Technology

The NSA, in collaboration with the CIA and FBI, routinely and secretly intercept shipping deliveries for laptops and PCs purchased online in order to install spy malware and bugs before they reach their owners. According to a new report from Der Spiegel based on internal NSA documents, the intelligence agency’s elite hacking unit (TAO) is able to divert online shipping deliveries to its own “secret workshops” in a method they call interdiction.

It wasn't the Russians, it was the auditors...

Source: Townhall.com

In a dramatic confirmation of the relentless growth of online video, at the expense of the agonizing, slow death of conventional TV, YouTube said that its worldwide viewers are now watching more than 1 billion hours of videos a day, on pace to eclipse total US TV viewership over the next few years, a milestone facilitated by the Google aggressive embrace of artificial intelligence to recommend videos. By comparison, Americans watch 1.25 billion hours of live and recorded TV per day according to Nielsen, a figure that has been steadily dropping in recent years.

Update 2: according to the latest, at 11:35 AM PST: "We have now repaired the ability to update the service health dashboard. The service updates are below. We continue to experience high error rates with S3 in US-EAST-1, which is impacting various AWS services. We are working hard at repairing S3, believe we understand root cause, and are working on implementing what we believe will remediate the issue."

And on twitter:

A group of Harvard scientists have reported that one of the world’s most super-rare metals has mysteriously vanished from their laboratory.  Last month, scientists at Harvard University successfully created metallic hydrogen – a feat that no-one else had done before. Morningticker.com reports: Scientists hailed it as the “holy grail” of high pressure physics when they finally produced it in the lab: metallic hydrogen, a century after it was first theorized to exist.