Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
No, Turning On Your Phone Is Not Consenting to Being Tracked by Police
March 6th, 2016Via: The Intercept: The Maryland Court of Special Appeals on Wednesday upheld a historic decision by a state trial court that the warrantless use of cell-site simulators, or Stingrays, violates the Fourth Amendment. The trial court had suppressed evidence obtained by the warrantless use of a Stingray — the first time any court in the […]
MIT’s New 5-Atom Quantum Computer Could Make Today’s Encryption Obsolete
March 6th, 2016“all you have to do is go in the lab, apply more technology, and you should be able to make a bigger quantum computer” So the only thing preventing a more general purpose quantum computer is money and enough engineers… Hmm… Via: PC World: Much of the encryption world today depends on the challenge of […]
Billboards to Track People via Mobile Phones
March 2nd, 2016“All data is anonymous and aggregated, they say, meaning individual consumers cannot be identified.” Oh sure. Via: New York Times: Pass a billboard while driving in the next few months, and there is a good chance the company that owns it will know you were there and what you did afterward. Clear Channel Outdoor Americas, […]
Google Unveils Neural Network with “Superhuman” Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image
February 28th, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review: Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes […]
Virtual Reality and Zuckerberg’s, “Rictus Grin”
February 22nd, 2016Har! Via: The Verge: The image above looks like concept art for a new dystopian sci-fi film. A billionaire superman with a rictus grin, striding straight past human drones, tethered to machines and blinded to reality by blinking plastic masks. Golden light shines down on the man as he strides past his subjects, cast in […]
‘See Something Suspicious Online? Homeland Security Wants to Know About It’
February 18th, 2016Via: NextGov: The Department of Homeland Security wants an extra $1 million next year to develop a public-service campaign designed to increase awareness of online threats. The new initiative will be modeled on the “If You See Something, Say Something” effort rolled out after the Sept. 11 attacks. The new cyber PSA “will look to […]
The NSA’s SKYNET Program May be Killing Thousands of Innocent People
February 16th, 2016Via: Ars Technica: In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that “we kill people based on metadata.” Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent. Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA’s SKYNET programme. According to the […]
Bloomberg Op-Ed Calls For An End Of Cash
February 1st, 2016Via: ZeroHedge: Bring On the Cashless Future Cash had a pretty good run for 4,000 years or so. These days, though, notes and coins increasingly seem declasse: They’re dirty and dangerous, unwieldy and expensive, antiquated and so very analog. Sensing this dissatisfaction, entrepreneurs have introduced hundreds of digital currencies in the past few years, of […]
“No Cost” License Plate Readers Are Turning Texas Police into Mobile Debt Collectors and Data Miners
February 1st, 2016Via: Electronic Frontier Foundation: Vigilant Solutions, one of the country’s largest brokers of vehicle surveillance technology, is offering a hell of a deal to law enforcement agencies in Texas: a whole suite of automated license plate reader (ALPR) equipment and access to the company’s massive databases and analytical tools—and it won’t cost the agency a […]
Private Browsing Microsoft Style
February 1st, 2016All browsing done with Edge in “InPrivate” mode is logged. haha It even flags the “InPrivate” visits in the log. Is anyone actually using Edge, besides security researchers attempting to see how screwed it is? Via: Kinja: So just how private is InPrivate Browsing mode in Microsoft Edge? Not as private as Microsoft would lead […]
