"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.
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.
Lytro Cinema. There's a pretty good breakdown of how the technology works for the original consumer cameras on YouTube.
I really wish this were The Onion.
Wow, there are other people like me?
In the past five years, virtually every realm of society has been disrupted as a consequence of "software eating the world." None of our social, legal or political institutions have caught up with this tectonic shift, and those responsible for governing, for providing security, and for protecting our rights are reeling.
Technology seems to have disrupted the frameworks guarding human rights.
The most touching story I've read in a while. RIP, Mr. Bob Ebeling.
For Facebook and other platforms like it, [these] incidents [...] betray a larger, existential difficulty: How can you possibly impose a single moral framework on a vast and varying patchwork of global communities?
From the algorithmic structures that underlie your News Feed to the process of community management and censorship, Facebook pushes its worldview and moral framework on its user base.
The National Security Agency director and three past National Security Agency directors, a former CIA director, a former Homeland Security secretary have all said that they're much more sympathetic with Apple in this case.
— Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism official. (via NPR)
A funny yet serious look at the encryption debate. I won't spoil it for you.