Of course they did. U.S. spies spent years infiltrating virtual gaming worlds like Worlds of Warcraft, “hunting” for terrorists and vacuuming up oodles of data, according to a report Monday by ProPublica, the N.Y. Times, and The Guardian. In fact, there were so make virtual reality spies bumbling around places [Keep reading]
Some UPS shipping customers are experiencing delivery delays, which have come during what might nearly be the worst time of the year — holiday preparations. There’s a cascade of complaints on the UPS Facebook page from consumers complaining about missing packages. Complaints are spilling out onto other web locations, too. [Keep reading]
Websites that offer short-term, high-interest loans to consumers continue to draw the attention of regulators, with New York state authorities issuing 16 subpoenas to lead generation websites recently, according to the New York Times. The relatively new practice of offering payday loans online through websites involves a thicket of complicated [Keep reading]
Here’s the first of several stories I expect to see like this. A security researcher claims he can hack his way into commercial drones and make them take instructions from him. Think of it as a flying botnet. Now there’s an appetizing idea! (H/T to Threatpost and Dennis Fisher for [Keep reading]
Nearly one-quarter of young Americans bank primarily by smartphone, claims a new survey released by Ally Bank. In a telephone poll taken in September, 23 percent of Americans aged 18-34 said they were “primarily using mobile devices” to do their banking, up from 15 percent last year. Add in other [Keep reading]
The U.K. is aflutter with talk that smartphones might be the reason Britons are having 20 percent less sex than they did a decade ago. The research isn’t as tidy as all that — the 20 percent part is sound, the smartphone part is largely a guess. But then, I’ll [Keep reading]
Could a hip 20-something Chicagoan limit her weekly spending to $100 a week for an entire month? Nicole DiVito set out to find out last month, trying what she called “No-Spend November.” The results were…mixed. “No Spend November… Good in theory; Mediocre in practice,” DiVito says. I think she’s being [Keep reading]
Jeff Bezos is a lot of things, but when I see him talk, I feel the same way I do about a charming magician. Now I know why. He’s convinced some very important people that drones will soon be dropping Amazon packages out of the sky, only 30 minutes after [Keep reading]
Brazil is considering a law that would force U.S. companies like Google to store and keep data on its citizens only within Brazil’s borders – not at Google’s U.S. servers. Let’s call that data protectionism. Pandora, meet the NSA. This isn’t a story about Brazil. It’s a story about the [Keep reading]
Corporations use Big Data to get the upper hand on consumers; it’s time for consumers to strike back. A host of online calculators makes it easier for you to compare prices across a wide variety of industries, and learn quickly if you’re about to be ripped off — or at [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan