By Rick Mendenhall

There’s something sexy about the word corruption. I’m sure you’ve all scanned through your GAoogle news feed at one time or another and clicked a link just because it had corruption in the title. Because of this, I’m going to try and say corruption as often as possible in this post. Even when it might be unnecessary to say corruption. For instance, The Departed is an academy award winning movie about corruption.

Speaking of corruption, this Friday, November 13, 2014, the American Bar Association is hosting a talk on corruption risks for the United States defense and aerospace industry as they agree to more and more deals with foreign countries, especially with Asian countries. If you’re interested in the defense arms race in Asia, click here for the Summit’s coverage of it (sorry it’s not about corruption). If you’re interested in the defense industry in general, the PR Newswire has a thorough defense market forecast through 2020.

But if you’re actually just attracted to corruption, check out this BBC article about a Chinese official who stashed so many cash-bribes in his home that money-counting machines broke while tallying the illegal treasure trove.

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November 12, 2014

By Matt Klinger

In response to concerns about government surveillance, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which develops technical standards for the internet, is working on a plan to expand the use of encryption on the web.  Most web traffic today is exchanged under the hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP), an unencrypted medium.  Some sites, however, like banks, online retailers, and Gmail, use HTTPS, which incorporates encryption into the exchange.  The IETF hopes to produce a standard by the end of 2014 that encourages the use of HTTPS for all web traffic, although adoption by websites would not be mandatory.

Salon reports the IETF is also looking into make anonymous surfing of the web easier by expanding the use of Tor - a networking software that anonymizes web traffic.  Journalists, activists, and others across the globe use Tor to protect their communications.  Meanwhile, the U.S. National Security Agency and its British counterpart seem intent on cracking the software.  Ironically, Tor's precursors were developed by the U.S. Department of Defense to safeguard its communications and the U.S. government reportedly still funds around 60 percent of Tor's development tab.

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December 04, 2013

By Julie Inglese

Human Rights Watch urges government leaders to begin an international discussion on “fully autonomous robot weapons.”  Although these weapons are yet to come into existence, technology is getting close and many countries have already publicly addressed their existence. 

The robots will have the capacity to select targets and kill them without further intervention by humans.  A debate is already taking place on whether the robots are a danger to human rights.  Some people believe that talks should begin now on how or if these robots should be used, while others propose an outright ban on their use before they even go into the field.

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November 21, 2013