-moving computer-driven investment firms are getting an edge by trading on market data before it gets to other investors, according to market players and researchers who have studied the trading. The firms gain that advantage by buying data from […]
Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing ‘Is Not an Accident’
June 4th, 2010Via: Gizmodo: Lawyers suing Google claimed Thursday they have discovered evidence in a patent application that Google deliberately programmed its Street View cars to collect private data from open Wi-Fi networks, despite claims to the contrary. “At this point, it is our belief that it is not an accident,” said Brooks Cooper, an Oregon attorney […]
The Coming Artilect War
June 3rd, 2010Via: Technofascism Blog: If you haven’t heard of Hugo de Garis, AI researcher and Professor at China’s Xiamen University, then you’ve probably never heard of an Artilect either. A contraction of Artificial Intellect, the Artilects are future creations that, according to de Garis, will be immortal, godlike robotic beings that, due to being built on […]
