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How complex systems fail, or the curious Brexit paralysis
After losing the Brexit vote, prime minister Cameron resigned. That sounds reasonable: he lost and so he resigned. But did you notice that nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to become the next prime minister? Not even senior politicians like Boris Johnson that campaigned in favor of Leave and wanted to be PM for a long time?…
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The Ethereum/DAO attack — what’s the message being sent here?
So some guys say “code is law, this time it’s for real, and it sits on the Ethereum block chain”. Then, oops, the code does not do what it was intended to do, and … well, the only thing that comes to mind is Douglas’ Adams “so God said: ‘Oops, I didn’t think of that’…
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Comcast about its own policies
Got this from Comcast in response to an e-mail to the FTC. I assume it is canned, but interesting nevertheless: Contrary to the allegations raised in this complaint, Comcast does not apply “arbitrary” usage thresholds, does not “zero-rate” or grant special policy exemptions to its own video content, and does not implement policies intended to…
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Help Doctorow and the EFF lobby the W3C to permit security research
You know times are bad if security researchers are being threatened with legal action. That’s something the DMCA actually does: if you investigate whether DRM works or not, you might be breaking the law, and big companies can sue you. You know times are worse, when the pre-eminent web standards body, the W3C, is working…
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Privacy is the new Green
About forty years ago, something remarkable happened: people across the western world began to realize that just because something has always been done, sometimes it may be better not to do it any more. Just because we’ve always drilled for any oil in the ground that we could find, sometimes it may be better to…