An anonymous reader shares a PopularMechanics report: An American Airlines flight crew encountered an unidentified flying object over New Mexico on February 21. American Airlines has confirmed the strange incident, during which a “long, cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile” zipped over the Airbus A320, according to a pilot’s transmission obtained by The War Zone. American Airlines Flight…
Tag: investigations
Research Linking Violent Entertainment To Aggression Retracted After Scrutiny
Science magazine: As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000 — an unusually large number — and they were all 10 years old. “It was just too perfect,” says West, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at…
How Oracle Sells Repression in China
In its bid for TikTok, Oracle was supposed to prevent data from being passed to Chinese police. Instead, it’s been marketing its own software for their surveillance work. From a report: Police in China’s Liaoning province were sitting on mounds of data collected through invasive means: financial records, travel information, vehicle registrations, social media, and surveillance camera footage. To make sense…
270 Addresses Are Responsible for 55% of All Cryptocurrency Money Laundering
Criminals who keep their funds in cryptocurrency tend to launder funds through a small cluster of online services, blockchain investigations firm Chainalysis said in a report last week. From a report: This includes services like high-risk (low-reputation) crypto-exchange portals, online gambling platforms, cryptocurrency mixing services, and financial services that support cryptocurrency operations headquartered in high-risk jurisdictions. Criminal activity studied in this…
‘We Need to Inflict Pain’: Mark Zuckerberg’s War on Apple
When Tim Cook told an interviewer that Apple wouldn’t get in a Facebook-style data-collection controversy, “Mr. Zuckerberg shot back that Mr. Cook’s comments were ‘extremely glib’ and ‘not at all aligned with the truth,'” reports the Wall Street Journal. But “In private, Mr. Zuckerberg was even harsher. ‘We need to inflict pain,’ he told his team, for treating the company so…
Mars atmosphere shedding charged particles onto Phobos?
New research suggests that particles escaping from Mars’ atmosphere have been accumulating on the surface of the planet’s largest moon Phobos for billions of years. They could provide important new details about the history of both worlds. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-atmosphere-history-phobos-soil…
Fake Pro-China Accounts Are Reaching Millions on Twitter
“A pro-China network of fake and impostor accounts found a global audience on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to mock the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” reports the Associated Press, “as well as the deadly riot in Washington that left five dead, new research published Thursday found.” Slashdot reader schwit1 shared their report:
Messages posted by the network, which also praised China,…
How the NSA’s Hubris Left America Vulnerable
A new book promises “the untold story of the cyberweapons market — the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth — and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.” Its author — a New York Times cybersecurity reporter — shares the book’s story about David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst who later worked in Abu…
New Site Extracts and Posts Every Face from Parler’s Capitol Hill Insurrection Videos
“Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared,” reports WIRED, saying the site raises clear privacy concerns: The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple,…
Intelligence Analysts Use US Smartphone Location Data Without Warrants, Memo Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A military arm of the intelligence community buys commercially available databases containing location data from smartphone apps and searches it for Americans’ past movements without a warrant, according to an unclassified memo obtained by The New York Times. Defense Intelligence Agency analysts have searched for the movements of Americans within…