police

Anti-government rants on Facebook can land you in a heap of trouble.

A federal judge has given the green light to the U.S. Justice Department's prosecution of an Indiana man who allegedly posted incendiary remarks about police.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge William Lawrence in Indiana rejected requests by the defendant, Matthew Michael, to throw out the charges on the grounds that no specific Drug Enforcement Administration agent or other individual had actually been named in the posts.

Lawrence ruled that -- assuming the Facebook postings were illegal threats, which has yet to be proved -- they &… Read more

Swedish police raided Web host PRQ earlier this week but it wasn't clear what they were after. Now, the ISP's owner is saying that the authorities seized servers for Web sites that allegedly dealt in illegal file-sharing.

According to TorrentFreak, police took three servers -- one belonged to one of Sweden's popular torrent sites called Tankafetast, another to an alleged Android app piracy site called Appbucket. It's unclear what was on the third server.

On Monday, the authorities targeted PRQ, which is known for hosting some of the most popular outlaw sites on the Internet. Former … Read more

Seattle residents now have the option of following the local police department on Twitter. In a first-of-a-kind program, the city's authorities are launching a new initiative that involves cops translating the news they get on the streets to tweets.

Dubbed "Tweets-by-beat," this program attempts to replace the police blotter that normally runs in local papers with a tech version of basically the same thing, according to the New York Times. When residents follow the department on the social network, they'll get routine tweets of the up-to-the-moment crime happenings in their neighborhoods.

"Liquor violation -- intoxicated … Read more

You've double-parked your car to pick something up when a robot rolls up and threatens to give you a ticket. You might laugh, but the thing's talking with a human voice.

Researchers at Florida International University's Discovery Lab are working with a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves to build telepresence robots that could patrol while being controlled by disabled police officers and military vets. In a sense, they would be hybrid man-machine cops, like RoboCop. … Read more

The Big Apple is seeing a surge in stolen Apple devices.

The latest data from the New York City Police Department shows that iPhone and iPad thefts have soared 40 percent this year so far, compared with the same period last year.

Between January 1 and September 23 of this year, a total of 11,447 cases of stolen iDevices were reported to the New York City police, a rise of 3,280 over 2011, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said in a report sent to CNET.

"As if to mirror the market place, thefts of Apple products increased this … Read more

The cops are getting their geek on. Four days a week, a police officer ducks into the social media room at the Redwood City Police Department, launches a video chat application and stands by waiting for your call, just like those Time Life Books operators.

Located smack in the middle of the Valley, the police department is the first in the country to offer video chat on its Web site. Police Chief J.R. Gamez was clearly peacock-proud when we asked about his organization's tech know-how. The police department tweets city alerts to followers and posts updates on Facebook. … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Who inherits your iTunes library? Why your digimedia may go to the grave.

- Meet a group of journalists in L.A. who share a passion for listening to police scanners.

- Bic geniuses who unveiled pen made for women get roasted by Internet.

- Let us not forget that Apple and Samsung are in bed.… Read more

AT&T has temporarily disabled a frequency emitted by 16 towers that were found to be interfering with police and firefighter radio communications in Oakland, Calif., the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

The towers were causing radio failures, particularly when a police car was within a quarter to half a mile of one of them, said David Cruise, Oakland's public safety systems adviser.

After the U.S. Federal Communications Commission confirmed the interference, AT&T shut down the 850MHz frequency for 2G customers on the towers last Friday, but the carrier left the 1,900MHz and 700MHz … Read more

When Megaupload's founder Kim DotCom's mansion was raided in January, he claimed far too much force was used with unnecessary helicopters circling and elite forces arriving armed to the teeth. Now there's video to prove it.

Released by New Zealand's 3News, the video starts with a helicopter flying over DotCom's compound and landing directly in front of the massive mansion. Four armed officials jump out and run toward the house. As the helicopter takes off, ground forces are seen coming in through the gates.

DotCom's New Zealand home was reportedly worth $30 million. During the raids, … Read more