Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Google’s Internet Balloons Are Staying Aloft Longer Than Anyone Expected
December 14th, 2014Via: The Verge: When Google announced Project Loon in June of last year many balloon experts were skeptical of its chances. The stated goal was that the balloons that would last 100 days or more in the air, but nobody was routinely getting anywhere near that kind of longevity. Much larger NASA balloons typically stayed […]
Fake Mobile Base Stations in Center of Oslo, Norway
December 13th, 2014Via: Aftenposten: Investigations made by Norwegian daily Aftenposten during the past weeks have revealed a number of fake base stations on several locations, in and around the Norwegian capital. They were detected around the parliament building Stortinget, near several ministries and the prime minister’s residence in Parkveien. Conversations and data may be monitored The fake […]
Repository of Censored and Sensitive Chinese Keywords
December 12th, 2014Via: CitizenLab: …we have collected 13 lists of sensitive Chinese keywords and aggregated them into a single, sortable, and share-able CSV file (see a Google docs sample, sorted by the number of lists each keyword appears on). This file, along with a description of the 13 lists and their sources/origins, are located in a GitHub […]
Retail Neuroscience
December 10th, 2014Via: CBS: Retailers are trying to get into customers’ brains and they now have the technology to do it. It’s called consumer neuroscience and companies are getting valuable shopper intel that can shape the shopping experience.
Facebook AI Assistant for Imbeciles
December 10th, 2014Via: Wired: Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook. It’s a common thing to do. But […]
The Vending Machine Of The Future Is Here, And It Knows Who You Are
December 9th, 2014I haven’t bought anything from a vending machine since 2005. Then again, I haven’t been to a town with traffic lights in nearly two years. In any event, here’s one for your bulging Not-The-Onion file folder. Via: Telegraph: The Luce X2 Touch TV vending machine, which was debuted to industry professionals in Hertfordshire in October, […]
Give NSA Unlimited Access to Digital Data, Says Federal Judge
December 8th, 2014Via: Computerworld: The U.S. National Security Agency should have an unlimited ability to collect digital information in the name of protecting the country against terrorism and other threats, an influential federal judge said during a debate on privacy. “I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the […]
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
December 6th, 2014Via: The New Yorker: On Thursday, Freedom House published its fifth annual report on Internet freedom around the world. As in years past, China is again near the bottom of the rankings, which include sixty-five countries. Only Syria and Iran got worse scores, while Iceland and Estonia fared the best. (The report was funded partly […]
Operation Auroragold: How the NSA Hacks Cellphone Networks Worldwide
December 6th, 2014Via: First Look: According to documents contained in the archive of material provided to The Intercept by whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA has spied on hundreds of companies and organizations internationally, including in countries closely allied to the United States, in an effort to find security weaknesses in cellphone technology that it can exploit for […]
INCENSER
December 1st, 2014Via: Electrospaces: Recently disclosed documents show that the NSA’s fourth-largest cable tapping program, codenamed INCENSER, pulls its data from just one single source: a submarine fiber optic cable linking Asia with Europe. Until now, it was only known that INCENSER was a sub-program of WINDSTOP and that it collected some 14 billion pieces of internet […]
