As WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange marks his 777th day in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, the Metropolitan Police has spent over $11.8 million on guarding the embassy.
Assange has been detained without charge for 1,337 days – and 777 of those days have been spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, according to the latest WikiLeaks statement. Meanwhile, the price tag for guarding Assange hit over seven million British pounds (US$11.8 million) early on Wednesday, according to govwaste.co.uk counter. Officers have been staking out the embassy around the clock since June 2012, with the cost to the London taxpayers surpassing $15,000 per day.
Read moreHouse of Lords committee condemns regulations being drawn up by European commission and recent ECJ ruling.
A "right to be forgotten" – enforcing the removal of online material – is wrong in principle and unworkable in practice, a parliamentary committee has said. The House of Lords home affairs, health and education EU sub-committee has condemned regulations being drawn up by the European commission and a recent landmark judgment by the European court of justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg. The study supports the coalition government's opposition to the EU proposals on the grounds that search engines should not be made responsible for the content of the internet.
Read moreThe secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, “amplif[y]” sanctioned messages on YouTube, and censor video content judged to be “extremist.”
The capabilities, detailed in documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, even include an old standby for pre-adolescent prank callers everywhere: A way to connect two unsuspecting phone users together in a call. The tools were created by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), and constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda and internet deception contained within the Snowden archive.
Read moreIn Newcastle the 22-year-old computer science student Christopher Wilson was sentenced to 6 months coercive detention for not revealing the password that is required to decrypt the data on his computer.
He was urged to do this in “the interests of national security”. Wilson is accused of fooling police with cyber attack warnings as well as encouraging people to post deliberately inflammatory messages on a Facebook condolence page that was set up for two killed police officers. Wilson was already suspected to have sent rampage warning mails to the University of Newcastle. Two of these mails could be tracked back to Northumbria University where he was studying at that time.
Read moreCommunications between British on social networks are considered external and can be intercepted.
The British government has asserted the right to intercept communications that go through services like Facebook, Google and Twitter that are based in the United States or other foreign nations, even if they are between people in Britain. The report says that the findings are based on a government document that the groups obtained through a lawsuit. The government document says contact between British people through social networks based elsewhere, or use of search engines located outside Britain, constitutes “external communication,” and as such, is subject to interception, even when no wrongdoing is suspected.
Read moreMat Honan in a humorous manner created an everyday life picture in a "smart" house which (according to analysts) each consumer will have in 5-10 years.
I wake up at four to some old-timey dubstep spewing from my pillows. The lights are flashing. My alarm clock is blasting Skrillex or Deadmau5 or something, I don’t know. I never listened to dubstep, and in fact the entire genre is on my banned list. You see, my house has a virus again. Technically it’s malware. But there’s no patch yet, and pretty much everyone’s got it. Homes up and down the block are lit up, even at this early hour. Thankfully this one is fairly benign. It sets off the alarm with music I blacklisted decades ago on Pandora. It takes a picture of me as I get out of the shower every morning and uploads it to Facebook.
Read moreGoogle is planning to launch a new health service called Google Fit to collect and aggregate data from popular fitness trackers and health-related apps at the Google I/O conference.
Such a service would mark a direct challenge to Apple’s HealthKit framework, launched last week and rolling out with its new mobile platform iOS 8 this fall to aggregate data from wearable devices and apps. Last month Samsung also unveiled similar device, called SAMI. Google Fit will aggregate data through open APIs, Google will also announce partnerships with wearable device makers at its I/O conference.
Read moreSamsung Electronics is working to use biometric sensors in its mobile security system which the company expects to be available even for low-end smartphone models, an executive said Monday.
“We’re looking at various types of biometric [mechanisms] and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection,” Samsung’s senior vice president Rhee In-jong told analysts and investors at a forum in Hong Kong. Rhee spearheads the development of Samsung’s mobile enterprise software called Knox. Biometric authentication in mobile devices today consists mainly of using a user’s fingerprint as a scanner. Samsung first adopted fingerprint scanning into its smartphones with the Galaxy S5 launched in April, about seven months after Apple’s iPhone 5S.
Read moreRussian lawmakers are planning to make content filtering in Runet, and to forbid DNS-servers domains. RU and .RF placing abroad and transfer Coordination Centre domains functions to the authorized federal executive authority.
"Kommersant" reports about the government's plans to increase control over the Russian Internet space citing data from federal official and Internet company managers that wished to remain anonymous. They reported that the authorities discuss the issue of Runet federalization, that is, "the ban on joining regional and local data networks to foreign Internet networks" that can be done only through federal access.
Read moreThe fingerprint sensor on Samsung's Galaxy S5 handset has been hacked less than a week after the device went on sale.
Berlin-based Security Research Labs fooled the equipment using a mould it had previously created to spoof the sensor on Apple's iPhone 5S.
The researchers said they were concerned that thieves could exploit the flaw in Samsung's device to trigger money transfers via PayPal. The payments firm played down the risk. "While we take the findings from Security Research Labs [SRL] very seriously, we are still confident that fingerprint authentication offers an easier and more secure way to pay on mobile devices than passwords or credit cards," it said.
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