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Stop Online Piracy Act Vote Delayed

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Dec. 16 (News) - The House Judiciary Committee considering whether to send the Stop Online Piracy Act to the House floor abruptly adjourned Friday with no new vote date set – a surprise given that the bill looked certain to pass out of committee today. The committee’s ch

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Senate Wants The Military To Lock You Up Without Trial

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 21:45:00 -0800

Wired - Dec. 01 - Here’s the best thing that can be said about the new detention powers the Senate has tucked into next year’s defense bill: they don’t force the military to detain American citizens indefinitely without a trial. They just let the military do that. And eve

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Playing with Fire: Amazon Launches a $200 Tablet, Slashes Kindle Prices

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - Sep. 28 (News) - One year ago, almost to the day, Jeff Bezos gave me the reason why people should carry around a Kindle in the age of the iPad. No Angry Birds. “The number one app for the iPad when I checked a couple of days ago was called Angry Birds—a game where you t

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The Dead, the Dollars, the Drones: 9/11 Era by the Numbers

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Lena Groeger - Sep. 09 (Opinion) - Ever since the Twin Towers fell, the United States has been at war. The costs of that decade of conflict have been unimaginably high: trillions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of lives lost. The numbers are almost too big to grasp

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Archaeopteryx Knocked From Roost as Original Bird

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Danielle Venton - Jul. 28 (News) - Archaeopteryx’s status as the forerunner of modern birds is crumbling in the face of a new, closely-related fossil. The new discovery, a feathered, chicken-sized dinosaur named Xiaotingia, has prompted a fresh look at the dinosaur family tree, casting Archaeopteryx as a bird-like dinosaur rather than dinosaur-like bird.

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Sidestepping Apple: Companies rethink app strategies

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Tim Carmody - Jul. 26 (News Report) - We all knew that once Apple starting enforcing new rules for in-app purchases, it would change how media companies do business on the iPhone and iPad. Now, we're beginning to see just what that looks like for companies trying to avoid giving a 30% cut to Cupertino. Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble all removed the stores from their iOS applications on Monday, as well as any hyperlinks to or mentions of their online stores.

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Lion Is Smooth, But Tries Too Hard to Be iOS

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Brian X. Chen - Jul. 20 (Opinion) - Mac OS X Lion is rich with visual enhancements, such as the new Launchpad feature for launching apps My head started hurting after the first hour of using Mac OS X Lion. Two words: inverted scrolling. That’s correct — Lion’s default scrolling behavior is

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There’s A Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says

Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Spencer Ackerman - May. 25 (News Report) - You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it's worse than you've heard. Congressis set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

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Blackwater’s New Ethics Chief: John Ashcroft

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:27:03 -0700

Wired - By Spencer Ackerman - May. 04 (News Report) - The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

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The Little Red (Face)Book

Sun, 01 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Steven Levy - May. 01 (Opinion) - When I spoke at Facebook about In The Plex recently, rumors were swirling that the social networking giant was about to enter China, supposedly in a partnership with the search engine Baidu. So I made sure that my talk to a dining hall full of FB’ers included the cautionary tale of what happened when Google met China. (An excerpt of the saga as detailed in my book appeared in Fortune.) Though similar in some ways — focus on engineering, full-on embrace of Internet values — Facebook and Google are quite different companies. Their China efforts will also undoubtedly vary. But some of the challenges that Facebook will encounter will be just as tricky as the ones Google faced. Those problems ultimately led to Google’s reconsideration of the enterprise.

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TSA Admits Bungling of Airport Body-Scanner Radiation Tests

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By David Kravets - Mar. 16 (News) - The Transportation Security Administration is re-analyzing the radiation levels of X-ray body scanners installed in airports nationwide, after testing produced dramatically higher-than-expected results.

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A Media Colossus Is Born: Feds Approve Comcast-NBCU Merger

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Sam Gustin - Jan. 18 (News) - The Federal Communications Commission gave its blessing to the marriage of NBC Universal and Comcast, which weds one of the world's premier entertainment and news companies to the nation's biggest cable and internet provider. The FCC imposed some conditions to keep the company from stomping rivals, but critics are not impressed.

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2010 in Review: The Year the Internet Went to War

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By David Kravets - Dec. 28 (Editorial) - It was a year without parallel. Threat Level’s bread-and-butter themes of censorship, hacking, security, privacy, copyright and cyberwar were all represented in tug-of-war struggles with unprecedented outcomes. Google defeated China’s censors, but caved to corporate censorship in the United States. The largest computer-crime case ever prosecuted ended in the nation’s longest prison term. A small-time Xbox modder who advertised his services online beat the federal rap. And a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet finally put proof to decades of warnings that malware will eventually be used to kinetic effect in the real world.

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FCC Net Neutrality Rules Slammed from All Sides

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Ryan Singel - Dec. 20 (News Analysis) - The federal government’s new internet fairness rules — aimed at preventing the nation’s cable and DSL internet service providers from meddling with the open, free-wheeling nature of the internet — were met with loud criticism Monday night from all sides of the political spectrum.

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Secret U.S. Space Plane Eludes Observers; May Spook Governments, Too

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By David Axe - Nov. 18 (News) - The Air Force launched the 29-foot-long, Boeing-built X-37 in April. Now six months into a potential nine-month deployment, the X-37 periodically changes orbits, frustrating amateur satellite-spotters.

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Why Mark Zuckerberg Should Like The Social Network

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Fred Vogelstein - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - It’s hard to go anywhere and not see, hear and read about Mark Zuckerberg right now. Last week and the week before, the Facebook founder and CEO was getting attention for giving away $100 million. This week he’s talking about two long-awaited Facebook features — a way to easily get your data out of Facebook and a better way to parse friends into subgroups. On Tuesday night, satirist Andy Borowitz wondered on the radio — only half in jest — if he should win a Nobel Prize in economics.

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Caught Spying on Student, FBI Demands GPS Tracker Back

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Oct. 07 (Special Report) - A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online.

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Unpublished Iraq War Logs Trigger Internal WikiLeaks Revolt

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kevin Poulsen, Kim Zetter - Sep. 27 (News) - A domino chain of resignations at the secret-spilling site WikiLeaks followed a unilateral decision by autocratic founder Julian Assange to schedule an October release of 392,000 classified U.S. documents from the war in Iraq, Wired.com has learned.

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Petraeus: Here’s My Afghan Redeployment Strategy

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:24:04 -0700

Wired - By Spencer Ackerman - Aug. 18 (News Report) - General David Petraeus isn’t planning to wake up one morning after July 2011 and order his troops out of Afghanistan’s provinces all at once. Instead, his idea is to slowly and deliberately remove small units, district by district, in an intricate process he describes as “thinning out.”

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Net Neutrality Protesters Call for Google to Stand Tall

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Ryan Singel - Aug. 14 (News Report) - Protestors of Google's perceived betrayal of net openness rules convened with signs and songs at the Mountain View Google campus on August 13, 2010.

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Google, CIA Invest in ‘Future’ of Web Monitoring

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Noah Shachtman - Jul. 29 (News) - The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time -- and says it uses that information to predict the future.

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The Man Who Could Unsnarl Manhattan Traffic

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Felix Salmon - Jun. 01 (Special Report) - Komanoff’s model suggests a world in which everything from subway fares to bridge tolls can be precisely tuned throughout the day, allowing city planners to steer traffic flow as quickly and smoothly as a taxi driver tooling his cab down Broadway on a quiet Sunday morning.

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Facebook's Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative

Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Ryan Singel - May. 07 (Opinion) - Facebook's latest moves shows the company cares more about dominating the web than treating its users respectfully. It's time the web come up with an open alternative to return control to users.

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Apple iPad Reaches ‘One Million Sold’ Twice as Fast as iPhone

Mon, 03 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Eliot Van Buskirk - May. 03 (News) - Apple announced on Monday that it has sold over one million iPad devices over the internet and in its retail outlets, following the Friday release of the 3G version of the device, which can connect to the internet either via cellular data networks in

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Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Nathan Hodge - Apr. 28 (Special Report) - The U.S. government swears the undeclared drone war over Pakistan is legal and effective. Prominent law professors are telling Congress otherwise.

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