Police don’t have much trouble getting access to your cell phone data. Location data, call records, text messages—it’s all up for grabs, often without a warrant. In fact, last year alone, law enforcement authorities made at least 1.1 million requests to mobile carriers for your information.
     |
What do Person of Interest, Hunger Games and Minority Report have in common? They’re all set in a surveillance dystopia, where They are watching your every move and controlling your life with electronic devices. Like all subgenres
| |
The United Nations now has its own drone program. Its first unmanned aircraft took off earlier this week in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Joining some 87 countries with the capability, the organization says it’s just keeping up with the world’s technological advances.
| |
If you’re an American abroad, the NSA could find out where you are right now, if they wanted to. According to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the agency’s collecting 5 billion records a day on cell phone locations around the world. Some of those are from "incidentally" domestic cell phones.
| |
There have been tons of revelations about the National Security Agency since Edward Snowden began leaking
| |
Skype use in China was especially risky for a while — when a local company (TOM Online) was processing data with no real safeguards, it virtually guaranteed the presence of government monitoring. Now that Microsoft has teamed with Guangming Founder on a new China-specific Skype build, there’s a chance that your chats are more secure. GreatFire.org has noticed that the updated app encrypts all data and sends it directly to Microsoft, making it harder to censor or spy on any communications. Don’t be too quick to discuss taboo topics, though. It’s not clear that the Chinese software is free of back doors; Microsoft says it’s following local regulations, which aren’t exactly open-minded. Even so, anyone already using Skype in mainland China will likely want to upgrade if they value some semblance of privacy.
Update: Guangming Founder was created by Guangming Daily, a government-backed newspaper; while Skype’s new approach is still more secure, the association casts extra doubt on the privacy that users can expect.
Filed under: Internet, Software, Microsoft
Via: The Next Web
Source: GreatFire.org
Internet services can toughen their security to mitigate government surveillance, but that won’t do much to lock down information that’s already in snoops’ hands. Twitter hopes to prevent those raids on past data through its recent implementation of Perfect Forward Secrecy, an encryption technique that stops intruders from decoding traffic on a grand scale. Each communication session has a random encryption key that never travels across networks; even if spies get full access to Twitter’s archives, they’ll have to crack any PFS-protected chats one at a time. The new policy won’t stop determined government agents from reading your tweets, but it will make them work harder for anything they want.
Filed under: Internet
Source: Twitter Blog
While Americans shuddered over revelations about NSA surveillance earlier this year, hundreds of private companies have been marketing technology that lets anybody be a spy. We’re not talking about a few nanny cams here and there, either. We’re talking about military-grade tools for whomever has the cash.
| |
It seems like every day brings a new "revelation
| |
The skeletal recognition tech behind Kinect is useful for way more than just gaming. It’s good for sign language, cheating at pool, and (duh) porn
| |
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
