A (relatively easy to understand) primer on elliptic curve cryptography →
Some math required, but a good introduction to the cryptographic problems that underly the future of technical security.
The Stupidity of Computers →
Computers do not invent new categories; they make use of the ones we give them, warts and all. And the increasing amount of information they process can easily fool us into thinking that the underlying categories they use are not just a model of reality, but reality itself.
We will define and regiment our lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive to what a computer can "understand."
A look at how computers and society interact to define ontologies and taxonomies and then define ourselves within them.
Fox News debuts bizarre, giant tablets in its outrageous new newsroom →
In a video that could be mistaken for a College Humor or Saturday Night Live parody, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith walks viewers through the network's new setup, which includes workstations with 55-inch touchscreen monitors. In the video, journalists swipe through pages and apps, presumably collecting information for live reporting.
Instead of real reporting, I think Fox just started parodying a real news show.
The triumph of opinion-driven cable TV and the collapse of newspapers has created an American news media that does an increasingly poor job of informing the public. And an excellent job of dividing it.
— David Rohde, "How the Broken Media Helped Break the Government"
Adventures in String Reversal →
Your algorithm does it wrong. Here's proof.
How a Purse Snatching Led to the Legal Justification for NSA Domestic Spying →
A breakdown of the precedent for metadata surveillance set in Smith v. Maryland.
Geeks on the Frontlines →
Rolling Stone covers hackers and America's private cybersecurity apparatus.
How Facebook and Brooklyn Killed America's Obsession With Cars →
It's interesting to note a new trend uncovered by the public advocacy research group U.S. Pirg—young people have officially begun to lose interest in driving. After six consecutive decades of unimpeded growth in driving rates, they began to stagnate in the mid '00s.
Some interesting statistics on mobility, but I'm not sure that you can prove the Internet caused the decrease since there's also a huge cost to owning a car that the economic downturn probably discouraged.
Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android →
A nice look at how Google is sidestepping the most obvious problems with Android to continue to deliver high-quality software and seamless application updates for their own applications.