June Fifth: “Edward Snowden Day” Except Not. Yet.
No, June 5, the date that Edward Snowden’s first leak was published, is not a national holiday. Yet.
Read more...Category Archives: Technology and innovation
Philip Pilkington: Cody Wilson and the Language of Power
How a conversation with a crypto anarchist put the BBC on tilt and unwittingly provided a lesson in how power issues are kept out of polite conversation.
Read more...Wolf Richter: Like So 2000 – Wall Street Pumps Crashed Internet Stocks
Internet stocks are down since March, so they must be a buy….right?
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Virtual Worlds and the Future of Economics
Varoufakis spoke with Senior Editor Peter Suderman about what he learned as a video game economist, the failings of his chosen academic profession, and how computer games and virtual online worlds might be the future of macroeconomics.
Read more...Health Care Information Technology: A Danger to Physicians and to Your Health
The causes of the crapification are legion, but one that is having a bigger impact on health care than is widely recognized is bad information technology implementation. And I don’t mean the healthcare.gov website.
Read more...Satyajit Das: Flash Boys’ HFT Mumbo Jumbo
Satyajit Das reviews Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys. Das finds it to be deeply flawed,: deficient in its understanding of HFT and not very well written.
Read more...Planned Obsolescence Disguised as Innovation, Oligopoly Disguised as a Free Market, and the Enrichment of Oligarchs
We are delighted to feature this post from Roy Poses, who with his colleagues at Health Care Renewal, have been providing consistently high quality analysis of the often dubious practices and economics of the health care system.
Read more...Matt Stoller: How Uber Creates an Algorithmic Monopoly to Extract Rents
We are not setting the price. The market is setting the price. We have algorithms to determine what that market is.<
Read more...Heartbleed Bug a Catastrophic Hole in Web Security; Webusers Told to Change Passwords
I remember the days when people were worried about using the Internet for purchases because they weren’t convinced their credit card information would be transmitted securely. It now turns out that a version of Open SSL that has been in production for two years, and on which https and other services like instant messaging, e-mail, and other web applications use has a gaping security hole called the Heartbleed bug.
Read more...Wolf Richter: I Just Got PayPal’s New Absolutely-No-Privacy-Ever Policy
PayPal’s new “privacy” policies show how deeply the private surveillance apparatus digs into your life.
Read more...Was Marx Right?
We participated in a Room for Debate forum at the New York Times, on the topic of “Was Marx Right?” Readers are likely to say, “But of course!” Yet Marx had such a large opus and his forecasts were so bold that any fair reading has to come to more nuanced conclusion.
Read more...China Rumored to be Shutting Down Bitcoin Sites; Why IRS Ruling that Bitcoin is Property is Fatal to Its Use in Commerce in the US
Bitcoin is getting hammered today.
Read more...As Predicted, IRS Deems Bitcoin to be Property, Limiting Its Usefulness in Commercial Transactions
We told readers earlier this month that the IRS was well-nigh certain to deem Bitcoin to be property, not a currency, and that would deter its use in commerce. We got pushback from Bitcoin defenders, who tried several lines of argument, basically along the lines of “digital currencies are inevitable” and “the tax authorities are irrelevant”. Today, the IRS issued a release that states that it regards Bitcoin as tradeable property, which will make it cumbersome to use it in commercial transactions.
Read more...Google, Apple, and Other Tech Titans’ Wage-Suppression Conspiracy Estimated to Cover One Million Workers
You have to give credit where credit is due. Technology leaders like acting on a grand scale, and that apparently includes when they engage in criminal conspiracies.
Read more...Murdoch’s Other Hacking Scandal: A Review of “Murdoch’s Pirates” by Neil Chenoweth
Back in the late 1980’s, Rupert Murdoch’s latest fiendish plan for world media domination (there’s a new one every decade or so) centred on pay TV. But as the 1990s rolled in, the media baron focused on a new world to conquer: crypto.
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