63519931
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
From an abandoned McDonald's in the backyard of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, a dozen or so volunteer scientists and engineers have taken control of a decommissioned, still running, 70s-era space satellite, currently some 20,000 kilometers away, by using discarded vintage space computers and a few sweet eBay finds. The so-named "McMoon's" Control Center is some sort of bizarre testament to human ingenuity and what a bunch of very smart people with virtually no budget or proper authorization can pull off. A bit of context: The International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) satellite was launched on August 12, 1978, and was originally meant to study the Earth’s magnetosphere from the L1 Lagrangian point between the Sun and the Earth, where the gravity of both bodies cancel each other out.
63421133
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You've maybe heard a bit about Stingray. Over the past couple of years, it has emerged that police forces in the US have been using the powerful surveillance tool, which tricks phones into connecting to a dragnet, to track mobile devices, and intercept calls and text messages.
Meanwhile, the London Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) continue to remain tight lipped about their use of the technology, leaving citizens in the dark on what privacy protections, if any, are in place for those who may get swept up by the broad surveillance techniques.
63197007
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Now the NSA has yet another dilemma on its hands: Investigative journalist Jason Leopold is suing the agency for denying him the release of financial disclosure statements attributable to its former director. According to a report by Bloomberg , prospective clients of Alexander's, namely large banks, will be billed $1 million a month for his cyber-consulting services. Recode.net quipped that for an extra million, Alexander would show them the back door (state-installed spyware mechanisms) that the NSA put in consumer routers.
62905001
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
While IDF planes drop bombs on Gaza and Hamas fires rockets from inside its borders, both groups are also tweeting, sharing, and promoting the war every step of the way.
The Gaza conflict has offered up its own brand of Twitter war between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas, who are squaring off in an online social media battle to match the on-the-ground campaign. And just as in the physical world, in the cyber version playing out in social media, the weaponry the Israelis deploy far outclasses Hamas capabilities.
The IDF has been disseminating a mixture of images, tweets, and YouTube videos designed to both justify their operations and perform the classic strategy of any military PSYOP—defining your enemy in no uncertain terms.
62813713
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A drone was just used to save a life: Earlier this week, an elderly man who was missing for three days was found with the help of a drone in Wisconsin.
82-year-old Guillermo DeVenecia had been missing for three days. Search dogs, a helicopter, and hundreds of volunteers had spent days looking for him. David Lesh, a Colorado-based skier (catch him doing a double front flip here, because, why not) decided to look for him using his drone—and found him within 20 minutes.
"We weren't really sure what we would find or what kind of shape he would be in if we did find him . I don't think any of us expected to find him," Lesh told the Madison NBC affiliate, WMTV. "We noticed a man out in the field sort of stumbling, a little disoriented."
62813551
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You can choose from characters like a Mudkip, a tank, a core from Portal and Nic Cage. For weapons you've got your pick of a pistol, a turtle and what looks like a shake-weight. Every text on the option menu is written in Doge-tongue, with Doge's ghostly, wandering face fading in when you hover the cursor around.
The game I’m talking about, please be nice :(, is a messy club sandwich of a production, too drenched from memes to avoid collapsing all over your fries. But game developer Aran Koning knew this would happen, or he wouldn’t have ended the title in a frowny face.
Aran knew he needed this virtual-roundtable force to channel into a game. 133 additions later to please be nice :(, and Koning’s team has only ever rejected the suggestion of ‘twerking.’
62495645
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
I caught wind of a new app called ON?. It forefronts the simplest and most frequently asked question of all: "Is my phone on?" If you're old enough to own a land line, then a dial tone should be relief enough. But cell phones don't have dial tones. So what's the next best thing?
Of course, the glow of a lover's late-night text doth tell us the phone still has life. But when a lover is away or if you haven't paid your bill, there's no simple, frictionless way to make sure that a phone is really, in fact, working.
Unfortunately, ON? has yet to be accepted by the guardians of Apple's app store. It remains unreleased, banned, censored. This despite its helpful support page and an experienced, eager bunch of capitalistic founders.
62328709
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Hidden From Google, the brainchild of a web programmer in New Jersey, archives each website that Google is required to take down from European Union search listings thanks to the recent court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google's search results if they're outdated or irrelevant. That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies, among thousands of others.
62088083
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Dubai is building "the world's first climate-controlled city"—it's a 4.3 mile pedestrian mall that will be covered with a retractable dome to provide its shoppers with air conditioning in the summer heat. The Mall of the World, as it's called, will become the sort of spectacular, over-the-top attraction Dubai is known for. Shortly after, it will probably become an equally spectacular real-world dystopia.
By sectioning off a 3-million-square-foot portion of the city with an air conditioned dome, Dubai is dropping one of the most tangible partitions between the haves and the have nots of the modern era—the 100 hotels and apartment complexes inside the attraction will be cool, comfortable, and nestled into a entertainment-filled, if macabre, consumer paradise.
61692353
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
A terrible number of words have been written about Breaking Bad , yet none have struck upon the irony at its core. For all of the cult hit’s vaunted fine-brush realism and sly cultural references, the show never even winked at the real world “blue” that grew up alongside it. During the five years Heisenberg spent as a blue-meth cook, the nation experienced a nonfictional explosion in the manufacture and sale of sapphire pills and azure capsules containing amphetamine. This other “blue,” known by its trade names Adderall and Vyvanse, found its biggest market in classrooms like Walter White’s. As this blue speed is made and sold in anodyne corporate environments, the drama understandably focused on blue meth and its buyers, usually depicted as jittery tweakers picking at lesions and wearing rags on loan from the cannibal gangs of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
61529113
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
In a ruling anticipated for years, the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that police must have a warrant to search a person's cell phone. The ruling, which is strong in its defense of Fourth Amendment rights in the digital space, is a landmark decision for the treatment and protection of individuals' data.
"Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience," reads Chief Justice John Robert's opinion. "With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans 'the privacies of life.'"
"The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought," it continues. "Our answer to the question of what police must do before searching a cell phone seized incident to an arrest is accordingly simple—get a warrant."
61297429
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
Weeks after he started working quietly as an FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his online alias "Sabu," led a cyber attack against one of the bureau's very own IT contractors.
In July 2011, at Monsegur's urging, members of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacking collective Anonymous, took advantage of compromised log-in credentials belonging to a contractor with a top secret security clearance employed at the time by ManTech International.
According to chat logs recorded by Monsegur at the behest of the FBI and obtained by Motherboard, the informant directed hackers to pilfer as much data as possible from ManTech's servers as investigators stood by. Stolen data was published as the third installment of AntiSec's "Fuck FBI Friday" campaign: a collection of leaks intended to embarrass the same federal agency that presided over the hack and others.
61268635
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
It hopefully doesn't come as a surprise that your friends shape who you are. But we tend to think of that on a micro level: If your close circle of friends tends to have tattoos, wear polo shirts, or say "chill" a lot, it's quite possible that you'll emulate them over time—and they'll emulate you too.
But what happens on a macro scale, when your friend circle doesn't just include the dozen people you actually hang out with regularly, but also the hundreds or thousands of acquaintances you have online? All of those feeds may seem filled with frivolities from random people (and they are!) but that steady stream of life updates—photos, rants, slang—are probably shaping you more than you think.
A massive Facebook study recently published in PNAS found solid evidence of so-called emotional contagion—emotional states spreading socially, like a virus made of emoji—on the social network.
61178389
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
You're likely familiar with the theory of how the Moon formed: a stray body smashed into our young Earth, heating the planet and flinging debris into its orbit. That debris coalesced and formed the Moon. The impact theory still holds, but a team of geochemists from the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France has refined the date, finding that the Moon is about 60 million years older than we thought. As it turns out, that also means the Earth is 60 million years older than previously thought, which is a particularly cool finding considering just how hard it is to estimate the age of our planet.
61160847
submission
Daniel_Stuckey writes:
The intelligence firm at the center of a notorious cybersecurity breach that affected top government officials failed to institute standard security measures prior to the attack, according to a newly leaked report. In December 2011, a group of skilled hackers broke into the network of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), compromising the personal data of some 860,000 customers, including a former U.S. vice president, CIA director, and secretary of state, among others. For Stratfor, a Texas-based geopolitical intelligence and consulting firm, the incident was an international embarrassment that caused roughly $3.78 million in total damages—and all of it could’ve been avoided by meeting common fraud prevention requirements.
