Robert Ambrogi, The 10 Most Important Legal Technology Developments of 2016
“I’ve come round to thinking that we might already be living through the first world cyberwar – it’s just that we haven’t acknowledged or named it yet
An interesting thread/tweetstorm on the hack
Bitcoin passes $1,000 but only number that matters is zero Financial Times
Etzioni, Amitai, COIN: A Study of Strategic Illusion (March 12, 2015). Small Wars & Insurgencies, 26:3, 345-376, 2015.. Available for download at SSRN:https://ssrn.com/abstract=2577457
“Has the United States military become a learning institution, one able to transition from relying on a conventional war model to fighting against irregular adversaries such as insurgents and terrorists? This paper examines the United States’ interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to respond to this question. It shows that there are two major ways for a military to fail to be a learning” institution: It may stick to its old dogma or — acquire a new one but one that is unrealistic. Those who saw counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine as the best way to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan made the US military into a learning organization but– taught it the wrong lesson. They failed to take into account the absence of the sociological conditions that make a post-conflict environment amenable to nation-building — which is an integral part of the main variants of counterinsurgency. The paper closes by outlining the foremost reasons the US military continues to be a poorly adaptive organization.”
This month, the Federal Reserve joined a long list of government institutions across the world in releasing its views on blockchain. This distributed ledger technology, which underpins the well-known and controversial bitcoin cryptocurrency, is essentially a recordkeeping system that can replace a periodically-updated central database—a design that underlies most financial systems used today—with a clever distributed database that updates in near real time.
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Yet regulators have struggled to strike a suitable posture in response to blockchain developments. On one hand, there is nothing yet to regulate, with no known commercial-scale financial blockchain applications. On the other hand, it is still unclear why or how regulation should change in anticipation of technological development.
We have glanced at the future: New York State To Motorists: All Your Info Are Belong To Us:
Beginning next month, all motorists who wish to travel through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel or Queens Midtown Tunnel in New York City will have no choice but to hand over their location data to the government. Previously it was possible volunteer this information by way of “EZ Pass,” which motorists can purchase and install in their vehicles. However, those who wished not to utilize “EZ Pass” had the option of paying the old fashioned way, by handing over U.S. currency to attendants.But now New York State is instituting a brand new “innovation” for these various crossings. No longer will there be any option available for those who’d prefer that the government not indiscriminately collect their data. As of January 2017, anyone traveling these bridges and tunnels will be forced forfeit their information by way of “scanning devices” which indiscriminately suck up the license plate information of every vehicle passing through.Thus decrees King Cuomo II: “Customers who do not pay their tolls are subject to $50 violation fees, car registration suspensions, and other enforcement actions.”