• how does antispam currently work at large email providers - how would widespread E2E crypto affect this - what are the options for moving things to the client (and pros, cons) - is this feasible for email? - How do things change when moving from email to other sorts of async messaging (e.g. text messaging) or new protocols - i.e. are there unique aspects of existing email protocols, or are these general problems? Brief note about my background, to establish credentials: I worked at Google for about 7.5 years. For about 4.5 of those I worked on the Gmail abuse team, which is very tightly linked with the spam team (they use the same software, share the same on-call rotations etc).

In Island fand ein einzigartiges politisches Experiment statt: Vier Jahre lang regierten Anarchisten die Hauptstadt Reykjavik. Und diese Amateure haben Erstaunliches vollbracht.

Short stories are the lifeblood of science fiction and fantasy — novels get all the buzz and the parties, but short fiction is where the wildest ideas and coolest characters come out. And here are 15 or so anthologies that will show you just how superb science fiction and fantasy storytelling can get.

Last week's judgment by the European court of justice allowing anyone to demand that a search engine should remove unwanted information from its index – even if it is accurate, lawful, and publicly available elsewhere – is a dangerous step in the wrong direction.

RT @sfslim: Read “Agency”, a brilliant short story from @quinnnorton about technology working a little too well (7 min read)

At RedMonk, we have been arguing for many years that the developer has evolved from virtual serf to de facto kingmaker. Accepting that, at least for the sake of argument, it is worth asking whether one of the unintended consequences of this transition may be a return to Unix-style philosophies.

As our technological and sociological realities change, so too do our jobs. But just what, exactly, will we be doing 15 years from now? Here are some completely unexpected jobs you've almost certainly never heard of—but likely will soon.

That infinite space "between" what we humans feel as time is where computers spend all their time. It's an entirely different timescale. To computers, we humans work on a completely different time scale, practically geologic time. Which is completely mind-bending. The faster computers get, the bigger this time disparity grows.

Wer kennt es nicht, das Problem mit den Datenträgern? Über die Jahre sammeln sich alte Festplatten an, die man nicht einfach in den Müll werfen will, weil man nicht mehr so genau was drauf ist, ob die Verschlüsselung ordentlich genug war oder ob sie überhaupt noch anlaufen, um das zu prüfen. Auf der Suche nach einer Vernichtungsmethode, die nicht nur unzweifelhaft zuverlässig ist, sondern auch einen hohen Entertainment-Faktor aufweist, bin ich vor einer Weile bei Thermit gelandet. Das Pulver lässt sich problemlos und völlig legal im Baumarktbedarf ordern, es wird u.a. zum Schienenschweissen verwendet. Heute war es dann endlich soweit, auf einem geeigneten Freigelände (mit Betonplatten-Untergrund) fand sich eine kleine Hackergemeinde zum Entfachen eines Kompatktinfernos zusammen.

Current computing is based on binary logic -- zeroes and ones -- also called Boolean computing, but a new type of computing architecture stores information in the frequencies and phases of periodic signals and could work more like the human brain using a fraction of the energy necessary for today's computers, according to a team of engineers.

The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide

There no longer is a meaningful distinction between the digital world and the physical world. Your public transit rides, your love notes, your working notes and your letters home from your journeys are now part of the global mesh of electronic communications. The inability to live and love, to experiment and err, without oversight, is wrong because it's wrong, not because it doesn't catch bad guys.

Widely known as the "bloggers law," the new Russian measure specifies that any site with more than 3,000 visitors daily will be considered a media outlet akin to a newspaper and be responsible for the accuracy of the information published. Besides registering, bloggers can no longer remain anonymous online, and organizations that provide platforms for their work such as search engines, social networks and other forums must maintain computer records on Russian soil of everything posted over the previous six months.

The bottom line is that network neutrality advocates will need to broaden their thinking to respond effectively to the internet's changing structure. Merely banning fast lanes isn't going to accomplish much if the largest ISPs are allowed to sell new private roads.

The AI does not love you, nor does it hate you, but you are made out of atoms it might find useful for something else. - Eliezer Yudkowsky

The world’s biggest IT security company Symantec has admitted anti-virus software is “dead” and it doesn’t think of the technology as a money maker anymore. The comments came from the company’s senior vice president for information security, as a handful of other companies released reports trying to put the final nail in the coffin of anti-virus.

It doesn’t matter how much an education costs, doesn’t matter if your kids can’t afford to go to college or come out with massive debt, we will always be able to send our kids to university. And because a lot of our income is derived from tax incentives and taxpayer-financed bailouts your taxes are sending our kids to school. But you do not have the right to any of our money to send your kid to school. Your kids are born with a glass ceiling above which they will almost certainly never have the opportunity to rise. Our kids are born with a marble floor beneath which they will never be allowed to fall.

We’re in a weird time for the way the future looks; somehow House of Cards can slyly introduce a floating text-message interface to their present-day political drama without so much as blinking, but most of our iconic near- and far-future worlds run on tracks laid down well before the ’90s.

Annually this event aims to strengthen the networking between computer scientists nationwide and to provide a communication platform for highlighting the excellence of Austrian computer science. Distinguished computer scientists will present a variety of attractive topics, illustrating the broad scope and the impact of national research. Similar to last year, eight researchers from different computer science departments at national and international universities will give an overview over the computer science research done in Austria. Furthermore, there will be included a poster session in order to allow PhD students to present and discuss their work with the community.

Twitter used to be a sort of surrogate newsroom/barroom where you could organize around ideas with people whose opinions you wanted to assess. Maybe you wouldn't agree with everybody, but that was part of the fun. But at some point Twitter narratives started to look the same. The crowd became predictable, and not in a good way. Too much of Twitter was cruel and petty and fake. Everything we know from experience about social publishing platforms—about any publishing platforms—is that they change. And it can be hard to track the interplay between design changes and behavioral ones. In other words, did Twitter change Twitter, or did we?