Imagine what it must feel like to be a member of SWAT huddled outside the apartment of a hostage-taker, or a soldier crouched near the door of a terrorist compound, or a firefighter preparing to run into a burning building -- would you want to be the…
Google's latest Transparency Report is out, and guess what. It's troubling! Google senior policy analyst Dorothy Chou breaks the bad news rather concisely in an official Google blog post: "Government surveillance is on the rise."
Let's have a little talk about secrets. There are all kinds of secrets out there in the world: personal secrets, state secrets, secret recipes, secret sauces, top secrets, secret levels in video games, Victoria's Secret. The list goes on. But as we'r…
Good news for everybody out there who's been paralyzed by fear of a robot takeover in the not too distant future. You know that last resort weapon in _The Matrix_, the one that Keanu Reeves or whoever activates when those stingray-looking robots are
Right now, at 11:19 a.m. EST, artist Jonas Lund does not appear to be at his computer. Perhaps he's gone to the bathroom or to get a snack or maybe he's still asleep. Open in his browser is just one page, a pile of code at Github. You can look for yo…
After a decade of hearings and British court appeals per Gary Mckinnon's extradition to the United States to be tried for the biggest military hacking incident the U.S. Justice Department had ever seen.
Remember _The Hunt for the Red October_, that terrific movie from the 1990s starring Alec Baldwin and Sean Connery running around on submarines? The Red October was this new Soviet super sub that was virtually undetectable by radar and rigged up with…
If you didn't already know it, the United States is in terrible trouble of being hit by a horrible, crippling cyberattack. _The New York Times_ calls it a "dire threat." Defense Secretary Leon Panetta calls it the impending "cyber Pearl Harbor." We d…
There are a lot of upsides to living in our always on, ever connected world. Watching YouTube videos on your pocket computer. Watching YouTube videos in an airplane that's flying through the air. Heck, even watching YouTube videos while sitting on yo…
Renting things is always a bit of a gamble. What if you rent a car and the previous renter left an ounce of weed in the glovebox? That's not going to go over too well when you're reaching for the registration at a routine traffic stop. And how about
In the past five years, I have had some pretty terrible haircuts. All of them have been documented on Facebook. All of them would get me fired from my current job. Now think about all the pictures of me and my imbecilic friends playing air cello, air…
There's no word yet on how many fights broke out over the new iPhone at shops around the world over the weekend between eager customers or "Apple and Samsung":http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578007862126166322.html?mod=googlene…
The last time we heard from Isaac Wilder, co-founder of the "Free Network Foundation":http://thefnf.org/, he was getting the hell out of New York City. We first met Wilder, whose peer-to-peer, wifi-hotspot driven communications initiative took front
Last Friday, the U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force announced the arrest of Adel Daoud, a suburban Chicago teenager who’s since been said to be “enamored with Osama bin Laden and intent on killing Americans.” Daoud is charged with planting a bomb outsid…
Two Romanian hackers have fessed up to their involvement in a three-year-long credit card conspiracy that targeted over 150 Subway sandwich shops and as many as 146,000 of their unsuspecting customers. From 2008 to 2010, Iulian Dolan and Cezar Iulian…
NYPD police commissioner Ray Kelly issued a five-page memo last week, giving officers permission to created fake Facebook profiles to assist with electronic probes. Officers will be able to register their alias with the department and obtain a laptop…
Twitter really gave it the old college try with the Malcolm Harris case. The Occupy protester was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge last fall, along with about 700 other kids trying to stand up to the banks. Like those hundred or so other protesters, H…
He doesn’t appear to be in Fed custody for the moment, but this mugshot via Dallas County records confirms that Barrett Brown, better known as @BarrettBrownLOL on Twitter, is at the very least sitting in county jail awaiting possible charges on Thurs…
Border security will never die. Federal budgets and immigration waves may both be on the wane, but hey, no matter. The U.S-Mexico border-industrial complex continues booming apace, with some even saying there's no end in sight in pushing to build up
The hall monitor model was bound to fail. Think about it. You give a student an orange sashes, a rule book and a badge and expect them to keep the peace. But what about said student's friends? They'll get away with murder with their insider connectio…
I had an interesting argument the other day about traffic cameras, and camera tracking/facial recognition in general. The opposing argument was a fairly typical slippery slope type objection -- _now it's traffic tickets, but next it'll be your face l…
Although he has a good deal of hair left, Larry Flynt, legendary pornographer and publisher of _Hustler Magazine_ is beginning to resemble Dr. Evil (if only by virtue of character) as his offers of $1 million become more frequent. As you may recall,
Fashion Week was just getting underway in New York. George W. Bush went for an early morning jog in Florida. Iraq shot down a Predator drone. The weather was still summer and perfect. Until 8.46 AM, September 11, 2001 was another morning in America.
