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Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance - Morning Consult https://morningconsult.com/2016/07/26/arab-american-groups-join-partner-tech-privacy-fight-surveillance/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTlRNeE16TmpNR0ZpT0daaSIsInQiOiJ1QXBqd28wWmlEbnpjWUVWRDNOaDZCU2tFMmJ6NXJ2MVJyRHZpcjhGWWxPcGJ1U1VyQXFCXC9PcUN6RmJ3emRKdkJJTWJSUmtBRGRTV09XNlI4QUZHU0xybWYxQ1I5QTRqQkJrZDAxbUEwVzg9In0%3D Arab Americans Join With Tech, Privacy Groups to Fight Surveillance Amir Nasr   |   July 26, 2016 Privacy advocates in the technology space have a new ally in Arab American groups to help with their fight to keep U.S. surveillance at bay. They are spurred on by anti-Muslim rhetoric from Republicans. In December, Donald Trump called for a “total and complete shutdown” of U.S. borders to Muslim immigrants. In March, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the country needed to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim...

You should be able to trust your wireless keyboard. And yet security researchers have been warning people to be suspicious of wireless computer accessories using sketchy radio protocols for years. Those warnings peaked five months ago, when hackers at the security firm Bastille found that millions of cheap keyboard and mouse dongles let hackers inject keystrokes onto your machine from hundreds of yards away. Now, in case you missed that message, the same researchers have extended their attack to millions more devices—and this time, they can not only inject keystrokes, but also read yours, too. On Tuesday Bastille’s research team...

he smartwatch market has hit its first bump, and it’s all Apple’s fault. Vendors shipped a total of 3.5 million smartwatches worldwide last quarter. This Q2 2016 figure is down 32 percent from the 5.1 million units shipped in Q2 2016, marking the first decline on record. .... As you can see above, Apple’s market share decreased 25 percentage points (from 72 percent to 47 percent) and it shipped less than half the smartwatches (1.6 million). But the company still holds almost half the market, with every other vendor shipping fewer than a million units.

A new federal court ruling could make sharing your passwords for subscription services -- covering everything from Netflix to HBO GO -- a federal crime punishable by prison time, according to a judge who opposed the decision. The ruling, issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, pertained to a trade-secrets case and found that certain instances of sharing passwords are prosecutable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) - legislation predominantly concerned with hacking. The case involved David Nosal, a headhunter who left his former company Korn/Ferry and then used the password of an employee to...

I am having trouble loading the various forum pages. Whenever I open Free Republic all I am getting are the latest comments rather than a list of the latest posts. The only way I seem to be able to get the latest posts is to sign out and then come back to FR as a lurker. I have cleared my cache and cookies without any resolution of the problem. Any suggestions?

Last year, Elizabeth Holmes topped the FORBES list of America’s Richest Self-Made Women with a net worth of $4.5 billion. Today, FORBES is lowering our estimate of her net worth to nothing. Theranos had no comment. Our estimate of Holmes’ wealth is based entirely on her 50% stake in Theranos, the blood-testing company she founded in 2003 with plans of revolutionizing the diagnostic test market. Theranos shares are not traded on any stock market; private investors purchased stakes in 2014 at a price that implied a $9 billion valuation for the company. Since then, Theranos has been hit with allegations...

<p>I remember when Mozilla fired Brendan Eich for being a normal human being, I was sort of bummed that I was going to stop browsing with Firefox. I'm not really the organized boycotting type, but I am someone who simply refuses to participate in idiocy. If some anti-American Hollywood liberal wants to fight against a normal civilization, then I just stop watching their movies and buying their music. If a coffee establishment tells their baristas to engage with me about race when I'm trying to get my morning triple venti soy latte, then I go elsewhere. If one of my favorite conservative-leaning talk show hosts starts supporting a liberal for President, then I turn the dial. It's not that I keep a list, but if it's seared into my brain deep enough, then I certainly alter my habits as a consumer of products, services, and content. Conversely, if someone is under attack by Marxists, then I tend to overly support them, like the Chick-Fil-A scenario, where I was stuffing my face with spicy chicken sandwiches several times per week for months. Thank goodness that died down. Anyway, I knew whatever Eich ended up doing, if it was a product or service, I was going to be a customer. I have no idea what Eich's politics are, but I know he is someone worth supporting.</p>

California’s high-tech business wizards like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg are in full freak-out mode over Donald Trump, and the key to understanding why lies in the H-1B visa program. As a recent L.A. Times story titled “Donald Trump has done the unthinkable: Unite Silicon Valley” reports: Ambitious start-up CEOs who swore off talking politics for fear of offending investors are enlisting in campaigns to discredit Trump. Longtime valley Republican stalwarts who have voted for every GOP nominee for decades say they can’t do it this year. The libertarian-minded innovators who just want to get government out of their way have less...

Maybe they use the '80s flick "War Games" as a training film, too. The U.S. Defense Department is still using — after several decades — 8-inch floppy disks in a computer system that coordinates the operational functions of the nation's nuclear forces, a jaw-dropping new report reveals. The Defense Department's 1970s-era IBM Series/1 Computer and long-outdated floppy disks handle functions related to intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear bombers and tanker support aircraft, according to the new Government Accountability Office report.

My Pine64 Media Center Several months back, I participated in a Kickstarter campaign for the PINE A64, First $15 64-Bit Single Board Super Computer. The campaign started in December of 2015, and was designed to fund the production of a 64-bit computer on a card for the masses priced at $15. Initial estimated delivery was January or February. Their initial estimates on shipping were somewhat optimistic, as I just received mine the other day (5/21/2016). Reading through some of the comments on the project, some people were rather bent out of shape about the shipping delays, which is something I...

Have a need to use my rickety old website. It is a 200 page FrontPage monster which has been sitting out at my ISP for quite a few years with little updating. I have recently been approached about restarting my column nationally. Am so excited! I would like to use the webpage as the vehicle and realize that it will need to be upgraded. I run WIN7. There is no extension left for Frontpage and the software currently does not recognize the website, there isn't even a screen to put in the username and code. The ISP states that FTP...

A research firm estimates Amazon.com has sold 3 million Echo voice-controlled home speakers, and that close to half of U.S. Amazon customers are aware of the product. [snip] The device, which sells for $180, also has given Amazon a big role in the emerging field of home automation, as many people use it to control thermostats or lights that work off Wi-Fi. [snip] Launched in late 2014, the Echo slowly picked up speed as word spread about its uncanny abilities — from answering questions to turning on the living-room lights.

"Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering. The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory...

From sundown to sundown, turn off all your technological devicesWell, this weekend you can take part in a makeshift holiday as thousands will be joining in to the National Day of Unplugging to take a 24-hour break from technology. Participants are asked to log off beginning Friday, March 4 at sundown and stay offline through Sat., March 5 at sundown. At nationaldayofunplugging.com, you can sign the "Unplug pledge" and promise to unplug from tech devices including phones, tablets and laptops. This project was started by Reboot, an group that "affirms the values of Jewish traditions and creates new ways for...

China aims to become a world leader in advanced industries such as semiconductors and in the next generation of chip materials, robotics, aviation equipment and satellites, the government said in its blueprint for development between 2016 and 2020. In its new draft five-year development plan unveiled on Saturday, Beijing also said it aims to use the internet to bolster a slowing economy and make the country a cyber power. China aims to boost its R&D spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product for the five-year period, compared with 2.1 percent of GDP in 2011-to-2015. Innovation is the primary driving...

UC Berkeley officials are sending alert notices to approximately 80,000 current and former faculty, staff, students and vendors following a criminal cyberattack on a system storing their Social Security or bank account numbers. The campus has no evidence that any unauthorized individual actually accessed, acquired or used any personal information; however, it is informing those potentially impacted so they can be alert to signs of any possible misuse of their information and take advantage of credit protection services the campus is offering free of charge. The attack occurred in late December 2015, when an unauthorized person or persons obtained access...

<p>Silicon Valley may have plenty of millionaires, but the road to U.S. billionairedom is increasingly paved through finance.</p> <p>Nearly 27% of all U.S. billionaires in 2014 worked in finance (read: hedge-fund managers and a few others), according to a study by Caroline Freund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and Sarah Oliver, a research analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank.</p>

Feburary 14, 2016 Paul_Behan Don’t Keep Your Personal Or Financial Data On A Windows 10 Machine! Well not if you want to keep it private. Like many people I was surprised at the Edward Snowden revelations a few years ago. Nothing has seemed to change and in many cases things have got worse. Some corporations are in partnership with government agencies in regard to collection of data.(snip) According to this an article, (1) even after turning off all the tracking options on a computer, the researcher left the computer on overnight and tracked the traffic. He was surprised to find...

In 2014, the Northeast Utilities Company in Connecticut -- now known as Eversource Energy -- allegedly laid off around 200 of its American tech workers and replaced them with low-wage foreigners admitted on H-1B guest worker visas. Now a photo has emerged depicted the workers' final, silent patriotic protest -- silent because the workers reportedly were forced to sign non-disparagement agreements to shield their employer. The image depicts the display of American flags around cubicles of the company's IT department -- circulated by trade magazine ComputerWorld -- before the Americans were replaced with foreign labor. The powerful image seems to...

Congress plans to question about two dozen federal agencies on whether they were using backdoored Juniper network security appliances. In December, Juniper Networks said it had discovered unauthorized code added to ScreenOS, the operating system that runs on its NetScreen network firewalls. The rogue code, which remained undetected for two years or more, could have allowed remote attackers to gain administrative access to vulnerable devices or to decrypt VPN connections. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform wants to determine the impact that this issue had on government organizations and how those organizations responded to the incident. The...