Month: January 2016

  • Cellular network surveillance + more

    The Dragnet | The Verge – or how cellular network surveillance was unmasked. A US criminal case into online returns fraud provides the reader with information about law enforcement usage of cellular network surveillance.  More wireless related content here. New Technologies and Mixed Use Convergence by Applin & Fischer (University of Kent) – interesting paper on how…

  • Cool tools & things that made last week

    Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools website has a podcast series, this episode on great tips Cool Tools is a direct descendant of The Whole Earth catalogue. Kelly started his career helping Stewart Brand edit the last few editions of the Whole Earth catalogue. He was then an editor for follow on projects including the Whole Earth…

  • Cinema building obligations

    Hong Kong Looking at Cinema Building Obligations | Variety – When the British colonial government was building new towns in Kowloon and the New Territories it operated policies that specified the minimum number of cinema screens that should be built per head of population. The Hong Kong government are looking to revisit cinema building obligations because retail…

  • PrivaTegrity: the flawed model of distributed keys

    Dave Chaum’s PrivaTegrity – an idea to to try and balance between state actors demand for internet sovereignty and the defacto end of citizen privacy. Whilst also addressing the need to deal with emotive causes such as terrorism, paedophile rings and organised crime got a lot of attention from Wired magazine. Backdoors are considered problematic…

  • Threat score + more things

    The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score – The Washington Post – similar to China’s social credit score, the threat score sounds like a concept perilously close to ‘pre-crime’ in Minority Report. Also how will the threat score handle accusations of systemic racism or infringement of civil or constitutional rights? Moleskine 开出了第一家咖啡店,在日内瓦机场…

  • The smartphone market and Huawei

    It is hard for anyone reading the media to believe that Huawei’s rise in the smartphone market was anything short of miraculous. In reality the roots of this rise go back at least six years. Back in 2010, Huawei was already shipping 3,000,000 smartphones. However since that time, the year-on-year percentage growth in consumer devices…

  • SEO marketer crime + more

    SEO Marketer Sentenced to More than Three Years in Federal Prison for Extorting Money from a Local Merger and Acquisitions Firm | Department of Justice – just wow. Who would have thought that an SEO Marketer would be sent down for a crime that sounds more like a mafiosi. You’ll never look at an SEO marketer…

  • Gudetama + more things

    Gudetama joined the great and the good  by being rendered in The Wall Street Journal‘s famous portraiture style. This has featured the most notable characters over the years from bankers to statesmen and even Hello Kitty. It was funny to see Sanrio’s lazy egg yolk character Gudetama get his own portrait lying on his bed. More…

  • Antitrust inquiry + more news

    In China, Microsoft Faces New Antitrust Inquiry | New York Times – not terribly surprising. China’s legal framework is challenging for foreign companies at the best of time. Interpretation of the law, prosecution and judicial penalties of an antitrust inquiry are essentially political in nature (paywall) China To Implement for Malaysian born Chinese | The Coverage –…