Technology, economics, and culture.
It’s called MintChip. From Hacker News:
Every MintChip has an ID, and every transaction is logged on both the sending and receiving device with the ID of the other device. This means that if someone takes your chip, they get a complete record of every transaction you’ve ever made. In other words, it’s not anonymous at all.
The details are vague, but tying cash to a ‘tamper-proof’ hardware seems like the wrong direction.
Yours truly contributed to a New York Times “Room for Debate” forum on the future of the dollar:
Canada is eliminating the penny, but not the cent: digitally, consumers can still pay to the cent, for instance charging $1.03 to a credit card rather than paying $1.05 in cash. It’s almost inevitable that digital money will soon replace not just the penny, but all physical money — in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. Moving away from paper notes and coins and toward a digital currency is a no-brainer, at least when it comes to cost and efficiency. But when it comes to privacy and freedom, cash can’t be beat. We must ensure that we protect our civil liberties by preserving some untraceable payment method.
Germany plans to introduce legislation that would require search engines to pay content owners for using snippets shown in search links to news items. Obviously this would be a curtailment of fair use, and as a result, free speech. But what’s truly amazing is that the stated reason for this plan is that search engines are making more money than new sites.
A site like Google News (or standard Google when it returns news links at the top of a search) are not substitutes for news sites. In fact, search engines are the primary source of traffic for news sites. So it’s not the case that news sites are harmed by search engines. They are not losing any money to search; it’s quite the opposite. So why the law? According to the New York Times, “The proposal was cheered by German publishers, who complain that Internet companies like Google have profited hugely from their content, while generating only scraps of digital revenue.”
Got that? They’re saying, ‘Google hasn’t taken anything from us–in fact they’ve driven traffic to us–but at the end of the day they’re making more money than we are, and we want some of it.’
If you’re dubious, consider that publishers right now have the ability to opt out of being indexed by Google–or even just opt-out of Google News and stay in Google search. Yet they don’t. If the aggregation and linking that Google and other search engines are doing was not a fair bargain, publishers would opt out and demand payment. The fact that they don’t shows that they already value being in Google’s index. They are already being fairly compensated. This plan is not about fairness; it’s about rent-seeking.
DoD Buzz:
It’s a depressing thesis, but from all the public statements about cyber-losses, it sounds plausible. Unless a true “Cyber Pearl Harbor” — in which bad guys knock out the power grid or the financial system or our telecommunications — happens tomorrow. Even if it doesn’t, Healey proposed a new set of parallels: A “Cyber-Vietnam,” i.e. a prolonged campaign, rather than a single sneak attack; or a “Cyber Battle of Britain,” in which the government appeals to — or impresses — private citizens for help in responding to a major crisis.
Keep moving those goal posts.
Here is video of yours truly along with Jim Harper and Ryan Radia discussing cybersecurity at a Cato Institute panel on the Hill this past Friday.
“My greatest fear,” Clarke says, “is that, rather than having a cyber-Pearl Harbor event, we will instead have this death of a thousand cuts. Where we lose our competitiveness by having all of our research and development stolen by the Chinese. And we never really see the single event that makes us do something about it. That it’s always just below our pain threshold. That company after company in the United States spends millions, hundreds of millions, in some cases billions of dollars on R&D and that information goes free to China….After a while you can’t compete.”
Glad to see Mr. Clarke give up the idea that a cyberattack could cause a day of electronic armageddon, but I think now he’s moved the goal posts a wee bit too far. He’s now in Amit Yoran “Cyber 9-11 has happened over the last 10 years, but it’s happened slowly so we don’t see it” territory. There’s no way to measure or see the holocaust that’s happening, so we just need to trust the experts. And whose pain threshold is he referring to exactly? I’m fairly certain the companies who are losing billions to espionage are acutely aware of the problem and addressing it. I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.
Here is video of the exchange. The real story here is how poorly Rep. Hank Johnson handled it. The questions were framed around a joke about Dick Cheney that fell flat and detracted from the seriousness of the issue. Johnson should be embarrassed. Several folks have pointed out that Gen. Alexader got Wired writer James Bamford’s name wrong, but it was Johnson who first got it wrong, and I think Alexander was making light of that. And the worst pat, Johnson never asked the real question: Are calls between Americans where on party is overseas being recorded?
The Register:
China is claiming attacks on public and private organisations from outside of its borders have rocketed in the past year – from five million computers affected in 2010 to 8.9m in 2011. …
Surprisingly, Japan is alleged to be the source of most attacks on China, supposedly landing 22.8 per cent, followed by the US with 20.4 per cent and then the Republic of Korea with 7.1 per cent.
The attacks were both financially motivated and targeted at stealing sensitive information from government departments, according to the report, although tellingly there is no breakdown for each.
Bloomberg Businessweek has a good cover story on what Chinese cyberespionage looks like to U.S. companies.
Jason Healy at the Atlantic:
The second problem with mandatory government monitoring is the most obvious and severe. Especially after scandals over warrantless intercepts, NSA has lost a great deal of the public’s trust. Companies, even those that may hold the agency in high regard otherwise, may have little confidence that government agencies might not dip into the content of their monitoring communications to collect intelligence, not just block attacks.
But there is a solution to, at least, the second problem. The administration already has a better option than mandating government monitoring: declassification.
Makes intuitive sense. The benefits of NSA monitoring with none of the risks to civil liberties. But as Healy explains in the article, it’s not clear the NSA’s signatures are all that. They likely won’t be helpful against the type of very specifically targeted ‘advanced persistent threat’ that is supposed to be the number one threat.
Tony Busseri knows:
It will take legislation, and laws that accomplish anything meaningful will require a public/private partnership of historical efficiency.
I am holding my breath.
Jerry Brito is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and director of its Technology Policy Program. He also serves as adjunct professor of law at GMU and is a regular contributor to TIME.com.
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon