WOO ON TECH

Technology News for Busy People

I want your texts!

Technology lobbyists have been pushing for reform of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act for years, primarily to address the multitude of shortcomings, loopholes that couldn’t have been predicted almost 30 years ago. Law enforcement has also jumped onto the bandwagon, having recently submitted a rider proposal that would be attached to any changes proposed

Eye Spy

Is your webcam spying on you? Maybe.

When laptops and desktops first started shipping with webcams built right into the chassis, people immediately started joking about their computers spying on them, and I saw numerous semi-serious and completely serious attempts to cover them up with tape, post-it notes, permanent marker and just about anything people could put their hands on to alleviate

Hacker invading your laptop

Though it’s no secret to the security world, the US government has specifically avoided naming Chinese state agencies as the source of a tremendous surge in cyberattacks on corporate and government institutions over the course of the past 2 years. On Monday, the gloves finally came off as Obama’s security advisor, Tom Donilon pointed the

Automatic Logo

iPhone: Your next back-seat driver

Classic car enthusiasts have bemoaned the industry’s shift towards computerizing every aspect of automotive operations, especially things that in the past could be tuned and maintained with a set of tools and a little elbow grease. The rise of technologies like fuel-injection, ABS and automatic transmissions have made our cars some of the most sophisticated

Battery

Among the many things that complicate technology, batteries have historically been a big, heavy, environmentally disasterous anchor around everyone’s necks. Researchers at UCLA have recently announced a breakthrough in producing graphene-based “supercapacitors” that essentially takes the best parts of a capictor and a traditional battery to form what may be as transformative as the discovery

Unlock Your Cellphone

You might not have realized this, but in 2012, US Copyright Office let an exception to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) expire that suddenly made it illegal to unlock a cellphone you owned, for the purposes of using it with a different carrier. Passed in 1998, the DMCA covers many areas of modern technology, but the exception essentially

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