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ToTok, an Emirati messaging app that has been downloaded to millions of phones, is the latest escalation of a digital arms race. IMAGE: The Aldar Building in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where the Emirates’ signals intelligence agency and Pax AI, a data mining firm linked to ToTok, have their offices.  Photo Credit...Ben Job/ReutersWASHINGTON — It is billed as an easy and secure way to chat by video or text message with friends and family, even in a country that has restricted popular messaging services like WhatsApp and Skype.But the service, ToTok, is actually a spying tool, according to American officials...

A French nightclub has caused a stir after it exhibited pole-dancing robots donning high heels. The gyrating robots had CCTV cameras for heads and were interspersed among their human counterparts at the Strip Club Cafe (SC-Club) in Nantes on Friday night. The androids moved their hips in time to the blasting music while on elevated platforms, in front of a male-dominated audience.

February 11, 2016 Ted Cruz Launches Internet Data-Mining "Stazi" APP To Identify Friends and Phone Contacts of Cruz by sundance If you begin to receive weird phone text messages, Facebook contacts and weird emails from the Cruz campaign, it’s probably because one of your “friends” is a Ted Cruz supporter – and he or she has you in their contact list. An alarming article from the Associated Press explains how Ted Cruz has moved his campaign from direct cyber contact to data-mining and spyware within the contacts on phones and social media of Ted Cruz supporters.According to the Associated Press...

His "Cruz Crew" mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users' phones -- tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign. That information and more is then fed into a vast database containing details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy. Cruz's sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month -- the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to...

When your iPhone updates to iOS 9 in the fall, you'll be able to track your reproductive health -- including how often you have sex and whether or not you used protection. As part of its upcoming iOS 9 release, Apple will launch a new set of HealthKit features that will let you log information about menstrual cycles and specific physical changes, such as basal body temperature, cervical mucus quality, and spotting. There will also be a way for people to track sexual activity in the pre-installed app. You can even input ovulation test results. Apple keeps that data private...

Want to find the nearest pterosaur? There's an app for that — or a database, at least. A newly developed website catalogs more than 1,300 specimens of extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, thus enabling users to map out the ancient creatures on Google Earth. The goal is to help researchers find trends in the evolution and diversity of these ancient winged reptiles. "Having a very specific database like this, which is just for looking at individual fossil specimens of pterosaurs, is very helpful, because you can ask questions that you couldn't have answered with bigger databases [of more animals]," said...