What We Need to Know About PRISM

A lot remains uncertain about the number of users affected by the NSA PRISM surveillance program that is taking place, the extent to which companies are involved, and how the NSA handles this sensitive data. Does the NSA regularly collect and examine a huge swath of the cloud communications of American and foreign Internet users? Does the agency present evidence and seek careful judicial review to obtain limited amounts of user data related to individual investigations? Or is the answer somewhere in the middle, with queries being constructed such that algorithms scan most or all of the accounts, identifying a smaller set of "interesting" accounts whose contents are sent to the NSA?

EFF

U.S. gov't destroyed my chance for fair trial

"If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it," he said. "All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants."

 CBS News

Space Oddity- Commander Chris Hadfield

It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

"It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?” My concern is that without serious discourse and explicit policy changes, the current path will lead to an ever more polarized economic world, with robotic technologies replacing the middle class and further distancing our society from authentic opportunity and economic justice."

MIT Technology Review

Throw-Away Society

"Actual sea-battles were rare, and even then were fought close to shore. Ships were roped together in lines to face an enemy fleet and showers of arrows and missiles would have been exchanged. Each side then resorted to hand-to-hand fighting as they attempted to board their opponents' ships. The warriors in the prow were specially selected for this task. The aim was not to destroy enemy craft, but to capture them if possible, as they represented a considerable investment in time, resources and labour."
BBC

This description of the Vikings not destroying enemy ships due to their value made me recall Toffler's theories on Transience and the Throw-Away Society:

"Anti-materialists tend to deride the importance of "things." Yet things are highly significant, not merely because of their functional utility, but also because of their psychological impact. We develop relationships with things. Things affect our sense of continuity or discontinuity. They play a role in the structure of situations and the foreshortening of our relationships with things accelerates the pace of life."
Future Shock, Chapter 4

The Future Will Be Silent-OMD

IRS believes it can read your emails, chats, and more without a warrant

Looks like the IRS believes it can read your emails, Facebook Chats, Twitter Direct Messages, SMS messages, and more without needing to obtain a search warrant beforehand. However, a ruling in the 2010 case, U.S. v. Warshak, by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals states that accessing someone’s email messages without obtaining a warrant first violates the Fourth Amendment. According to an IRS 2009 Search Warrant Handbook discovered by the American Civil Liberties Union, the IRS says,

“Emails and other transmissions generally lose their reasonable expectation of privacy and thus their Fourth Amendment protection once they have been sent from an individual’s computer.”

Slash Gear

Amazon Secretly Removes "1984" From the Kindle

Thousands of people last week discovered that Amazon had quietly removed electronic copies of George Orwell's 1984 from their Kindle e-book readers. In the process, Amazon revealed how easy censorship will be in the Kindle age.
In this case, the mass e-book removals were motivated by copyright . A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

i09

The future is now: Navy to deploy lasers on ships in 2014

The Pentagon has plans to deploy its first ever ship-mounted laser next year, a disruptive, cutting-edge weapon capable of obliterating small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles with a blast of infrared energy.
Navy officials announced Monday that in early 2014, a solid-state laser prototype will be mounted to the fantail of the USS Ponce and sent to the 5th fleet region in the Middle East for real-world experience.

Fox News

Future of organs? Synthetic tissue built with 3-D printer

Scientists have built a 3-D printer that creates material resembling human tissues. The novel substance, a deceptively simple network of water droplets coated in lipids, could one day be used to deliver drugs to the body -- or perhaps even to replace damaged tissue in living organs.
The creation, described in the journal Science, consists of lipid bilayers separating droplets of water -- rather like cell membranes, whose double layers allow the body’s cells to mesh with their watery environments while still protecting their contents.
“The great thing about these droplets is that they use pretty much exclusively biological materials,” said study co-author and University of Oxford researcher Gabriel Villar, making them ideal for medical uses.

Los Angeles Times