June 2012
48 posts
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D.C. Council approves LivingSocial tax breaks →
What a racket. From the Washington Post:
The D.C. Council gave tentative approval Tuesday for nearly $33 million in tax breaks for LivingSocial to keep the growing company in the District after members deemed it essential to city efforts to brand itself as a hub for start-up and technology companies. In a unanimous vote, the deal will save the five-year-old company about $32.5 million in taxes...
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This house believes that a hyperconnected world is... →
That’s the proposition I am defending in a week-long online debate at The Economist versus Symantec CTO Greg Day. Please check out our opening statements, and by all means feel free to vote for my side.
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Is Stuxnet an act of war?
Tyler Cowen asks on his blog today:
By the way, didn’t it just come out in The Washington Post that the United States helped attack Iran with Flame, Stuxnet and related programs? If they did this to us, wouldn’t we consider it an act of war? Didn’t we just take a major step toward militarizing the internet? Doesn’t it seem plausible to you that the cyber-assault is not yet over and thus we...
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“Democracy is like a puppy. It looks all sweet and fluffy when you’re...”
– Andy Zaltzman
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Someone is holding $2.85 million in bitcoins →
Bitcoin is anonymous, but transparent, so you can see the balances associated with individual addresses in the system. Jon Matonis points us to the top ten balances, which are pretty astounding. He writes:
But why leave your wealth in a distributed proof-of-work system instead of a traditional bank? In a broad sense, bitcoin wealth offers protection from unpredictable political risk such as...
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“Very happy to announce that as of this morning, Heather and I are legally...”
– Dick Cheney’s daughter, Mary • Revealing that she got married to her longtime partner, Heather Poe, on Friday. The couple, which has two children, lives in Northern Virginia, but got married in Washington DC, one of the areas where gay marriage is legal. Congrats guys!
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Exiled Cubans Living in Spain Feel Abandoned as... →
From the cry-me-a-river department, the NYT has an update on 115 Cubans who had been imprisoned in Cuba and to whom Spain gave asylum after it negotiated their freedom. Bottom line, they’re not happy:
Some of the Cubans have held protests in downtown Madrid, as well as in other cities like Málaga, to demand that their government support payments be extended, and critics and opponents of...
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The UN's 'Internet takeover' and the politics of...
When it comes to the UN exerting greater control over Internet governance, all of us who follow Internet policy in the U.S. seem to be on the same page: keep the Internet free of UN control. Many folks have remarked how rare this moment of agreement among all sides—right, left, and center—can be. And Congress seized that moment yesterday, unanimously approving a bi-partisan resolution...
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WatchCord is a hiccuping bear.
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A Note to Congress: The United Nations Isn't a... →
Yours truly writing with Adam Thierer in The Atlantic about the bipartisan congressional resolution that passed today against UN regulation of the Internet:
From the tone of the hearing, and the language of the House resolution, we are being asked to believe that “the position of the United States Government has been and is to advocate for the flow of information free from government...
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“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
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Microsoft's new Surface →
Shortform blog:
A little torn on this. Granted, we tend to be reflexively anti-Microsoft at times, but this probably is the most-aggressive attempt to take on Apple we’ve seen yet, and it’s worth taking seriously. They took Apple’s biggest iPad weakness — the lack of physical keyboard — and banked the entire device on it. It’s a smart approach, but you know, it’s...
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Leaked documents show a real threat to the... →
WCITLeaks is cited in the WSJ this morning. Gordon Crovitz:
The process is secret, so it was hard to know what authoritarian governments were plotting or how the U.S. was responding. This column last month detailed some of the proposals, but other commentators doubted that any changes would be material.
Disclosure came when two academics decided to use the openness of the Web to help save...
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Tumblr will be launching a brand new iOS app next... →
Karp said that there wont be ads on the app immediately, but they are planned and will be implemented soon after launch.
I’m hoping there’s an iPad version (even though we have Tumbleroo in the app store), and I’m glad Tumblr doesn’t seem to be overlooking revenue and simply waiting for an acquisition.
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Senators attend hacking demonstration →
One [DHS] official used a technique known as “spear fishing” to gain access to his colleague’s computer. With spear fishing, a hacker targets a computer user with an email containing an infected attachment.
In the demonstration, the official sent an email pretending to be his colleague’s boss. The email included an attachment that appeared to be a copy of the...
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An update on WCITLeaks.org
So far we have received and published four documents. That doesn’t sound like much, but they are very interesting ones. Eli and I are very happy with how our little project has turned out so far.
Thanks to all of you who have spread the word about WCITLeaks. The site was received positively in the Twitterverse, and we’ve garnered some press coverage, including these stories:
C-Net:...
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Press Communiqué of the Meeting of the Council of... →
Meeting for the past two days, Hu Jintao of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, among others, had this to say:
The heads of state stressed the importance of cooperation among member states in safeguarding international information security and pointed out the need to prevent information and communication technologies from being used to undermine world peace, stability and security and to...
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Porn, gambling, and malware: Bitcoin as the ‘Net’s... →
Ars Technica quoting yours truly:
These developments don’t surprise Jerry Brito, a researcher at the libertarian Mercatus Center at George Mason University. For most uses, he said, dollars (or other countries’ official currencies) are simply more convenient, so it’s hard for Bitcoin to gain traction. But he argued that Bitcoin’s relative anonymity and the lack of...
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New interview with Morrissey →
On politics:
It’s only my personal view, but I think the age of the President or the Prime Minister is dead. People everywhere have lost faith in politics, and rightly so. Something different needs to happen. I think we were all initially swept along with the Obama win, but he’s proven to be simply a set of teeth, and useless in every other regard. Time and time again we see the same scenario...
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Your right to be forgotten and my right to speak
Earlier this week I interviewed Andrew Keen about his new book, Digital Vertigo, and pressed him on his support for a ‘right to be forgotten.’ I noted that such a right would conflict with free speech rights, and he begged to differ.
“My own data, which I have published on the web, I should have a right, if I choose, for that data to go away,” he said. “That...
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Growing outrage over White House leaks →
Lindsey Graham:
I don’t think you have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out what is going on here. You’ve had three leaks of intelligence that paint the president as a strong leader. I don’t think it’s an accident that you have three stories within about 45 days that paint the Obama administration as being effective in the war on terror at our national security detriment.
What’s...
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On the podcast this week, I talk to...
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The Weekly Standard's Matt Labash on meme culture →
While I think he misses some of the wonder in the emergent order that are Internet memes, and I can’t believe he didn’t mention 4chan, this dispatch from ROFLcon is definitely worth a read, especially for the Tumblr set.
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Today we're launching WCITLeaks.org
As you may have heard, the UN is trying to take over the internet. Well, that’s not really true, but member states of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are definitely going to negotiate an agreement related to the Internet at the World Conference on International Communications (WCIT - pronounced ‘wicket’) this December in Dubai. U.S. officials have...
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Family advocates worry as Facebook looks to allow... →
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the social media giant is testing features that would allow young children to access the site. The children’s accounts may be linked to their parents, so that the parents can control whom their children friend and which applications they use.
Privacy advocates are having a cow. What do you think? Should kids under 13 have legal access to...
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How Cyberpunk Killed Cybersecurity →
Adam Elkus and Alex Olesker:
Now Rey has the cultural implications of digital dualism down cold. What are the policy implications? The first is the inability to see the very real similarities between all things “cyber” and everything else. Most petty crimes are never solved, so why should we be surprised that cybercrimes go mostly unpunished? Is there a very big difference between someone...
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Free Wi-Fi, but Speed Costs →
As devices demanding Wi-Fi proliferate, airports and hotels are also turning to tiered pricing models: offering limited Internet access free and a faster premium service to customers willing to pay.
Someone call the cops. That’s discrimination.
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Preventing a Cybercrime Wave →
Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in the NYT:
The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime — and they’re not understating the threat.
Also from the NYT, check out this...
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How Apple and Congress Limit iPhone Users' Freedom →
Tim Lee in response to my post on the EFF’s attack on Apple:
[Consumers are] being deprived of the freedom to purchase legal jailbreaking tools. In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which makes it a felony to distribute products “primarily designed” for circumventing copy-protection schemes like the one on the iPhone. Breaking the law “willfully and for purposes...
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iOS 6 to Bring Systemwide Facebook Integration →
Here’s one place I think Apple could stand to be more open. Why do they insist on baking all these sharing features into the OS? Why not use contracts like Windows 8?
It would be better for consumers because they would get to pick what social networks to add to their phones. It would be better for social networks, which wouldn’t have to hope and pray that they got built into the OS...
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In Ad Network Nightmare, Microsoft Making ‘Do Not... →
How does Microsoft friend Facebook feel about this?
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NYT reveals the backstory on Stuxnet →
David Sanger:
The unusually tight collaboration with Israel was driven by two imperatives. Israel’s Unit 8200, a part of its military, had technical expertise that rivaled the N.S.A.’s, and the Israelis had deep intelligence about operations at Natanz that would be vital to making the cyberattack a success.
Without the extensive knowledge the Israelis had acquired about Natanz, and without...
