"… if I ever have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode again – rising from his seat to jazz-slap the top of his piano wearing a fake-groove expression on his piggish little face – if I have to witness that one more time I'm going to rise up and kill absolutely everybody in the world, starting with him and ending with me.".
Charlie Brooker, the UK Guardian's TV 'critic', calls it quits.
posted by lalochezia
on Oct 15, 2010 -
71 comments
Alt-Printscreen, load photo software, paste, crop, navigate browser to image host, browse for file, upload. Yeesh, so much work. Want free and "seriously instant" screen-grabbing or screen-casting? Then you'll be glad to know two pieces of software have recently
cropped up to streamline the whole process: (
open-sourced)
Gyazo for instantly hosted screen-grabs, or (
free)
Jing, likewise, for
screen-grabs and screen-casts.
[more inside]
posted by tybeet
on Dec 1, 2009 -
17 comments
Cyborg Spy Beetles are no longer a thing of the future. UC Berkeley (funded by DARPA) has created cyborg beetles guided wirelessly via laptop. These spy beetles were created with the intent of bugging actual conversations, literally acting as the "fly on the wall".
[more inside]
posted by scrutiny
on Oct 27, 2009 -
56 comments
BigBrotherFilter: Estimates place the number of CCTV cameras in the UK at 4.2 million, but how can these images all possibly be watched? Researches in Turkey have
an answer: an eye-gaze tracking system placed on the
CCTV operators themselves which can "then automatically produces a summary of the CCTV video sequences they have missed during their shift".
[more inside]
posted by tybeet
on Apr 15, 2009 -
32 comments
The Anonymity Experiment. Is it possible to hide in plain sight?
Privacy-minded people have long warned of a world in which an individual’s every action leaves a trace, in which corporations and governments can peer at will into your life with a few keystrokes on a computer. Now one of the people in charge of information-gathering for the U.S. government says, essentially, that such a world has arrived.
posted by amyms
on Feb 16, 2008 -
44 comments
Before I was even aware that such a plan existed, the FAA has put the brakes on a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office plan to
purchase a fleet of 20 camera-equipped unmanned spy drone planes (only $30,000 apiece) to fly over my city and monitor civilian behavior round the clock. Sadly, the plan is not permanently kiboshed, but merely on hold until authorization can be obtained.
posted by jonson
on Jun 22, 2006 -
39 comments
Bush administration signals intent to invoke the obscure
state secrets privilege in order to stop the
EFF lawsuit against
AT&T, (previously discussed
here) for providing the NSA direct access
all 312 terabytes of its customers' telephone and internet traffic since 2001, (including those Good Vibrations charges you racked up).
In a nutshell, according to legal experts, invoking the privilege kills the judicial process dead: the courthouse doors are closed, and there's nothing but grownup stuff to see here; move along, kids.
posted by squirrel
on May 2, 2006 -
51 comments
NewsFilter: I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?
posted by I Love Tacos
on Feb 18, 2006 -
154 comments
National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Sometimes, its the unheralded steps, that take you most quickly to your destination.
On October 7, 2005, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and their associated domains announced the first release of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) Version 0.1. NIEM "establishes a single standard XML foundation for exchanging information between DHS, DOJ, and supporting domains, such as Justice, Emergency Management, and Intelligence."
The release of this specification, and the development of the systems that utilize it may actually be the cataylst for more 'progress' in information mining on the individual than most other, well publicized efforts.
NIEM Mission: "To assist in developing a unified strategy, partnerships, and technical implementations for national information sharing — laying the foundation for local, state, tribal, and federal interoperability by joining together communities of interest."
When you say it like that, it sounds sort of cool!
posted by sfts2
on Jan 12, 2006 -
19 comments
What you watch Tucked deep inside a massive bill designed to track sex offenders and prevent children from being victimized by sex crimes is language that could put many Hollywood movies in the same category as hardcore, X-rated films. The provision added to the Children's Safety Act of 2005 would require any film, TV show or digital image that contains a sex scene to come under the same government filing requirements that adult films must meet.
posted by halekon
on Oct 12, 2005 -
41 comments
