Tag: Policy

Bruce Schneier

Losing The Future: Schneier On How The Internet Could Kill Democracy

With his deep background in both cryptography and Internet security, Bruce Schneier is of the most thoughtful commentators on all matters cyber. So revered is he, that he even inspired a list of humorous Chuck Norris-style “Bruce Schneier” facts . In recent months, Bruce has been an invaluable sounding board amid the drip-drip-drip of details of ubiquitous government surveillance stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence on NSA spying and cyber operations. In this video, from a recent speech Bruce did at the TEDxCambridge event up here in the Boston area, he goes a bit deeper: drawing out the current trend lines like hacktivism, Facebook- and Twitter-fueled popular revolutions, civil war and mass surveillance, and trying to discern what the future might look like. /div> Bruce’s theory: although nimble groups of activists, dissidents and hackers have been more adept at using the Internet and innovative technologies and platforms built on […]

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FDA Will Regulate Some Apps As Medical Devices

In an important move, the U.S. Food And Drug Administration (FDA) has released final guidance to mobile application developers that are creating medical applications to run on devices like the iPhone and Android mobile devices. Some applications, it said, will be treated with the same scrutiny as traditional medical devices.* The statement is the final word from the FDA on the approach it will take when enforcing federal regulations regarding the safety of medical devices to the large and fast-growing category of medical applications. The agency said on Monday that, while it doesn’t see the need to vet “the majority of mobile apps,” because they pose “minimal risk to consumers,” it will exercise oversight of mobile medical applications that are accessories to regulated medical devices, or that transform a mobile device into a regulated medical device. In those cases, the FDA said that mobile applications will be assessed “using the same […]

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digital spying

Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org, argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals. The essays says that current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our […]

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World-is-Flat Author Weighs In On Internet Of Things

Those of you who don’t religiously read the Op-ed page of The New York Times, but who are interested in the Internet of Things, probably want to surf on over to the Times’s web site to check out Thomas Friedman’s opinion piece “When Complexity Is Free” from the Sunday Times. There are a couple of points, here. Friedman is one of the most astute observers of the geopolitical zeitgeist. His 2005 book The World Is Flat talked about the confluence of technologic innovation, the Internet and economic globalization. It is one of the most widely read works of “business writing” of the last century and helped explain, for the public and policymakers, the tectonic changes taking place in emerging and mature economies worldwide. Friedman’s stature as a trend-spotter (see #1) means that, when he says something is important (as he did with IoT this week) important folks take notice. In the […]

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Why The Mailpile Misstep Is No Joke To PayPal

 PayPal and Mailpile, the scrappy secure mail startup ended the week on a high note: hugging it out (via Twitter) after the online payments behemoth froze more than $40,000 in payments to the crowd-funded startup then donated $1,000 to the project, to boot. But making it right with the tiny secure email firm is just the beginning of the story at PayPal, which is making the whole mix-up as something of an object lesson in how it needs to change to address a fluid and fast-moving online payments market. First, some background: Mailpile, of Reykjavík, Iceland, has raised more than $145,000 in a month-long campaign on the crowd funding web site Indiegogo.com to build a “fast, web-mail client with user-friendly encryption and privacy features.” Beginning on Saturday, PayPal froze more than $40,000 of those donations, suspecting fraud. The company’s spokespeople told company executive Brennan Novak that it wanted to see […]

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