Techno-politics

According to aereo.com, “With Aereo, you can watch real, live TV through a tiny remote antenna you control over the Internet — from home or anywhere in your home coverage area.” If you’re a TV viewer with a broadband connection to the public Internet, this seems like an awesome idea. For $8 per month, you Continue Reading →

Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage Continue Reading →

A Turkish court on Friday ruled that a blanket ban of social-media website YouTube violated human rights and ordered most of the restrictions be lifted, citing a top court ruling this week that scrapped a similar ban on microblogging site Twitter. The state telecoms authority on March 27 blocked access to YouTube, Google’s video-sharing site, Continue Reading →

Did you catch the selfie that the Red Sox’s David Ortiz took with President Barack Obama? That was a great instance of cultural zeitgeist, wasn’t it? However, Samsung also has a deal with Ortiz that let it use the shot (taken with a Galaxy Note 3) in a Twitter ad — and the White House Continue Reading →

See if this sounds familiar: a strange name pops into your twitter mentions, using violent photos and provocative language to force the conversation off-track. You start out talking about something innocuous, but by the end, you’re being challenged to shore up your whole view of the world or admit defeat. Suddenly, you’re under assault. This, Continue Reading →

A couple weeks ago, we learned from leaked documents that the NSA has the capability to record an entire country’s calls, texts, and email in real time. That’s a hell of a capability, and those documents revealed that it was being used in one country. Now, thanks to a retired NSA leader, we know which Continue Reading →

A previous outspoken critic of Bitcoin says he’s starting to come around on the virtual currency, one month to the day after he called on regulators to ban it. In an interview with the Washington Post, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) said recent moves by the Internal Revenue Service, private Bitcoin entrepreneurs and other government Continue Reading →

Google released its latest transparency report on Thursday, revealing tens of thousands of law enforcement requests from across the world. In the second half of 2013, the report lists more than 27,000 requests for user data from around the world, affecting more than 42,000 different accounts. It’s a 120 percent jump in requests over the Continue Reading →

After cutting off Twitter access within its borders, Turkey is now blocking its citizens from visiting YouTube. The latest act of internet censorship comes only one day after a Turkish court ordered the government to lift its Twitter ban and temporarily restore access to the service. Turkey is accused of blocking internet sites to stifle Continue Reading →

President Barack Obama has officially announced his plan to reform the National Security Agency’s collection of phone records. Under his new proposal, the agency would no longer keep a database holding a large percentage of all American call records. Instead, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon would keep them for the same length of time Continue Reading →