Yearly Archives: 2013

Automatic Record-a-Cop App for Smart Phones

"This is an app that might get me to buy a smart phone. It automatically records an audio file of everything within 'earshot' of the phone’s microphone. Think of this. It will let you record everything, all the time. Then it automatically erases it. If you want to save the recording, you can. It has a 5-minute memory, but that will no doubt get much longer as the technology improves. There will always be situations in which you would like to have had record of what’s said. Now you can. But beware. Soon, everyone will be recording everyone else. It’s like 'Candid Microphone,' before there was 'Candid Camera.'" Continue reading →

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Verizon Files Patent for Creepy Device To Watch You While You Watch TV

"The company has filed a patent for a system designed to be used in the home to target advertisements at people. Using a combination of image and audio sensors, it would detect actions in your living room while you were watching TV. These sensors, deploying facial and profile recognition, would pick up 'physical attributes' like skin color, facial features, and even hair length, and also detect 'voice attributes' to help determine the tone of your voice, your accent, and the language you speak. Inanimate objects aren’t off-limits—the technology could also spot beer cans and wall art." Continue reading →

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PRISM Takeaway: Are We Citizens or Serfs? Should Obama Resign?

"The leaked news about the FBI and NSA PRISM surveillance project may well be the most important news event of your life. I would say it is the most important news story. They so far are downplaying revelations that the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepts every email and text and other data and stores them on a giant supercomputer in Utah, placing the NSA coverage below such pressing concerns as immigration reform and Supreme Court decisions concerning gay marriage. Alternatively, I would call it the PRISM scandal, but I can’t do that either. It’s not a scandal unless people are up in arms, and there is no evidence of that." Continue reading →

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‘Hell to pay:’ Residents angry as RCMP seize guns from High River homes

"RCMP revealed Thursday that officers have seized a 'substantial amount' of firearms from homes in evacuated High River. 'We just want to make sure that all of those things are in a spot that we control, simply because of what they are,' said Sgt. Brian Topham. 'People have a significant amount of money invested in firearms ... so we put them in a place that we control and that they’re safe.' About 30 RCMP officers set up a blockade, preventing 50 residents from walking into the town. Dozens more police cars, lights on, could be seen lining streets in the town on standby. Officers laid down a spike belt to stop anyone from attempting to drive past the blockade." Continue reading →

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How Bad Is The Surveillance State?

"Even more baffling to me is the reaction of some 'conservatives' who deny the scope of spying activities and, at once, minimizing the civil-liberties threat and justifying the activities as absolutely necessary and vital for the protection of the country. The truth is that the network television show 'Person of Interest' is much closer to reality than most people think – except for the fact that no one is actually using the mining of data to protect the lives of innocent American citizens caught in the crossfire. Let’s look at some of the hard, cold facts of today’s surveillance state." Continue reading →

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No Rose Can Mask the Stench of Obama’s Tyranny

"Mr. Obama considers government's power to be illimitable, and individual freedom to be a revocable gift conferred by those who presume to rule the rest of us. This was made abundantly – and redundantly – clear in a recent interview Obama gave to the repellently sycophantic PBS host Charlie Rose regarding the totalitarian NSA surveillance program. Speaking about what he called 'tradeoffs' between freedom and security, Obama said: 'I don’t think anybody says we’re no longer free because we have checkpoints at airports.' There are dozens of imaginable variations on the official lie Obama decanted on the Charlie Rose program." Continue reading →

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Do Americans love Big Brother?

"Now we know the NSA and the FBI are vacuuming up Americans’ telephone calls, emails, Google searches, parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and all sorts of digital 'pocket litter.' Vast quantities of the world’s communications are being stored in Utah, available for government inspection. Now we know the NSA and the FBI have consistently misled Congress and the public with half-truths about supposed oversight. Now we know the sudden flood of leaks is not damaging our security. So is it just that Americans love Big Brother because they haven’t been told the truth in the past? If so, the latest revelations may cause a shift in public opinion." Continue reading →

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6 Insidious Ways Surveillance Changes the Way We Think and Act

"When I moved to a Czech village in 1994 to teach English, I was fascinated by the cultural difference between Americans like me and my new community. At that time, the oppressive memory of the dreaded Communist secret police, the StB, was still fresh. As a brash young ex-pat, born after the era of McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, I understood little of what it felt like to live under constant surveillance. The Czechs knew better. Several decades under the watchful eyes of the StB (and before that, the spies of the Habsburg Empire) had molded their attitudes and behavior in ways that were both subtle and profound." Continue reading →

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Mass State Surveillance Not About Privacy

"The way we’re encouraged to cope with this is to make it about privacy: to turn inwards, take stock of our personal inner domain, and decide just how much of our lives can be offered up to the state. Large scale, bureaucratic intrusion into our personal lives is a given, but we can fill out a customer response card if we have any comments about the degree of the intrusion. If this is about privacy, the onus is on us to define its limits, to guide our servant institutions to the right policies that will protect our newly cordoned-off personal space. And so they invent a clever distraction about what the limits of privacy should be." Continue reading →

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China now home to the world’s fastest supercomputer

"A Chinese supercomputer is the fastest in the world, according to survey results announced Monday, comfortably overtaking a US machine which now ranks second. Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, achieved processing speeds of 33.86 petaflops (1000 trillion calculations) per second on a benchmarking test, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 survey of supercomputers. The tests show the machine is by far the fastest computer ever constructed. Its main rival, the US-designed Titan, had achieved a performance of 17.59 petaflops per second, the survey’s website said." Continue reading →

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