Jay-Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail is not so much an album as a co-branded multimedia content delivery platform, Presented By Samsung™ Galaxy™. He announced it, after all, during an epic commercial for the phone, and Samsung is giving away a million copies to people who download a special app by July 4th. But now another,…
In the aftermath of the revelations about the NSA's secret spying programs, there is plenty of anger to go around. American citizens are pissed that they were spied on. European governments are pissed that they were spied on. Nobody, it seems, is happy with being spied on. So why is spying such an accepted institution?
Some people say that Edward Snowden is a hero because the secret NSA spying program that he exposed was ripe for abuse. Other people say Edward Snowden is a villain, because the program seemed to be well-run and lawful. Both of these positions are grounded in fantasy. Nobody knows whether the government's power was…
Forget secret NSA requests - a Facebook "bug" has been inadvertently exposing the contact information of more than six million users for the past year.
Despite all the bluster of the past couple weeks, a new Pew poll shows that most Americans favor terrorist investigations over privacy: "Currently 62% say it is more important for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy."
Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian have another leak: Meet "Boundless Informant" the NSA tool that records and analyzes where NSA intelligence comes from, including over 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks in just a 30-day period.
Ever since 9/11, the American government has been busily constructing the most comprehensive surveillance state in this country's history. This vast and invasive bureaucracy is too big to hide, but the public has done its part by politely ignoring it. No longer. Now is when we, the people, choose whether or not we…
The best things going for Bang with Friends, the app that lets you find folks that are down to bone, is that it's populated solely by people you know on Facebook (less risk than a sketchy rando) and that it promises anonymity (no risk that you're the one who looks sketchy). Well, almost no risk.
Most of New York Magazine's April profile of actress Eva Mendes is devoted to her refusing to talk about things.
If that bulky headline didn't give you warning enough, prepare to jump down the rabbit hole now. Cast your mind back to a few days ago. Neetzan Zimmerman noted that local New York paper the Journal News' decision to publish the names and addresses of gun owners in Rockland County had come under criticism:
Christopher Chaney, a 35-year-old Florida resident who hacked into email accounts belonging to Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera and others, was sentenced to 10 years in prison today. Earlier this year, Chaney pled guilty to nine felonies, including charges of theft and wiretapping.
It often seems as if people save all their most obnoxious and excruciating conversations for public transit, just to make sure the pain is spread to more of their fellow humans. So imagine if every conversation that occurred on public transit was recorded: What twisted portrait of humanity would be produced? We may…
We've called him a "seed-spilling sex creep," a "pale nerd king," and "a real-life The Matrix extra," so we figured it was about time to talk to Wikileaks founder and megalomaniacal Bond villain Julian Assange. In order to promote his new book, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, Assange agreed to a…
You know that bit of legal-sounding text that all your friends are sharing on Facebook? "I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details..." blah blah blah? Yeah: it's meaningless. We'll show you why, line by line.
Since the campaign is done, the Obama campaign's massive, supersecret tech operation has finally been opened up for the world to marvel at. Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has written a fascinating profile of Obama's tech team. Buried in it is the fairly unsettling fact that the Obama campaign's data-mining operation…
Facebook's newest partnership will not allay the fears of anyone worried the company is going to get increasingly nosy in order turn a profit. The social-networking behemoth has a new partnership with an organization called Datalogix, which tracks millions of Americans' spending habits with loyalty cards at more than…
Hey, hope you didn't write anything embarrassing in a private message before around 2009 on Facebook. These messages may now be published on your Timeline for all your Facebook friends to see. But are these actually old private messages, or old public wall posts you simply wish had been private?
Last Friday, French gossip magazine Closer published a series of photographs of Kate Middleton sunbathing topless. Yesterday morning, police in Paris raided the publication's offices of Closer magazine, searching the building and inspecting the staff's computers in an attempt to find the name of the photographer. And…
For years, permanently deleting your photos from Facebook was harder than removing an arrow from your body. You thought you hit delete, but they often lingered on Facebook's servers for months or years, still viewable by their original Facebook URL. Speaking from personal experience, this unintended feature was a boon…
We received an anonymous personal account this week from a woman who'd read about Reddit's "fusking" of private nude photographs that had been uploaded to PhotoBucket. The tipster had had a similar experience, only with a website we'd never heard of. PinkMeth.com (very NSFW), she wrote, had stolen nude photographs…
