Archive for the 'Surveillance' Category
Retailers Race Against Amazon to Automate Stores
April 2nd, 2018Via: New York Times: A global race to automate stores is underway among several of the world’s top retailers and small tech start-ups, which are motivated to shave labor costs and minimize shoppers’ frustrations, like waiting for cashiers. They are also trying to prevent Amazon from dominating the physical retail world as it does online […]
Ever Record a Video on Facebook? Facebook Still Has It.
March 31st, 2018Via: New York Magazine: Have you downloaded your Facebook data archive yet? Facebook makes it easy to obtain a ZIP file of all the data it has on you: your status updates, your friend list, your messages … and, as I and several people I spoke with were surprised to discover, every video you ever […]
U.S. to Seek Social Media Details From All Visa Applicants
March 29th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: The State Department wants to require all U.S. visa applicants to submit their social media usernames, previous email addresses and phone numbers, vastly expanding the Trump administration’s enhanced vetting of potential immigrants and visitors. In documents to be published in Friday’s Federal Register, the department said it wants the public to comment on […]
Monero Less Untraceable Than It Seems
March 29th, 2018Via: Wired: Monero is designed to mix up any given Monero “coin” with other payments, so that anyone scouring Monero’s blockchain can’t link it to any particular identity or previous transaction from the same source. But in a recent paper, a team of researchers from a broad collection of institutions—including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University, […]
By 2019 Every New Ford Will Have 4G LTE Connectivity for Over-The-Air Updates
March 18th, 2018Tesla has been doing this for years, and it’s very disturbing. Of course, the justification is that changes can be made to the car to fix things over the air, without the customer having to bring the car in for servicing. I get all of that. But many people don’t realize that the vehicles are […]
China to Bar People with Bad ‘Social Credit’ from Planes, Trains
March 16th, 2018Via: Reuters: China said it will begin applying its so-called social credit system to flights and trains and stop people who have committed misdeeds from taking such transport for up to a year. People who would be put on the restricted lists included those found to have committed acts like spreading false information about terrorism […]
TSA Laptop and Phone Searches on Domestic Flights
March 12th, 2018Via: Guardian: There are a growing number of reports of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) searching the electronic devices of passengers on domestic flights in the US, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has sued the federal agency for records. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a lawsuit against the TSA […]
Palantir Wins $876 Million U.S. Army Contract
March 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Billionaire investor Peter Thiel got a fresh victory in Washington. His data-mining startup, Palantir Technologies Inc., won a much-contested contract to provide software to the U.S. Army. Palantir will work with Raytheon Co. to replace the troubled Distributed Common Ground System now in effect. They beat out seven other proposals for a decade-long, […]
FBI Used Geek Squad Technicians as Informants
March 8th, 2018Via: EFF: After the prosecution of a California doctor revealed the FBI’s ties to a Best Buy Geek Squad computer repair facility in Kentucky, new documents released to EFF show that the relationship goes back years. The records also confirm that the FBI has paid Geek Squad employees as informants. EFF filed a Freedom of […]
Tor Is a Foreign Policy Weapon of the U.S. Government
March 2nd, 2018Via: Yasha Levine: For years, the Tor Project — along with other U.S. government crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government spying online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital equivalent of the First […]
