“Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein delivered a speech on Tuesday about what he calls ‘responsible encryption’ today. It misses the mark, by far.”
“The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalans’ independence. On Wednesday morning, police entered the registry’s headquarters in Barcelona and seized all of its computers. The cops also arrested six members of staff, and held four of them for two days. Its CTO has been accused of sedition. The raid and arrest has sparked protests from the .cat company, as well as the Internet Society and the EFF.”
“Something similar happened back in 2014, when police in Peoria, Illinois, arrested a man for impersonating the town’s mayor on Twitter. The man (Jon Daniel) sued the city with the help of the ACLU and argued that the arrest violated his First Amendment rights. Ultimately, the city was forced to pay $125,000 to settle the case.”
“The defendant, who faces a maximum of three years in prison if convicted, argued that it was ‘patently illogical’ to hold someone criminally liable for sending nude pictures to a minor—yet it’s legal to expose themselves to minors in person. The Indiana ruling is among a string of cases in which sexting laws are clearly nonsensical.”
“Two years ago, ridesharing at the Atlanta airport was perfect. It was being widely used. It was cheap and convenient. Customers were king. Drivers were making money. Poor people without jobs suddenly had a job. Suddenly, the airport authorities had a problem. They had previously constructed vast parking lots for people coming and going from the airport. They had been a huge source of revenue. That revenue gradually began to fall. Then it fell some more. What had previously been a system of benign neglect began to turn.”
Read more: https://fee.org/articles/this-airport-abuses-uber-and-lyft-drivers-and-their-customers/
“IMF Director Christine Lagarde hinted at the development of a digital currency, similar to the bitcoin, for the organization’s special drawing rights (SDR) mechanism to replace existing reserve currencies. The international finance organization has already begun exploring the possibility with an External Advisory Group discussion last December. Referring to a possible future situation along these lines, Lagarde said that the prospect of a digital currency as a replacement for reserve currencies that are part of the SDR was not ‘a far-fetched hypothetical.'”
Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/news/imf-chief-suggests-imfcoin-cryptocurrency-possibility/
“‘A lot of people aren’t thinking hard about the world they are asking [Silicon Valley] to build,’ Stamos wrote. ‘When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.'”
“The deadline to apply for the multi-state offer is Oct. 17, and it’s not clear how many merchants will sign on. Because so many have complained about the tight timeline, the states are holding a meeting on Wednesday to decide whether to extend the deadline. Massachusetts, meanwhile, got a court order forcing Amazon to turn over by mid-October the identities of marketplace sellers doing business on the site since 2012.”
“In addition to selling a computer-numerically-controlled (CNC) mill which can complete unfinished lower receivers for AR-15 semi-auto rifles, Defense Distributed will now sell unfinished receivers for Glocks and single-stack M1911s. Using Defense Distributed’s mill, known as the Ghost Gunner, anyone with $1,600 and some basic milling knowledge can create the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle.”
“Nation-states are nothing but agreed-upon myths: we give up certain freedoms in order to secure others. But if that transaction no longer works, and we stop agreeing on the myth, it ceases to have power over us. So what might replace it? The trends that are pinching the nation-state are helping the city-state. In a highly connected, quasi-borderless world, cities are centres of commerce, growth, innovation, technology and finance.”
Read more: https://aeon.co/essays/the-end-of-a-world-of-nation-states-may-be-upon-us