Brazil awarded a $4.5 billion contract to Saab AB on Wednesday to replace its aging fleet of fighter jets, a surprise coup for the Swedish company after news of U.S. spying on Brazilians helped derail Boeing's chances for the deal.

Until earlier this year, Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet had been considered the front runner. But revelations of spying by the U.S. National Security Agency in Brazil, including personal communication by Rousseff, led Brazil to believe it could not trust a U.S. company.

Pennsylvania police this week were pulling people to the side of the road, quizzing them on their driving habits, and asking if they’d like to provide a cheek swap or a blood sample — the latest in a federally contracted operation that’s touted as making roads safer.

Fort Worth residents had complained about the high-pressure questioning, the intimidating presence of uniformed officers, and what they called a clear hit to their constitutional rights.

Amazon has explained to me that Disney can pull their content at any time and 'at this time they've pulled that show for exclusivity on their own channel.' In other words, Amazon sold me a Christmas special my kids can't watch during the run up to Christmas.

Yes, Disney is stupid and evil for doing this. But when Amazon decided that it would offer studios the right to revoke access to purchased videos, they set the stage for this.

Officials at the National Security Agency are divided over whether to offer an amnesty deal to espionage suspect Edward Snowden, who is said to have cost the agency tens of millions of dollars to ensure his presence was removed from its networks.

Whether return of that cache is worth a deal with Snowden is a contentious subject within the NSA. Rick Ledgett, who runs the NSA task force assessing the damage on the Snowden leaks, told CBS' news program "60 Minutes" during a segment aired Sunday (see below) that an amnesty deal is "worth having a conversation about.

Light bulb manufacturers will cease making traditional 40 and 60-watt light bulbs -- the most popular in the country -- at the start of 2014.

While LED sales are growing rapidly -- Voykovik said they doubled in each of the last two years at Home Depot -- most consumers still opt for incandescent bulbs. The percent of sales that are LEDs are in the single digits, he said.

A wealthy Texan teenager who mowed down and killed four pedestrians while driving drunk has been sentenced to 10 years’ probation at a private rehab centre, rather than 20 years in jail as prosecutors had demanded.

Critics of the lenient sentence are outraged not so much by the sentence itself, as by the defence’s apparently successful argument that 16-year-old Ethan Couch was a victim of “affluenza” – meaning his family is so wealthy, and he so entitled, that he believed his actions would have no consequences.

The software, dubbed App Ops, was bundled into Android 4.3 as a hidden application. For each installed program, it presents a series of switches so that users can activate some permissions, such as granting access to the cellular or Wi-Fi network, but block others, such as sharing your physical whereabouts.

"Google told us that the feature had only ever been released by accident - that it was experimental, and that it could break some of the apps policed by it," said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the EFF.

In one of the premier open source software deployments in Europe, the city migrated from Windows NT to LiMux, its own Linux distribution. LiMux incorporates a fully open source desktop infrastructure. The city also decided to use the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard, instead of proprietary options.

As of November last year, the city saved more than €11.7 million because of the switch. More recent figures were not immediately available, but cost savings were not the only goal of the operation. It was also done to be less dependent on manufacturers, product cycles and proprietary OSes, the council said.

nvestigative journalists have exploited a cryptographic weakness in a third-party website commenting service to expose politicians and other Swedish public figures who left highly offensive remarks on right-wing blogs, according to published reports.

The Gravatar hashes, which are typically embedded in any comment left on millions of sites that use the avatar service, are generated by passing a user's e-mail address through the MD5 cryptographic function.

The negotiators made sure that public interest groups were excluded from even the press briefing about the negotiations, which should tell you all you need to know about what the negotiators think of the public.

If you think the public is too stupid to understand the public policy positions you're negotiating for, then you shouldn't be in that job.