The Obama administration has been stoking the fires of fear about a cyberattack on America’s infrastructure for well over a year now, but a little-discussed physical attack on a power plant earlier this year suggests we shouldn’t ignore more traditional threats.
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Houston struggles to save the Astrodome, London vows to make biking safer, L.A. sees light rail successes, and San Francisco mounts a shitty campaign for its sewers. It’s Christmastime in the city for this week’s urban reads.
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Let’s face it. If you believe that Amazon can realize the awesomeness that is drone delivery, you should halfway fear a future of an overbearing police drone force monitoring us. That terrifying totalitarian future might not be as promising as Amazon’s vision for drones but what does that matter to an obsessive government? They’d just abuse drones as a pervasive eye in the sky, all in the name of security.
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Eric Rosol is not a big-time hacker. However, the Wisconsin man did participate in the 2011 distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that Anonymous unleashed on Koch Industries—for one whole minute. And for that one minute of his life, a judge just decided, Rosol must pay a $183,000 fine.
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The NYPD isn’t known for its, uh, transparency. In fact, it’s mostly known for aggressively withholding information. So this new, interactive crime map released by the NYPD this weekend is a welcome surprise.
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Those Mexican thieves that stole a truckload of cobalt-60
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Last year, the FCC and the Big Four carriers announced that they were developing a national lost-and-stolen phone registry. Now, the wireless industry says that the database is complete.
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An emergency clean-up crew was dispatched to a full-size replica of the Space Shuttle Independence in Houston earlier this morning after some miscreants covered it in graffiti. "Houston We ARE the Problem" is almost a political statement, sure—but vandalizing a national treasure with racial slurs? That’s a serious problem. [KHOU]
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Let’s play a little game called Good Idea/Bad Idea. Round One: Saving money. That’s a good idea! Round two: Saving thousands of dollars in a Bitcoin wallet that’s highly susceptible to hackers and heists. As the customers of Bitcoin payment processor BIPS will tell you, that’s a bad idea.
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What really sucks about losing your phone—besides losing the phone—is that you also lose a whole bunch of your data. But to help ease that pain, a iPhone thief in China copied down a list of all his victim’s contacts (by hand!) and returned it to its rightful owner. All 1,000 of them.
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