Julian Assange, the founder of whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks, has claimed that fresh leaks are on the horizon and indicated that European politics may soon be rocked by fresh spying revelations. In a recent interview with Dutch television program Nieuwsuur he said: "We know it is the US National Security Agency that is the most aggressive [at spying] on other nations. We have obtained evidence, which we will publish in due course, about US intelligence agencies interfering in European elections."

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Submitted on August 15th 2016 by Chubros with 5 comments

Cortana, Windows 10’s built-in virtual assistant, is both really cool and really creepy.

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Submitted on August 15th 2016 by sjvn with 7 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. Broken Promises Added by Gozzin on August 16th 2016.

From an unassuming office in Venice Beach, Bryan Johnson's science-fiction-meets-science start-up, Kernel, is building a tiny chip that can be implanted in the brain to help people suffering from neurological damage caused by strokes, Alzheimer’s or concussions. The team of top neuroscientists building the chip — they call it a neuroprosthetic — hope that in the longer term, it will be able to boost intelligence, memory and other cognitive tasks.

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Submitted on August 16th 2016 by gladsdotter with 9 comments

WikiLeaks is now offering a $20,000 reward for information in the killing of DNC staffer Seth Rich. By Keri Blakinger.

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Submitted on August 10th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 1 Related Links:

1. How a DNC Staffer's Murder Unleashed a Perfect Storm of Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories Added by gladsdotter on August 10th 2016.

A mysterious group claims to have stolen some hacking tools allegedly belonging to the NSA.

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Submitted on August 15th 2016 by baron778 with 1 comments

Roadside breathalyzers, used for estimating blood alcohol content, have been used by law enforcement as far back as the 1930s. However, to date there is still no equally fast-acting, accurate roadside equivalent that cops can use if they suspect someone of driving under the influence of marijuana. That could be about to change, however, due to a new saliva-based test developed in the laboratory of Shan Xiang Wang at Stanford University in California.

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Submitted on August 13th 2016 by hedman with 4 comments

When the World Wide Web first took off in the mid 1990s, the dream wasn’t just big, it was distributed: Everyone would have their own home page, everyone would post their thoughts – they weren’t called “blogs” until 1999 – and everyone would own their own data, for there was no one around offering to own it for us. The web consisted of nodes joined by links, with no center.

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Submitted on August 11th 2016 by drunkenninja with 2 comments

As the dank memes of Weird Facebook continue to filter into the mainstream web, sowing laughter, confusion, and fury in almost equal measure, the admins and followers of pages like “Everything Is a Social Construct” and “Nihilist Memes” are gearing up for war. This time, their target is not the “normie” outsiders who have diluted and damaged their meme aesthetic, but Facebook itself. As these surrealist, irony-fueled pages grow, they face an increasing risk of swift deletion—often, admins claim, without warning or due recourse. The anarchic element of meme culture ensures that posts will get flagged as offensive and inappropriate...

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Submitted on August 12th 2016 by Splitfish

Espionage platform with more than 50 modules was almost certainly state sponsored.

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Submitted on August 11th 2016 by kxh

Artificial intelligence prophets including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Raymond Kurzweil predict that by the year 2030 machines will develop consciousness through the application of human intelligence. This will lead to a variety of benign, neutral and terrifying outcomes. For example, Musk, Hawking and dozens of other researchers signed a petition in January 2015 that claimed AI-driven machines could lead to "the eradication of disease and poverty" in the near future. This is, clearly, a benign outcome.

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Submitted on August 16th 2016 by drunkenninja

All summer, kids have been hanging out in front of the Morris Park Library in the Bronx, before opening hours and after closing. They bring their computers to pick up the Wi-Fi signal that is leaking out of the building, because they can’t afford internet access at home. They’re there during the school year, too, even during the winter — it’s the only way they can complete their online math homework.

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Submitted on August 14th 2016 by TNY

One of the most famous quotes about the web says that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” But what about surveillance? Is it possible to make the internet route around spying? In the last few years, especially after revelations of pervasive monitoring by the NSA and its British sister spy agency the GCHQ, some countries, Brazil being the most vocal, have publicly announced their intentions to avoid sending internet traffic to the US and the UK in an effort to dodge surveillance.

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Submitted on August 13th 2016 by TNY

Recent news stories have been plagued by a new wave of online hoaxers on social media, so make sure you don't get tricked.

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Submitted on August 10th 2016 by gladsdotter

In May, Google circulated a draft proposal to effectively kill Adobe Flash by blocking the plugin and prioritizing HTML5 by the end of the year. The company is going ahead with that plan to “de-emphasize” Flash with a staged disabling of the plug-in through multiple versions of Chrome. Starting with Chrome 53 — currently in beta — in September, background Flash elements, like page analytics, will be blocked. Google notes that today 90% of the plug-in loads in the background and is used solely for things like analytics. This move is designed to encourage publishers and sites to switch over to HTML5 equivalents...

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Submitted on August 10th 2016 by spacepopper with 1 comments

Behind the scenes, groups of individuals are trying to make BitTorrent better with steady, incremental updates. A new proposal tabled by P2P developer Luca Matteis envisions a tweak to the protocol that would allow greater resilience in the BitTorrent ecosystem. Regardless of differing opinions on what kind of content should be shifted around using the protocol, few will contest the beauty of BitTorrent.

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Submitted on August 14th 2016 by mariogi

A mother in Houston, Texas woke up one morning to pretty much every parent's worst-case scenario. "I happened to get a text from a friend of mine that said she saw a picture on Facebook and she thought it was a picture of our daughters' room," Jennifer, who asked to keep her last name private, told ABC subchannel KTRK. As it turned out, the security cameras she'd installed in her daughter's room to keep them safe had been hacked and the footage had been uploaded on the internet to livestream.

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Submitted on August 14th 2016 by geoleo with 1 comments

Once a year, security enthusiasts gather at the Las Vegas-based hacker convention DEF CON to call out vulnerabilities in the tech industry. At DEF CON 2016 -- the 24th such meeting -- presenters Anthony Rose and Ben Ramsey from Merculite Security focused on smart locks. And the news wasn't good. Specifically, the duo tested 16 different Bluetooth-enabled locks and found that 75 percent had "insufficient BLE security." You can find their 42-page slide presentation here, but the gist is that Rose and Ramsey were able to access multiple...

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Submitted on August 12th 2016 by junglman

For Scott Malcomson, the Web is slowly being redefined according to the old political maps of nation-states.

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Submitted on August 13th 2016 by gladsdotter with 1 comments

Windows tech support scammers have fleeced an unbelievable number of people out of their hard-earned cash. One geeky vigilante decided to turn the tables. Now, plenty of tech-savvy folks have had a little fun at the expense of these fraudsters. Generally they play along and waste as much of the caller’s time as possible and watch them harmlessly fiddle with a virtual machine. This guy took things to the next level.

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Submitted on August 15th 2016 by yuriburi with 3 comments

A generously funded “online hate crime hub” has been set up to tackle online vitriol by identifying suspects and encouraging citizens to report them to police, but critics fear the newly-established unit might endanger freedom of speech. The project was published by the London Mayor’s Office and is being partially funded by the Home Office, which will contribute £450,000 ($581,000) to the £1.7-million ($2.2-million) project, which is expected to run for at least two years.

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Submitted on August 15th 2016 by cone