Black-Out Leads to Hack-Back It has not been a good month for municipal riders of the “Bay Area Rapid Transit” or BART system in San Francisco, California. On July 3, at the Civic Center station, a BART police official shot dead a man who appeared “wobbly” and possibly a danger to others. Locals immediately decried […]
The Fight to Free the Net
Who’s Best Equipped for the Battle? Max Shulman over at the New Republic starts his most recent magazine article with something of a window-rattler: “The State Department’s Shameful Record on Internet Freedom.” For some time now, under the leadership of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. State Department has made access to a free […]
Home In A Phone
Teleconferencing In the Hmong Diaspora Anna Boiko-Weyrauch | Seattle, Washington How do you interact with members of your community if they’re stretched across the world? Many people rely on the Internet, email and social media to communicate across borders. But for many Hmong people – far from their ancestral home in Asia – teleconferencing […]
Back For More Lulz?
And Spreading Malware Hits Big and Small Alike Periodically we like to share a few of the stories and posts from across the web that caught our eye. There are no editorial threads implied connecting these items together, other than being interesting. #1: LulzSec vs. NewsCorp: After very publicly disbanding just a few weeks ago, […]
Journalism’s ‘Dark Arts’
Hacking, Blagging, and Why the Murdoch Hacking Scandal is Nothing New There’s an unofficial rule among British journalists: dog doesn’t bite dog. In other words, reporters working at one Fleet Street tabloid should not expose the wrong doings of reporters at other Fleet Street tabloids, as there are plenty of wrong doings to go around. […]
From Russia With Malice
The Dangers of Russian Hacking The attack began on April 27, 2007. Friction between Russia and Estonia had been on the rise ever since Tallinn announced its intention to remove a Soviet-era war memorial from its capital square. With nationalist feelings at play on both sides, tensions were high. As the massive bronze statue was […]
While We’re Away
Digital Frontiers editor Doug Bernard is off this week, but while he’s away, we’d like to highlight several stories elsewhere on voanews.com. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama went where no U.S. president has gone before, by holding his first-ever “Town Hall” meeting using the social media network Twitter. The cyberspace event focused on the U.S. […]
Security or Idiocy?
Who, And Where, Are The Greatest Threats To Internet Security? The web has been humming with talk this week – talk, concern, worry and general shpilkes – about Internet security. There’s good reason: not only are there renewed questions about just which hacker group is responsible for what cyber-attack, but the rate and severity of […]
LulzSec Laughs Last
Why the Latest, Hottest Hacker Group May Never Have Existed. I’ll admit it. Like many of my colleagues, I’m a sucker for a great story. Sure, I run it through the standard fact-checking traps, and try to question and independently confirm each detail. And always, I remind myself that if it smells too good to […]