privacy-and-security
The Science Behind Unhackable Quantum Communication
For many years, we've been able to communicate via electronic messages really, really securely. Thank asymmetric key cryptography for this, a scheme for encoding messages that is nigh unbreakable. The widely-used and depended-upon secrecy scheme rests...
The Navy's Huge New Drone Will Fly from Aircraft Carriers Automatically
When you look at it from the front, the new Navy X-47B sort of stares back like like a 14-ton cyclops from an alien world. The thing is so uncanny that when they shipped it across the country to its testing grounds in Maryland on the back of a truck...
The NSA Is Not Spying on You, Claims NSA Chief at DefCon
Nobody really knows what the National Security Agency is up to on a day-to-day level. The massive intelligence outfit is responsible for monitoring foreign communication operates in such secrecy, nobody really knows how big its operation in Fort Meade...
Microsoft's Skype Is Killing Chat Privacy
Skype, which has previously been one of the few untappable forms of communication out there, is now kowtowing to the Man and making chat records more available to authorities. Time to bring back the pager and pay phone combo, folks.
A British Kid Flew to Italy Without a Passport, Ticket, or Boarding Pass
In 2012, trying to make fun of ridiculous airport security and TSA ineptitude makes for worse stand up comedy than Kenny Bania, but at least we're safer, right? I mean, with all of the idiotic shoe-removing, body scanning, and luggage searching...
YouTube Wants to Know Who You Are
Reading YouTube comments is a hell of an adventure. The delightful mix of misspelled insults and expletive laden vitriol probably wouldn't be possible if the site weren't so liberal with its anonymity policy. For whatever reason, though, YouTube now...
The Green Drone of the Future Will Never Come Down
Drones have become synonymous with phantom death, and yes, it is indeed freaky to know that a pilot at a remote console can kill people from incredible distances, all while watching it unfold on a screen. There’s certainly a moral dilemma there, which...
How to Spot a Psychopath on Twitter
It's easy to draw conclusions about someone's personality based on how they tweet. Everyone knows who the self promotional tweeters are, the ones that always want you to read something they wrote or back their Kickstarter campaign. We appreciate the...
Bomb Squads Aren't For the Faint Hearted
I know it's scary to get into this at the moment, but as authorities are about to check Paris Avenue's 1600 block for Dark Knight Shooter, James Holmes' booby traps, it's got my memories and historic intrigue in full flow. Despite recalling the time I...
Meet the Militia Fighting the War Against Spam
Thanks so some ambitious, enterprising and dare-we-say fearless geeks, the Internet will be a little bit cleaner from now on. On Wednesday, a global team of computer security experts (read: defenders of freedom) took down Grum, the world's third...
WikiLeaks Can Teach the Pentagon How to Predict the Future
For all the griping the U.S. government has done about WikiLeaks, there are some actually some useful applications for the treasure trove of data the whistleblower organization has gotten its hands on. In a sense, the WikiLeaks dumps have created the...
Facebook's Spying On You For a Good Cause
Whether you realize it or not, a bundle of sophisticated technology is constantly scanning through Facebook interactions — wall posts, messages, chats — looking for sexual predators. A combination of intelligent software and human moderators can spot...