cryptography

Online porn and your privacy

The Pornhub announcement comes at an auspicious time. Congress this week affirmed the power of cable providers to sell user data, while as of a few weeks ago more than half the web had officially embraced HTTPS. Encryption doesn’t solve your ISP woes altogether—they’ll still know that you were on Pornhub—but it does make it much harder to know what exactly you’re looking at while you’re there.

Wired: The World’s Biggest Porn Site Goes All-In on Encryption »

EU to target encrypted apps

Last week, the UK’s Home Secretary Amber Rudd said that WhatsApp risked becoming a “place for terrorists to hide.” Then, like many others that have used this tired old trope, she went on to call for the development of some magic unicorn key to unlock all encrypted communications, one that was somehow available only to those on the side of truth, beauty, law and order, and not to the other lot. In doing so, her cluelessness was particularly evident, as her invocation of the “necessary hashtags” emphasized, but she’s not alone in that.

Porkins Policy Radio episode 85 The Truth Shall Make You Free with Aaron Franz

Good friend Aaron Franz joins me on the show this week to discuss our recent work in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology. We begin by talking about some of the behind the scenes aspects of the issue. I talk about the whole process of how the issue came into being from the initial offer from Clifford Cobb, getting all the writers together, and dealing with all the road bumps along the way. Aaron and I talk about the actual writing process and the challenges involved in writing for an academic journal.

Decrypt, or else…

Falkvinge:

An appeals court has denied the appeal of a person who is jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt files. The man has not been charged with anything, but was ordered to hand over the unencrypted contents on police assertion of what the contents were. When this can result in lifetime imprisonment under “contempt of court”, the United States has effectively outlawed file-level encryption – without even going through Congress.

(Partial) Hollywood Transhumanism: A Conversation with Jay Dyer

This is a partial clip from a full talk available at JaysAnalysis for paid subscribers. Dean Arnold invited me to speak at a private theater in Chattanooga, TN. The topic was my work, Esoteric Hollywood, film and propaganda, intelligence agencies and their role in film making, popular culture as social engineering and predictive programming in relation to transhumanism as a new mythology intended to dupe the public.