Scuba diver and photographer Jules Casey, based in Australia, shot this amazing video of an octopus who doesn't like what it sees – a stingray flying too close for comfort. Rather than flex its muscles, it makes a great escape – disappearing under the ocean floor. — Read the rest

Lin Wood, the pro-Trump lawyer now famous mostly for unhinged rantings and conspiracy theories, may have voted illegally in Georgia.

Wood, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, was one of the lawyers who unsuccessfully pushed a handful of lawsuits to block Georgia's election results after alleging fraud.

Prosecutor: Officers stood on Rayshard Brooks' shoulder, kicked him while he lay on the ground struggling for life.

Security researchers at Purdue and U. of Iowa confirm what many security experts have long feared: there are serious security weaknesses in 5G that undermine the promised security and privacy protections.

"You have the right to remain silent." We've heard the Miranda warning countless times on TV, but what good is the right to remain silent if our own cellphones testify against us? Imagine every incriminating and embarrassing secret our devices hold in the hands of prosecutors, simply because you've been accused of a minor crime. — Read the rest

In 2012, the Wall Street Journal first reported on a mysterious cellphone surveillance tool being used by law-enforcement; years later, we learned that the origin of this report was an obsessive jailhouse lawyer who didn't believe that the cops had caught him the way they said they had.

In early June, protesters surged into Hong Kong's streets to protest a change to the country's extradition rules that would allow the Chinese state to demand the extradition of political dissidents to the mainland; as the protests grew, Hong Kong's puppet government had no choice but to withdraw its proposal — but that wasn't enough, and millions of people poured into the streets, demanding the resignation of administrator Connie Lam and the release of imprisoned demonstrators.

The proposal by the tame, Beijing-dominated government of Hong Kong to extradite people to mainland China for a variety of crimes (including political crimes) sparked mass demonstrations that made savvy use of networks and tactics to mobilize a series of actions under the #612strike banner that shut down main arteries and key government buildings.

The millions of Hong Kong people participating in the #612strike uprising are justifiably worried about state retaliation, given the violent crackdowns on earlier uprisings like the Umbrella Revolution and Occupy Central; they're also justifiably worried that they will be punished after the fact.

Hong Kong's previous mass-protest uprisings — 2014's Occupy Central, 2016's Umbrella Revolution — were ultimately smashed by the state through a combination of violent suppression and electronic surveillance, greatly aided by the hierarchical structure of the protest movements (which made it possible to decapitate them by arresting their leaders) and their internal divisions and infighting.

Stingrays (AKA IMSI catchers) are a widespread class of surveillance devices that target cellular phones by impersonating cellular towers to them (they're also called "cell-site simulators").

Spot the Surveillance is the Electronic Frontier Foundation's first VR app: it's part of the organization's Street-Level Surveillance, which has tracked and resisted the spread of ubiquitous surveillance tools, from license-plate cameras to Stingrays and beyond.

: (◕(' 人 ') ◕) : Oh, the huge manatees! Need a mental health break? Step on in to our transparent canoe. ?

An NBC investigative journalism team and a security researcher went wardriving around the DC area with a cell-site-simulator detector that would tell them whenever they came in range of a fake cellphone tower that tried to trick their phones into connecting to it in order to covertly track their locations (some cell site simulators can also hack phones to spy on SMS, calls and data).

Oakland, California — a city across the bay from San Francisco whose large African-American population has struggled with gentrification and police violence for decades — has a long reputation for police corruption and surveillance.

The use of fake cellphone towers, known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers, plays well with the nation's spy agencies and in some police jurisdictions. The authorities just can't get enough of being able to locate or listen in on private phone calls! — Read the rest

Adam Greenfield (previously) is one of the best thinkers when it comes to the social consequences of ubiquitous computing and smart cities; he's the latest contributor Ian Bogost's special series on "smart cities" for The Atlantic (previously: Bruce Sterling, Molly Sauter).

Connecting voting machines to the internet is a terrible idea: the machines are already notoriously insecure, and once they're online, anyone, anywhere in the world becomes a potential attacker.

Watch these swimmers on Hahei Beach, New Zealand flee from a killer whale, aka an orca, last weekend. "You guys are idiots," says the cameraperson. Killer whales don't attack people in the wild. From the New Zealand Herald:

"They came in very close, about 10 metres from shore," (said Gary Hinds, chairman of the Hot Water Beach Lifeguard.)

In 2016, Motherboard used public records requests to receive 3,000 pages of documents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detailing the federal police agency's longstanding secret use of IMSI Catchers (AKA "Stingrays" — the fake cellular towers that silently capture data on every cellphone user in range).