Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Libra: The Central Bank of Facebook
June 18th, 2019This is hilariously stupid. Via: ZeroHedge: It won’t, however, be a cryptocurrency in the traditional sense. It won’t have a limited supply, defined inflation rate or any commodity character whatsoever. Proof-of-work? Phsaw! Every good Friedmanite knows that opportunity cost in creating new monetary units is simply wasted capital! Only mouth-breathing rubes stuck in the 19th […]
GPS Outage Would Cost U.S. Economy $1 Billion Per Day
June 17th, 2019Via: Ars Technica: Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems. […]
The Omnipresent Surveillance State: Orwell’s 1984 Is No Longer Fiction
June 14th, 2019Via: The Rutherford Institute: The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed […]
Photos Of Travelers Coming In And Out Of The U.S. Have Been Hacked And Stolen
June 10th, 2019Via: BuzzFeed: A US Customs and Border Protection subcontractor suffered a data breach that exposed the photos of tens of thousands of travelers coming in and out of the United States, the agency revealed Monday, in what it described as a “malicious cyber-attack.” The database of identifying traveler photos and license plate images had been […]
The Future Will Be Recorded, on Your Smart Speaker: Always-On Corporate Listening Devices, “Are Certainly Our Future”
June 9th, 2019Mmm hmm. Via: Bloomberg: Amazon’s patent application for an always-on feature for Alexa, its popular voice-activated personal assistant, has raised a lot of concern. “If you’re already freaked out by the privacy implications of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo,” says Gizmodo, “we have some bad news.” A headline in ScienceAlert is even more direct: “Newly […]
The Future Of School Safety Includes Round-The-Clock Surveillance Of Students
June 7th, 2019Via: TechDirt: To go to school is to be surveilled, on campus and off. The average school hosts a number of cameras, and the average school administration is always looking for more ways to keep tabs on students, even after they’ve gone home. The move towards pervasive surveillance of off-campus activities is generally justified with […]
Trails Made by Starlink Satellites
June 7th, 2019“Please note that the density of these satellites is significantly higher in the days after launch (as seen here) and also that the satellites will diminish in brightness as they reach their final orbital altitude.” I would have added: Please note that this is from 25 of the first batch of 60 satellites of a […]
Project Kuiper Initiative: Amazon Will Spend Billions to Build Satellite Internet Service
June 6th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. plans to spend billions of dollars building a network of thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet service, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said. The Project Kuiper initiative, disclosed earlier this year, is the type of big bet the company needs to keep making as its massive scale renders smaller endeavors […]
Police Building Surveillance Networks with Amazon’s Ring Doorbells
June 5th, 2019Via: Cnet: While residential neighborhoods aren’t usually lined with security cameras, the smart doorbell’s popularity has essentially created private surveillance networks powered by Amazon and promoted by police departments. Police departments across the country, from major cities like Houston to towns with fewer than 30,000 people, have offered free or discounted Ring doorbells to citizens, […]
Apple Forces Developers to Place Its Login Button Above Google, Facebook
June 4th, 2019Just a few days ago, someone was asking me how to sign into the AirBNB app on her iPhone without using Google or Facebook credentials. I thought that there would be an option to enter her email and password, but there wasn’t. That app forces users to supply either Google or Facebook credentials. I don’t […]
