Friday, March 10, 2017

Pressing Blog Storytelling: Sharing Caring Traders

McKinsey – Book Excerpt – March 2017  -“The shift continues from the manufacturing economy of the industrial age to the digital economy of the information age, US national-security organizations need to transform as well ...

Dangerous backdoor exploit found on popular IoT devices TechRadar 


Fraud detection system with 93% failure rate gets IT companies sued



We went through 8,000 documents so you don't have to:








In a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists and computer scientists trained an algorithm to predict whether defendants were a flight risk from their rap sheet and court records using data from hundreds of thousands of cases in New York City. When tested on over a hundred thousand more cases that it hadn’t seen before, the algorithm proved better at predicting ...How to Upgrade Judges with Machine Learning MIT Technology Review 



Cauffman, Caroline and Smits, Jan M., The Sharing Economy and the Law: Food for European Lawyers (2016). Maastricht Journal of European and Comparative Law 23 (2016), pp. 903-907. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2925779

“Over the last five years, the sharing economy has enjoyed a real boom. One important example of this is the creation of numerous internet platforms that have made it easier for businesses and citizens to offer goods and services to the public. While the rise of platforms allowing for the sale of goods by commercial parties was openly embraced by society, the rise of platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, allowing non-professionals to offer services, has given rise to quite some social and legal consternation. This brief contribution discusses approach of the European Union towards the sharing economy, including the European Commission’s 2016 Communication on the ‘European agenda for the collaborative economy’.” 


 64% of investigative journalists say Feds spying on their email, calls, online searches. More here: “Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists. Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.”

Robert McCrum at the British newspaper the Guardianoffers his pick of Mark Twain’s Life On the Mississippi for number 56 in the 100 best nonfiction books.



When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.”



Here is the unmistakable voice of America’s greatest and most original, prose writer describing the childhood that would inspire his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Mark Twain (for it is he) goes on:



“When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had the hope that, if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn, but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”



Life on the Mississippi is not just the brilliant sketch that precedes the vaster and more colourful canvas of a celebrated novel, it expresses the heart and soul of Samuel Clemens, the alter ego of Mark Twain. Alongside The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872), this tour de force of unreliable reportage, spliced with travel, history and memoir, provides a deep insight into Huckleberry Finn as well as a key to its author and his outrageous originality. As his most recent biographer, Ron Powers, has put it: “Twain’s way of seeing and hearing things changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things. He was the Lincoln of American literature.”





"What Press Freedom Means When You Can Just Press 'Tweet'": Law professorNoah Feldman has this essay online today at Bloomberg View

"When Politics Becomes Existential": Today at the "Election Law Blog," Richard Pildes has a post that begins, "Judge Laurence H. Silberman has been a respected conservative judge for more than 30 years on the D.C. Circuit and has extensive executive branch experience as well."

"Court sides with gun blogger who posted officials' contact info": Bob Egelko of The San Francisco Chronicle has an article that begins, "In a victory for gun advocates, a federal judge said Monday that California appears to have violated freedom of speech with a law allowing public officials -- including legislators who voted for gun-control laws -- to prevent online posting of their addresses and phone numbers."
And Don Thompson of The Associated Press reports that "Judge blocks California law protecting officials' privacy."

"A Constitutional Right to Facebook and Twitter? Supreme Court Weighs In." Adam Liptak of The New York Times hasthis report.
Robert Barnes of The Washington Post reports that "Law to keep sex offenders off social media may be struck down."



On this evening's broadcast of NPR's "All Things Considered," Nina Totenberg had an audio segment titled "Supreme Court Considers Whether N.C. Law Violates First Amendment."