Items tagged with CIA
It was revealed several months ago that the U.S. Marshal Service secretly uses spy planes equipped with devices that mimic cell towers to scan for and harvest cellphone information on a mass scale. Now it's being reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a key role in helping the Justice Department...
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Thanks to the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, we know that the United States government has in place a sophisticated and all-encompassing spying program, and as time goes on, additional details leak out that underscore how little privacy we truly have. Whether it's intercepting Skype communications or tampering...
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An accountability board overseen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) cleared the spy agency of any wrongdoing after investigating the search of Senate computers that were used to review the agency's alleged use of torture tactics during Bush's presidency period. That might be fine and dandy under different...
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Even when the government conducts secret activities, those ventures have to be funded, and a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives last night took a swipe at the NSA’s domestic spying practices by cutting some of its funding. According to Ars Technica, Representatives James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), Zoe Lofgren...
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A new comprehensive writeup at The Intercept claims to reveal additional details of the NSA's plans to infiltrate and conquer the Internet -- as well as its desire to bring virtually all data, everywhere, within its reach. A year ago, this kind of claim would've sounded like hyperbolic conspiracy theory, but no...
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The CIA is paying AT&T some $10 million a year for access to certain customer call data that includes international-to-international calls as well as some domestic-to-international calls, according to a New York Times report citing information from “government officials”. The CIA’s involvement is part of an overseas counterterrorism...
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During a speech to the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC on cybersecurity, former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden confessed that if whistleblower Edward Snowden is captured by the US and brought back for trial, cyber-attacks by his defenders can be expected. While I find it hard to agree with most of what...
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It's beginning to feel like we're unable to go even a single week without learning of a public official caught in an affair, but last week's discovery of the affair of CIA Director David Petraeus came as a shock for a couple of reasons. David wasn't some mere politician, but a decorated war hero who most recently sat at the helm of one of...
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Besides being a low-ranking Marvel Comics super-villain, Trapster is a free application that went live on the App Store last Friday, allowing users to share information real-time on speed traps.Besides the iPhone (naturally the highest-profile device in the bunch), the app runs on GPS devices like Garmin and TomTom, as well as on smartphones...
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A new commercial PC game came out two days ago from a brand new game development and publishing company. The game is called CellZenith and the company is called Faramix Enterprises. What make this a unique story is not actually the game (full disclosure: we've not played the game, so we cannot comment intelligently about it), but the story...
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Social music networks are like college. You all meet up there for a while, make friends, maybe a few enemies, share all sorts of things, and then scatter to other places and make new friends. The overriding constant is that nobody has any money in either place. Social.FM, which until recently was known as Mercora, was launched in 2005, and...
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In case you don't know, an upskirt photo is one taken surreptitiously by pointing a camera upwards and ... well, we're hoping you can figure it out on your own, as well as the analogous downblouse photo.For some reason, with the advent of high-resolution camera phones, the practice of upskirt and downblouse photos have become very popular...
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Facebook and MySpace perform important functions for their users. But when you get right down to it, they exist and are popular because they are amusements. Serious business is not discussed on a page with glitter fonts and Linkin Park music videos that auto-play. There is a social site that's all business --LinkedIn-- and it's received an...
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If there was any doubt that brainy women could be sexy too, this week's Newsweek article, Revenge of the Nerdette, should set naysayers straight. The article features a group of brilliant, confident, and attractive women who call themselves the Nerd Girls. Here's a snippet of self-promotion from their own Nerd Girl Web site: They're "Beauty...
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YouTube may rule supreme in the melded world of online video and social networking, but Microsoft has a new trick up its sleeve that it hopes might steal some eyeballs away from the competition. Launching today in 20 countries and 12 languages is Microsoft's Messenger TV service, integrating online video directly into Microsoft's Live Messenger...
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Only a demotion? My, they're certainly lenient in Japan. A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic websites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday.The man, a Kinokawa city government employee in western Japan, visited porn sites from June 2007 to February 2008, city...
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OCZ Technology Introduces Special Ops Edition DDR3 Series for Gamers and System Builders in Need of the Ultimate StabilitySunnyvale, CA—April 29, 2008—OCZ Technology Group, a worldwide leader in innovative, ultra-high performance and high reliability memory, today announced the Special Ops Edition DDR3 Series, available in both PC3-8500 and...
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If Toshiba has its way, fingerprint authentication is about to become passé. Toshiba Satellite laptops with Toshiba's "Fusion finish" (the Satellite U400, M300, A300, and P300 models) will all come standard with "Toshiba Face Recognition" software. Instead of logging in with a traditional typed password, Satellite users can get access to their...
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Your computer memory is magnetic affair of one sort or another. (We're assuming you've stopped using Punch Cards by now)Your processor is an electrical festival. The two have developed into a very powerful computing/storage machine indeed, but they have essentially always run on two separate tracks, one relying on the other to handle any increased...
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Anyone ever watch the movie The Cheyenne Social Club? Well, this ain't that kind of social club. Thursday Rockstar Games announced the Rockstar Social Club, scheduled to launch (drum roll) on the same day as Grand Theft Auto IV, April 29th (go figure).Today Rockstar announced a new website called the Rockstar Social Club. Essentially a high...
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In a somewhat surprising move, AOL has shelled out $850 million dollars to acquire social networking site Bebo. If you add Bebo's 40 million users worldwide to AOL's customer base for AIM and ICQ, AOL can now boast 80 million unique users. And AOL can show those 80 million users advertising while they're on their service. I imagine it's a...
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Although as early as Saturday NHK had reported the decision by Toshiba to drop HD-DVD had already been made by Toshiba, the company did not publicly announce it - until today. "We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop,"...
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