Digital Disaster
Europe’s growing army of robot workers could be classed as “electronic persons” and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.…
'If the internet goes down, half the planet will come to a standstill': why 'preppers' will be the last ones standing…
A group of hackers that has claimed attacks on websites run by the U.S. Senate and the Central Intelligence Agency posted a cache of documents from Arizona police, calling it a protest against a controversial state law. ... LulzSec, as the group commonly refers to itself, said the posting of the documents was a protest of Arizona's SB1070, controversial state legislation that critics say is anti-immigration. The key provision of the law has been frozen because of legal challenges. ...
Breitbart starts off the segment reminding everyone just how much false reporting about him drove the Weinergate story early on. Breitbart also hammers away at the liberals who write Salon and other online publications and blogs that tried turning the scandal into yet another excuse to attack Breitbart's credibility.
Just one day after the author behind a popular Syrian lesbian blog admitted to being a married, American man named Tom MacMaster, the editor of the lesbian news site Lez Get Real, with the tagline "A Gay Girl's View on the World," acknowledged that he is also a man. ... In the guise of Paula Brooks, Graber corresponded online with Tom MacMaster, thinking he was writing to Amina Arraf. Amina often flirted with Brooks, neither of the men realizing the other was pretending to be a lesbian....
In a May 31 Facebook message, Voelkert, pictured at left, told "Studebaker" that he had secretly installed a GPS tracker in his wife's van and was using the device to monitor her movements. He "went on to discuss what kind of trouble that they could get in for doing this," and asked the teenager to "delete the message so there is no trace of talking about it," Dane reported. Along with disclosing that he planned to flee with his children in early-June, Voelkert wrote that he was "going to find someone to take care of her and now it will be easier because I know where she is at all times." He then added, "you should find someone at your school, there should be some gang bangers there that would put a cap in her ass for $10,000. I am just done with her crap!"
The underground world of computer hackers has been so thoroughly infiltrated in the US by the FBI and secret service that it is now riddled with paranoia and mistrust, with an estimated one in four hackers secretly informing on their peers, a Guardian investigation has established.
Techdirt reports that Senate bill 978 — a bill to amend the criminal penalty provision for criminal infringement of a copyright, and for other purposes — may be used to prosecute people for embedding YouTube videos. ... It will also set the stage to criminalize linking to copyrighted information — like corporate media news sources — and shut down the alternative media....
An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia... Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours... Television pictures showed reporters at a news agency in the capital Yerevan staring glumly at blank screens. [What a hilarious sentence!]
The team that ran the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in modern history is finding it difficult to adapt that model to government. WhiteHouse.gov, envisioned as the primary vehicle for President Obama to communicate with the online masses, has been overwhelmed by challenges that staffers did not foresee and technological problems they have yet to solve. Obama, for example, would like to send out mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so. The same goes for text messaging, another campaign staple. Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out ...
Google's web-based email service, Gmail, has crashed this morning, leaving millions of users from Britain to Australia unable to send and receive messages.
Zune users, particularly of the 30-GB version, have been waking up to find their music players are part of an apocalyptic meltdown. The Microsoft devices have been freezing after loading up, leaving users with a picture of the Zune icon and a loading bar. The reports seem to have started coming in at around midnight Tuesday and have continued to mount.