News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:28 pm
For most of my life I have positively sucked as a gardener.
I didn’t pay any attention to what my dad was doing in the garden as a surly and disinterested teen. Old Frank grew up farming and likely knew a thing or two, but he’s dead now. That horse has fled the barn and taken generational knowledge with it.
I didn’t think there was much to growing food when I put in my first vegetable garden behind my first house in Maple Ridge. There was a quite knowledgable gardener next door, not that I paid any attention to what …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:28 pm
BitTorrent, the content distribution network that has been angling for a position as the platform of choice for the creative industries, is today taking one more step to show artists how they can use the service to engage with their fans and potentially spin some business in the process. The company is teaming up with Public Enemy, the iconic hip hop band, for a project in which the group will use the BitTorrent platform not only to market and distribute some of their latest music to the site’s 170 million monthly users, but also give those users a …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:27 pm
The recent disclosures of government overreaches, including the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative non-profits for special scrutiny, have upset many Americans and have been condemned by politicians from both parties. However, let’s not forget another recent revelation about the IRS – one that offers a wake-up call about the power of all government agencies in the age of the Internet.
A month ago, internal documents were released showing that the IRS claimed the power to read email and other private documents stored on the Internet without a warrant. The IRS argued that anyone who used the Internet had …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:27 pm
President Barack Obama said
government surveillance programs that sweep telephone numbers
and Internet data have saved lives, as a controversy over the
monitoring followed him on a trip overseas.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, during a news conference
with Obama in Berlin, said the two discussed a U.S. program,
called Prism, that monitors the Internet activity of foreigners
believed to be located outside the U.S. and plotting terrorist
attacks.
“This is not a situation in which we are rifling through
the ordinary e-mails of German citizens or American citizens or
French citizens or anybody else,” Obama said. “We have struck…
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:27 pm
They may not be stylin’, but they are a privacy enhancement.
(Credit:
National Institute of Informatics)
Foiling facial recognition systems that identify people based on photographs may be as simple as wearing a special set of glasses equipped with near-infrared LEDs powered by a battery pack. The LEDs are arranged around the nose and eyes. The human eye can’t pick up the near-infrared, but a camera sees it as bright light, enough to obscure the face and confuse facial recognition software.
Researchers with the National Institute of Informatics and Kogakuin University in Japan developed the special privacy visor to counteract …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:27 pm
Taiwan has removed plans, at least temporarily, for a bill that would have led to more than partial censorship of parts of the Internet for its citizens. The parallal most obvious is that of the proposed SOPA law, which would have seen a similar effect in the United States.
As with SOPA, many in Taiwan were set to oppose the law. Why? Even partial censorship of the Internet hands agency of what you can read and think to a third-party, which is antithetical to a clear, functionally operating democracy. Here’s what Taiwan was contemplating:
Draft legislation to block links
…
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 1:27 pm
week after Edward Snowden’s leaks about National Security Agency surveillance and data-gathering were first reported, and four days after he revealed himself as the leaker, the news media is figuring out how the 29-year-old IT systems administrator managed his potentially huge data heist.
If you’re concerned about national security, the new revelations will probably dismay you; if you appreciate leaking of government secrets, Snowden’s technique is likely encouraging: Theft by thumb drive.
The NSA and other spy and military agencies have long known the dangers of the innocent-seeming portable USB flash drive. In October 2008, the NSA discovered that a …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 1:27 pm
In a time when it seems like the privacy we all enjoyed was just a smokescreen, it’s nice to know there’s at least one way to fight back against all the systems designed to keep track of our comings and goings. Developed by Japan’s National Institute of Informatics, these glasses include eleven LEDs that blast a privacy curtain of near-infrared light to obscure your face.
It’s invisible to the human eye, but to most cameras the near-infrared light will prevent facial recognition systems from registering the wearer’s face. Because unlike a pair of regular sunglasses, the LEDs are strategically placed …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 1:26 pm
The founder of the world’s biggest marketing services company, Sir Martin Sorrell, has said he believes revelations about the National Security Agency’s Prism internet surveillance program are a “game changer” that will spark a fundamental rethink of web privacy by web users.
The WPP chief executive said that Prism, which allows the NSA to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, according to documents obtained by the Guardian from whistleblower Edward Snowden, is so important that even young people who often have a cavalier attitude to what they reveal online are …
Still more to read....
News via Google / June 19, 2013 7:27 am
BitTorrent Sync, the file synchronization software, was up until now only available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X as an alpha version. It enables you to share data between two computer systems directly, bypassing the cloud in the process.
This makes it ideal for situations where all devices you want to share data between are connected to the Internet or a local area network. Most file synchronization services that use cloud storage, like SkyDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive, require an Internet connection as they save the data to the cloud, and from there to other authorized devices.…
Still more to read....
Rss
Twitter