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Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music : Nature Neuroscience : Nature Publishing Group - 2 views

www.nature.com/...nn.2726.html

Music stimulus emotion control industry governments Internet Internet censorship

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 21 Jan 11
     
    [Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. ...] *Is The Eagerness of The Industry, The Governments and the artists themselves to Control The Music Flow thru internet an Attempt to Control Human Emotions...?
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...07

Gerrilla open access open access Manifesto

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 18 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 18 Aug 11
     
    [Written by Aaron Swartz, who faces 30 years in prison for copying scholarly article, in July 2008, Eremo, Italy Aaron Swartz: "Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.]
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Study: Cable Cutting To Continue, Especially As Millennials Age | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...ially-as-millennials-age.shtml

study cable cutting age give people what we they claim deserve quality identification price

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 13 Sep 14
     
    "from the streaming-away dept In all of the discussions about cord-cutting, it seems like many times we get lost in the weeds of specific details on certain angles or certain perceptions. Occasionally lost in all of this is the simple fact that the public ditching their cable TV subscriptions is happening and the pace at which it's happening is rising." [# ! … wants to #choose # ! by themselves… # ! …and not another TV # ! Stop #contents #restrictions and #You'll see… # ! #Give The Pe@ple what they want, what they deserve… # ! … and a #new -#fairer- #business #model will #rise.]
Paul Merrell

Microsoft Demos Real-Time Translation Over Skype - Slashdot - 1 views

tech.slashdot.org/...al-time-translation-over-skype

audio-translations Microsoft Skype Kurzweil

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 May 14 - No Cached
  • "Today at the first annual Code Conference, Microsoft demonstrated its new real-time translation in Skype publicly for the first time. Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft's VP of Skype and Lync, compares the technology to Star Trek's Universal Translator. During the demonstration, Pall converses in English with a coworker in Germany who is speaking German. 'Skype Translator results from decades of work by the industry, years of work by our researchers, and now is being developed jointly by the Skype and Microsoft Translator teams. The demo showed near real-time audio translation from English to German and vice versa, combining Skype voice and IM technologies with Microsoft Translator, and neural network-based speech recognition.'"
  • Paul Merrell on 29 May 14
     
    Haven't yet explored to see what's beneath the marketing hype. And I'm less than excited about the Skype with its NSA tendrils being the vehicle of audio translations of human languages. But given the progress in: [i] automated translations of human texts; [ii] audio screenreaders; and [iii] voice-to-text transcription, this is one we saw coming. Slap the three technologies together and wait until processing power catches up to what's needed to produce a marketable experience. After all, the StarTrek scriptwriters saw this coming too.   Ray Kurzweil, now at Google, should get a lot of the pioneer credit here. His revolutionary optical character recognition algorithms soon found themselves redeployed in text-to-speech synthesis and speech recognition technology. From Wikipedia: "Kurzweil was the principal inventor of the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first commercial text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer Kurzweil K250 capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition." Not bad for a guy the same age as my younger brother. But Microsoft's announcement here may be more vaporware than hardware in production and lines of executable code. Microsoft has a long history of vaporware announcements to persuade potential customers to hold off on riding with the competition.  And the Softies undoubtedly know that Google's human language text translation capabilities are way out in front and that the voice to text and text to speech API methods have already found a comfortable home in Android and Chromebook. What does Microsoft have that's ready to ship if anything? I'll check it out tomorrow. 
Paul Merrell

Upgrade Your iPhone Passcode to Defeat the FBI's Backdoor Strategy - 0 views

theintercept.com/...at-can-defeat-fbi-ios-backdoor

surveillance state Apple iPhone FBI court-order passcode security

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • It’s true that ordering Apple to develop the backdoor will fundamentally undermine iPhone security, as Cook and other digital security advocates have argued. But it’s possible for individual iPhone users to protect themselves from government snooping by setting strong passcodes on their phones — passcodes the FBI would not be able to unlock even if it gets its iPhone backdoor. The technical details of how the iPhone encrypts data, and how the FBI might circumvent this protection, are complex and convoluted, and are being thoroughly explored elsewhere on the internet. What I’m going to focus on here is how ordinary iPhone users can protect themselves. The short version: If you’re worried about governments trying to access your phone, set your iPhone up with a random, 11-digit numeric passcode. What follows is an explanation of why that will protect you and how to actually do it.
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

One world, one container: Open Container Project - 0 views

mobile.linuxtoday.com/...er-open-container-project.html

one container world open container project open source infrastructure

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 29 Feb 16
     
    Today, containers are becoming the default way that people put apps on clouds. In no small part, that's because containers didn't become standardized until libcontainer appeared in 2014. But then Docker headed in its own direction, and others, starting with CoreOS, started splitting off. Fortunately, instead of forking themselves into irrelevance, almost all the containers powers got back on the same page with the Open Container Project (OCP).
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD.

Spotify, Apple, Tidal Paying $1.6 Million a DAY In Major Label Guarantees... - 0 views

www.digitalmusicnews.com/...idal-millions-daily-guarantees

spotify apple tidal MSPs pay Million a day old school industry sabotage new busines models themselves... censorship control

shared by Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 01 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 01 Sep 16
     
    "If Spotify crashed tomorrow and couldn't deliver a single song, they'd still own more than $1 million in guaranteed payments to three major recording labels, according to financial data just published. Welcome to the murky - and extremely expensive - world of major label advances."
Paul Merrell

He Was a Hacker for the NSA and He Was Willing to Talk. I Was Willing to Listen. - 2 views

theintercept.com/...o-talk-i-was-willing-to-listen

surveillance state NSA-hacker-interview

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • he message arrived at night and consisted of three words: “Good evening sir!” The sender was a hacker who had written a series of provocative memos at the National Security Agency. His secret memos had explained — with an earthy use of slang and emojis that was unusual for an operative of the largest eavesdropping organization in the world — how the NSA breaks into the digital accounts of people who manage computer networks, and how it tries to unmask people who use Tor to browse the web anonymously. Outlining some of the NSA’s most sensitive activities, the memos were leaked by Edward Snowden, and I had written about a few of them for The Intercept. There is no Miss Manners for exchanging pleasantries with a man the government has trained to be the digital equivalent of a Navy SEAL. Though I had initiated the contact, I was wary of how he might respond. The hacker had publicly expressed a visceral dislike for Snowden and had accused The Intercept of jeopardizing lives by publishing classified information. One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or “shapes”) the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled “I Hunt Sysadmins.” I felt sure he could hack anyone’s computer, including mine. Good evening sir!
  • The sender was a hacker who had written a series of provocative memos at the National Security Agency. His secret memos had explained — with an earthy use of slang and emojis that was unusual for an operative of the largest eavesdropping organization in the world — how the NSA breaks into the digital accounts of people who manage computer networks, and how it tries to unmask people who use Tor to browse the web anonymously. Outlining some of the NSA’s most sensitive activities, the memos were leaked by Edward Snowden, and I had written about a few of them for The Intercept. There is no Miss Manners for exchanging pleasantries with a man the government has trained to be the digital equivalent of a Navy SEAL. Though I had initiated the contact, I was wary of how he might respond. The hacker had publicly expressed a visceral dislike for Snowden and had accused The Intercept of jeopardizing lives by publishing classified information. One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or “shapes”) the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled “I Hunt Sysadmins.” I felt sure he could hack anyone’s computer, including mine.
  • I got lucky with the hacker, because he recently left the agency for the cybersecurity industry; it would be his choice to talk, not the NSA’s. Fortunately, speaking out is his second nature.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • He agreed to a video chat that turned into a three-hour discussion sprawling from the ethics of surveillance to the downsides of home improvements and the difficulty of securing your laptop.
  • In recent years, two developments have helped make hacking for the government a lot more attractive than hacking for yourself. First, the Department of Justice has cracked down on freelance hacking, whether it be altruistic or malignant. If the DOJ doesn’t like the way you hack, you are going to jail. Meanwhile, hackers have been warmly invited to deploy their transgressive impulses in service to the homeland, because the NSA and other federal agencies have turned themselves into licensed hives of breaking into other people’s computers. For many, it’s a techno sandbox of irresistible delights, according to Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who studies hackers. “The NSA is a very exciting place for hackers because you have unlimited resources, you have some of the best talent in the world, whether it’s cryptographers or mathematicians or hackers,” she said. “It is just too intellectually exciting not to go there.”
  • The Lamb’s memos on cool ways to hunt sysadmins triggered a strong reaction when I wrote about them in 2014 with my colleague Ryan Gallagher. The memos explained how the NSA tracks down the email and Facebook accounts of systems administrators who oversee computer networks. After plundering their accounts, the NSA can impersonate the admins to get into their computer networks and pilfer the data flowing through them. As the Lamb wrote, “sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network … who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?” Another of his NSA memos, “Network Shaping 101,” used Yemen as a theoretical case study for secretly redirecting the entirety of a country’s internet traffic to NSA servers.
  • “If I turn the tables on you,” I asked the Lamb, “and say, OK, you’re a target for all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. How do you feel about being a target and that kind of justification being used to justify getting all of your credentials and the keys to your kingdom?” The Lamb smiled. “There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet,” he replied. “Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with. Any time that I do something on the internet, yeah, that is on the back of my mind. Anyone from a script kiddie to some random hacker to some other foreign intelligence service, each with their different capabilities — what could they be doing to me?”
  • “You know, the situation is what it is,” he said. “There are protocols that were designed years ago before anybody had any care about security, because when they were developed, nobody was foreseeing that they would be taken advantage of. … A lot of people on the internet seem to approach the problem [with the attitude of] ‘I’m just going to walk naked outside of my house and hope that nobody looks at me.’ From a security perspective, is that a good way to go about thinking? No, horrible … There are good ways to be more secure on the internet. But do most people use Tor? No. Do most people use Signal? No. Do most people use insecure things that most people can hack? Yes. Is that a bash against the intelligence community that people use stuff that’s easily exploitable? That’s a hard argument for me to make.”
  • I mentioned that lots of people, including Snowden, are now working on the problem of how to make the internet more secure, yet he seemed to do the opposite at the NSA by trying to find ways to track and identify people who use Tor and other anonymizers. Would he consider working on the other side of things? He wouldn’t rule it out, he said, but dismally suggested the game was over as far as having a liberating and safe internet, because our laptops and smartphones will betray us no matter what we do with them. “There’s the old adage that the only secure computer is one that is turned off, buried in a box ten feet underground, and never turned on,” he said. “From a user perspective, someone trying to find holes by day and then just live on the internet by night, there’s the expectation [that] if somebody wants to have access to your computer bad enough, they’re going to get it. Whether that’s an intelligence agency or a cybercrimes syndicate, whoever that is, it’s probably going to happen.”
  • There are precautions one can take, and I did that with the Lamb. When we had our video chat, I used a computer that had been wiped clean of everything except its operating system and essential applications. Afterward, it was wiped clean again. My concern was that the Lamb might use the session to obtain data from or about the computer I was using; there are a lot of things he might have tried, if he was in a scheming mood. At the end of our three hours together, I mentioned to him that I had taken these precautions—and he approved. “That’s fair,” he said. “I’m glad you have that appreciation. … From a perspective of a journalist who has access to classified information, it would be remiss to think you’re not a target of foreign intelligence services.” He was telling me the U.S. government should be the least of my worries. He was trying to help me. Documents published with this article: Tracking Targets Through Proxies & Anonymizers Network Shaping 101 Shaping Diagram I Hunt Sys Admins (first published in 2014)
Paul Merrell

We're Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-halfway-encrypting-entire-web

Internet encryption https adoption

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The movement to encrypt the web has reached a milestone. As of earlier this month, approximately half of Internet traffic is now protected by HTTPS. In other words, we are halfway to a web safer from the eavesdropping, content hijacking, cookie stealing, and censorship that HTTPS can protect against. Mozilla recently reported that the average volume of encrypted web traffic on Firefox now surpasses the average unencrypted volume
  • Google Chrome’s figures on HTTPS usage are consistent with that finding, showing that over 50% of of all pages loaded are protected by HTTPS across different operating systems.
  • This milestone is a combination of HTTPS implementation victories: from tech giants and large content providers, from small websites, and from users themselves.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Starting in 2010, EFF members have pushed tech companies to follow crypto best practices. We applauded when Facebook and Twitter implemented HTTPS by default, and when Wikipedia and several other popular sites later followed suit. Google has also put pressure on the tech community by using HTTPS as a signal in search ranking algorithms and, starting this year, showing security warnings in Chrome when users load HTTP sites that request passwords or credit card numbers. EFF’s Encrypt the Web Report also played a big role in tracking and encouraging specific practices. Recently other organizations have followed suit with more sophisticated tracking projects. For example, Secure the News and Pulse track HTTPS progress among news media sites and U.S. government sites, respectively.
  • But securing large, popular websites is only one part of a much bigger battle. Encrypting the entire web requires HTTPS implementation to be accessible to independent, smaller websites. Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and founded by EFF, Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai as founding sponsors. As a CA, Let’s Encrypt issues and maintains digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know they’re actually talking to the site they intended to. CAs are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted communication, as these certificates verify the association between an HTTPS site and a cryptographic public key. Through EFF’s Certbot tool, webmasters can get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt and automatically configure their server to use it. Since we announced that Let’s Encrypt was the web’s largest certificate authority last October, it has exploded from 12 million certs to over 28 million. Most of Let’s Encrypt’s growth has come from giving previously unencrypted sites their first-ever certificates. A large share of these leaps in HTTPS adoption are also thanks to major hosting companies and platforms--like WordPress.com, Squarespace, and dozens of others--integrating Let’s Encrypt and providing HTTPS to their users and customers.
  • Unfortunately, you can only use HTTPS on websites that support it--and about half of all web traffic is still with sites that don’t. However, when sites partially support HTTPS, users can step in with the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere makes your browser use HTTPS wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
  • Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant. Until then, we have more work to do. Protect your own browsing and websites with HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot, and spread the word to your friends, family, and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can encrypt the entire web.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Feb 17
     
    HTTPS connections don't work for you if you don't use them. If you're not using HTTPS Everywhere in your browser, you should be; it's your privacy that is at stake. And every encrypted communication you make adds to the backlog of encrypted data that NSA and other internet voyeurs must process as encrypted traffic; because cracking encrypted messages is computer resource intensive, the voyeurs do not have the resources to crack more than a tiny fraction. HTTPS is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. You can get it here. https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere
Paul Merrell

Symantec: CIA Linked To Cyberattacks In 16 Countries - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...226740

cyberwar CIA leaked-malware Wikileaks Vault7

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Internet and computer security company Symantec has issued a statement today related to the Vault 7 WikiLeaks documents leaked from the CIA, saying that the methods and protocols described in the documents are consistent with cyberattacks they’d been tracking for years. Symantec says they now believe that the CIA hacking tool Fluxwire is a malware that had been known as Corentry, which Symantec had previously attributed to an unknown cyberespionage group called Longhorn, which apparently was the CIA. They described Longhorn as having been active since at least 2011, and responsible for attacks in at least 16 countries across the world, targeting governments and NGOs, as well as financial, energy, and natural resource companies, things that would generally be of interest to a nation-state.
  • While the WikiLeaks themselves have been comparatively short on details, as WikiLeaks continues to share specific vulnerabilities with companies so they can fix them before the details are leaked to the general public, the ability of security companies like Symantec to link the CIA to known hacking operations could prove to be even more enlightening as to the scope of CIA cyber-espionage the world over.
Paul Merrell

FCC's Wheeler Promises Net Neutrality Action 'Shortly' | Adweek - 0 views

www.adweek.com/...-net-neutrality-shortly-155347

net-neutrality FCC petition

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • he pressure is mounting on the Federal Communications Commission to revisit how it will regulate net neutrality in the wake of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision that tossed the rules back in the regulator's lap.
  • More than 1 million people signed the petition urging the FCC to "reassert its clear authority over our nation's communications infrastructure" and classify the transmission component of broadband Internet as a telecommunications service. While the court struck down the non-discrimination and no-blocking rules, it also ruled the FCC had the authority to regulate the Internet. That decision leaves the FCC with a thorny legal choice about whether it regulates by classifying the Internet as a telecommunications service or as an information service. In seeking to reassure the petitioners, Wheeler affirmed the commission's commitment to preserve and protect the open Internet. "We interpret the court decision as an invitation and we will accept that invitation," Wheeler said in a press conference following Thursday's meeting. "One of the great things about what the Internet does and why it needs to stay open, it enables people to organize and express themselves. A million people? That's boffo."
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jan 14
     
    Over a million signed the petition. Wow! But note that the battle is not over. The FCC could reimplement net neutrality now if it reclassified broadband internet as a telecommunications service. That the FCC has not already set this in motion raises danger flags. All it takes is for a few contracts to be signed to give the ISPs 5th Amendment taking clause claims for damages against the government for reimplementing net neutrality the right way, A "reasonable investment-backed expectation" is the relevant 5th Amendment trigger. 
Paul Merrell

Federal smartphone kill-switch legislation proposed - Network World - 0 views

www.networkworld.com/...switch-legislation-278760.html

smartphone kill-switch legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system.
  • Pressure on the cellphone industry to introduce technology that could disable stolen smartphones has intensified with the introduction of proposed federal legislation that would mandate such a system.
  • Senate bill 2032, "The Smartphone Prevention Act," was introduced to the U.S. Senate Wednesday by Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat. The bill promises technology that allows consumers to remotely wipe personal data from their smartphones and render them inoperable. But how that will be accomplished is currently unclear. The full text of the bill was not immediately available and the offices of Klobuchar and the bill's co-sponsors were all shut down Thursday due to snow in Washington, D.C.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The co-sponsors are Democrats Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii. The proposal follows the introduction last Friday of a bill in the California state senate that would mandate a "kill switch" starting in January 2015. The California bill has the potential to usher in kill-switch technology nationwide because carriers might not bother with custom phones just for California, but federal legislation would give it the force of law across the U.S. Theft of smartphones is becoming an increasing problem in U.S. cities and the crimes often involve physical violence or intimidation with guns or knives. In San Francisco, two-thirds of street theft involves a smartphone or tablet and the number is even higher in nearby Oakland. It also represents a majority of street robberies in New York and is rising in Los Angeles. In some cases, victims have been killed for their phones. In response to calls last year by law-enforcement officials to do more to combat the crimes, most cellphone carriers have aligned themselves behind the CTIA, the industry's powerful lobbying group. The CTIA is opposing any legislation that would introduce such technology. An outlier is Verizon, which says that while it thinks legislation is unnecessary, it is supporting the group behind the California bill.
  • Some phone makers have been a little more proactive. Apple in particular has been praised for the introduction of its activation lock feature in iOS7. The function would satisfy the requirements of the proposed California law with one exception: Phones will have to come with the function enabled by default so consumers have to make a conscious choice to switch it off. Currently, it comes as disabled by default. Samsung has also added features to some of its phones that support the Lojack software, but the service requires an ongoing subscription.
Gary Edwards

Everything You Need to Know About the Bitcoin Protocol - 0 views

thenextweb.com/...bitcoin-platform-currency

Bitcoin Marc-Andreessen

shared by Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • . In this research paper we hope to explain that the bitcoin currency itself is ‘just’ the next phase in the evolution of money – from dumb to smart money. It’s the underlying platform, the Bitcoin protocol aka Bitcoin 2.0, that holds the real transformative power. That is where the revolution starts. According to our research there are several reasons why this new technology is going to disrupt our economy and society as we have never experienced before:
  • From dumb to smart money
  • The Bitcoin protocol is the underlying platform that holds the real transformative power and is where the revolution starts. According to our research there are several reasons why this new technology is going to disrupt our economy and society as we have never experienced before:
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Similar to when the TCP/IP, HTTP and SMTP protocols were still in their infancy; the Bitcoin protocol is currently in a similar evolutionary stage. Contrary to the early days of the Internet, when only a few people had a computer, nowadays everybody has a supercomputer in its pocket. It’s Moore’s Law all over again. Bitcoin is going to disrupt the economy and society with breathtaking speed. For the first time in history technology makes it possible to transfer property rights (such as shares, certificates, digital money, etc.) fast, transparent and very secure. Moreover, these transactions can take place without the involvement of a trusted intermediary such as a government, notary, or bank. Companies and governments are no longer needed as the “middle man” in all kinds of financial agreements. Not only does The Internet of Things give machines a digital identity, the bitcoin API’s (machine-machine interfaces) gives them an economic identity as well. Next to people and corporations, machines will become a new type of agent in the economy.
  • The Bitcoin protocol flips automation upside down. From now on automation within companies can start top down, making the white-collar employees obsolete. Corporate missions can be encoded on top of the protocol. Machines can manage a corporation all by themselves. Bitcoin introduces the world to the new nature of the firm: the Distributed Autonomous Corporation (DAC). This new type of corporation also adds a new perspective to the discussion on technological unemployment. The DAC might even turn technological unemplyment into structural unemployment. Bitcoin is key to the success of the Collaborative Economy. Bitcoin enables a frictionless and transparent way of sharing ideas, media, products, services and technology between people without the interference of corporations and governments.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 14
     
    A series of eleven pages discussing Bitcoin and the extraordinary impact it will have on the world economy. Excellent article and a worthy follow up to the previous Marc Andressen discussion of Bitcoin.
  • Gary Edwards on 19 Feb 14
     
    A series of eleven pages discussing Bitcoin and the extraordinary impact it will have on the world economy. Excellent article and a worthy follow up to the previous Marc Andressen discussion of Bitcoin.
Paul Merrell

The US is Losing Control of the Internet…Oh, Really? | Global Research - 2 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5354119

surveillance state internet-freedom U.S. NSA-blowback ICANN IETF IAB W3C Internet-Society

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • All of the major internet organisations have pledged, at a summit in Uruguay, to free themselves of the influence of the US government. The directors of ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium, the Internet Society and all five of the regional Internet address registries have vowed to break their associations with the US government. In a statement, the group called for “accelerating the globalization of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing”. That’s a distinct change from the current situation, where the US department of commerce has oversight of ICANN. In another part of the statement, the group “expressed strong concern over the undermining of the trust and confidence of Internet users globally due to recent revelations of pervasive monitoring and surveillance”. Meanwhile, it was announced that the next Internet Governance Summit would be held in Brazil, whose president has been extremely critical of the US over web surveillance. In a statement announcing the location of the summit, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff said: “The United States and its allies must urgently end their spying activities once and for all.”
Paul Merrell

Freedom Online Coalition Basically Ignores Surveillance: Makes A Mockery Of Its Name | Techdirt - 1 views

www.techdirt.com/...e-makes-mockery-its-name.shtml

surveillance state Kerry bloopers quotes

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 May 14 - No Cached
  • We already wrote about how US Secretary of State John Kerry made some tone deaf remarks about "online freedom" and transparency during his appearance at the Freedom Online Coalition meeting in Estonia last week. However, it appears that his remarks fit in well with the theme of the event, which appeared to be "big governments ignoring that whole state surveillance online thing." The Freedom Online Coalition is a group of 23 governments, including the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France and many others -- and you'd think they'd pay some attention to the very vocal concerns about how those governments are engaged in lots of online spying. In fact, a bunch of public interest groups sent a letter asking the FOC to live up to their state commitments, and respond to claims of human rights violations against journalists and others via state surveillance online. But... that didn't happen:
  • A dominant theme that ran throughout the conference was erosion of credibility and doubt about member government follow-through on commitments to protect freedom online themselves, much less to serve as role models for other governments. Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans acknowledged the credibility gap facing the coalition and invited constructive criticism and debate about the proper limits of surveillance. Yet while the final Tallinn declaration produced by FOC governments asserted that members would “[c]ollectively condemn – through diplomatic channels, public statements and other means – violations and abuses of human rights and fundamental freedoms online as they occur in different countries throughout the world,” the declaration says little about reining in indiscriminate surveillance, nor does it acknowledge that mass surveillance chills freedom of expression and violates the right to privacy. Perhaps the Freedom Online Coalition should start exploring a name change to more accurately reflect what they really represent.
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 07 May 14
     
    "from the blathering-about-other-stuff-coalition dept We already wrote about how US Secretary of State John Kerry made some tone deaf remarks about "online freedom" and transparency during his appearance at the Freedom Online Coalition meeting in Estonia last week"
Paul Merrell

How To Keep NSA Computers From Turning Your Phone Conversations Into Searchable Text - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-conversations-searchable-text

surveillance state NSA smartphones encryption

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 May 15 - No Cached
  • As soon as my article about how NSA computers can now turn phone conversations into searchable text came out on Tuesday, people started asking me: What should I do if I don’t want them doing that to mine? The solution, as it is to so many other outrageously invasive U.S. government tactics exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is, of course, Congressional legislation. I kid, I kid. No, the real solution is end-to-end encryption, preferably of the unbreakable kind. And as luck would have it, you can have exactly that on your mobile phone, for the price of zero dollars and zero cents.
  • The Intercept’s Micah Lee wrote about this in March, in an article titled: “You Should Really Consider Installing Signal, an Encrypted Messaging App for iPhone.” (Signal is for iPhone and iPads, and encrypts both voice and texts; RedPhone is the Android version of the voice product; TextSecure is the Android version of the text product.) As Lee explains, the open source software group known as Open Whisper Systems, which makes all three, is gaining a reputation for combining trustworthy encryption with ease of use and mobile convenience. Nobody – not your mobile provider, your ISP or the phone manufacturer — can promise you that your phone conversations won’t be intercepted in transit. That leaves end-to-end encryption – using a trustworthy app whose makers themselves literally cannot break the encryption — your best play.
Paul Merrell

EXCLUSIVE: Edward Snowden Explains Why Apple Should Continue To Fight the Government on Encryption - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ryption-just-doesnt-make-sense

surveillance state encryption Apple Google Snowden Comey back-door-debate

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • As the Obama administration campaign to stop the commercialization of strong encryption heats up, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is firing back on behalf of the companies like Apple and Google that are finding themselves under attack. “Technologists and companies working to protect ordinary citizens should be applauded, not sued or prosecuted,” Snowden wrote in an email through his lawyer. Snowden was asked by The Intercept to respond to the contentious suggestion — made Thursday on a blog that frequently promotes the interests of the national security establishment — that companies like Apple and Google might in certain cases be found legally liable for providing material aid to a terrorist organization because they provide encryption services to their users.
  • In his email, Snowden explained how law enforcement officials who are demanding that U.S. companies build some sort of window into unbreakable end-to-end encryption — he calls that an “insecurity mandate” — haven’t thought things through. “The central problem with insecurity mandates has never been addressed by its proponents: if one government can demand access to private communications, all governments can,” Snowden wrote. “No matter how good the reason, if the U.S. sets the precedent that Apple has to compromise the security of a customer in response to a piece of government paper, what can they do when the government is China and the customer is the Dalai Lama?”
  • Weakened encryption would only drive people away from the American technology industry, Snowden wrote. “Putting the most important driver of our economy in a position where they have to deal with the devil or lose access to international markets is public policy that makes us less competitive and less safe.”
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  • FBI Director James Comey and others have repeatedly stated that law enforcement is “going dark” when it comes to the ability to track bad actors’ communications because of end-to-end encrypted messages, which can only be deciphered by the sender and the receiver. They have never provided evidence for that, however, and have put forth no technologically realistic alternative. Meanwhile, Apple and Google are currently rolling out user-friendly end-to-end encryption for their customers, many of whom have demanded greater privacy protections — especially following Snowden’s disclosures.
Paul Merrell

XKeyscore Exposé Reaffirms the Need to Rid the Web of Tracking Cookies | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

www.eff.org/...-need-rid-web-tracking-cookies

surveillance state NSA tracking-cookies browsers XKeyscore

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The Intercept published an expose on the NSA's XKeyscore program. Along with information on the breadth and scale of the NSA's metadata collection, The Intercept revealed how the NSA relies on unencrypted cookie data to identify users. As The Intercept says: "The NSA’s ability to piggyback off of private companies’ tracking of their own users is a vital instrument that allows the agency to trace the data it collects to individual users. It makes no difference if visitors switch to public Wi-Fi networks or connect to VPNs to change their IP addresses: the tracking cookie will follow them around as long as they are using the same web browser and fail to clear their cookies." The NSA slides released by The Intercept give detailed guides to understanding the data transmitted by these cookies, as well as how to find unique machine identifiers that analysts can use to differentiate between multiple machines using the same IP address. We've written before about how spy agencies piggyback on social media account data to find Internet users' names or other identifying info, and these slides drive home the point that HTTP cookies leave users vulnerable to government surveillance, since any intermediary (or spy agency) can read the sensitive data they contain.
  • Worse yet, most of the time these identifying cookies come from third-party sources on webpages, and users have no meaningful way to opt out of receiving them (short of blocking all third party cookies) since advertisers (the main server of these types of cookies) refuse to honor the Do Not Track header.  Browser makers could help address this sort of non-consensual tracking by both advertisers and the NSA with some simple technical changes—changes that have been shown to reduce the number of third party cookies received by 67%. So far, though, they've been unwilling to build privacy protecting features in by default. Until they do, the best way for users to protect themselves is by installing a privacy protecting app like Privacy Badger, which is designed to block these types of uniquely identifying tracking cookies, or HTTPS Everywhere to block the transmission of HTTP cookies.
Paul Merrell

Obama administration opts not to force firms to decrypt data - for now - The Washington Post - 1 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...5-aa5b-f78a98956699_story.html

surveillance state encryption Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • After months of deliberation, the Obama administration has made a long-awaited decision on the thorny issue of how to deal with encrypted communications: It will not — for now — call for legislation requiring companies to decode messages for law enforcement. Rather, the administration will continue trying to persuade companies that have moved to encrypt their customers’ data to create a way for the government to still peer into people’s data when needed for criminal or terrorism investigations. “The administration has decided not to seek a legislative remedy now, but it makes sense to continue the conversations with industry,” FBI Director James B. Comey said at a Senate hearing Thursday of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
  • The decision, which essentially maintains the status quo, underscores the bind the administration is in — balancing competing pressures to help law enforcement and protect consumer privacy. The FBI says it is facing an increasing challenge posed by the encryption of communications of criminals, terrorists and spies. A growing number of companies have begun to offer encryption in which the only people who can read a message, for instance, are the person who sent it and the person who received it. Or, in the case of a device, only the device owner has access to the data. In such cases, the companies themselves lack “backdoors” or keys to decrypt the data for government investigators, even when served with search warrants or intercept orders.
  • The decision was made at a Cabinet meeting Oct. 1. “As the president has said, the United States will work to ensure that malicious actors can be held to account — without weakening our commitment to strong encryption,” National Security Council spokesman Mark Stroh said. “As part of those efforts, we are actively engaged with private companies to ensure they understand the public safety and national security risks that result from malicious actors’ use of their encrypted products and services.” But privacy advocates are concerned that the administration’s definition of strong encryption also could include a system in which a company holds a decryption key or can retrieve unencrypted communications from its servers for law enforcement. “The government should not erode the security of our devices or applications, pressure companies to keep and allow government access to our data, mandate implementation of vulnerabilities or backdoors into products, or have disproportionate access to the keys to private data,” said Savecrypto.org, a coalition of industry and privacy groups that has launched a campaign to petition the Obama administration.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • To Amie Stepanovich, the U.S. policy manager for Access, one of the groups signing the petition, the status quo isn’t good enough. “It’s really crucial that even if the government is not pursuing legislation, it’s also not pursuing policies that will weaken security through other methods,” she said. The FBI and Justice Department have been talking with tech companies for months. On Thursday, Comey said the conversations have been “increasingly productive.” He added: “People have stripped out a lot of the venom.” He said the tech executives “are all people who care about the safety of America and also care about privacy and civil liberties.” Comey said the issue afflicts not just federal law enforcement but also state and local agencies investigating child kidnappings and car crashes — “cops and sheriffs . . . [who are] increasingly encountering devices they can’t open with a search warrant.”
  • One senior administration official said the administration thinks it’s making enough progress with companies that seeking legislation now is unnecessary. “We feel optimistic,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. “We don’t think it’s a lost cause at this point.” Legislation, said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), is not a realistic option given the current political climate. He said he made a recent trip to Silicon Valley to talk to Twitter, Facebook and Google. “They quite uniformly are opposed to any mandate or pressure — and more than that, they don’t want to be asked to come up with a solution,” Schiff said. Law enforcement officials know that legislation is a tough sell now. But, one senior official stressed, “it’s still going to be in the mix.” On the other side of the debate, technology, diplomatic and commerce agencies were pressing for an outright statement by Obama to disavow a legislative mandate on companies. But their position did not prevail.
  • Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, said absent any new laws, either in the United States or abroad, “companies are in the driver’s seat.” He said that if another country tried to require companies to retain an ability to decrypt communications, “I suspect many tech companies would try to pull out.”
  • Gonzalo San Gil, PhD. on 10 Oct 15
     
    # ! upcoming Elections...
Paul Merrell

t r u t h o u t | China Suicides: Is Apple Headed for a Consumer Backlash? - 0 views

www.truthout.org/eaded-a-consumer-backlash59963

Apple Foxconn boycotts labor conditions

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 May 10 - Cached
  • Beijing, China - As Apple released the iPad today across Europe and Japan, a key supplier in China continued fortifying factory buildings with anti-suicide nets and bracing against a growing tide of public criticism about working conditions after 10 apparent employee suicides this year — including one this week hours after the company chief visited.   While tentative calls have emerged in China for boycotts of Apple products and other items made by electronics giant Foxconn, what remains entirely unclear is the impact this will have on the electronics manufacturing industry at large. The massive Foxconn plant, possibly the largest factory in the world, has been under the microscope for years over poor working conditions. In the past six months, renewed concerns have hit other electronics suppliers as well.
  • Now, with an apparent suicide cluster well underway at a key Apple supplier, labor activists have begun to wonder if that tide might be about to turn in the same way it did for international apparel and shoe companies in the 1980s and 1990s. “I think there is a tendency for consumers of iconic products like iPhones to stick their head in the sand when it comes abusive labor practices,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. “Their iPhone reflects who they are, or rather the image of themselves they wish to present to the world, and they don't want that image tarnished.”
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