dan tynan on Feb 18 2011 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, Spy v spy
Last week, in a straight-out-of-Hollywood B-movie plot, we learned that an obscure cyber security company was trying to take out a whistleblowing site on behalf of a Fortune 50 corporation, thanks to a shadowy group of uber geeks whose identities are as yet unknown. (Quick, get me Matt Damon. He’s not available? Get me someone [...]
dan tynan on Feb 11 2011 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, National insecurity, Spy v spy
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. This will be the year of the hacker – or rather, the year hacking goes mainstream. It’s been brewing for quite some time. According to McAfee, a team of Chinese hackers has been infiltrating computer networks for the world’s largest oil and gas companies. Last week [...]
dan tynan on Aug 02 2010 | Filed under: Apple, Cringley, Gadgets, Infoworld, iPhone, Privacy, Spy v spy
And you thought those iPhone 4 signal problems were bad. At last week’s Blackhat conference, a San Francisco firm called Lookout Mobile Security revealed that third-party smart phone apps are stealing user information and (literally) phoning home with it. And by ‘home,’ I mean China. But unlike those bogus Droid X signal problems, this problem [...]
dan tynan on Jun 11 2010 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, Privacy, Spy v spy
Getting a chance to bash AT&T twice in two weeks is like getting to hit a pinata filled with $100 bills. Hand me the stick and stand back, boys. Last week I wrote about AT&T’s parsimonious data plan (all-you-can-eat is dead, Jim) and its chowder-headed attempt to silence an angry customer who sent CEO Randall [...]
dan tynan on Mar 16 2010 | Filed under: censorship, Crazyass cults, Cringley, Da Web, Infoworld, Julius Baer + Wikileaks, National insecurity, Privacy, Spy v spy
I just received an email from Wikileaks editor Julian Assange that’s pretty wild. It accuses the US government of deliberately trying to take the whistle-blower site down two years ago. As proof, Wikileaks has posted a 32-page classified document [PDF] from the Department of Defense Intelligence Analysis program, dated March 2008, which details "the counterintelligence [...]
dan tynan on Feb 22 2010 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, Life, Privacy, Spy v spy
Sometimes even I am blown away by how mind-numbingly stupid people can be when it comes to technology. I’m not talking about people who can’t find the ‘any’ key. I’m talking about institutional stupidity, the kind you only get when you mix technophobic bureaucrats and geeks with no sense of boundaries. In case you haven’t [...]
dan tynan on Dec 08 2009 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, National insecurity, politics, Privacy, Spy v spy
Location, location, location. It’s not merely the key to success in retail. It’s also the key to your privacy — or what little is left of it. And that too is rapidly disappearing, thanks to that wondrous gizmo you probably carry with you at all times: the cell phone. Earlier this week, security researcher and [...]
dan tynan on Aug 03 2009 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, politics, Spy v spy
Rumors that Uncle Sam wants to use our own computers to spy on us are raging across the blogosphere. Fortunately, they’re not true, no matter what Glenn Beck says.
dan tynan on Mar 30 2009 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, National insecurity, Spy v spy
By now you’ve probably read about GhostNet, the vast spy network that was uncovered after the office of the Dalai Lama asked researchers at the University of Toronto to examine their computer networks for malware. The researchers not only found nasties there, they uncovered an entire network that connected almost 1300 computers in 103 countries [...]
dan tynan on Oct 27 2008 | Filed under: Spy v spy
I always knew those Twitterati were up to no good. And now it seems the US Army has cottoned on to this as well. A draft US Army intelligence report has identified Twitter as a potential tool for terrorism. (You can find a copy on the Federation of American Scientists web site [PDF].) Apparently the [...]
dan tynan on Aug 22 2008 | Filed under: Cringley, Da Web, Infoworld, National insecurity, Spy v spy
What do Chinese gymnasts and FBI agents have in common? They believe laws (and/or regulations) are made to be broken.
dan tynan on Jul 23 2008 | Filed under: Cringley, Infoworld, Privacy, Spy v spy
Seductive Asian agents, wayward Brits, purloined Blackberries — it sounds like a LeCarre novel, but it’s really a true story. Cringely dives deep into a sex/spy scandal of Olympian proportions and talks about what this means for you and your data.
