Archive for the 'Dictatorship' Category
The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket
April 4th, 2014Via: Firstlook: This week, the Associated Press exposed a secret program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation. Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that “American […]
DARPA: Biological Technologies Office
April 3rd, 2014I saw this trailer for The Machine a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn’t resist including it with this news from DARPA. Via: DARPA: Technology, like biology, constantly evolves. It is DARPA’s mission to stay ahead of the shifting technology curve by making critical, early investments in areas that cut across fields of research […]
NSA Infiltrated RSA Security More Deeply than Thought
March 31st, 2014Via: Reuters: “We could have been more sceptical of NSA’s intentions,” RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters.
After Seven Years, Exactly One Person Gets Off the Government No-Fly List
March 28th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: A hearing in federal court Tuesday has apparently marked the conclusion of a drawn-out, costly, and, to use the judge’s own term, “Kafkaesque” legal battle over the government no-fly list. Malaysian college professor Rahinah Ibrahim sued the government back in 2006, after Dr. Ibrahim’s name mistakenly ended up on a federal government […]
The Most Popular Show In America Is Basically NSA Propaganda
March 25th, 2014Via: Business Insider: NCIS and its sibling NCIS: Los Angeles are the top-rated dramas on television, a distinction they have held for several years. Next season there will be a third iteration, which ones hopes will be titled NCIS: Spinoff. As Quartz’s Jason Lynch notes, viewers love these formulaic procedurals—while critics ignore them. But what […]
Sinkhole of Bureaucracy
March 24th, 2014Via: Washington Post: The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag. Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file […]
Turkey Tries to Block Twitter
March 22nd, 2014Via: BBC: Some users trying to open the twitter.com website are apparently being redirected to a statement by Turkey’s telecommunications regulator. It cites a court order to apply “protection measures” on the website. This comes after PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to “wipe out Twitter” following damaging allegations of corruption in his inner circle. The […]
How Virtual Gaming Worlds Are Revealing the Nature of Human Hierarchies
March 20th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: The way players form into groups in online games reveals that hierarchies are an inevitable product of the human condition, say complexity scientists.
U.S. Tech Giants Knew of NSA Data Collection, Agency’s Top Lawyer Insists
March 19th, 2014Via: Guardian: The senior lawyer for the National Security Agency stated unequivocally on Wednesday that US technology companies were fully aware of the surveillance agency’s widespread collection of data, contradicting months of angry denials from the firms. Rajesh De, the NSA general counsel, said all communications content and associated metadata harvested by the NSA under […]
UK Government Wants ‘Unsavoury’ Web Content Censored
March 18th, 2014Via: Wired: The UK minister for immigration and security has called for the government to do more to deal with “unsavoury”, rather than illegal, material online. James Brokenshire made the comments to the Financial Times in an interview related to the government’s alleged ability to automatically request YouTube videos be taken down under “super flagger” […]
