Answering a common question from a polarizing election cycle
What their choice means is very different than what it would mean for you to make it.
Source: How Millions of Good People Can Vote Differently Than You Will – The Atlantic
Month: October 2016
What we talk about when we talk about cybersecurity: security in internet governance debates | Internet Policy Review
Internet governance bodies agree that improving online security is important, but disagree on what a more secure internet would look like.
The tensions that arise around issues of security among different groups of internet governance stakeholders speak to the many tangled notions of what online security is and whom it is meant to protect that are espoused by the participants in multistakeholder governance forums. What makes these debates significant and unique in the context of internet governance is not that the different stakeholders often disagree (indeed, that is a common occurrence), but rather that they disagree while all using the same vocabulary of security to support their respective stances. Government stakeholders advocate for limitations on WHOIS privacy/proxy services in order to aid law enforcement and protect their citizens from crime and fraud. Civil society stakeholders advocate against those limitations in order to aid activists and minorities and protect those online users from harassment. Both sides would claim that their position promotes a more secure internet and a more secure society—and in a sense, both would be right, except that each promotes a differently secure internet and society, protecting different classes of people and behaviour from different threats.
The Right Is Giving Up on Democracy | New Republic
It’s not just Donald Trump and his fans who think the system is rigged.
“Why is the American Right giving up on democracy?”
Public-opinion polling shows that Trump’s low opinion of American elections has practically become Republican Party orthodoxy. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday, Republicans have an “unprecedented” level of “concern and mistrust in the system.” Roughly 70 percent of Republican voters believe that if Hillary Clinton wins the election, it’ll be due to fraud. In both this poll and an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll, only half of Republicans say they’d accept a Clinton victory. (In the latter poll, by contrast, 82 percent of Democrats said they would accept a Trump victory.)
Beyond this election, beyond even the fate of the Republican Party, there is a significant minority of Americans who are giving up on democracy because it doesn’t serve their purpose of upholding a white Christian patriarchy. Trump is merely a symptom of this problem, and even if he fades as a political force after the election, the underlying disease will remain, and indeed will likely spread. The threat to the American system is not an armed revolt after November 8, but the growing number of Americans who are convinced that only “regime change” can save capitalism, Christianity, and America itself.
In a highly indebted world, austerity is a permanent state of affairs — Quartz
The logic behind austerity holds that “the market”—which the public had just bailed out—did not like the debt incurred when states everywhere rescued and recapitalized their banking systems.
Public debt, however, grew, because economies got smaller and grew slower the more they cut.
The reason is simple—and it is surprising anyone thought that anything else would happen. Imagine an economy as a sum, with a numerator and a denominator. Make total debt 100 and stick that on the top (the numerator). Make Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 100 and stick that on the bottom (the denominator) to give us a 100% debt-to-GDP ratio. If you cut total spending by 20% to restore “confidence,” the economy is “balanced” at 100/80. That means the debt-to-GDP ratio of the country just went up to 120%, all without the government issuing a single cent of new debt.
In short, cuts to spending in a recession make the underlying economy contract. After all, government workers have lost jobs or income, and government workers not shopping has the same effect as private sector workers not shopping. So the debt goes up as the economy shrinks further.
As difficult as it can be to make this reality part of the political conversation, public debt is an asset. Even at today’s low rates, it earns interest and retains value. No one is forced to invest in public debt, but every time bonds are issued investors show up and buy them by the truckload. By market criteria, public debt is a great investment.
But who pays for it? That would be the taxpayer.
Source: In a highly indebted world, austerity is a permanent state of affairs — Quartz
As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential – The New York Times
The next generation of online attack tools used by criminals will add machine learning capabilities pioneered by A.I. researchers.
The alarm about malevolent use of advanced artificial intelligence technologies was sounded earlier this year by James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence. In his annual review of security, Mr. Clapper underscored the point that while A.I. systems would make some things easier, they would also expand the vulnerabilities of the online world.
“I would argue that companies that offer customer support via chatbots are unwittingly making themselves liable to social engineering,” said Brian Krebs, an investigative reporter who publishes at krebsonsecurity.com.
Source: As Artificial Intelligence Evolves, So Does Its Criminal Potential – The New York Times