How The FBI Identified That Masked Arsonist Identified and Jailed Because of Her Etsy Review

An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
To some extent, every Internet user leaves a digital trail. So when a masked arsonist was seen on video setting fire to a police car on the day of a recent protest in Philadelphia, the fact that her face was hidden didn’t prevent a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent from tracking down the suspect. The keys…

IRS Used Cellphone Location Data To Try To Find Suspects

The Internal Revenue Service attempted to identify and track potential criminal suspects by purchasing access to a commercial database that records the locations of millions of American cellphones. The Wall Street Journal reports: The IRS Criminal Investigation unit, or IRS CI, had a subscription to access the data in 2017 and 2018, and the way it used the data was revealed…

Breathtaking New Map of the X-ray Universe

Behold the hot, energetic Universe. A German-Russian space telescope has just acquired a breakthrough map of the sky that traces the heavens in X-rays. From a report: The image records a lot of the violent action in the cosmos – instances where matter is being accelerated, heated and shredded. Feasting black holes, exploding stars, and searingly hot gas. The data comes…

Oracle’s BlueKai Tracks You Across the Web. That Data Spilled Online

From a report: Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There’s no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The company has spent a decade and billions of…

Guinness Reinstates Billy Mitchell’s Donkey Kong, Pac-Man Records

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Guinness World Records has reinstated a number of classic video game world records held by Billy Mitchell. The move comes just over two years after Mitchell’s records were expunged following an investigation by Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard, which partners with Guinness to adjudicate video game records. That investigation found that recordings of…