security

Showing 7 posts tagged security

Let's Cut Through the Bitcoin Hype

Dan Kaminsky:

The internet’s proven to be a pretty big deal for global society, and Bitcoin could basically be thought of as the Internet, applied to Money.

There’s an old comment that the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Sure, we’ve routed money over the internet for a while now, but those flows have always been managed, moderated, regulated by some vestige of authority.

Bitcoin’s about as friendly to this sort of regulation as the rest of the internet is — not very. To put it another way: Bitcoin’s a dollar bill, with a teleporter built in. We can just poke in a few coordinates and poof, off it goes, with the ease of posting to some forum somewhere. That’s somewhat new.

Great read.

Wearing a Badge, and a Video Camera

Randall Stross of NYT looks at the growing trend of police officers wearing tiny cameras to record all of their interactions with civilians. It may sound intimidating, but at least one study shows this is a very good thing:

THE Rialto study began in February 2012 and will run until this July. The results from the first 12 months are striking. Even with only half of the 54 uniformed patrol officers wearing cameras at any given time, the department over all had an 88 percent decline in the number of complaints filed against officers, compared with the 12 months before the study, to 3 from 24.

Rialto’s police officers also used force nearly 60 percent less often…

Part of this reminds me of Google Glass. Part of it reminds me of End of Watch. Also interesting: Taser makes these cameras — yes, that Taser.

[via @cdixon]