Here is a talk from last O’Reilly Velocity conference.
Artur Bergman offers a candid insight into what goes on when you are under attack.

Do you expect to be able to generate admissible evidence from a face-to-face conversation?

From Whatsapp blog:

End-to-end encryption helps make communication via WhatsApp private – sort of like a face-to-face conversation.

Según informan en Reuters los operadores de Brasil han bloqueado Whatsapp durante 48h por orden de una Juez del Tribunal Estatal de Justicia de São Paulo. Al parecer se debe al incumplimiento de la empresa de Mountain View de reiteradas comisiones rogatorias en el seno de un asunto por tráfico de drogas.

Subyace al parecer también un conflicto con los operadores locales por la funcionalidad de llamadas de la aplicación. Por lo pronto parece que Telegram ha ganado 1,5M de usuarios en dos días.

No tengo presentes estadísticas al respecto de situaciones similares en España. Para blanqueo de capitales hay algunos porcentajes de cumplimiento en la Memoria de Información Estadística 2010-2012 de la Comisión de Prevención del Blanqueo de Capitales e Infracciones Monetarias (ver p39 de la memoria).

La muestra de la que dispongo para delitos más graves es muy reducida, pero en la investigación de delitos patrimoniales la respuesta (o la falta de ella) de muchos proveedores globales les llevaría al bloqueo más pronto que tarde de actuarse con esta contundencia.

This is a highly recommendable text from Mr. Ken White from Popehat in which he explains how Federal Prosecution works using the recent Silk Road raid as an example.

There’s no indication that the murder occurred or that the murderer was an undercover, so it may have been a scam by the purported murderer. The presence of the murder scheme in the New York complaint is entirely gratuitous to support holding Ulbricht without bail and make him look menacing, even though it may actually signify that a purported criminal mastermind was duped by fake murderers in two separate countries. Federal criminal justice is like that.

Mr White also delivered a very interesting IAmA at Reddit six months ago:

I think the federal guilty plea rate is in the 90-95% range, with the remainder being trials and the occasional dismissal or other resolution.

How bad is that? This is really, really bad, because this means the forces that may shape and influence laws are not applying. How will we know how facts are proven in court if the court is not hearing them?

Also on Aaron Swartz:

Third part: As a defense attorney, what’s frustrating is seeing so many smart people devoted to the idea that Swartz was singled out for unusually harsh or unfair treatment. He wasn’t. People get treated just as badly, or worse, by the federal system all the time with zero attention. And the federal system is like the motherfucking Ritz Carlton compared to the state system.

A Polynomial Time Algorithm for the Hamilton Circuit Problem
Xinwen Jiang
(Submitted on 26 May 2013)

In this paper, we introduce a so-called Multistage graph Simple Path (MSP) problem and show that the Hamilton Circuit (HC) problem can be polynomially reducible to the MSP problem. To solve the MSP problem, we propose a polynomial algorithm and prove its NP-completeness. Our result implies NP=P.

Subjects: Computational Complexity (cs.CC)
Cite as: arXiv:1305.5976 [cs.CC]
(or arXiv:1305.5976v1 [cs.CC] for this version)
Submission history
From: Xinwen Jiang [view email]
[v1] Sun, 26 May 2013 00:40:00 GMT (1363kb)

Paper.

So, P=NP or not?

We also need a creditable algorithm to tell us if the generated instance contains a simple path. Hence our testing system has three parts: the instance generator, the backtracking algorithm as a benchmark and Z-H algorithm. Until now, since 2010.10.06, more than 52 millions of instances have been generated randomly, each of which has 100 vertices. Some instances contain a simple path while others (it is the majority in all the generated instances) do not. All the results show that our polynomial time algorithm can get the same answer as the backtracking algorithm does. No exception.

Nice try guys, keep it up.

As some of you may remember, in January 2011 Puerto 80 S.L.U. got seized its domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org.

Yesterday August 29th, The Honorable Paul A. Crotty, District Judge at the Southern District of New York, ordered the warrants of seizure to be vacated and the domains returned.

Previously, the same day, the District Attorney Preet Bharara submitted a letter to advise the Court that “…as a result of certain recent judicial authority involving issues germane to the above-captioned action, and in light of the particular circumstances of this litigation, the Government now seeks to dismiss its amended forfeiture complaint.”

I guess the “certain recent judicial authority involving issues germane to the above-captioned action” are Flava Works, Inc. v. Gunter, — F.3d —-, 2012 WL 3124826 (7th Cir. Aug. 2, 2012) cited in a Notice of Supplemental Authority submitted to the court by the defendants last August 8th.

It literally says:

The court concluded that that the plaintiff was not likely to succeed on its claim that the “myVidster” website was liable for direct or contributory copyright infringement by hosting and embedding links to infringing copies of the plaintiff’s videos, which were not hosted by myVidster.

The Flava Works opinion supports the position that the seized domain names are neither committing, enabling or assisting infringement by engaging in the conduct alleged by the government in the Amended Complaint. The Seventh Circuit explained that because watching a streaming video is not infringement (any more than sneaking into a theater and watching a copyrighted movie is infringement), providing a link to where a streaming video is hosted does not encourage or assist infringement.

See also arstechnica and the full saga at techdirt.

image credits

See also BoingBoing

This assertion, however, went against something Bressler said earlier in testimony, which Samsung’s attorney Charles Verhoeven was quick to catch and point out to jurors: Bressler previously said that each and every detail is important in evaluating patents. Verhoeven continued to grill Bressler about the specific details of the Vibrant and other Samsung phones’ designs.

“You’re asking me to compare peanut butter to turkey,” Bressler told Verhoeven as he grew frustrated with the latter’s questions. Your guess is as good as ours as to whether Apple’s phones or Samsung’s are the peanut butter, or the turkey.

From Wired, arstechnica.

From BoingBoing, Xeni writes:

What’s interesting about this interview, in light of the «It’s a Girl Thing!» flap: Seltzer does think that image—the messages people get about what a computer engineer has to be like—makes a big difference in who decides they want to be a computer engineer. Which is basically the same idea «It’s a Girl Thing!» was trying (poorly) to address. Unfortunately, the EU video ended up being all image and no substance, and worse, it added to the image problem by telling people what girls are supposed to be like. (By that video’s definition, I am not a lady.)

«We didn’t think they [Google] were doing anything wrong,» Schwartz affirmed. He also attested that at no time during his tenure did Sun «consider APIs proprietary or protected». An Oracle attorney asked Schwartz if he had been fired by Oracle when the deal was completed in 2010. Ever quick on his feet, Schwartz replied that «They already had a CEO».

From theregister: Space-cadet Schwartz blows chunks out of Oracle’s Java suit.

See also.

And also @ the Vulture House: Google Street View Wi-Fi data slurper named. And Wired.