December 2011
17 posts
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Turns out your butt has a unique biometric...
By now, we’re all used to hearing about the rise of biometric identity. Police have been using fingerprints for years, after all. Iris scans and facial recognition technology are widely used for secure access to computer networks and even everyday consumer products. Mexico and India are both biometrically registering millions of people. But who knew scientists would figure out how to use...
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Click here to see Salon.com's chat with me about... →
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Contractor earns $46M to dispose of all that crazy...
Fireworks. Medical needles. Insect spray. Cooking fuel. Flammable gas torches. Ammunition. Yes, people forget they have cooking fuel in their travel bags. Or, amazingly, they thought it was acceptable in the first place to take cooking fuel onto an airplane.
So what happens to all that bizarre crap security screeners have to confiscate? It doesn’t just disappear, after all. Turns out a...
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Lawsuit: 14 bomb dogs dead after being left in...
The dogs were reportedly on a stopover in Houston waiting for a flight to Afghanistan. So I know this isn’t much of a holiday-friendly story, but for what it’s worth, here are their names: Tiny, Rex, Rocky, Crock, Dork, Harrie, Stress, Sigo, Rex, Jaco, Kimbo, Kilo, Albert and Bak. More from the Houston Chronicle:
The animals were to be flown to Afghanistan Dec. 21, 2010. But when...
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WatchSometimes my friends and family aren’t always clear about what I do at the Center for Investigative Reporting. This new video we just released explains everything. Check me out at the 1:59 mark!
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Has the war on terror militarized America's...
After months of work, my reporting partner Andrew Becker and I are live with another story about the war on terror. A shorter version appears today on the Newsweek/Daily Beast site. The complete story can be found here, accompanied by a full package of amazing multimedia material assembled with help from our incomparable team at the Center for Investigative Reporting. There’s a map, a...
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“I remember one question about bedwetting.”
– Legendary former CIA agent Bob Baer on the lengthy application he filled out before joining the spook shop.
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Hollywood wants to halt 'content thieves,' but new...
Earlier this week, Age of Peril told you about a new site that automatically checks your IP address and reveals (sort of) what files you’ve been downloading from the web through file-sharing networks. Now TorrentFreak has used the tool in a way that perhaps the entertainment industry didn’t expect: to expose file-sharing pirates inside Hollywood’s biggest studios. These are the...
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New website makes it startlingly easy to see what...
I don’t use online file-sharing networks to download copyrighted music and movies, not due to some position I take on the matter, but mostly because I’m paranoid about linking my computer to anything that can feasibly inject malicious software. So I didn’t hesitate to drop by the site Youhavedownloaded.com, because I knew they wouldn’t have any records of my Internet...
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*SWAT team, bomb squad and Predator drone all...
*A colleague pointed out that maybe I should have made the headline a little clearer. These resources were reportedly deployed to pursue the alleged armed thieves of six cows.
You’re gonna love this, Tumblr fans. Some cows went missing in North Dakota. Six in all. Here is what local authorities decided was necessary to search for said bovine:
A SWAT team
A bomb squad
The highway...
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Couldn't this same technology be used for piecing...
It’s known as the Shredder Challenge. The military’s think tank of crack technology researchers called DARPA launched a curious contest earlier this year that few people thought was actually possible: Develop a computer algorithm that can aid in reassembling shredded documents. The idea was to figure out how war fighters could extract useful intelligence from them as quickly as...
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