Fer Gregory/Shutterstock One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to…

Elon Musk has made his name on big ideas, whether it’s space tourism or the electric car — but his latest project, mysteriously dubbed the Hyperloop, may be more revolutionary than anything he’s done. It started with a simple promise: the ability to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half…

Barta IV/Flickr In the early 1970's, the U.S. government learned that an undersea cable ran parallel to the Kuril Islands off the eastern coast of Russia, providing a vital communications link between two major Soviet naval bases. The problem? The Soviet Navy had completely blocked foreign ships…

“Welcome to the dark side.” That was the standard line when people found out I was raising Homebrew, our new seed fund. It came from entrepreneurs or other investors, always said with a chuckle, like it was an innocent throwaway. Venture as the “dark side” of entrepreneurship is a really old joke. I…

Published 18 July 2013 Share page About sharing Image caption, Google's shares have risen nearly 60% since Larry Page became chief executive in 2011 ByLeo KelionTechnology reporter Google's been busy. Over recent weeks it's added photo auto-enhancement to its Google+ social network, launched air…

An Arizona Department of Public Safety officer keeps an eye on his dashboard computer as it reads passing car license plates. Ross D. Franklin/AP License plate scanners are the dark horse of the surveillance world. They've been around for a decade, but people rarely notice. They don't look much…

Hunter Walk And Satya Patel’s Homebrew Is A $35M Seed-Stage Fund To Invest In The “Bottom Up Economy” Leena Rao 7:41 AM PDT · July 17, 2013 Former Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk has been making angel investments for some time now, and recently began observing that although he was one of the smallest…

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, has warned that the fear of terrorism is being exploited by the Government to erode civil liberties and risks creating a police state. Dame Stella became the first woman director general of MI5 in 1992 Credit: Photo: MARTIN POPE Dame Stella accused…

As part of its announcement of the new-look Maps app for Android today, Google slipped in some other news. Latitude, the social location-sharing service that launched in February 2009, is to be retired on August 9th 2013. Its features will be split between the Google+ mobile app and the Android OS –…

Thirty independent community news sites have banded together to tell the world, in effect, “We are not Patch.” The project, called Authentically Local, includes such well-known sites as Baristanet, based in Montclair, N.J., The Batavian, of Batavia, N.Y., and the New Haven Independent. In a…

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Fred Wilson, at a recent PandoMonthly, called Foursquare " Maps with people in them ." Maybe if this were 2009 it would be. But I'm forced to disagree with the iconic venture capitalist. Foursquare is