The government of Ecuador, whose embassy in London has served as a refuge from UK authorities for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange since 2012, has been growing weary of their guest for quite some time. According to a Friday report from Reuters, it even went so far as to try and name him to a diplomatic position in…
The government of the U.K. has denied a motion to grant Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012 over fears he could be extradited, diplomatic protections.
On Sunday night, Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch “Zuma,” a mysterious government spacecraft of unknown purpose, on one of its partially-reusable Falcon 9 two-stage rockets from Launch Complex 40 at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The exact time of the launch has yet to be set, though SpaceX has set a…
Federal authorities say they can request a U.S. tech company build surveillance backdoors into their products without any kind of court order, according to statements from July released this weekend, ZDNet reported.
Twitter couldn’t drop the ball any harder this year if it tried. Death threats, continual harassment, and now this.
The ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reached absolutely bizarre, reality-bending levels this week, with Trump responding to reports Tillerson had called him a “moron” by suggesting that they could “compare IQ tests ... I can tell you who is going to win.”
Humans have had such a dramatic impact on Earth that some scientists say we’ve kickstarted a new geological era known as the Anthropocene. A fascinating new paper theorizes that alien civilizations could do the same thing, reshaping their homeworlds in predictable and potentially detectable ways. The authors are…
New research shows that ravens can plan ahead for different types of events, and even resist the urge to take an immediate reward in favor of getting a better one in the future. These capacities are often considered the exclusive domain of humans and great apes, so their presence in birds comes as a surprise.
Trump thumbed his nose at the American people on Wednesday by meeting with Russian officials as suspicions about his campaign ties to the country are at their peak. Adding insult to injury, the White House didn’t allow any U.S. press to be present. But Russian press got a front row seat in the Oval Office and former…
It’s hard to know how smart animals are for the simple reason that they’re not able to come right out and tell us. Scientists have developed various methods over the years to assess animal intelligence, but a simple new body-awareness test involving elephants may be a promising new tool to add to the arsenal.
Here we go again, gumshoes. WikiLeaks (read: Julian Assange) says it acquired a massive cache of CIA documents related to the agency’s cyberwar efforts. The information therein, WikiLeaks claims, reveals covert CIA hacking tools that can take over iPhones, Android phones, TVs, and pretty much any type of computer.…
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, submitted a letter of resignation on Wednesday to the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
Brain-training programs like the ones offered by Luminosity and LearningRx claim to boost intelligence and even offset the effects of aging. A re-evaluation of the existing scientific literature on the matter shows these claims are complete bullshit.
While most of us eventually stop playing spies, American police departments have found it increasingly tough to grow up, using military-developed surveillance equipment for crimes as minor as 911 hangups in recent years. Sensing an opportunity, defense contractors apparently stepped in to fulfill the demand, as…
Apparently, some elephants are as intelligent as an eight-year-old child. This and other sometimes-depressing, sometimes-inspiring facts are in the latest hilarious Casually Explained video on the spectrum of intelligence.
In the latest edition of scraping the barrel of the Snowden leak, The Intercept has released a trove of National Security Agency newsletters. According to one document from 2003, working at Guantanamo Bay is a real blast!
It was hailed as the most significant test of machine intelligence since Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess nearly 20 years ago. Google’s AlphaGo has won two of the first three games against grandmaster Lee Sedol in a Go tournament, showing the dramatic extent to which AI has improved over the years. That…
Remember how one of the UK’s intelligence agencies set a fiendishly difficult quiz right before Christmas? Well, now it’s published the answers, so you can stop scratching your head.
In the past few months, dozens of media outlets reported on a disturbing secret app being used by ISIS members to exchange secure messages. The media reports were based on one another, as well as the word of a volunteer hacking collective called Ghost Security Group (GSG). Another story has also made the rounds…
On the streets of UK cities, there’s an unexpected form of graffiti appearing. It’s not tags of spray paint, but instead job ads, scrawled onto sidewalks, prompting people to apply for a job at the nation’s intelligence headquarters, GCHQ.
