In The News

The FBI Used the Web’s Favorite Hacking Tool to Unmask Tor Users

Kevin Poulson December 29, 2014
Anonymity on the Tor network may be compromised: “FBI agents relied on Flash code from an abandoned Metasploit side project called the ‘Decloaking Engine’ to stage its first known effort to successfully identify a multitude of suspects hiding behind the Tor anonymity network,” reports Kevin Poulson for Wired. “Tor, a free, open-source project originally funded by the US Navy, is sophisticated...

Sony Fights Against Hackers, Who Threaten Violence at Theaters Playing “The Interview”

Cecilia Kang, Andrea Peterson and Ellen Nakashima December 22, 2014
Hackers, yet unknown, exposed embarrassing, confidential and protected documents from Sony Pictures Entertainment along with threats for theaters featuring “The Interview,” a film originally scheduled for nationwide release December 25. Globalization in entertainment, technology, security, civil and privacy rights converge as suggested by the team of writers for this Washington Post essay. The...

Geoengineering Could Worsen Climate Change

Tim Radford December 1, 2014
Representatives from around the globe gather for the UN Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, starting December 1, to consider measures to adapt and mitigate the results of global warming. Relying on geoengineering to forestall impending disasters associated with climate change is foolhardy, expensive and possibly even dangerous, suggests Tim Radford in an article for Climate News Network. He...

A First: Spacecraft Lands on Speeding Comet

Marcus Woo November 12, 2014
The world is cheering a huge milestone in space exploration. The European Space Agency has landed the Philae probe with its tiny chemistry lab on a comet – 483 million kilometers away, hurtling 64,000 kilometers per hour. “For the last couple months, Rosetta has been studying the comet, surveying its surface and measuring the dust particles and gases around it,” reports Marcus Woo for Wired,...

How Social Media Is Helping Islamic State to Spread Its Poison

Con Coughlin November 11, 2014
Exposure of top-secret, massive US surveillance operations by Edward Snowden – and subsequent efforts by companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to counter the surveillance – is aiding the Islamic State, contends Con Coughlin for the Telegraph. “Aided by the increased use of encryption software by the leading internet service providers, terrorist groups such as the Islamic State … have...

Meet the Entrepreneurs at the Forefront of the Space Race

Carren Jao October 22, 2014
The world is entering a new Space Age as entrepreneurs spearhead advances in space technology and travel. This renewed Space Age is attributed to a greater commercial role in the space industry; in the United States, NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, adopted a decentralized market strategy in 2005, and interest in the space industry has exploded since with the expansion of...

In “Umbrella Revolution,” China Confronts Limits of Its Power

David Lague, James Pomfret and Greg Torode October 2, 2014
The “one country, two systems” approach in Hong Kong is not working well for China. A free press, critical of controls, and independent courts that have already released student leaders are weakening China’s control of the island: Chinese authorities “need to contain the campaign for democracy in one of Asia’s leading financial hubs without the tools employed on the mainland to suppress dissent...