Author Archives: conrad

The official website for the U.S. Marines was hacked by a group purporting to be the Syrian Electronic Army on Monday, following President Obama’s announcement that he would seek congressional approval for a military strike on Syria, the Independent reported. The … Continue reading →

U.S. spy agencies have built an intelligence-gathering colossus since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to the government’s top-secret budget. This summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. … Continue reading →

Women are less likely than men to commit corporate fraud, according to a team of sociologists. A team of researchers from Penn State University say that when women are involved in corporate fraud, they generally have a lesser role to … Continue reading →

Online ratings, internet reviews… these don’t always reveal the best choice, according to a new MIT study. A massive controlled experiment of web users found that such ratings are highly susceptible to irrational “herd behavior” — and that the herd … Continue reading →

When our understanding of cause-and-effect is contradicted by what we actually see, sometimes our understanding overrules our perception. Research published online in Psychological Science on June 26 found people’s causal expectations influenced their perception of the ordering of events in … Continue reading →

Well, not really a debate, but they each respond to the same questions…  Excellent discussion of the underlying issues at play. From TalkingPointsMemo.com: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/06/obama-and-snowden-debate-nsa-surveillance-programs.php?ref=fpb

To ensure public safety, there may be a requirement for some level of governmental surveillance.  The question is: how can we ensure public safety through surveillance while still maintaining individual privacy?  This is one of the more important issues of the day, … Continue reading →

The Global Islamic Media Front Technical Center is a group of mysterious programmers with links to Al Qaeda who claim to be trying to arm jihadists with digital weaponry. These high tech terrorists have released a series of plugins that … Continue reading →

Mozilla, maker of Firefox, the world’s most popular web browser, has a problem. Gamma International Ltd. is passing off a product that looks and acts like Firefox, but which is really a cleverly written spyware application. Gamma’s product, FinFisher, is … Continue reading →

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) will pay $390,000 to settle a regulatory investigation into its 2012 smart meter “spying” scandal. The agreement with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) was reached earlier this month. CPUC had been investigating the actions … Continue reading →