Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Are New York’s Free LinkNYC Internet Kiosks Tracking Your Movements?
September 10th, 2018Via: The Intercept: LinkNYC kiosks have become a familiar eyesore to New Yorkers. Over 1,600 of these towering, nine-and-a-half-foot monoliths — their double-sided screens festooned with ads and fun facts — have been installed across the city since early 2016. Mayor Bill de Blasio has celebrated their ability to provide “the fastest and largest municipal […]
Decentralisation: The Next Big Step for the World Wide Web
September 9th, 2018Via: Guardian: The decentralised web, or DWeb, could be a chance to take control of our data back from the big tech firms. So how does it work and when will it be here?
The U.S. Army Wants to Transmit Power to Drones with Lasers
September 8th, 2018Via: Defense Systems: Even as drone technology advances, power constraints limit the amount of equipment unmanned systems can carry as well as the time they can stay in the air. Some drone systems, like the Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications drone from CyPhy Works, deliver power through a tether to keep a small drone aloft […]
IBM Used NYPD Surveillance Footage to Develop Technology That Lets Police Search by Skin Color
September 6th, 2018Via: The Intercept: In the decade after the 9/11 attacks, the New York City Police Department moved to put millions of New Yorkers under constant watch. Warning of terrorism threats, the department created a plan to carpet Manhattan’s downtown streets with thousands of cameras and had, by 2008, centralized its video surveillance operations to a […]
Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
September 4th, 2018Via: New York Times: A state’s capacity to spy on its citizens has grown exponentially in recent years as new technology has meant more aspects of our lives can be observed, recorded and analyzed than ever before. At the same time, much to the frustration of intelligence agencies around the world, so has the ability […]
Robot Boat Sails Into History by Finishing Atlantic Crossing
September 4th, 2018Via: ABC: All summer, the small boat drifted steadily eastward across the churning North Atlantic until it neared the Irish coast, where it made history by becoming the first unmanned sailboat to cross the Atlantic. The SB Met, built by Norwegian company Offshore Sensing AS, reached the finish line of the Microtransat Challenge for robotic […]
Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales in Stores
September 3rd, 2018Via: Bloomberg: For the past year, select Google advertisers have had access to a potent new tool to track whether the ads they ran online led to a sale at a physical store in the U.S. That insight came thanks in part to a stockpile of Mastercard transactions that Google paid for. But most of […]
Senate Democrats Are Circulating Plans for Government Takeover of the Internet
August 17th, 2018Via: Reason: A leaked memo circulating among Senate Democrats contains a host of bonkers authoritarian proposals for regulating digital platforms, purportedly as a way to get tough on Russian bots and fake news. To save American trust in “our institutions, democracy, free press, and markets,” it suggests, we need unprecedented and undemocratic government intervention into […]
Google Tracks Your Movements, Like It or Not
August 13th, 2018Mmm hmm. Via: AP: Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An Associated Press investigation found that many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used privacy settings that say they will prevent […]
Hacker Finds Hidden ‘God Mode’ on Old x86 CPUs; ‘These Backdoors Probably Exist Elsewhere’
August 12th, 2018One more for your herniating Compromised Down to the Silicon file folder. Via: Tom’s Hardware: Some x86 CPUs have hidden backdoors that let you seize root by sending a command to an undocumented RISC core that manages the main CPU, security researcher Christopher Domas told the Black Hat conference here Thursday (Aug. 9). The command […]
