Continuations

A few days ago I wrote about my support of the defense fund for Barrett Brown. One of the reasons regulators and legislators seem to think we need such over the top draconian sentences is because we have the wrong security model for payments in particular and authentication more generally. Information will continue to leak – that is it’s nature. It should not be possible for me to transact in your account simply by having information on your account. Instead we need to broadly embrace two fac...

The question as to what should represent people online has has generated some mighty fine posts and comments recently. Here is a short list of people strongly supporting some form of pseudonymity or even anonymity: - Caterina Fake: Anonymity and Pseudonyms in Social Software - Andy Weissman: Everybody wants to be special here (in praise of pseudonymity) - Jyri Engeström: untitled G+ post - Chris Pool / moot: 4chan Creator Doubles Down on Web Anonymity with Canvas (via The Atlantic) - Jillian ...

It has been interesting to follow the recent spate of attacks on the systems of large companies including Apple and Facebook. The latest theory is that employees of the companies visited a site that used a zero-day Java exploit to gain access to computers. The site itself was apparently not aware of the malicious code being hosted there. At least some of this malicious activity seems to be connected to the Chinese military which has not surprisingly denied any involvement. All of this has hap...

A few times over the last couple of months I have been asked what government could do to help startups. I believe there are five different areas that could really make a difference. The first two are specific to the kind of startups that we invest in at Union Square Ventures, but the other three apply across the board. 1. Net Neutrality By this I mean a clear commitment to separating bandwidth, devices and applications. Once I have bought a certain chunk of bandwidth (whether wired or wireles...