You might call it old-school hacking—the kind of hacking you do with an axe. California police are dealing with a rash of attacks on Internet fiber optic cables. An incident Monday night brought the total number of attacks to 15 since last summer.
What was initially thought to be a weather balloon was actually a giant Google balloon that crash-landed in southern California’s Chino Hills neighborhood Saturday morning. No neighborhood residents were injured when the Google Loon project balloon landed in a palm
Abram Belles, a 91-year-old WWII veteran from Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, was all set to be ushered out of the home he’s lived in for almost 70 years because of an overdue tax bill. But nearly 200 people on the Internet unexpectedly rallied to his side to raise the money he needed to stay in his home.
On the whole, the candidates’ websites seemed surprisingly timid, even backward, as if the designers were primarily afraid of (a) soaking up too much bandwidth from visitors, and (b) leaving some important scrap of text off the main screen, for fear that visitors would explore no further. These are both very last-generation concerns. Seriously, folks, it’s 2015. A dash of animation, such as Fiorina and Chris Christie offer, will not cause anyone’s computer to chug.
A deep dive into the subscriber data by Annalee Newitz of Gizmodo suggests there were even fewer female subscribers than previously believed – in fact, she could only find evidence that about 12,000 out of 37 million total profiles belonged to “real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.”
China’s government announced earlier this week that it had arrested 15,000 people for an assortment of cybercrimes, the result of a project announced in July titled “Cleaning the Internet.”
(Reuters) Police in China said on Tuesday they had arrested about 15,000 people for crimes that “jeopardized Internet security”, as the government moves to tighten controls on the Internet.
For years, security-minded politicians have been saying that U.S. spy agencies and the private sector need to have a better working relationship to stop terrorism. But if the arm-in-arm relationship between communications giant AT&T and the National Security Agency is any indication, that relationship is already in full bloom. Worse, the government has been paying AT&T millions to supply the info.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) posted a 40-day public comment period late August 3 aimed at transferring the oversight of the Internet to a not-for-profit entity.
On Thursday, Facebook Inc., unsatisfied with its global access, announced it has built a full-scale drone to fly between 60,000 feet above ground at night and 90,000 feet during the day to allow the entire world to use Facebook.
As James T. Areddy at the Wall Street Journal tells it, the Chinese military was deeply troubled by the role a supposedly U.S.-dominated Internet played in destabilizing other despotic governments and warned Beijing could be next. The warning described the Internet as “a new form of global control” and the United States as a “shadow” hovering behind various uprisings.
This may be a case of “trolling” gone wild, an increasingly common and troubling phenomenon. It’s easy and cost-free for social media users to whip up campaigns of harassment, unleashing destructive passions that can spill over into far worse activities.
Big people don’t need a pervasive nanny state with vast power, money, and manpower to micro-regulate their business transactions and personal life choices. A larger public sector inescapably means a smaller private one. This is especially true as power shifts from elected officials to the permanent big government bureaucracy, which voters have very little influence upon.
One of the problems faced by Republican campaigns is that Silicon Valley tends to lean left, giving Democrats substantial support in a variety of forms from the big tech companies. There are plenty of great tech people out there ready to work for Republican campaigns, though. Recruiting them early and folding them into a well-organized campaign is essential. Gov. Scott Walker seems to have done just that.
In its second annual report on consumer mobility, the Bank of America found that Americans are more plugged in than ever, with 71 percent even admitting that they sleep with their cell phones next to them. This, the BoA said, is evidence of a growing rate of addiction to mobile devices.
Capitalizing on his huge expansion of the Obamaphone program that gave millions of low-income Americans a free cell phone, President Obama is now angling to give millions of Americans free Internet access.
The Turkish government has developed an international reputation for wasting no time in censoring websites and social media users inconvenient to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan or in any way offensive to Islam. It appears to take significantly more time to determine whether websites disseminating Islamic State propaganda deserve to be taken offline, too, with about seven of these websites blocked in Turkey on Sunday.
Japanese health officials are attempting to deal with a growing problem—a million young adults, mostly men, have locked themselves in their bedrooms and are refusing to come out. This condition, called “hikikomori” by Japanese health professionals, is deeply troubling Japanese leaders.
Just 3 minutes after the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal nationwide, much of America shifted its attention to learn more.
The Iranian government, alarmed at the declining rate of marriage in the Islamic Republic, has announced it will officially launch a free online “matchmaking service” that officials insist is not a dating site. Unlike a dating site, users have no choice in who they are paired with upon subscribing to the service.
At least one Turkish columnist, described as pro-government by the newspaper Hurriyet, is blaming an aggressive Internet strategy to smear critics of the majority AK Party for its own losses during Sunday’s parliamentary election.
En route from Sarajevo to Rome on Saturday, Pope Francis told reporters on his plane that parents should not allow their children to have computers in their bedrooms in order to protect them from both the “filth” of pornography and dependence on their electronic gadgets.
We are meant to imagine an innocent, if perhaps a bit high-spirited, gathering of cheerful teens interrupted by a brutal racist cop, who couldn’t wait to find the nearest young lady of color and body-slam her for fun. The reality seems a bit more… nuanced.
Kentucky Fried Chicken’s China division is striking back against rumors that it has genetically modified chickens to grow six wings and eight legs, filling a defamation suit against three Chinese companies as the Chinese government launches a campaign a to cleanse online “rumors, negativity and unruliness.”
Russian Internet users, apparently manipulated by the Kremlin, began conspicuously surfacing online after Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea. These paid “trolls” work all day to flood online articles and social media with praises towards Russian President Vladimir Putin and condemnation of the West.
