Earlier this month, a group of former top government officials came out to say they sided with Apple in its refusal to help the FBI crack into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters.
Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was among those siding with the world’s most profitable company. He argued that developing software to weaken the iPhone’s existing protections would be like “creating a bacterial biological weapon” that could also be used by criminals.
NASA’s Journey to Mars mission isn’t getting Congress as excited as the agency may have hoped. It lacks a defined plan to support its stated mission and doesn’t have clear milestones to track its progress, according to lawmakers.
At a special hearing Wednesday before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, the program was characterized as little more than a very expensive stunt, reported the Verge. One expert’s estimate put the total cost at upwards of half a trillion dollars to reach Mars.
http://fortune.com/2016/02/04/nasa-mars-plan/
Eighteen months and 9,000 airstrikes after starting its bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the U.S. is running low on precision bombs and missiles, the U.S. Defense Secretary said Tuesday morning.
Pentagon chief Ash Carter laid out the problem during a preview of the Defense Department’s 2017 budget, which includes a request for $1.8 billion to buy 45,000 smart bombs and other guided munitions. But he also
http://fortune.com/2016/02/02/pentagon-smart-bombs-isis-budget/
You don’t have to listen very hard to hear the bears growling on Wall Street, London, or Paris, these days. Indeed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down another 300 points on Wednesday to just under 16,200.
With the U.S. stock market sagging, oil off to its worst start ever, and the China’s economy continuing to deteriorate, bearish analysts have a wealth of evidence to point to.
And they don’t come much more bearish than Albert Edwards, strategist at Société Générale. He’s not had much nice to say about the global economy in years, and recent events have only hardened his convictions that the world is headed for disaster, and will take the prices of equities down with it. How much? Edwards predicts the U.S. stock market could plunge as much as 75%. That would be worse than during the financial crisis, in which stocks from their peak to trough dropped a brutal 62%.
Analyst: Here Comes the Biggest Stock Market Crash in a Generation
An improperly configured database exposing the information of 191 million registered U.S. voters was discovered on Dec. 20. The database was taken offline Monday, Dec. 28, presumably to be patched.
Discovered by researcher Chris Vickery, who has since been working with with security website Databreaches as well as IT expert and security blogger Steve Ragan to pinpoint the cause, the unsecured voter list could become a problem for the people listed. Such lists can may contain more than the voter’s name, date of birth, gender, and address—which on their own is a good amount of personally identifiable information (PII).
Database of 191 Million U.S. Voter Records Left Exposed Online
A federal judge has certified two shareholder class actions accusing Facebook of hiding concerns about its growth forecasts prior to the social media company’s May 2012 initial public offering.
U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan said retail and institutional investors who claimed to lose money from buying Facebook shares at inflated prices in connection with the $16 billion IPO may pursue their respective claims as groups.
Residents of a handful of states may soon need to remember their passport before they head to the airport, even when flying domestically.
That’s because the Transportation Security Administration is getting closer to enforcing a decade-old federal law demanding that states comply with various federal standards when issuing driver’s licenses and The New York Times reports that residents in a few non-compliant states may not be able to use their driver’s licenses pass through airport security lines as soon as next year.
The TSA Could Soon Stop Accepting Some State Driver’s Licenses for Air Travel
As Spain’s national parliamentary election results came in on Sunday night, TV news commentators repeated two concepts with notable frequency: “fin del bipartidismo” and “ingobernabilidad.”
Specifically, they noted that the Spain was ending its 33-year period with two party rule. Is the Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy threatening to become ungovernable, just as it emerges from a humiliating bailout and its worst economic crisis in over 20 years?
Oil prices could drop to as low as $20 per barrel next year, according to both an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) minister and a Goldman Sachs analyst.
Venezuelan Oil Minister Eulogio del Pino said that OPEC could not enter a price war and needed to find a way to stabilize the oil market. “OPEC has to do something very soon … We don’t agree with the position that says the market some way is going to dictate the price of crude oil. We don’t agree with that position of Saudi Arabia,” del Pino said on the sidelines of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) Summit in Tehran on Sunday, as reported by Reuters.
China, long known for its strict Internet censorship laws, is now sending online censors to take posts at the country’s biggest online companies.
Key “network security officers” will monitor the work of key websites and Web firms for crimes such as fraud and the “spreading of rumors,” China’s Ministry of Public Security said in a statement. These officers would be a part of the roughly 2 million people employed by the government to monitor Web activity, as first reported by the BBC.
The ministry didn’t say which companies would be getting a new in-house police unit, the Wall Street Journal notes. It also wasn’t clear whether these new measures would apply to international companies as well as local tech firms operating in China.
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