President Obama met for a second time with top technology industry executives on Friday, discussing concerns over the National Security Agency's surveillance programs and the possibility of reform.
This week in social media, Twitter turned eight years old and was banned in Turkey, Facebook faced off with the government over privacy (and it's the other way around this time), and Pinterest and Tumblr both got into marketing and ads. It's time for Social Media Saturday!
Google's Larry Page, Edward Snowden, and the NSA's Rick Ledgett all spoke at TED this week on the National Security Agency's surveillance. Here are the highlights.
If you thought the National Security Agency, which is now famous for collecting U.S. phone records or "metadata," wasn't at least capable of listening in on the actual content of phone calls, think again. A new Washington Post report says the NSA has the capability to record phone calls and hold on to the entire record on a 30-day basis - for entire countries.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with most giants of the tech industry, has expressed his critical views on the U.S. National Security Agency's activities before, but it appears that the most recent NSA revelation published this week has pushed him over the edge. On Thursday, Zuckerberg called President Obama himself, after which he publically aired his grievances on (of course) Facebook.
Google has decided to challenge China's censorship and surveillance of the internet by offering encrypted Web searches for those inside the country by default, a move the company says is part privacy internet technology it's increasingly rolling out around the world.
Twenty-five years ago today, on March 12 1989, a British computer scientist working at CERN submitted a proposal for an information management system based on "hypertext" that would link people, computers, and documents in a connected "web" he called "Mesh." A year later he would rename it the World Wide Web - I think you've heard of it.
The battle of words between the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the chairwoman of the Senate committee whose charge is to oversee the CIA's activities is primed to erupt into a Constitutional crisis, and possibly a watershed moment for the public conversation over the powers of the U.S. Government's spying apparatus.
Is that Facebook? Or is the U.S. National Security Agency pretending to be Facebook to install malware on your computer? It turns out, that's a question you might have to ask yourself.
On Monday, the ex-National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of more than a million top-secret documents to the press in 2013 - leading to an avalanche of revelations about the U.S. cyberspy agency's activities - took the (virtual) stage at South by Southwest.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange kicked off the South by Southwest Interactive conference on Saturday with a Skype-powered video chat with the tech geeks gathered in Austin, TX. Speaking from his imposed house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange talked with SXSW attendees about his life, the National Security Agency, and the new era of journalism and activism.
South by Southwest Interactive has always been seen as the hip place to go to learn about the next big Silicon Valley startup, but the tone and focus has changed a little this year. The festival is toning down the "trendy" and enlarging its international focus, along with taking on some serious issues in technology.
The year 2013 will probably be remembered as the year when the general public learned that there are no guarantees of security and privacy in cyberspace. Aerospace manufacturer Boeing took a stab at a perfectly secure device, as it unveiled the "Boeing Black" this week, entering the race to make a smartphone that keeps its data safe.
Britain's version of the National Security Agency, the GHCQ, has reportedly captured images from the webcam chats of millions of Yahoo users. And Yahoo is not happy about it, to say the least.
While thousands of tech companies and organizations, big and small, and many more concerned citizens got out and protested mass internet surveillance earlier this month, one senior VP at a security firm told attendees at this week's RSA Conference on cyber security that they aren't mad enough.
Reddit, Tumblr, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, the American Civil Liberties Union and more than 5,000 other internet-based companies and organizations have joined together to protest surveillance by the National Security Agency on Tuesday, Feb. 11.
