Wired says It’s Time to Encrypt the Entire Internet | Enterprise | WIRED. What a bad idea. The net is built on simple text protocols. Basic email is built on simple text protocols. XML is built on simple text protocols. They all work really well. Adding a layer of opacity over the top in the 90% of places where it’s not needed will make things so much harder to build, and verify. The point I take away from the security issues of the last couple of years is a commonplace: security is hard. Why do we want to impose it on every piece of the Net? Unnecessarily?

The case for: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/08/the-case-for-elizabeth-warren-in-7-minutes/?tid=rssfeed

The case against: same as that against Obama in 2008, and for Clinton: experience. How not to run into a Congressional brick wall.

Not a thinking thing. from Frontiers in Theoretical and Pphilosophical
Psychology

A Futurist cookbook that’s down on pasta.

but he needn’t. In “We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell” he despairs of DRM in HTML5 and the industry’s push to have it all ratified by W3C, but there’s nothing new here. Industry has always been pushing some broken DRM scheme in net standards, whether it’s Flash, Silverlight, ActiveX, QuickTime, Sony’s root kits, … And we’ve all just discarded one after the other precisely because of the brain-dead restrictions they imposed. The fact that the new HTML standard says we need to support the latest incarnation doesn’t mean that browsers will all be including it, just the corporate ones from Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like. If the people providing the media want to lock their creations up, let them. There’ll be a sea of open source Creative Commons please just watch this artistic production that will happily do an end run around all the locked down stuff. And if it’s good, and we care about it, it’ll be successful on its own terms. Cory knows all this, he’s been doing it himself for years. Buck up, man.

The Economist, late to the party and with little to offer in terms of suggested remedies, but at least they too perceive the problem.

technology and jobs: Coming to an office near you

Been seeing a lot of support for Guaranteed Minimum Income lately. I think the idea is catching on. A bit thin on how exactly it is to be paid for, or even what the projected costs would be, but enthusiasm for the idea of not tying it directly to “poor people”.

Homeland Insecurity | Souciant.

Really speaks to me and how I perceive my own situation.

See?

ProPublica wrote a story about a couple in CA that sound just like Shelley and I. Our healthcare costs are about to go up by 70%. We support the law, but in our case (and it appears 2-3% of the general population) it’s going to hurt badly; my insurance will be my second highest expense behind my mortgage.

How do we fix this? Jeez, the guy even looks like me!