Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
The Website That Visualizes Human Activity in Cities Across the World
September 9th, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review: Phone data is set to become a standard resource that almost anyone can use to study and watch humanity continuously, much as they can now watch the weather unfold anywhere on the planet almost in real time. But one thing is holding them back—the lack of powerful computational tools that can […]
New Teflon Coating Renders Drones Nearly Invisible
September 8th, 2015Via: Inverse: Just as we’re getting used to the idea of drones flying overhead, the University of California-San Diego has figured out how to make them invisible. While making a drone literally invisible isn’t possible, covering it in a sheet that reflects its surroundings — like a fluid mirror — has a similar effect. The […]
Microsoft Adding Windows 10 Style Spyware to Windows 7 and Windows 8
August 31st, 2015Update: Several Windows 10 Privacy Tools — How many hosts is Microsoft phoning everything home to? Is it feasible to just block them all with an external firewall so a Windows box simply can’t reach Microsoft? The article below says that Windows 10 is ignoring the hosts file and phoning home anyway, so it seems […]
Police Secretly Track Cellphones to Solve Routine Crimes
August 24th, 2015Via: USA Today: In one case after another, USA TODAY found police in Baltimore and other cities used the phone tracker, commonly known as a stingray, to locate the perpetrators of routine street crimes and frequently concealed that fact from the suspects, their lawyers and even judges. In the process, they quietly transformed a form […]
Katherine Albrecht: Windows 10 Is Full Blown Electronic Tyranny
August 24th, 2015Via: Pete Santilli:
No-Fly List Uses ‘Predictive Assessments’ Instead of Hard Evidence, U.S. Admits
August 24th, 2015Shocker. Via: Guardian: The Obama administration’s no-fly lists and broader watchlisting system is based on predicting crimes rather than relying on records of demonstrated offenses, the government has been forced to admit in court. In a little-noticed filing before an Oregon federal judge, the US Justice Department and the FBI conceded that stopping US and […]
IBM: Digital Rat Brain
August 19th, 2015Via: Quartz: In August 2014, IBM announced that it had built a “brain-inspired” computer chip—essentially a computer that was wired like an organic brain, rather than a traditional computer. These chips are designed to work like neurons—the brain’s nerve cells. Wired reported on Aug. 17 that the team working on the brain chips recently hit […]
Even When Told Not To, Windows 10 Won’t Stop Talking to Microsoft
August 18th, 2015Via: ArsTechnica: For example, even with Cortana and searching the Web from the Start menu disabled, opening Start and typing will send a request to www.bing.com to request a file called threshold.appcache which appears to contain some Cortana information, even though Cortana is disabled. The request for this file appears to contain a random machine […]
NSA Spying Relies on AT&T’s ‘Extreme Willingness to Help’
August 15th, 2015NSAT&T: Since 1985. Via: ProPublica: The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly […]
NSA Preparing Quantum Resistant Encryption Algorithms
August 15th, 2015Via: National Security Agency: IAD recognizes that there will be a move, in the not distant future, to a quantum resistant algorithm suite. Based on experience in deploying Suite B, we have determined to start planning and communicating early about the upcoming transition to quantum resistant algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to provide cost effective […]
