13 Pages Tagged “Surveillance”
Reviews
- Interference
An intriguing followup to Semiosis that weaves several drastically different sentient species (both plant and animal) into a story about factions, community, freedom, communication and war. - The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
★★★★★
Samit Basu
Starts as a cyberpunk take on Aladdin and gleefully launches into a glorious mishmash of robots, legacies, secrets and political upheaval in a crumbling spaceport slowly sinking into the mud on a backwater planet. - Ready Player One (Movie)
★★★★☆
Steven Spielberg
Better than I expected, having soured on the book by the time it came out. Not a straight adaptation so much as a rewrite of the same premise that’s more character-driven and yes, more cinematic. With Spielberg. - The Telling
★★★★★
Ursula K. Le Guin
A thoughtful tale of discovery, as an observer from Earth struggles to find and understand fragments of the lost cultures hidden beneath a society that’s thrown away its past in favor of a single vision.
Blog Posts
- Pokédrones
A few years back, Niantic posted about a geospatial model they were building using Pokémon Go players’ scans of Pokéstops. This week that model is back in the news, since it’s being used for military drone navigation.
- Remember Back When Sudafed WORKED?
It’s been 18 years since drug companies replaced pseudoephedrine with phenylephrine to keep their cold medications available over the counter when the people waging War On Drugs(tm) decided to restrict the main ingredient in Sudafed (and what it was named after) because it could be used to make meth. Though I remember some other decongestant […]
- Ring! Ring! Who’s There? *handcuffs*
Police from five cities — and an LA Sheriff’s helicopter — descended on a neighborhood because someone panicked over Ring footage of a food delivery sent to the wrong address.
- What’s in a Name? (1984 Edition)
I always find it weird when someone insists that 1984 is warning about socialism because of the party name.
- Spamfighting vs. Privacy
As a former email admin, I found this history of spamfighting from a former Gmailer fascinating. The implications of widespread encryption are sobering.
- Somebody Hears You
Every time I listen to Vienna Teng’s “The Hymn of Acxiom,” it gets creepier. It’s beautiful, it’s haunting…and it’s all about how big data is tracking…
- Strange Signs of San Diego (Gaslamp Edition)
An uncomfortable-looking chair, graffiti on plywood, plastered signs, and a stairway under surveillance.
- Smoking Dutch Cleanser
Here’s something I just don’t understand about the whole electronic eavesdropping controversy. Given that FISA warrants are: Easy to obtain Secret Obtainable retroactively, so you can legally start listening in immediately Why is it necessary to eavesdrop without one? What’s so hard about getting a warrant? While we’re at it, given that the bad guys […]
- We know where your network is
Apparently wardrivers (people who cruise neighborhoods with a laptop looking for open wireless networks) have been submitting their findings to WiGLE—a searchable database and interactive map of wireless access points. Already checked—our home network isn’t in there. (As much as I’ve locked it down, it had better not be!) But they do list several in […]