RESOURCES
Bitcoin Mining Now Accounts For Almost One Percent of the World’s Energy Consumption
It is well-established established that Bitcoin mining — aka, donating one’s computing power to keep a cryptocurrency network up and running in exchange for a…
India’s Biometric Database Is Creating A Perfect Surveillance State — And U.S. Tech Companies Are On Board
Big U.S. technology companies are involved in the construction of one of the most intrusive citizen surveillance programs in history. For the past nine years,…
Phone Numbers Were Never Meant as ID
One key lesson from the recent T-Mobile and several other breaches: our phone numbers, that serve as a means to identity and verify ourselves, are…
Police Bodycams Can Be Hacked To Doctor Footage, Install Malware
Josh Mitchell's Defcon presentation analyzes the security of five popular brands of police bodycams (Vievu, Patrol Eyes, Fire Cam, Digital Ally, and CeeSc) and reveals…
Child Drownings In Germany Linked To Parents’ Obsession With Mobile Phones
The German Lifeguard Association (DLRG) has made a direct connection between children getting into difficulty in the water and parents being too busy on their…
Children ‘at risk of robot influence’
Forget peer pressure, future generations are more likely to be influenced by robots, a study suggests. The research, conducted at the University of Plymouth, found…
Banks and Retailers Are Tracking How You Type, Swipe and Tap
When you’re browsing a website and the mouse cursor disappears, it might be a computer glitch — or it might be a deliberate test to…
Google tracks you even if you tell it not to
Google wants to know where you go so badly that it records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. An Associated Press…
Planet at Risk of Heading Towards Apocalyptic, Irreversible ‘Hothouse Earth’ State
This summer people have been suffering and dying because of heat waves and wildfires in many parts of the world. The past three years were…
The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible
Alex Glover is a recently retired geologist who has spent decades hunting for valuable minerals in the hillsides and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains that…
As Google Maps Renames Neighbourhoods, Residents Fume
For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market.…
Phone and internet use: Calls drop, screen time increases
Two in five adults look at their phone within five minutes of waking, while a third check their phones just before falling asleep, according to…
Mysterious drone swarm attacks
Moscow says the US supplied the technology behind the drone attack, but Washington denies involvement. In the most recent and unusual of the attacks, a…
The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping
Amazon has changed the way Americans shop. This year, the e-commerce giant said its annual Prime Day sale was “the biggest shopping event in Amazon…
Social Media Manipulation Rising Globally, New Oxford Report Warns
A new report from Oxford University found that manipulation of public opinion over social media platforms is growing at a large scale, despite efforts to…
Facebook is not alone in making everyone’s data available for whatever purpose
Most companies that trade in the sale and manipulation of personal information are private and beholden to few rules other than the bare minimum of…
The story of how the Electronic Frontiers Foundation became so EFF’d up
EFF has taken millions in funds from Google and Facebook via straight donations and controversial court payouts that many see as under-the-radar contributions. Hell, Google…
All watched over by machines, Surveillance Valley
Google building military drones, Facebook watching us all, and Amazon making facial recognition software for the police, need to be understood not as aberrations. Rather,…
Survival of the Richest
Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers,…
Digital ads are starting to feel psychic
It seems like everyone these days has had a paranoiac moment where a website advertises something to you that you recently purchased or was gifted…