Month: March 2016

President Obama places a call from his secure BlackBerry 8900 from the presidential limo while in Indonesia in 2010. Secretary of State Clinton wanted similar phones for her staff, but they were told to "shut up and go color" by NSA. (credit: White House Photo by Pete Souza, November 10, 2010))

Judicial Watch, the conservative political action group that has largely driven the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's e-mails, has obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request indicating that Clinton tried and failed to get the National Security Agency to give her the same secure BlackBerry that President Obama used. Donald Reid, the State Department's coordinator for security infrastructure, reported in a 2009 e-mail, "Each time we asked the question 'What was the solution for POTUS,' we were politely asked to shut up and color."

Reid was trying to solve a problem for Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric J. Boswell—the problem being that the new secretary of state was a certifiable BlackBerry addict but wasn't much of a computer user. Clinton became hooked on the BlackBerry in much the same way that President Obama did during the 2008 presidential campaign but found her preferred method of checking e-mail was banned from the secure office space at State's "Mahogany Row," the 7^th floor at the State Department's Foggy Bottom headquarters in Washington. Use of wireless devices was banned in the space, which is designated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF).

But Reid found that using the desktop computer within the SCIF for e-mail was not in Clinton's comfort zone:

(credit: T-Mobile US)

T-Mobile USA and YouTube have reached a compromise that will bring YouTube into T-Mobile's Binge On program, which reduces streaming quality but exempts videos from data caps.

The Google-owned YouTube was the most notable absence from Binge On when T-Mobile launched the program in November. YouTube later said that while reducing data charges can be good for customers, "it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent."

But today, T-Mobile announced that YouTube, Google Play Movies, and a few other services have joined Binge On, bringing the total to more than 50 (including its own T-Mobile TV).

(credit: Richard Riley)

Maybe the one single thing more regrettable than drunk texting is drunk tweeting. Publicly broadcasting intoxication is definitely not the best way to bolster one’s social media clout, and yet a lot of people can't resist boasting about their alcoholic escapades. Researchers have now trained an algorithm to spot alcohol-related tweets, and even to guess if the tweeter was drinking at the time of posting.

Nabil Hossain at the University of Rochester, upstate New York, decided to combine Twitter and machine learning to keep track of alcohol use across a given community.

To do that, he and his team collected thousands of geotagged posts tweeted between July 2013 and July 2014 in New York state, and then winnowed them down to tweets containing booze-related keywords (ranging from “beer keg” to “shitfaced").