Unsecured Internet of Things gadgets get hacked within 40 minutes of being connected to the net Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow The Atlantic’s Andrew McGill set up a virtual server on Amazon’s cloud that presented to the internet as a crappy, insecure Internet of Things toaster; 41 minutes later, a hacked IoT device connected to it … Read more
Update: the Best 37 Torrent Sites Pirate Bay is The King of Torrents Once Again TorrentFreak Hollywood hoped that it would never happen, but this week The Pirate Bay quietly turned thirteen years old. Torrentz Remains Down, But The Clone Wars Are On TorrentFreak by Ernesto Mere hours after Torrentz.eu announced its farewell last week, various clones and … Read more
KickassTorrents Enters The Dark Web, Adds Official Tor Address TorrentFreak With millions of visitors per day KickassTorrents (KAT) is currently the mostvisited torrent site on the Internet. Uber vs. Europe continues: Two executives convicted in France Mashable! A French court has convicted and fined Uber and two of its executives for deceptive commercial practices and illegal business … Read more
I am Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. I write to urge you to watch this important new video where anthropologists who know something about the matter demonstrate how an academic boycott is ultimately personal. I am against the boycott. The distinction between a small community of anthropologists, the … Read more
Panama Papers whistleblower issues statement, naming and shaming failed states and institutions Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow “John Doe,” the mysterious whistleblower who released the largest-ever leak of confidential documents in world history — papers from the Panamanian law firm Mossack-Fonseca, a key player in the offshore dark money industry — has published their first-ever public … Read more
A Worldwide Survey of Encryption Products Berkman Center Newsfeed Teaser In this paper, which is modeled on a similar effort in 1999 by researchers from George Washington University, Berkman Fellow Bruce Schneier and collaborator Kathleen Seidel together with Harvard College student Saranya Vijayakuma identify and survey 865 encryption products from 55 different countries, 546 of them … Read more
Free Bitcoin textbook from Princeton Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow The Princeton Bitcoin Book by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller and Steven Goldfeder is a free download — it’s over 300 pages and is intended for people “looking to truly understand how Bitcoin works at a technical level and have a basic familiarity … Read more
A Brief History of Debian – The Debian Manifesto debian.org [ previous ] [ Contents ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ A ] [ next ] Written by Ian A. Murdock, Revised 01/06/94 Debian Linux is a brand-new kind of Linux distribution. Rather than being developed by … Read more
Negotiating the WSIS+10 and the Future of the Internet Dipnote – U.S. Department of State Official Blog by Daniel Sepulveda After two and a half years of technical analysis and discussions, six months of deliberations among all stakeholders, and intense negotiations at the United Nations, at three o’clock in the morning on December 12, 2015, the … Read more
New Study Shows Armchair Activists Actually Make a Difference – Social media “slacktivism” plays an important role in social movements. Upvoted by Gabrielle Canon In the wake of the devastating November terrorist attack that left 130 dead in Paris, Facebook photos around the world began appearing in the faded colors of the French flag: With just one click, … Read more
Open Access Is a Human Rights Issue EFF.org Updates by Elliot Harmon A BBC article has been making the rounds this week about #icanhazpdf, a “secret codeword” that people use to access research papers from limited-access journals. The idea is simple: when researchers—or, for that matter, curious readers—find a reference to an article that they can’t … Read more
EU top court: NSA spying means US servers are not a fit home for Europeans’ data Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow Historically, US companies have been able to get around the (relatively stringent) European data-protection rules thanks to a “Safe Harbor” agreement between the US and the EU — but Max Schrems, an Austrian privacy activist, … Read more
FBI Keeps Telling Purely Theoretical Encryption Horror Stories The Intercept by Jenna McLaughlin Federal law enforcement officials decrying the proliferation of strong encryption said Tuesday that the only reason they lack actual examples of how often it shields criminals is that they’ve done a “bad job” of collecting them. UK’s MI5 security chief warns that encryption is making … Read more
EDRi identifies key challenges to freedom of expression online Yeni Medya On 13 November 2014, EDRi met with the European External Action Service (EEAS) for a civil society consultation on the EU Human Rights Guidelines on Freedom of Expression Online and Offline. The EEAS aims at improving the Guidelines in the future and was seeking input … Read more
The future of wearables: report The Next Web by Andrew Levy There have been a lot of changes to the mobile platform landscape in recent months. Innovative reimaginings of the way we connect with the world, new products and undeniably out-of-the-box features have made it an exciting time for consumers and the industry alike. Library Suspends Tor … Read more