A federal court has ruled that the fifth amendment can cover the passcode on an employee’s phone even if it was given to them by their employer. The case involves two data analysts for Capital One who were accused of insider trading. The Securities and Exchange Commission believed it had the legal right to see […]
New York has become the first US state to issue a bitcoin license. Circle Internet Financial will now have to follow some of the same consumer protection regulations that affect traditional banks. The state came up with the idea of a specific BitLicense back in January 2014 but had yet to issue one. In June […]
(Check out parts one and two of this report if you haven’t yet seen them.) Following the main museum we visited the Mansion, home during the war to the top brass and, before Bletchley Park’s expansion, the codebreakers. Most of this area was simply rooms filled with props to resemble their state during the war, though […]
Following our visit to the National Museum of Computing (see Part 1), we returned the next day for Bletchley Park proper. It’s a deceptively huge visitor facility which begins with two brief exhibition galleries designed as an introduction to the context of the second world war and the general codebreaking process. Useful as these were, […]
Taking advantage of the freedom of our (tiny) motorhome, my wife and I decided our last long weekend away this year should be to a geeky facility I’ve written about several times here at GaS but never visited until now: Bletchley Park. For those who don’t know, this is a British country mansion whose grounds […]
MasterCard is to test facial recognition as a payment authorization tool on smartphones. That’s prompted questions over the security of the way it will handle the data. The idea is to replace the need to type in a PIN code when making a purchase. While MasterCard hasn’t confirmed this, it’s likely the tool will work […]
A company has launched a system for logging into online banks using emoji rather than digits. But there’s no word of a major bank taking up the idea. Intelligent Environments works in online and mobile financial services in the UK. Among its products is a financial services ‘platform’ that includes login systems. The company has […]
If you saw the wonderful, brilliant, hilarious movie we posted last week, Kung Fury, then you certainly remember the character of Hackerman. His computer skills were all but unrivaled, and without him on the team, they would not have been able to achieve the time traveling which was an essential element to their journey. But […]
So a new dinosaur has been discovered, and has been given a rather colorful nickname due to its horn placement: The newly identified Regaliceratops peterhewsi has been informally named after Mike Mignola’s perpetually grumpy paranormal investigator (Hellboy,) owing to the presence of a pair of prominent horns just above its eyes. All I am saying here is […]
We all have our fears, and sometimes they are rational, and sometimes not so much. But do you ever wonder what some of the most brilliant and powerful minds in the world may fear? Ezra Klein of Vox media recently sat down with Bill Gates and ended up asking him that exact question: what is […]