The other day, I was re-reading the 2008 Liberty vs. The United Kingdom ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (‘ECHR’). The case reads like any BREAKING / REVEALED news report on Edward Snowden’s disclosures, and will play a crucial role in the currently pending court cases in Europe on the legality of the […]
Archives for October 2013
Wall Street software failure and a relationship to voting
October 24, 2013 by
An article in The Register explains what happened in the Aug 1 2012 Wall Street glitch that cost Knight Capital $440M, resulted in a $12M fine, nearly bankrupted Knight Capital (and forced them to merge with someone else). In short, there were 8 servers that handled trades; 7 of them were correctly upgraded with new […]
When an Ethnographer met Edward Snowden
October 18, 2013 by
If you talk about ‘metadata’, ‘big data’ and ‘Big Brother’ just as easily as you order a pizza, ethnography and anthropology are probably not your first points of reference. But the outcome of a recent encounter of ethnographer Tom Boellstorff and Edward Snowden (not IRL but IRP), is that tech policy wonks and researchers should […]
Just launched — Equal Future: Dispatches on Social Justice & Technology
October 17, 2013 by
Hello, Freedom to Tinker readers! I’m writing to introduce a new resource that may be of interest to you. It’s called Equal Future, and is written by Robinson + Yu with the support of the Ford Foundation.
Engineering an insider-attack-resistant email system and why you wouldn't want to use it
October 16, 2013 by
Earlier this week, Felten made the observation that the government eavesdropping on Lavabit could be considered as an insider attack against Lavabit users. This leads to the obvious question: how might we design an email system that’s resistant to such an attack? The sad answer is that we’ve had this technology for decades but it […]
