Hasta La Gadget!

The NSA insists that it respects American privacy, but documents leaked by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post suggest that the agency has trouble maintaining that respect. A May 2012 audit, buried in the documents, 2,776 incidents where the NSA’s Washington-area facilities inadvertently obtained protected American data through a mix of human errors and technical limits. Among its larger gaffes, the NSA regularly had problems determining when foreign cellphones were roaming in the US, leading to unintentional snooping on domestic calls. The agency also spent months tapping and temporarily storing a mix of international and domestic data from US fiber lines until the Foreign Intelligence Surveilliance Court ruled that the technique was unconstitutional. NSA officials responding to the leak say that their agency corrects and mitigates incidents where possible, and argue that it’s difficult for the organization to avoid errors altogether. However, the audit also reveals that the NSA doesn’t always report violations to overseers — the division may be interested in fixing mistakes, but it’s not eager to mention them.

Filed under: Cellphones, Networking, Internet

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Via: GigaOM

Source: Washington Post

You know what they say? If you can’t beat ‘em, then join ‘em. I would suppose that government regulating some of society’s activities, such as gambling, alcohol and prostitution has something to do with keeping tabs and control over the situation. After all, if you were to outlaw something, chances are pretty high things could get ugly on the streets, so why not regulate the entire situation and make some money out of it at the same time? Some things, however, should not be regulated – such as texting while driving, as an outright ban would be, theoretically speaking, the correct thing to do. But is it effective? California’s texting-while-driving ban that took effect since the start of 2009 has not really resulted in the effect that lawmakers wanted, as cases of texting-while-driving has exploded since.

The AAA of California released its annual roadside observational surveys recently, finding out that handset-to-head cellphone use is down by 57% ever since the no-handsets-while-driving law took effect in 2008. Unfortunately, texting while driving is up by 126% since the 2009 ban, where approximately 4% of drivers admitted to doing it last year, against the 1.5% figure touted before the law kicked in. Perhaps the explosion of instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp has something to do with this unwanted growth. After all, enforcing such a ban can prove to be tricky and difficult to say the least.

Texting While Driving Gains Popularity After Being Outlawed original content from Ubergizmo.

If you get a lot of work-related email, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the misuse of priority tags — potluck dinners are suddenly as vital as company-wide meetings. It’s with a sense of dread, then, that we learned that Microsoft has applied for a patent on prioritizing phone calls. The approach would let callers choose an urgency level that flashes alerts, sends messages and otherwise signals that a call can’t wait. It would simultaneously foil telemarketers and other cold callers by requiring a passcode or encrypted authentication. If granted, the patent could be useful for on-call workers and worried parents. That said, we won’t mind if Microsoft declines to use it; we don’t need high-priority calls to refill the office coffee pot.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft

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Source: USPTO

An amendment designed to stop the NSA from collecting phone records of millions of Americans has been narrowly defeated, 205 votes to 217, in the House of Representatives.

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Now here is a robot that snooping boyfriends or curious ex-wives would like to have – on that can crack a smartphone’s security code in under 24 hours. Of course, when you look at it on the surface, this is […]

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