The U.S. and Britain have long considered themselves the standard-bearers for freedom of expression. Can this proud tradition survive the idea that ‘hurtful’ speech deserves no protection?

View endnotes. Share your story in the comments. For more coverage, check out our Living with Data series by Harvard Berkman fellow Sara Watson. Interested in print copies? Email us. Make your own web comics with AJAM’s free and open source library Pulp.

In the early morning hours of July 3, one of the two top commanders of Al Qaeda in Syria summoned me from my jail cell. For nearly two years, he had kept me locked in a series of prisons. That night, I was driven from a converted schoolroom outside the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, where I was being…

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I remember when I only had one password to remember, to access my university email account. It’s the first password I used regularly to access an Internet-enabled service, and it was easy to remember and use, because twenty years ago, there simply weren’t that many web services to create accounts…

Stanford historian aims to dispel Western misconceptions about The Arab Spring

Smartphone addiction? It’s hard to diagnose. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google Plus Share via Email More Options Resize Text Print Article Comments 1

You have viewed your allowance of free articles. If you wish to view more, click the button below. Printed from: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/59e6e6d6-5a49-11e4-8771-00144feab7de.html Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others. ©…

The hostages were taken out of their cell one by one. In a private room, their captors asked each of them three intimate questions, a standard technique used to obtain proof that a prisoner is still alive in a kidnapping negotiation. James Foley returned to the cell he shared with nearly two dozen…

From Thompson’s “Peak Google” post. I love Ben Thompson’s Stratechery site, so much in fact that I’m writing a response to his recent “Peak Google” post, even though these days most of us limit our bloggy commentary to the 140-character windows of Twitter. I’m responding to Thompson’s post for a…

When President Barack Obama spoke to the public in September about his decision to use American military force against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria he used familiar language. ISIS (or ISIL as the White House and others refer to the group), the president said, “is a terrorist organization,…

Under the Radar: NSA’s Efforts to Secure Private-Sector Telecommunications Infrastructure

Paul Krugman Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, has too much power, and it uses that power in ways that hurt America. O.K., I know that was kind of abrupt. But I wanted to get the central point out there right away, because discussions of Amazon tend, all too often, to get lost in side…

Here’s a little real talk about the book publishing industry — it adds almost no value, it is going to be wiped off the face of the earth soon, and writers and readers will be better off for it. The fundamental uselessness of book publishers is why I thought it was dumb of the Department of Justice…

Random musings, pictures and the occasional cat gif. I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer…

Despite the hype about disruption, the truth is most tech giants, particularly platform providers, are not so much displaced as they are eclipsed. IBM, for example, has been successfully selling and servicing mainframes for going on 50 years (although they are now in serious trouble (members-only)).…

'Violent' Muslims? 'Amoral' atheists? It's time to stop shouting and start talking to each other

The core platform this application appears to be designed on is Fiksu (http://www.fiksu.com). Fiksu’s describes themselves as a “user acquisition” company, focused on analytics, social tracking, advertising, incent, and interest mining. Per their “Social” product, their capabilities include…

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably gleaned how I feel about Gamergate. I’m not even going to attempt to summarize it—this covers it pretty well. When 4chan started banning every Gamergate-related thread from its videogame forum, the infuriated gamers fled to 8chan (aka ∞chan), a year-old…

An inquiry into one recent scandal reveals how kids think about sexting—and what parents and police should do about it. It was late on a school night, so Jennifer’s kids were already asleep when she got a phone call from a friend of her 15-year-old daughter, Jasmine. “Jasmine is on a Web page and…

Anurag Acharya is the key inventor of Google Scholar, but the real origin of the project lies in his college years at the Kharagpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology. The IIT is India’s version of MIT and Stanford combined, and has produced a long list of now-celebrated engineers and…

"Kurz vorher hatte ich einen Verlobten", sagt sie. "Aber alles, was mich interessierte, lag nicht auf seiner Linie. Er mochte nicht laufen. Ob er jemals Rad gefahren ist, weiß ich nicht. Und was er von Büchern hielt, auch nicht. Ich wollte lieber jemanden, mit dem ich meine Interessen teilen…

Einige erstaunliche Fähigkeiten bei der Internetüberwachung hat der BND, wie der Untersuchungsausschuss nun weiß. Beunruhigend ist die mangelnde Kontrolle des Dienstes. Empfangsanlage in der BND-Außenstelle in Bad Aibling nahe der Mangfall-Kaserne | © Stephan Jansen / dpa Der Bundesnachrichtendienst…

By Maurits Martijn, from De CorrespondentTranslated from Dutch by Jona MeijersIllustrations by Kristina Collantes In his backpack, Wouter Slotboom, 34, carries around a small black device, slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes, with an antenna on it. I meet Wouter by chance at a random cafe in…

“The sexts are currency,” explains Hanna Rosin. Teenage girls told Rosin boys collect the photos like “baseball cards or Pokemon cards.” iStockphoto hide caption In April, residents of Louisa County, Va., were shocked to learn of a sexting “ring” among the town’s teenagers. When Hanna Rosin asked…

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by Bruce Schneier CTO, Co3 Systems, Inc. schneier@schneier.com http://www.schneier.com A free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentaries on security: computer and otherwise. For back issues, or to subscribe, visit . You can read this issue on the web at . These same…

Over the weekend, a game developer in Boston named Brianna Wu fled her home after an online stalker vowed to rape and kill her. She isn’t the first woman who’s been forced into hiding by aggrieved video game fans associated with Gamergate, the self-styled reform movement that’s become difficult to…

My colleague, Bodo Möller, in collaboration with Thai Duong and Krzysztof Kotowicz (also Googlers), just posted details about a padding oracle attack against CBC-mode ciphers in SSLv3. This attack, called POODLE, is similar to the BEAST attack and also allows a network attacker to extract the…

Advanced persistent cybersecurity

Skip to main content Since 2011, billions of dollars of venture capital investment have poured into public education through private, for-profit technologies that promise to revolutionize education. Designed for the “21st century” classroom, these tools promise to remedy the many, many societal ills…

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courtesy Laura Poitras Six months before the world knew the National Security Agency’s most prolific leaker of secrets as Edward Joseph Snowden, Laura Poitras knew him as Citizenfour. For months, Poitras communicated with an unknown “senior government employee” under that pseudonym via encrypted…

A scenario from the closer-than-you-think future: It’s the end of a great, healthy day. You achieved a grueling pace on a 25-mile bike ride through the East Bay hills without your heart rate ever venturing into dangerous territory. You didn’t smoke, drank only one beer, chowed down on a kale salad…

Online advertising—the business that powers much of the internet—has a fundamental problem. And Facebook thinks it has a solution. Online ads were built on a beguiling promise: For the first time, advertisers would know exactly how many people saw their ads, how many bought something as a result,…

BERLIN — These days Germany is known for being many things: a leader in clean technology, a manufacturing powerhouse, Europe’s foreign policy center. But increasingly, it seems to have taken on yet another stereotype — as a nation of Luddites. And truth be told, Germany is not a great place to be a…

Skip to main content Trigger warning: Discussion of assault, rape, stalking and harassment. We consider visibility to be desirable. It is highly lucrative, much sought after. And yes, it is a huge asset in the careers and companies of many cishet white men. Visibility gets them jobs, raises, venture…