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Society, Policy & Culture
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Machines are better referees than humans but we’ll be sued if we use them
Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
How the US Treasury imposes sanctions on me and every other "Stephen Law"
Right, here's another thing I am getting off my chest - email letter to OFAC (edited slightly from version sent). Dear OFAC This corresp...
The Insecurity of Secret IT Systems
We now know a lot about the security of the Rapiscan 522 B x-ray system used to scan carry-on baggage in airports worldwide. Billy Rios, director of threat intelligence at Qualys, got himself one and analyzed it. And he presented his results at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit this week. It’s worse than you might…
The Book of Graham
I emailed my 22 year old cousin Eric, who’s graduating Summa in Economics from Harvard, to see if he needed any help getting interviews...
Screwed by Square
In addition to making the small bucks as a science fiction writer, I have a day job. I run a game store which hosts events and serves the local community here in Brooklyn, but also sells games and …
The Egg (2009)
It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.
NBC Story about Hacking at Sochi is 100% Fraudulent
Yesterday (Feb 5 2014) On February 4th, NBC News ran a story claiming that if you bring your mobile phone or laptop to the Sochi Olympics...
Hacking Airline Lounges for Free Meals
I think this is a great hack: A man bought a first-class ticket and used it to have free meals and drinks at the airport’s VIP lounge almost every day for nearly a year, Kwong Wah Yit Poh reported. The itinerary for the ticket was found to have been changed more than 300 times within a year, and the owner of the…
We are not normal people
Is a product's technical complexity correlated to its revenue potential?
US bans students from “blacklisted” countries from getting access to Coursera
I’m following a Coursera course entitled “Constitutional Struggles in the Muslim World” and just received a rather odd email. All students from Syria, Sudan, Iran and Cuba will no…
Square thinks I don’t exist
Seriously. During the signup process, they ask for some personal information: your name, home address, phone number, and Social Security Number. They hand it off to an identity verification service , which scrapes, say, public records and credit reports, to ask questions that only you can answer:
This is What it's Like to Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meetup
"You want Tikhon and Arianna on your team. They are A++ hustlers that will walk through walls and put in hundreds hours of work on your toughest problem. There are 43 investors in Simple Contacts, Tikhon and Arianna are my first calls."
Network Solutions Auto-Enroll: $1,850
I got an email from Network Solutions — where I still have two domains, originally registered in the ’90s — that informed me I have been enrolled in their WebLock Program.
Snowden-haters are on the wrong side of history
In the autumn on 1963, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, worried at Martin Luther King’s growing influence, began tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. They hoped to discredit him by gai…
Yale censored a student's course catalog site. I made an unblockable replacement
I hope I don't get kicked out of Yale for this.