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Edward Snowden: Here’s how we take back the Internet

Appearing by telepresence robot, Edward Snowden speaks at TED2014 about surveillance and Internet freedom. The right to data privacy, he suggests, is not a partisan issue, but requires a fundamental rethink of the role of the internet in our lives — and the laws that protect it. “Your rights matter,” he says, “because you never know when you’re going to need them.” Chris Anderson interviews, with…

When will Bitcoin be truly inclusive?

If bitcoin is the great leveller, then why is it still mostly driven by people who are young, white, tech-savvy, and with full access to banking services?

This month, the Bitcoin Foundation has been quietly setting up a committee for Financial Inclusion. The aim, says committee head Andreas Antonopoulos, is to increase awareness and education about bitcoin’s potential role in that area.

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Can the Sharing Economy bring back bartering?

Seeing as we’re in the post-holiday period, you’ve probably got lots of stuff (aka “crap”) lying around the home. That thing your mother gave you that you’ll never use. That thing someone re-gifted disingenuously, pretending it’s something you might like. You know. Well, the strange thing about the universe is that there’s always someone out there with completely opposite taste to yours. There’s…

The Newsweek credibility matrix

Newsweek returned to print on March 6th with a genuine bombshell: it had found the real Satoshi Nakamoto. The article, written by Leah McGrath Goodman, claimed to have accomplished what previous articles from The New Yorker, Fast Company and other publications had failed to do. Its claims were stunning: after years of searches from very capable journalists, Newsweek claimed that the secretive…

A Libertarian View of Nationalism, Secession, and Ethnic Enclaves

The “nation”, of course, is not the same thing as the state, a difference that earlier libertarians and classical liberals such as Ludwig von Mises and Albert Jay Nock understood full well. Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a…

Tomorrow’s apps will come from brilliant (and risky) Bitcoin code

For many, bitcoin — the distributed, worldwide, decentralized crypto-currency — is all about money … or, as recent events have shown, about who invented it. Yet the actual innovation brought about by bitcoin is not the currency itself but the platform, which is commonly referred to as the “blockchain” — a distributed cryptographic ledger shared amongst all nodes participating in the network, over…

Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

Editor’s Note: Given Richard Stallman’s longtime role in promoting software that respects user freedom (including GNU, which just turned 30), his suggested “remedies” for all the ways technology can be re-designed to provide benefits while avoiding surveillance — like the smart meters example he shares below — seem particularly relevant.

The current level of general surveillance in society is…

Batman versus The Terminator

30 years have passed since Bruce Wayne survived Skynet’s nuclear blasts in August of ’97. Iron demons now roam the planet, and without the requirement to defend the innocent against crime and injustice, Wayne has seeked refuge in the bomb shelter that saved his life; the Batcave.

Having scavenged the wasteland for resources, he discovers the radio of a dead soldier. There is static over a…

Bitcoin has enjoyed wider adoption than any previous crypto-currency; yet its success has also attracted the attention of fraudsters who have taken advantage of operational insecurity and transaction irreversibility. We study the risk investors face from Bitcoin exchanges, which convert between Bitcoins and hard currency. We examine the track record of 40 Bitcoin exchanges established over the…

Party Like It’s 1999? – Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 2 Notes Essay

This post originally appeared in BlakeMasters.com. You can follow Blake here.

Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 2 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—Party Like It’s 1999?

I.  Late to the Party

History is driven by each generation’s experience. We are all born into a particular culture at a…

[Preview] The Wolfram Alpha Programming Language

Stephen Wolfram introduces the Wolfram Language in this video that shows how the symbolic programming language enables powerful functional programming, querying of large databases, flexible interactivity, easy deployment, and more.

To learn more about the Wolfram Language, visit reference.wolfram.com/language.

For the latest…