According to the report, the NSA has planted backdoors to access computers, hard drives, routers, and other devices from companies such as Cisco, Dell, Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, and Huawei.

The ANT department prefers targeting the BIOS, code on a chip on the motherboard that runs when the machine starts up. The spyware infiltration is largely invisible to other security programs and can persist if a machine is wiped and a new operating system is installed.

An anonymous reader writes to point out a giant gift to the world from the Internet Archive: a massive collection of MAME ROMs, playable in your browser using Javascript Mess.

An army of volunteer elves are updating information about each of the hundreds of game cartridges now available, and will be improving them across the next few days.

Anthropologist Daniel Miller has been studying British teens, and he has a dire message for Facebook: The social network is “dead and buried” to Britain’s 16-to-18-year-olds because they’re “embarrassed even to be associated with it.”

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has been telling people for years that he wants to turn the service into a global utility, akin to the power grid or the water supply — something that feeds everything else you do.

In October, Rockstar filed patent infringement suits against Google and several of its Android hardware partners, and this week, Google filed a countersuit, arguing that Android does not infringe Rockstar’s patents and that its lawsuits are damaging the Android brand.

Although Rockstar filed its suits in Texas, Google filed the countersuit in San Jose, California, arguing that the case should be moved. Texas has become a hotbed of patent lawsuit activity, due to its friendliness towards litigators, so it’s only natural that Google would want to case relocated.

Dawn raids last Tuesday nabbed almost 60 people and implicated three government ministries, the directors of state banks, and some of Turkey's most powerful businessmen in a massive corruption probe spread across three different cases. Three members of Turkey's cabinet resigned on Christmas Day, and one called on Erdogan to follow suit as accusations of kickbacks, smuggling, and abuse of office continue to mount.

"A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves; an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought."

Snowden told WaPo journalist Barton Gellman that he had lobbied within the NSA against the internet dragnets, adding: "All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it."

The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change.

The vast majority of the 91 groups on Brulle's list – 79% – were registered as charitable organisations and enjoyed considerable tax breaks. Those 91 groups included trade organisations, think tanks and campaign groups.

Funding also went to groups that took on climate change denial as a core mission – such as the Heartland Institute, which held regular conclaves dedicated to undermining the United Nations climate panel's reports, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which tried and failed to prosecute a climate scientist, Michael Mann, for academic fraud.

I checked my own personal web site first, www.bsdly.net. I was a bit surprised to find that it was blocked in the default Parental control regime.

Next I tried www.usenix.org, the main site for USENIX, the US-based but actually quite international Unix user group. This also turned out to be apparently blocked in the Parental control regime.

You will have guessed by now that I'm a civil liberties man, so the next site URL I tried was www.eff.org, which was also blocked by the Parental Control regime.

A little closer to home for UK kids, I thought perhaps a thoroughly benign organization such as Amnesty International would somehow be pre-approved. But no go: I tried the UK web site, amnesty.org.uk, and it, to was blocked by the Parental Control regime.

While many pro-IP groups hailed the report as demonstrating the importance of IP to the American economy, the report was panned by critics who pointed out that the definition of “IP-intensive industries” was so broad as to be meaningless.

According to the NSF, the Business Research and Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS) “is an annual, nationally representative sample survey of approximately 43,000 companies, including companies in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing industries.

Formal intellectual property protection is far less important to the vast majority of U.S. businesses than some would like us to believe.

“I think that as important and as necessary as this debate has been, it is also important to understand that it has done unnecessary damage to United States' intelligence capabilities and to US diplomacy,” he said.

"I think giving him amnesty is idiotic,” said James Woolsey, who ran the CIA from 1993 to 1995, in an interview this week on Fox News. “He should be prosecuted for treason. If convicted by a jury of his peers, he should be hanged by his neck until he is dead."