Tag: NEWYORK

There was once a time when crooked dock workers pulled off relatively straightforward, conventional crimes, like drug smuggling or human trafficking. Today's law-breaking longshoremen, however, are apparently expanding and embellishing their criminal operations, thanks to social networking. As Reuters reports, federal prosecutors have charged 11 suspects, including one New York Harbor ...

Facebook users in New York may have an entirely new reason to mind their online p's and q's, thanks to a state judge's decision to allow private Facebook posts as court evidence. As Forbes explains, the Suffolk County, New York case involved a woman who was personally injured after falling out of an office chair in 2003. Claiming that the incident was due to the chair's defective construction, ...

The Switched team arose early last Saturday to trek out to the New York Hall of Science in Queens for the city's first-ever Maker Faire. As we chugged coffee, we watched the modders, hackers and DIY-based designers of the world strut their stuff. Feeling a bit like kids again (possibly due to being alongside budding mechanics and entire areas devoted to teaching kids how to solder and ...

In June, MasterCard announced plans to begin testing a smartphone payment system for mass transit commuters in the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. Now, the credit card company is reportedly allowing nemesis Visa into the venture, as well. As Reuters reports, the joint program will allow commuters to wave their credit or debit cards over electronic readers to purchase tickets, in lieu of ...

Over the course of the past few months, German politicians and privacy advocates have been waging war against Google as part of an initiative to ensure that citizens' homes aren't displayed on the site's Street View feature. Politicians in small town New York, on the other hand, have Google-related issues that concern a far more global phenomenon: swimming pools. As the AP reports, council ...

Food is only as fast as the corners cut making it -- or such has been the corporate, American idea of fast food preparation technology. Yet, the fast food restaurant 4food dislikes this philosophy, and is opting to open a three-story restaurant in midtown Manhattan and to break practically every rule in the, err, fast food book -- if there is such a thing. First off, there are over 140 ...

Crowd-sourcing your dating life as a last means hope of finding that special someone is, well, desperate. But who are we to criticize a chosen path to love? Earlier this week, a 23-year-old New Yorker named Brian became a hit on the Web because he let the Internet pick his partner. Part of his internship at advertising agency BBH required him to "make something, anything famous," his tweet to ...

The thing that we rarely talk about when discussing the certain fate of print media is its ecological value. Most of us, we'd venture, have at least some nostalgia for printed matter, as well as mixed feelings for the spread of e-books. But one book that we're sure no one will miss is the White Pages. Verizon asked New York state regulators on Friday to end the distribution of millions of ...

Traditional wanted posters found in post offices across the nation take significant investments of time and effort to produce and distribute. Yet, outside of the Ten Most Wanted list, the FBI has not made significant use of the Internet to distribute notices about fugitives. Now, however, the message is beginning to emerge with the gradual rollout of BanditTracker. The system debuted in 2007 ...

Share Since 2002, the NYPD has conducted over 50 raids on the same house in Brooklyn. Each time, it has made the same mistake, all thanks to one computer glitch. According to the New York Post, the whole snafu began in 2002, when police entered the Brooklyn address of Walter Martin, 83, and his wife Rose, 82, into an alert database. They originally used the address to run a test on the system, ...

The Armory Show consists of over 300 galleries and thousands of artists, parading new talent out alongside pieces by Kandinksy and Warhol, Damien Hirst and Murakami. Though the majority of works appear in traditional mediums, interactive, video-based work always draws a crowd weary from looking at booths and booths of acrylics, apoxy, krylon and more. Canadian-Mexican Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is ...

For the past few years, social network mega-sites Facebook and MySpace have been getting a little safer thanks to each making efforts to block sex offenders. Now, much of the rest of the Internet is getting the similar treatment, with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announcing that 13 more sites are finally following suit, hooking into the state's database of sex offenders and filtering ...

That Twitter avatar may look cute and docile, but once that bird starts hangin' with the wrong crowd, dangerous things can happen. The New York Daily News reports that gangs in New York have taken Twitter to the seedy part of town -- and the police have caught on. Several recent incidents of violence between rival teenage gangs have been instigated by intimidating tweets; one youngster was ...

The Internet turned the big 4-0 this year, and the commercially available wireless phone celebrated its own quarter-century milestone. After all of that time, it seems that state and national governments are finally ready to accept the crazy notion that both modes of communication can be used to instantly disseminate urgent information during times of strife. Japan introduced a cell phone ...

For one week every six months, even the most backwards, style-un-savvy New Yorker turns into a bit of a fashion nut. New York Fashion Week takes over the fair city, sending flocks of twig-legged girls dashing down Broadway, trying to get into (or out of) shows. Resident fashion nerd Leila Brillson takes the whole thing seriously while the rest of the staff admires her unflagging commitment to ...