Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There are very few government checks on what America’s sweeping surveillance programs are capable of doing. John Oliver sits down with Edward Snowden to discuss the NSA, the balance between privacy and security, and dick-pics. Connect with Last Week Tonight online… Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight YouTube channel for more almost news as it…
Apparently a crew of three “artists,” plus assistants, dragged a four-foot-tall plaster-like bust of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden up Fort Greene Park and on top of the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument last night (Sunday night), and adhered it to one of the top columns. They also adhered letters spelling his name to the bottom of…
A warning that’s displayed to Internet users who have been exposed to the malicious code forcing their browser to hammer Github servers. cache hit 176:single/related:113512d42fdae4484580a08c02bd611c empty The massive denial-of-service attacks that have intermittently shut down GitHub for more than five days is the work of hackers with control over China’s Internet backbone, according to two…
When Hillary Clinton ditched government email in favor of a secret, personal address, it wasn’t just an affront to Obama’s vaunted transparency agenda—security experts consulted by Gawker have laid out a litany of potential threats that may have exposed her email conversations to potential interception by hackers and foreign intelligence agencies. “It is almost certain…
What began around 10 p.m. Eastern Wednesday was still underway on Monday morning, according to GitHub. GitHub is still battling what it says is the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack in the service’s history. What began around 10 p.m. Eastern Wednesday was still underway on Monday morning, according to GitHub’s Twitter feed. The…
Aaron Swartz found out the hard way that you can’t expect justice from the Department of Justice: what should the next Aaron Swartz do when facing decades in prison for information activism? I am among those who have seen the recently released documentary about Aaron Swartz’s short life, The Internet’s Own Boy. I watched the…
Gawker Media runs on tips and leaks from people with information to share. To make that sharing as private as possible, we are announcing our newest, most secure method for sending things to our reporters and editors: the Gawker Media SecureDrop. If you have something to tell us, or a document or file to provide…
Wikipedia is suing the NSA over surveillance programs that involve tapping internet traffic en masse from communications infrastructure in the U.S. in order to search it for intelligence purposes. The lawsuit argues that this broad surveillance, revealed in documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, violates the First Amendment by chilling speech and the open exchange…
From the time the first commercials aired during the American pro football championship game last month, CSI: Cyber has been one of the more talked-about and least-anticipated shows in recent memory. At least in tech circles. For normal viewers, it’s one of those shows that you wake up in the middle of at 10:27 after…
Congressional Republicans are once again holding the government hostage against a budget authorization bill, this time threatening to put the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into furlough. Maybe it’s time to call them on their bluff and go one step further: Let’s shut down the DHS. The agency is no longer relevant in an age where cyberterrorism may be the new normal,…