The End of the Internet Dream? | WIRED

Source: The End of the Internet Dream? | WIRED, by Jennifer Stisa Granick, Director of Civil Liberties at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, and keynote speaker at Black Hat 2015

It’s up to us to make sure the Net is our liberator, not our oppressor

The first casualty of centralization has been privacy. And since privacy is essential to liberty, the future will be less free.

The Surveillance Paradigm: Be the friction – Our Response to the New Lords of the Ring – Feuilleton – FAZ

Source: The Surveillance Paradigm: Be the friction – Our Response to the New Lords of the Ring – Feuilleton – FAZ, by Shoshana Zuboff

A new social logic is taking shape: It’s all about surveillance. The individual is used as a mere provider of data. It’s time to break the arrogance of Silicon Valley.

Zuboff’s three laws: First, that everything that can be automated will be automated. Second, that everything that can be informated will be informated. And most important to us now, the third law: in the absence of countervailing restrictions and sanctions, every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control, irrespective of its originating intention.

Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ Out of ‘Fire Department’

Source: Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ Out of ‘Fire Department’

Firefighters don’t actually fight that many fires these days. It’s time to re-think how we deliver costly emergency services.

In 1980, according to the National Fire Protection Association, the nation’s 30,000 fire departments responded to 10.8 million emergency calls. About 3 million were classified as fires. By 2013, total calls had nearly tripled to 31.6 million, while fire calls had plummeted to 1.24 million, of which just 500,000 of were actual structure fires.

Ransomware and the New Economics of Cybercrime – The Atlantic

Digital thieves’ most crucial adaptation in recent years has little to do with their technical tools and everything to do with their business model.

“In the physical world, you have law enforcement coming out against paying ransom for hostages, but in this case we’ve seen law-enforcement agencies not only recommend it but actually paying it themselves,” Alperovitch says, referring to incidents in which police departments have paid bitcoin ransoms to recover control of their systems. “The problem you have here is that literally everyone is experiencing this problem. No one is immune. Luckily, hostage-taking is a pretty rare activity in our society, so it’s easy to recommend not paying a ransom when they know they’re not likely to experience that issue themselves.”

Source: Ransomware and the New Economics of Cybercrime – The Atlantic