https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/public/ recent bookmarks from guardiantech 2014-05-26T19:20:49+00:00 http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/22/technology/security/nsa-obama-blackberry/index.html guardiantechIn response to Obama's request, the NSA set up a lab where dozens of experts performed surgery for several months on a high-profile patient: the soon-to-be presidential BlackBerry. The course of treatment was to manipulate the device's innards to weed out potential threats to secure communication. In the end, that meant taking most of the fun out of the phone: the president can't play Angry Birds, for example. "You try to get rid of any functionality that's not really required. Every piece of functionality is an opportunity for the adversary," [former NSA technical director Richard] George says. According to George, the president simply wanted a phone that enabled him to communicate with his advisers. Though the president was a well known BlackBerry addict at the time, the choice of smartphone model was the NSA's, not Obama's, George explained.]]> blackberry obama nsa https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:b4dea56f79b7/ 2013-06-07T21:27:03+00:00 http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/06/06/2118531/direct-access-nsa-spying/?mobile=nc guardiantechFollowing reports of a top secret program called PRISM that allows intelligence agencies to access a wide variety of supposedly private online communications, several of the tech companies implicated in the report have issued carefully worded statements denying the government has access to their servers or a backdoor method of entry. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) don’t have the ability to access their data. It's all in the wording.]]> obama surveillance https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:0966b25359cb/ 2012-11-16T06:19:45+00:00 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/11/why_romney_was_surprised_to_lose_his_campaign_had_the_wrong_numbers_bad.html guardiantechOn Election Day, the whole Romney ground-game flopped apart. ORCA, the much touted- computer system for tracking voters on Election Day, collapsed. It was supposed to be a high-tech approach to poll-watching, a system by which campaign workers would be able to track who voted. Those who had not yet voted could therefore be identified and then have volunteers tasked to finding them and getting them to the polls. ORCA was supposed to streamline the process, but it was never stress-tested. Field operatives never saw a beta version. They asked to see it, but were told it would be ready on Election Day. When they rolled it out Tuesday, it was a mess. People couldn’t log on and when they did, the fields that were supposed to be full of data were empty. Lesson in there somewhere.]]> obama romney uselection https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:6e330b49c485/ 2012-11-15T17:35:55+00:00 http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/13/tech/innovation/obama-tech-policy/index.html guardiantechTechnology policy didn't get much airtime in the 2012 presidential election, but the Obama administration will face serious issues over the next four years.]]> obama us tech https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:57fdf100513f/ 2012-11-07T22:24:15+00:00 http://kotaku.com/5958541/hundreds-of-obamas-and-romneys-go-to-war-in-this-hilarious+looking-mod guardiantechThe mod, created by Reddit user matbitesdog, is used in Medieval II: Total War, and you can download it for laughs here. Enjoy the pics. Perhaps future elections could be fought like this too?]]> obama war mod games https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:5709cf170007/ 2012-11-05T12:24:41+00:00 http://flowingdata.com/2012/11/05/all-possible-paths-to-the-white-house/ guardiantech obama romney election https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:99cf002ea269/ 2012-08-30T17:55:25+00:00 http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106724/how-i-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-romneyworld guardiantechthis brazen editing of Obama's riff seemed very much in keeping with the Romney campaign's equally brazen declaration that the Obama administration is doing away with the welfare work requirement. Filter bubbles in politics are arguably far more dangerous than those in technology.]]> obama romney distortion filterbubble https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:37e863686840/ 2011-05-02T22:10:01+00:00 http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/5680724572/ guardiantech charlesarthur historic binladen obama https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:aecb07729645/ 2011-05-02T22:07:02+00:00 http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/mixed-signals-10000051/how-obama-watched-the-bin-laden-mission-10022338/ guardiantech charlesarthur osama obama https://pinboard.in/u:guardiantech/b:74402b97acb2/