“You’ve probably heard about bitcoins, but what are they and why are they special? We take a look at what makes bitcoins an innovation, and their pros and cons as people now see them.”
“The study, to be published in the journal Management Science covering the period 2000 to 2007, found Craigslist has had a huge impact on local US newspapers, which have in the past relied heavily on classifieds. Over that period the researchers noted a 20.7 percent drop in classified ad rates, a 3.3 percent increase in subscription prices and a 4.4 percent decrease in circulation, according to a summary of the research released this week by New York University. ‘We ascribe this impact to Craigslist,’ Seamans told AFP. ‘When Craigslist enters a market, the effect on a newspaper’s classified ads is almost immediate,’ he added.”
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/14/craigslist-has-cost-u-s-newspapers-5-billion/
“Nigel Warren, an East Village resident, was fined $2,400 for running an illegal hotel because he rented his bedroom out to a visitor for three days. He wasn’t operating a sleazy flophouse, and the entire transaction was markedly casual, but he was prosecuted nonetheless. Warren’s offending transaction took place through Airbnb, an online hostelling website. Airbnb works on a peer-to-peer structure, connecting people with extra space to people who can’t (or don’t want to) shell out for a regular hotel. One can’t help but suspect big hotel powers might be lurking behind a law that forbids short stays anywhere but in hotels.”
http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/rent-my-flat-black-market-edition
“The PirateBrowser website explains that the application combines Tor client Vidalia – which anonymises data connections – with the FireFox Portable Edition browser, the FoxyProxy add-on and ‘some custom configs’. The site also claims that the browser is an anti-censorship tool rather than purely for piracy, citing countries including Iran and North Korea alongside the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland as places it expects PirateBrowser to be particularly useful.”
“Even as the U.S. security state becomes more closed, centralized and brittle in the face of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, civil society and the public are responding to the post-Snowden repression by becoming more dispersed and resilient. That’s how networks always respond to censorship and surveillance. Each new attempt at a file-sharing service, after Napster was shut down — Kazaa, Kazaa lite, eDonkey, eMule, The Pirate Bay — was less dependent on central servers and other vulnerable nodes than the one before it. Wikileaks responded the same way to U.S. government attempts to shut it down.”
“Bitmessage is an open-source communications protocol for keeping your email private. Unlike PGP and similar programs that hide just the content of messages, Bitmessage also hides metadata like the sender and receiver of messages. And unlike PGP, Bitmessage doesn’t require that users manage public or private keys to use the system; Bitmessage uses strong authentication so that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed. Bitmessage is also decentralized and trustless, which means that you don’t need to trust root certificate authorities or any third parties who, under legal duress from a government, might give up your data.”
http://readwrite.com/2013/07/15/bitmessage-choice-of-a-rightly-paranoid-generation
“Networks, when attacked, become even more decentralized and resilient. A good example is Napster and its successors, each of which has more closely approached an ideal peer-to-peer model, and further freed itself from reliance on infrastructure that can be shut down by central authority, than its predecessors. Hierarchies, on the other hand, respond to attack by becoming even more ossified, brittle and closed. Hierarchies respond to leaks by becoming internally opaque and closed even to themselves, so that their information is compartmentalized and they are less able to make effective use of the knowledge dispersed among their members.”
“Across the US, from Maryland to Seattle, work is underway to construct user-owned wireless networks that will permit secure communication without surveillance or any centralised organisation. They are known as meshnets and ultimately, if their designers get their way, they will span the country. The Seattle Meshnet has just completed a successful crowdfunding campaign for meshboxes – routers that come preloaded with the cjdns software needed to join Hyperboria. Users will just plug the routers into their existing internet connection and be ready to go on the virtual meshnet – or a local physical meshnet when one becomes available.”
“In a critical security advisory issued over the weekend, the Tor Project told its users that they should seriously consider migrating away from Microsoft’s Windows operating system and disabling JavaScript. The Tor Project security advisory was a response to revelations on Sunday that an attack had targeted users of the Tor Browser. According to the advisory, the attack exploited a Firefox JavaScript vulnerability that has already been resolved. The vulnerability is a cross-platform threat, but the exploit in this case was Windows-specific. Tor Browser Bundle users on Linux, OS X, and LiveCD systems like Tails were never at risk of exploit.”
http://threatpost.com/tor-urges-users-to-leave-windows/101825
“Katie died in a 2010 crash after another driver ran a red light. The driver was underinsured, and Fisher’s family had to sue the driver for negligence in order to force Katie’s insurance company, Progressive, to pay the difference. What really irked Fisher was that Progressive actively participated in the other driver’s legal defense. His scathing post about the debacle quickly went viral and turned into a social media nightmare for Progressive. The company defended its decision: ‘Under Maryland law, in order to receive the benefits of an underinsured driver claim, the other driver must be at fault.'”
http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/17/technology/progressive-settlement/