Archive for July, 2014
‘Human Props’ Stay in Luxury Homes but Live Like Ghosts
July 15th, 2014Via: Tampa Bay Times: When the Mueller family sits for dinner, the leftover broccoli and crepes are already wrapped in plastic, the kitchen is beyond spotless, and the rest of the home is so tucked-away tidy it looks like they just moved in. In a way, they have: Every inch of furnishing, every little trinket […]
“An FBI Counterterrorism Agent Tracked Me Down Because I Took a Picture of This”
July 15th, 2014Via: ACLU: So, consider this: A professional photographer taking a photo of a well-known Boston landmark is now considered to be engaged in suspicious terrorist activity? I lived through the McCarthy era, so I know how false accusations, surveillance, and keeping files on innocent people can destroy their careers and lives. I am deeply troubled […]
German NSA Committee May Turn to Typewriters
July 15th, 2014Via: Ars Technica: Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament’s National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group’s work. In an appearance (German language) Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. “In […]
GCHQ Has Developed Covert Tools to Seed the Internet with False Information
July 15th, 2014The headline is a huge understatement. Go through the document for a laundry list of stuff they’re up to. Via: First Look: The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web […]
A Contraceptive Implant with Remote Control
July 14th, 2014Date check: Nope, it’s not April Fool’s Day. Just make sure the firewall on your birth control chip is up to date… Via: MIT Technology Review: A startup has developed a contraceptive chip that could be deactivated and reactivated using a wireless remote. … Developed by MicroCHIPS of Lexington, Massachusetts, the device will begin pre-clinical […]
From 2004: “Army Test in 1950 May Have Changed Microbial Ecology”
July 14th, 2014Via: San Francisco Chronicle: Serratia is a bacterium that some doctors and residents of the Bay Area have been familiar with for many years. In 1950, government officials believed that serratia did not cause disease. That belief was later used as a justification for a secret post-World War II Army experiment that became a notorious […]
Apple’s New iPhone, Made in China—By Robots
July 14th, 2014Via: Fiscal Times: The worst kept secret of Apple and its Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn isn’t their poor labor conditions. It isn’t even the fact that they use robots to help bring together all the pieces that make up an iPhone. It’s that their robots are now performing more and more human-like functions. In the past, […]
U.S. Marines Test Robotic Mule at RIMPAC, Hawaii
July 14th, 2014That thing is loud. Pretty effective for announcing their presence. Via: BBC: US marines have tested a new robotic mule at the world’s largest international maritime warfare exercise in Hawaii. The Legged Squad Support System (LS3) is operated by a sensor strapped to a human foot. Military footage shows Lance Corporal Brandon Dieckmann fitting the […]
Electronic Health Records Ripe for Theft
July 14th, 2014Via: Politico: America’s medical records systems are flirting with disaster, say the experts who monitor crime in cyberspace. A hack that exposes the medical and financial records of hundreds of thousands of patients is coming, they say — it’s only a matter of when. As health data become increasingly digital and the use of electronic […]
“How the CIA Partnered With Amazon and Changed Intelligence”
July 13th, 2014Via: DefenseOne: The intelligence community is about to get the equivalent of an adrenaline shot to the chest. This summer, a $600 million computing cloud developed by Amazon Web Services for the Central Intelligence Agency over the past year will begin servicing all 17 agencies that make up the intelligence community.
