Microsoft Fights U.S. Search Warrant for Overseas E-mails →

Microsoft, one of the world's largest e-mail providers, is resisting a government search warrant to compel the firm to turn over customer data held in a server located overseas.

Specifically, hosted in a datacenter in Dublin, Ireland. This is an entirely novel legal argument, however.

Microsoft argues that for data held overseas, the U.S. government should abide by its mutual legal assistance treaties, or MLATs. Those are agreements between the United States and foreign countries that typically require the requesting government to be in compliance with the other government's laws. Irish law requires authorization from an Irish district court judge to obtain e-mail content from a provider.

Seems pretty obvious that since we have chosen to comply with EU data protection regulations by hosting European users' data in Ireland, that data should be subject to the legal protections of those regulations.

Ars Spies on an NPR Reporter →

An amazingly revealing experiment about the online services we use everyday.

Cell Phone Tracking System Reveals How Traffic Jams Start →

In Boston, it turned out traffic jams are caused by just a few drivers in the grand scheme of things, the Globe noted. "What they found, perhaps surprisingly, is that during rush hour, 98 percent of roads in the Boston area were in fact below traffic capacity, while just 2 percent of roads had more cars on them than they could handle," the Globe wrote. "The backups on these roads ripple outward, causing traffic to snarl across the Hub."

Falsehoods programmers believe about time →

I keep coming back to this because all of our assumptions are wrong. See also: More falsehoods programmers believe about time.

Programming Sucks →

So much gold in this rant:

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works. Why do we tell you to turn it off and on again? Because we don't have the slightest clue what's wrong with it, and it's really easy to induce coma in computers and have their built-in team of automatic doctors try to figure it out for us.

The human brain isn't particularly good at basic logic and now there's a whole career in doing nothing but really, really complex logic. Vast chains of abstract conditions and requirements have to be picked through to discover things like missing commas. Doing this all day leaves you in a state of mild aphasia as you look at people's faces while they're speaking and you don't know they've finished because there's no semicolon.

You immerse yourself in a world of total meaninglessness where all that matters is a little series of numbers went into a giant labyrinth of symbols and a different series of numbers or a picture of a kitten came out the other end.

Spurious Correlations →

I think this just became one of my favorite sites.

Most People in the World Have No Idea How to Manage Their Money →

Thanks for the education, mom and dad.

It's Insanely Easy to Hack Hospital Equipment →

We tested every single device in our environment–various radiology stuff and MRIs, ultrasound and mammography systems, cardiology, oncology. We tested all of our lab systems, surgery robots, fetal monitoring, ventilators, anesthesia.

Basically all of them are broken.