“Go ahead,” he said. “I know in a little bit you’re going to go post some smart ass comment on Facebook.” He could not keep the scorn from his voice. “And everyone will sympathize with you. And I’ll look like the bad guy.” Her jaw tightened. “I have never called you out on Facebook,” she [...]

From media and communications to banking, an increasing number of our daily activities is performed online. While this transformation has raised the curtain on exciting new frontiers, it also opens doors to security threats undreamed of by previous generations. In Scientific American’s newest eBook, Cyber Hacking: Wars in Virtual Space, we peer behind the scenes [...]

Last week President Obama signed a sweeping aviation bill that, among other things, will open the skies to “unmanned aircraft systems,” more commonly known as drones. Much of the discussion regarding the coming era of domestic drones has been focused on the many important questions regarding their use at low altitudes. To what extent will [...]

  The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments this week about whether law enforcement officials have a constitutional right to collect DNA after an arrest and before a person has been convicted of a crime. The argument in favor of this practice holds that it is no different than fingerprinting during a booking procedure. [...]

The flood of online data about each of us seems to be increasing exponentially. For the most part we’re willing participants, lured by the promise of convenience and information. But how much control will we have over the data that we give up? Michael Fertik, CEO of Reputation.com, which is in the business of giving [...]

Earlier today Mozilla introduced Collusion, an add-on for the Firefox browser that shows you how companies are tracking you as you surf the Web. A cool visual demonstration of the software illustrates all the links that form as you crisscross just a few popular sites online, including IMDB, the New York Times and the Huffington [...]

The scandal that helped shutter Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and left at least nine News International journalists facing possible criminal charges has brought phone hacking into the spotlight as a means of subversively gathering information for news articles. As investigators study the scope of the problem, including the role phone hacking played [...]

China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency has struck back against Google following the Internet giant’s claims earlier this week that recent hacker attempts to steal G-mail user passwords appeared to have originated from China. Xinhua called Google’s statements "evil-intentioned" in an article published Friday and quoted Dai Yiqi, a cyber security researcher with Tsinghua University, as [...]

Spam comprises upward of 80 percent of incoming e-mail, despite monumental efforts by help desks and security software companies to defeat it. The reason spam volumes continue to grow is that such efforts are often misplaced and fail to hit spammers where it hurts. Instead of trying to shut down the hydralike tangle of Web [...]

Editor’s Note: The following blog post first appeared May 15 on the World Science Festival’s Web site Underscoring the importance of encryption in our increasingly data-driven digital lives, this year’s World Science Festival features its first-ever session on cryptography, entitled "Keeping Secrets: Cryptography in a Connected World." During this discussion expect a well-rounded panel—including mathematician [...]

Google, Microsoft and Mozilla are moving quickly to respond to calls from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and consumer watchdogs for a "do not track" option that allows Web surfers to protect their private information from being exploited by advertising networks. By announcing plug-in software and new anti-tracking features, the major Web browser makers have [...]

Edward Felten, one of the most incisive minds of the digital age, has been appointed the chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. Scientific American gave the Princeton professor an award in 2003 for his critiques of digital privacy. The squib we ran at the time read: "Corporations intent on monopolizing the digital economy have [...]

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networking has emerged as a vastly popular way for computer users to democratize the transfer of information, allowing faster and easier sharing of images, documents and other files without the need for a centralized server. Unfortunately, and ironically, P2P is a little too democratic for the U.S. government, which has been victimized several [...]