Popping the web advertising bubble

Following on from his entertaining Website Obesity talk, Pinboard maestro Maciej Cegłowski delves a little deeper into the possibility of a web advertising implosion:

The problem is not that these companies will fail (may they all die in agony), but that the survivors will take desperate measures to stay alive as the failure spiral tightens.

These companies have been collecting and trafficking in our most personal data for many years. It’s going to get ugly.




Moral cryptography

Phillip Rogaway, professor of computer science at the University of California, interviewed in The Atlantic about the failure of the cryptographic community to address moral implications of universal surveillance:

Waddell: What led you to understand the political implications of your own work?

Rogaway: I myself had been thinking increasingly in these terms when the Snowden revelations came out. Those revelations made me confront more directly our failings as a community to have done anything effectual about stemming this transition of the Internet to this amazing tool for surveilling entire populations.




Signal Desktop

The EFF recommended private messaging tool Signal has released a beta desktop version. Android synch only at the moment, but it’s getting closer to a universal (sorry Windows phone) secure messaging platform.