Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Bin Laden compound could yield big intelligence harvest
“Thousands of documents” recovered from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan could help the U.S. “destroy al-Qaida,” U.S. officials told NBC News. …
U.S. officials would not discuss details of what might be in the papers and on the computer drives, including whether the material was encrypted. But in an interview with NBC News’ Brian Williams, CIA Director Leon Panetta said, “The reality is that we picked up an awful lot of information there at the compound.” …
Panetta confirmed that relatives of bin Laden were in Pakistani custody and said the U.S. had been assured that it would “have access to those individuals.”
Panetta said that combined with the computer data, “the ability to continue questioning the family” could yield significant leads “regarding threats, regarding the location of other high-value targets and regarding the kind of operations that we need to conduct against these terrorists.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com with Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem of NBC News)
Mobile journalism in the real world, or: How I work
My Livescribe notes from a recent (non-msnbc) food writing outing. If I tap anywhere in the notes, the pen begins playing the audio from that point.
Originally posted April 15, 2011, and revised Aug. 19, 2011, to reflect upgrades.
When I joined msnbc.com nearly 12 years ago, I made an abrupt transition at age 38 from a very traditional newspaper orientation.
When I worked at The Charlotte Observer, Congressional Quarterly, Knight-Ridder Washington and The Washington Post, I had been using the same tools for almost 20 years:
• The standard reporter’s notebook and pen.
• A landline telephone with an audio pickup to record interviews.
• A handheld audio recorder for field interviews.
• A “portable” (but actually fairly bulky) point-and-shoot camera. Later, that got traded in for an equally bulky portable camera that could shoot as much as 90 seconds of grainy video.
With standard variations for specific assignments (if you were ever a cops reporter, you’ll remember clipping a brick-size beeper to your belt), those were the tools print reporters used for decades.
I recently returned to work after having taken a couple of weeks off, during which I did nothing remotely job-related, and the tools I use now were scattered on my desk where I’d left them. I was struck by how remarkably different they are.
‘This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak’
Cross-posted from Technolog: read in context
Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down.
While it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because “what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren’t Twitter users,” says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of “The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam.”
“Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out,” he says. “It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what’s going on.”
Here’s the text of our full conversation with Howard:
Live from Las Vegas, it’s …
Having worked in radio years and years ago, I had a great time doing this CES interview on Chad Hartman’s show on WCCO/Minneapolis today. We talked tablets, phones, TV and weird tech. You can download it directly here or listen to the podcast on the station’s site.
Fractured Android leaves orphans behind
If tablets are the stars at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, then the headliner is Google, whose Android mobile operating system runs most of the devices getting so much attention this week in Las Vegas.
The iPad is still the king, but Apple isn’t here — as usual. This gives Google’s little green robot command of the spotlight almost by default. Nearly every major computer maker already has an Android tablet or is debuting one (or more) at CES; by the end of the year, Android will have grabbed a third of the tablet market to go along with half the smartphone market, analysts Piper-Jaffray projected this week.
But by mid-year, consumers will have to wade through a half-dozen different Android operating systems on tablets. Those on earlier releases will essentially be stranded — Google orphans left to rely on the cleverness of an already-thriving community of hackers who fill in the holes in Android on their own. Meanwhile, developers must weigh whether it’s worth the resources to bring out yet another version of their applications for yet another version of Android.
WikiLeaks attacks getting more sophisticated
Over at Technolog, I’m analyzing the newest DDoS attack on WikiLeaks. This one is 50 times the size of the Anonymous attack on Scientology in 2008.
U.S. can’t let WikiLeaks limit candor, diplomats say
Former U.S. ambassadors say taking more diplomatic communications offline in response to the WikiLeaks documents would cripple the ability to “make the world work.”
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com with NBC News reports)
Officially old now
Word just came that an msnbc.com project I worked on several years ago is going into the Newseum. It’s an exhibit honoring what the Online News Association deems outstanding winners from the first decade of Online Journalism Awards.
The relevant item was part of a larger project I did on airline baggage screening in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It’s an interactive application we put together to show people what TSA carry-on baggage screeners really do and how complicated and nerve-racking their jobs really are. My contribution was the original idea, the research and the writing; much more talented people than I figured out how to actually put it together in a groundbreaking way (remember, this was back in 2002) and make it work.
People already call me a museum piece; I guess I am one now. You can find the interactive by clicking the box.
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Reporting: States working harder to collect online sales taxes
Sales taxes or similar levies have always been in place on most online purchases in most states. But they are almost never paid. And with their budgets in crisis, states are more determined than ever to get their share.
Full story (Alex Johnson/msnbc.com)
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Florida college students’, staff members’ personal data exposed
The central library system for Florida’s public colleges is sending out e-mail notices this week to as many as 126,000 summer school students, faculty and staff at six colleges disclosing that it exposed their personal information online from May 29 to June 2.
Investigators with the Leon County Sheriff’s Office discovered that “some personal information had been accessed by unauthorized persons and that some was available through Google until the search engine was notified,” the College Center for Library Automation said.
“The records of these institutions were contained in temporary work files that were being processed by CCLA at the time of exposure” during a software upgrade, it said.
While “CCLA has found no indication that the data has actually been obtained or misused,” it urged students, faculty and staff at the six institutions — Broward College, Florida State College-Jacksonville, Northwest Florida State College, Pensacola State College, South Florida Community College and Tallahassee Community College — to immediately place fraud alerts on their credit files.
Alex Johnson - Journalist at Large 