Why Americans Are So Sensitive to Harm →

In Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology, [Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia] argues that concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, "now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before," expanded meanings that reflect "an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm."

Legal quirk enabling surveillance state expansion absent Congressional vote →

The Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure was amended to allow judges to sign warrants to allow the authorities to hack into computers outside a judge's jurisdiction as part of a criminal investigation. What's more, Rule 41 would allow judges to use one warrant to search multiple computers anywhere instead of having to get warrants for each computer.

Congress would need to act to overturn the rules by Dec 1.

Apple's Organizational Crossroads →

[...] it's not surprising that Apple is good at this stuff [...]: everything about the company is designed to produce integrated devices that don't sacrifice perfection for the sake of modularity.

The problem is that everything that goes into creating these jewel-like devices works against being good at services.

That's a different take on it, but Apple's definitely failed to crack online services, even as they (allegedly) invest in their own datacenters.

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods →

Below is a list of some lessons I've learned as a distributed systems engineer that are worth being told to a new engineer. Some are subtle, and some are surprising, but none are controversial. This list is for the new distributed systems engineer to guide their thinking about the field they are taking on. It's not comprehensive, but it's a good beginning.

How hackers eavesdropped on a US Congressman using only his phone number →

A US congressman has learned first-hand just how vulnerable cellphones are to eavesdropping and geographic tracking after hackers were able to record his calls and monitor his movements using nothing more than the public ten-digit phone number associated with the handset he used.

Watch the full report on 60 Minutes.

Facebook's new chatbots still need work →

For now, it's still entirely unproven that customers will want to chat with bots — especially when they work so poorly.

Facebook just validated the bot movement for businesses →

"It's a once-in-a-decade paradigm shift," said Beerud Sheth, CEO of the bot development firm Gupshup, when asked about the technological trend towards engagement in messaging. He believes it could be as significant as when Apple cofounder Steve Jobs introduced the world to the App Store. Mike Roberts, Kik's head of messaging and bot experience, described it this way: Messaging is the new browser and bots are the websites.

"Conversation as a platform" definitely has some traction in a mobile-first world, and I think the browser/websites analogy is apt, but I think the use cases here are far smaller and simpler than Facebook, Slack, and Skype would have you believe.

Canadian Police Obtained BlackBerry's Global Decryption Key →

According to technical reports by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that were filed in court, law enforcement intercepted and decrypted roughly one million PIN-to-PIN BlackBerry messages in connection with the probe. The report doesn't disclose exactly where the key — effectively a piece of code that could break the encryption on virtually any BlackBerry message sent from one device to another — came from.

The actual, honest-to-God global master BlackBerry encryption key.

See also Motherboard's reporting on this issue and the revelation that PGP-protected BlackBerrys are also hackable.