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Court Revives NSA Dragnet Surveillance Case

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Dec. 29 (News) -

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? Pro-Science Rapper’s Shout Out for Evolution

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Ben Paynter - Dec. 28 (Special Report) - Baba Brinkman—dubbed the hip hop Richard Dawkins—is releasing music videos from his Rap Guide to Evolution album in hopes that teachers will punch up their science lectures.

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FDA Won’t Act Against Ag Antibiotic Use

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - Dec. 23 (News) - With no notice other than a holiday-eve posting in the Federal Register, the US Food and Drug Administration has reneged on its long-stated intention to

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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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The Psychology Of Nakedness

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Jonah Lehrer - Nov. 30 (Special Report) - The human mind sees minds everywhere. Show us a collection of bouncing balls and we hallucinate agency; a glance at a stuffed animal and we endow it with a mood; I’m convinced Siri doesn’t like me. The point is that we are constantly translating our visual perceptions into a theory of mind, as we attempt to imagine the internal states of teddy bears, microchips and perfect strangers.

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Senate Set to Vote on Neutering Net Neutrality

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:53:00 -0800

Wired - By David Kravets - Nov. 07 (News) - WASHINGTON, D.C — The Senate is likely to vote within days on a measure that would undo net-neutrality rules adopted by the Federal Communications Commission in 2010, even though they’ve yet to go into effect. One of the lead sponsor’s of Senate Journal

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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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Every Bug, Every Gas, Right Now: Air Force Wants Instant WMD Detector

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Lena Groeger - Aug. 03 (News) - Spurred by the anthrax hysteria of 2001, the U.S. government has thrown billions of dollars into developing new equipment and technologies to detect chemical and biological warfare agents. Now the Air Force has a plan that, if it actually works, would render all those billions obsolete.

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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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What Hemingway Would Think of the Internet

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Marty Beckerman - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - If Ernest Hemingway hadn’t killed himself 50 years ago today at age 61, he probably would have died by now anyway. (No human liver could withstand more than a century of nonstop alcoholic pummeling. Not even Papa’s.) But Newsweek can fantasize about Princess Diana cheating death, so we can imagine Hemingway walking — or staggering — among us in 2011. What would the hard-drinking, adventure-loving writer think of our modern technological lifestyle? Not bloody much. We’re obsessed with conquering the digital world — accumulation of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn recommendations — whereas Hemingway conquered the physical world. The thrill of a retweet from Roger Ebert or Ashton Kutcher will never compare to the thrill of running with (more like from) the bulls or fighting a pack of voracious sharks over the remains of a prize-catch marlin.

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Bug’s Penis Makes Loudest Animal Sound

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Mark Brown - Jul. 01 (News Report) - This minuscule water boatman might be smaller than a drawing pin, but it’s also the loudest animal on the planet. Well, relative to its body size, at least. The male lesser water boatman, aka Micronecta scholtzi, can create mating calls as loud as 99.2 decibels, which is the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a loud, full-blown orchestra, or standing 15 meters away from a hurtling freight train. “Remarkably,” said Stratchclyde University’s James Windmill in a press release, “even though 99 percent of sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river.”

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The Singularity We Live In …

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Craig Newmark - Jun. 30 (Opinion) - Around five hundred years ago, another nerd, Johannes Gutenberg, invented some tech, but lacked the marketing skills to go really big. That took a social media practitioner, Martin Luther, who started with a posting on a church door. That had impact similar to a really good Facebook Wall post. However, Luther made use of a social networking platform, the Church store-and-forward network, which really got his stuff around, to considerable effect, in the Western hemisphere. That played out over maybe a few hundred years and led to a new balance of power in Europe and a loss of message control, resulting in many strains of Protestantism, and the democratization of Christianity. The latter led to greatly increased literacy. The social network platform was built by a much earlier social media practitioner, Paul of Tarsus, or St. Paul, to successfully effect mass change. Paul used what I call “e-mail”, or “epistle mail”.

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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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Growth promoters: If you can’t convince them, sue them

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

Wired - By Maryn McKenna - May. 25 (News Report) - Several environmental groups filed a lawsuit today that alleges the FDA has acted unlawfully, ignoring its own statutory authority, by failing to curb growth-promoting antibiotic dosing despite decades of evidence that it stimulates the emergence of antibiotic resistance, undermining medical treatment and harming human health.

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ACLU Counts 4 More Secret Records Demands in WikiLeaks Probe

Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kevin Poulsen - May. 23 (News) - An examination of case numbers of entirely sealed dockets in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, suggests to the ACLU that there were four Justice Department records demands issued in the same manner as a December 2010 demand sent to Twitter, which seeks information on three current and former WikiLeaks associates.

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» Revised ‘Net Censorship Bill Requires Search Engines To Block Sites, Too

Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Nate Anderson - May. 12 (Opinion) - Surprise! After months in the oven, the soon-to-be-released new version of a major U.S. Internet censorship bill didn’t shrink in scope — it got much broader.

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Battle Brews Over FBI’s Warrantless GPS Tracking

Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Kim Zetter - May. 09 (News) - The FBI's use of GPS vehicle tracking devices is becoming a contentious privacy issue in the courts, with the Obama administration seeking Supreme Court approval for its use of the devices without a warrant, and a federal civil rights lawsuit targeting the Justice Department for tracking the movements of an Arab-American student. In the midst of this legal controversy, Threat Level decided to take a look at the inside of one of the devices, with the help of the teardown artists at iFixit.

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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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Artifical Floating Islands Revive Aquatic Dead Zones

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

Wired - By Dan Ferber - Apr. 26 (Special Report) - Sometimes, all a polluted lake needs is a little love from an island—a “floating treatment wetland.” Load soil or sod onto a loofah-like mesh of plastic (made from recycled carpet and water bottles, of course), float it, add seeds, and let the plants take over. Their roots become home to biofilms that gobble nitrates and phosphates, denying those nutrients to algal blooms. Small critters eat the biofilms, fish eat the critters, and the water gradually gets cleaner

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Using Tech To Document Haiti's Rape Epidemic

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Arikia Millikan - Mar. 31 (News Report) - While the UN has reported that about 50 percent of women living in Haiti’s shantytowns have been raped or sexually assaulted, documenting the individual events is a trying process. Victims will often not come forward for fear of incurring additional violence and ostracism within their communities, or out of frustration with the legal system. A medical certificate must be issued within 72 hours of the rape in for legal action to proceed, but they are only issued in a few hospitals and could take days to obtain. Many rape cases occur in Internally Displaced Persons camps, where it is especially difficult to identify and locate perpetrators — whose conviction, ultimately, is unlikely.

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