capturetheocean

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@CloudFlare launches Universal SSL, doubles the number of sites online using SSL in one day. ::slow clap:: Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-universal-ssl/

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"A revolution is afoot in privacy regulation. In an assortment of white papers and articles, business leaders—including Microsoft—and scholars argue that instead of regulating privacy through limiting the collection of data, we should focus on how the information is used."

Excellent article. Use regulation is the ideal end state, but difficult to enforce - especially without clearer understanding of regulatory baselines. If data storage required for retention, use is implied/inevitable. "The Potemkinism of Privacy Pragmatism." by Chris Jay Hoofnagle

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The romance of a better world through data is over. It's time to look deeper at who is using big data, how they're using it, and for the benefit of whom.

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The Internet's Original Sin

Ethan Zuckerman in theatlantic why the Internet is becoming... well, terrible. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/

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One of the things I would say to a large company is not that you can’t collect any data it is that you should only collect the data and hold it for as long as necessary for the operation of the business.

Edward Snowden at SXSW

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An excellent summary of what we learned in 2013 about how the Internet works. 

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One reason for our complacency is that we lack the intellectual framework to grasp the new kinds of political injustices characteristic of today’s information society.

The Age of Infopolitics by Colin Koopman

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To borrow a phrase, the anatomy of the "world's nervous system" - published by @guardian 

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"Journalism at its best is about holding powerful people and institutions accountable. When you do your jobs, you serve the people who need to know what is being done with their money and in their names, and who need information to make sound decisions in all aspects of their lives."

@Dan-Gillmor on why 2014 has to be the year that the Internet governance changes direction. 

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From the main page:

"Perkins Coie’s Privacy & Security practice maintains a comprehensive chart that summarizes state laws regarding security breach notification. The chart is for informational purposes only and is intended as an aid in understanding each state’s sometimes unique security breach notification requirements."

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From the Introduction:

"The past few weeks have seen increasing discussions of how human rights treaties might apply to mass electronic surveillance programs as run e.g. by the NSA and GCHQ or the agencies of the other ‘Five Eyes’ countries. […] This is the introduction to a series of posts on the application of human rights treaties to foreign surveillance. The main focus of the series is on the threshold question of whether human rights treaties would apply at all to extraterritorial interferences with privacy."

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Aiding Surveillance: An Exploration of How Development and Humanitarian Aid Initiatives are Enabling Surveillance in Developing Countries

An overdue and incredibly important look at the ways that the projection of infrastructure and digital systems, absent equally sophisticated regulatory environments, is creating insecure information systems. From @GusHosein the excellent folks at Privacy International

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According to a recent Pew survey, only small fractions of internet users have taken steps to avoid being observed by hackers (33 percent), advertisers (28 percent), friends (19 percent), employers (11 percent), or the government (5 percent).

motherjones Article: "6 Reasons Why We Share Too Much Online, According to Behavioral Scientists."

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Excellent Economist article giving an approachable explanation of how the currency works, and strains. Photo credit: Derek Bacon/Economist

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The Future of Futures

In a recent blog post, @EdFelten announced that his team are working on a Bitcoin-driven exchange where people can trade or gamble "shares" based on the outcome of events. It sounds like a distributed computing approach to securing a gambling on future events (currently limited to those that can be measured). In other words, people will be able to gamble on nearly any kind of event. Almost anything can become a futures market - career trajectory, family planning, or even crimes.

This could easily become a competitive kickstarter for day-to-day events. This may seem innocuous at first, but imagine a world where seemingly arbitrary outside forces had a vested financial interest in the outcome of your life. What happens when people are able to "invest" in the outcome of any event - with a preference for those that can be quantified and/or measured?

Early days, but this is both a fascinating and potentially terrifying way to think about how we engage with each other going forward. Regardless, as Felton notes, the distributed architecture being built to support Bitcoin will be applied to a wide variety of exchanges and interaction types.  It's early days to be predicting the commercial and sociological influence of distributed super computing, but what's less clear is the future of, well, futures.

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National laws regulating State involvement in communications surveillance are mostly inadequate or simply do not exist. To demonstrate their commitment to protect privacy and to ensure people can communicate freely, States can start by immediately revising their own laws and the role of the judiciary, in order to correct serious gaps that exist in most national legal frameworks.

UN Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue on the recent recognition by the UN of a Global Right to Privacy. The issues, though, are larger than privacy and will require us to first understand those laws.

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If the history of the FBI and NSA teach us anything, it is that officials cannot be counted on to know the difference between legitimate surveillance and abuses of power. Constant checks on the judgment of insiders is vital.

The NSA's Porn Surveillance Program: Not Safe for Democracy from theatlantic