You wouldn’t know it from the buzz, but the hack of Sony’s PlaysStation Network that compromised 77 million accounts is not the biggest breach in history. It’s only 4th according to DataLossDB. We’ve been losing much more data for quite a while now.
In a thoughtful blog post this week, computer scientist Ben Adida reflected on …
News of a second Sony video game network breach means that thousands more user credit card numbers may be at risk of fraud. It seems that once you hand over your financial information to an online vendor, you’re pretty much at the mercy of that company’s wherewithal to install the latest Apache patch. But there is something consumers …
Jeff Moss, the hacker better known as “The Dark Tangent,” has been named Vice President and Chief Security Officer of ICANN, the non-profit corporation that manages the Internet’s names and numbering infrastructure. He is the founder of DEF CON, the world’s largest conference for hackers, as well as the Black Hat security …
Late last year, after WikiLeaks began releasing its trove of State Department cables, many individuals sought to show solidarity with the group by making a donation. They found, however, that many payment processors would not remit money to WikiLeaks, some say as a result of U.S. government pressure. PayPal even froze the group’s …
A federal court yesterday rejected a settlement between Google, authors and publishers, throwing into doubt the search company’s plans to make every book ever published searchable online.
Acknowledging in his opinion that “the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” federal district court judge Denny Chin …
If you live in Massachusetts and you bought a Groupon deal for a sports bar, we hope you enjoy dollar tacos. That’s because deals that don’t stop at food, but also discount liquor, are now void in the Bay State.
Last month, the state’s Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission sent Groupon a letter telling it that deals that …
The Battlestar Galactica had no networked computers for the simple reason that they might allow the Cylons to take control of the ship. You might want to think about that next time you pop in a burned CD into your car’s stereo system.
Computer security researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Washington have successfully …
A video showing a man using his iPhone to hijack the “JumboTron” video screens in Times Square has gone viral, raking in close to a million views on YouTube since it was posted on Sunday. It has also sparked a raging debate on Twitter and blog comments: Is it real or a hoax?
“The way it works is pretty simple: plug in my …
Ever notice that most government websites leave something to be desired in the awesome department? Take for example the crazy mazes that are the Department of Agriculture or Department of Labor sites.
Well, at a recent Aspen Institute event on transparency and open government Blair Levin, the former FCC advisor and father of the …
This week we learned that cable and satellite TV companies are beginning to show targeted advertisements to viewers. That is, they can beam custom-tailored commercials to individual households even if they’re tuned to the same program.
For example, a 17-year-old male watching Watson on Jeopardy! might get a commercial for the Xbox, …
A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, but if that name is an Internet top-level domain name, world governments may beg to differ.
The “.com” at the end of TIME.com is known as a top-level domain—or TLD—and you may be aware of others, including .net, .org, .edu, and even .ly for Libya. While there are over a hundred …
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Jerry Brito, a policy wonk and web developer based in Washington, D.C.
After what some are calling a “Facebook revolution” in Egypt, you’d think that the Egyptians would have something to teach us about digital civic activism, and not the other way around. But the State Department has
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