All posts tagged: spy

DuckDuckGo’s Anti-AI Sunglasses Won’t Spy On Anyone

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Sunglasses used to exist simply to block the sun from your eyes — and to make you look cool, like Tom Cruise in Risky Business or Top Gun. But in recent years, those innocent little shades transformed into a tech product, with Meta and other companies creating camera- and audio-enabled smart glasses. And that’s created controversy, because people can be recorded without their consent. Enter DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused internet search engine and web browser company. The company has partnered with eyewear company Knockaround and is now selling what it calls “anti-surveillance” sunglasses, a simple yet chic style that’s just like the sunglasses we all knew before the AI surge. They protect your eyes and don’t spy on anyone. Yes, you can buy analog sunglasses in a million other places, including your local drugstore. But DuckDuckGo is out to make a point: AI glasses don’t respect your privacy, and the best way to protest them is not to buy them. The DuckDuckGo sunglasses even have a sassy name: Normal F* ****** Sunglasses. “We see the new …

The saddest, funniest spy show ever made is buried on Prime Video

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Between shows like The Night Agent, Jack Ryan, and the excellent Slow Horses, TV doesn’t lack for spy dramas. But there’s practically nothing out there like Patriot, a wildly underappreciated two-season drama that is sitting and waiting on Prime Video to be rediscovered. It’s a comedy, it’s a drama, it’s a James Bond movie if James Bond were a lot more easily distracted. You’ve gotta see it to believe it. Patriot is a different kind of spy show With a very different kind of spy Patriot is about John Tavner (Michael Dorman), a spy working for the U.S. government. He’s deeply ambivalent about the violence he has to commit in the course of his work, and deals with his pain by writing and performing extremely specific folk songs about his experiences. As he sings after a particularly traumatizing mission where he accidentally shoots a male hotel maid he mistook for an Egyptian physicist, he’s “showing signs of mental instability” and has “been getting baked, looking up at birds, wondering why there aren’t male hotel maids …

Kazuo Ishiguro Wrote a WWII Spy Novel!

Published by Jenni Sidey

If you felt a disturbance in the force earlier this week, it was probably just the Book Riot editorial team making exclamation points both literal and spiritual about the news that Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s next novel is a WWII spy caper. Due out March 9, 2027 (smash that preorder button), Miss Lambert Steps Aboard Danger opens in London in 1938 as a man departing from a music hall performance has a chance meeting with an enigmatic woman. Jordan Pavlin, publisher and editor-in-chief of Knopf, describes the book as “a blend of spy fiction and the kind of wit P.G. Wodehouse was known for,” to which we say, “LET’S GOOOOOO.” Ishiguro is no stranger to this setting—his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day also takes place in 1930s Britain—nor to experiments with genre. Never Let Me Go (2005) is a frighteningly prescient dystopian board school novel about class, connection, and medical ethics. The Buried Giant (2015) offers a meditation on memory mediated through Arthurian legend. Klara and the Sun (2021) asks questions about …

The spy who won't die

Published by Daniella Wilson

I was nine years old when You Only Live Twice came out, and going to see it at my local Odeon was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in my short life. I’d been waiting for this moment ever since going to see Thunderball, and was further fired up by the circus of publicity around its release – news items, trailers, collectors cards, interviews, promos, every TV show wanting to get in on the action, with items about the locations, the “girls”, the cars, Little Nellie the miniature helicopter… So, imagine my dismay when, in his first scene, Bond is killed. One moment he’s in bed with a charming young Chinese woman and the next she presses a button, the bed folds up into the wall and two thugs with machine guns burst in and drill it full of holes. Picture my continuing horror as Bond is buried at sea, wrapped in a sail. But – wait a minute – his body’s being salvaged by divers and they’re taking him to a submarine …

AI Spy Cameras Suddenly Blanketing America

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech There’s a specter haunting the United States. Americans may not have noticed it, but it’s sure noticed them: the emergent panopticon of AI facial-recognition cameras, automatic license plate readers, AI smart glasses, police fusion centers, surveillance drones, and biomarker databases infesting the landscape. These might seem like separate systems, and therefore different from the kind of centralized panopticon imagined in the pulp sci-fi our parents might have read. Yet as The Nation notes, all levels of AI surveillance — from porch-bound Ring video cameras to Target’s AI loss prevention cameras — work to collect data, sending it in one direction. When it comes to AI surveillance, regulations or privacy laws are next to nonexistent. Courts in over a dozen US states have moved to allow police to check Flock Safety’s sprawling network of AI license plate readers without a warrant. Federal authorities have long been able to tap your digital devices to obtain information without your consent. Local …

Republicans discuss boosting existing spy powers guardrails as FISA compromise

Published by Sam Flores

Republicans are discussing a year-long renewal of the nation’s warrantless spy powers in exchange for strengthening current aspects of the law, multiple sources involved in the talks told The Hill. Such a package would scale back the 18-month timeline requested by President Trump in renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA), which… Source link

Shaun Evans reveals how Betrayal most differs from other spy thrillers

Published by Daniella Wilson

Endeavour star Shaun Evans is back on ITV, this time starring in four-part spy thriller Betrayal, in which he plays a mid-career MI5 officer. The series follows Evans’s character John, as he finds himself under investigation, while also struggling with problems in his personal life, and becoming increasingly convinced that a hardline faction of the Iranian regime are planning an attack. When speaking with RadioTimes.com exclusively about the series, Evans noted that when adding to a genre as well established as the spy thriller, you have to bring “a fresh, new voice” to it. Evans said that the way in for him and the team behind the programme was to make John an “everyman figure”, and to look at “the daily life, the reality of what it’s actually like to work for the security services”. “The idea that you could be dealing with international terrorism at work and coming home and having to bath the kids or put a wash on, for me, seemed very fertile territory if we really wanted to dig into the …

Kyrylo Budanov, master spy and Zelensky’s new right hand

Published by Sam Flores

General Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukrainian military intelligence, during a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, February 23, 2025. RAFAEL YAGHOBZADEH FOR LE MONDE In the shadows where Kyrylo Budanov prefers to work, surrounded by military emblems and trophies taken from the enemy by special forces units, a television screen fixed to the wall across from his desk is one of the few sources of light. During a meeting with Le Monde, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence (HUR) was watching, with a sly grin, a map of the Russian capital. “Their target was Kyiv. Why shouldn’t I be looking at a map of Moscow?” he quipped with a smile, dropping for a moment the inscrutable mask he usually wears. The Ukrainian master spy, secretive by nature, has never shied away from either communication or calculated provocation, even though he remains a warrior at heart. Budanov has been a soldier since 2007. His career in special forces and intelligence services has, since the outbreak of conflict in the Donbas in 2014, brought him as many battle …

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