Tech

Cybersecurity Experts: ‘Donald Duck Could Be Elected’ Because Of Shoddy Electronic Voting System

Cybersecurity experts have warned that a highly flawed and vulnerable electronic voting system in Alaska could, by itself, swing the entire outcome of the mid-term elections and decide whether Democrats remain in control of the Senate. A report from The Intercept highlights how easy hackers could intercept and change electronic ballots before they are counted by county elections departments in the Last Frontier State. The report notes that thousands of voters will register electronically to receive a PDF ballot on their computer.

Samsung ‘Smart TV’ Records “Personal” Conversations & Sends Them to Third Parties

Samsung’s new global privacy policy for its line of Smart TVs states that a user’s personal conversations will be recorded by the device’s microphone and transmitted to third parties. A 46-page privacy policy which is now included in all newly purchased Samsung Smart TVs states that voice recognition technology “may capture voice commands and associated texts” in order to “improve the features” of the system. The policy, a summary of which is also posted online, ominously advises users to, “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

Unmanned Antares rocket explodes on launch

An unmanned commercial rocket headed for the International Space Station to deliver supplies exploded just after launching Tuesday, filling the sky with a massive fireball. The Antares rocket supplied by contractor Orbital Sciences blew up moments after liftoff at NASA’s space launch facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, the space agency said. The explosion destroyed the rocket and spacecraft and immediately raised questions about the future of NASA’s reliance on private commercial ventures to carry vital payloads into space to supply and support the orbiting space station.

Democrats on FEC move to regulate Internet campaigns, blogs, Drudge

In a surprise move late Friday, a key Democrat on the Federal Election Commission called for burdensome new rules on Internet-based campaigning, prompting the Republican chairman to warn that Democrats want to regulate online political sites and even news media like the Drudge Report. Democratic FEC Vice Chair Ann M. Ravel announced plans to begin the process to win regulations on Internet-based campaigns and videos, currently free from most of the FEC’s rules.

The Government Wants To Censor Social Media By Studying ‘Social Pollution’ On Twitter

Months after the Federal Communications Commission was forced to withdraw a newsroom study many viewed as an attempt to censor the media, the government is making a second attempt by studying “social pollution” on Twitter, and engaging in a free-speech analysis one FCC commissioner described as “straight out of a George Orwell novel.” The National Science Foundation — the federal agency charged with promoting science, advancing welfare and securing national defense — is funding said study by researchers at Indiana University, who will mine Twitter data and categorize users’ politically related tweets into convenient government definitions of “social pollution,” “social epidemics” and “misinformation.” Two of those same researchers, Filippo Menczer and Alessandro Flammini, co-authored a paper in 2012 examining social media use during the 2010 midterm election, which focused on “right-leaning Twitter users” who exhibited “greater levels of political activity, a more tightly interconnected social structure, and a communication network topology that facilitates the rapid and broad dissemination of political information.

Is this interactive tattoo the future of ‘wearable’ technology?

The folks at NewDealDesign, the San Francisco-based design company behind the Fitbit Force wellness watch, drafted a mock-up of the tattoo for Fast Company’s Wearables Week. They called it ‘Project Underskin.’ The foundation of Underskin would be a visible tattoo implanted in the knuckle of the thumb and a larger, invisible tattoo implanted in the palm, according to Fast Company.

Nine real technologies that will soon be inside you

Sure, we’re virtual connected to our phones 24/7 now, but what if we were actually connected to our phones? That’s already starting to happen. Last year, for instance, artist Anthony Antonellis had an RFID chip embedded in his arm that could store and transfer art to his handheld smartphone.

Leaked draft confirms TPP will censor Internet and stifle Free Expression worldwide

This morning Wikileaks published a second leaked draft of the Intellectual Property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The draft confirms people’s worst fears about Internet censorship. That’s according to community-based organization OpenMedia, which is leading a large international Fair Deal Coalition aimed at securing balanced copyright rules for the 21st Century.

Cyber-criminals could trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank ‘disappear’

Cyber-criminals will trigger the next global financial crisis by making a major bank “disappear”, one of the UK’s leading finance chiefs has claimed. Mark Boleat, head of policy for the City of London, said cyber-criminals would go about “destroying bank records and changing the amounts people have in their accounts”, sending shockwaves through the financial system like a “neutron bomb”. People would find that their savings have been wiped out, their records deleted, and they would come up against “denials of service”, stopping them from accessing funds, Mr Boleat told The Sunday Telegraph.

Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times

The men were too absorbed in their work to notice my arrival at first. Three walls of the conference room held whiteboards densely filled with algebra and scribbled diagrams. One man jumped up to sketch another graph, and three colleagues crowded around to examine it more closely.

Number of websites explodes past a billion (and counting)

The number of websites has burst above one billion and is growing apace, according to figures updated in real time by online tracker Internet Live Stats. Tim Berners-Lee, considered the father of the World Wide Web, touted the milestone on Twitter — one of the most prominent websites in the mushrooming but sometimes murky Internet world. It comes as the agency responsible for managing addresses on the Internet expands choices far beyond “.

Newly Revealed NSA Program Allows Online Global Internet Mapping

The NSA’s “Treasure Map” project is aimed at conducting global cyber attacks and mapping the Internet in its entirety to include end users’ devices, Der Spiegel has revealed. “The breathtaking mission is described in a Treasure Map presentation from the documents of the former intelligence service employee Edward Snowden… It instructs analysts to ‘map the entire Internet – Any device, anywhere, all the time.” the media outlet reports.

The Obamacare Website Was Hacked In July, But Officials Only Noticed It 10 Days Ago

A computer server hosting information for Healthcare.gov, the flagship Obamacare website that millions of Americans have trusted with their social security numbers, income totals and other sensitive personal information, was the subject of a hacker attack earlier this summer, officials said Thursday. The federal government wasn’t aware it had been hacked on July 8 until just ten days ago.

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