Four short links: 29 July 2013

Better Crypto, NukeViz, Weed Economics, and Ethics of Prediction

  1. Applied Practical Cryptography — technical but readable article with lots of delicious lines. They’re a little magical, in the same sense that ABS brakes were magical in the 1970s and Cloud applications share metal with strangers, and thus attackers, who will gladly spend $40 to co-host themselves with a target and The conservative approach is again counterintuitive to developers, to whom hardcoding anything is like simony.
  2. Nukemap — interactive visualization of the fallout damage from a nuclear weapon. Now we can all be the scary 1970s “this is what it would look like if [big town] were nuked” documentaries that I remember growing up with. I love interactives for learning the contours of a problem, and making it real and personal in a way that a static visualization cannot. WIN. See also the creator’s writeup.
  3. Legalising WeedChuck, a dealer who switched from selling weed in California to New York and quadrupled his income, told WNYC, “There’s plenty of weed in New York. There’s just an illusion of scarcity, which is part of what I’m capitalizing on. Because this is a black market business, there’s insufficient information for customers.” Invisible economies are frequently inefficient, disrupted by moving online and made market-sense efficient.
  4. Can Software That Predicts Crime Pass Constitutional Muster? (NPR) — “I think most people are gonna defer to the black box,” he says. “Which means we need to focus on what’s going into that black box, how accurate it is, and what transparency and accountability measures we have [for] it.”
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