Recommended:
Law, Tech and Policy
How to Protect the Future Web From Its Founders’ Own Frailty (June 24, 2016) – Cory Doctorow. See also: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It (June 7, 2016) – New York Times, and The Fathers of the Internet Revolution Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web (June 13, 2016) – IEEE Spectrum
Open Access: All Human Knowledge is There—So Why Can’t Everybody Access It? (July 6, 2016) – Glyn Moody at ArsTechnica
Researchers Sue the Government Over Computer Hacking Law (CFAA) (June 29, 2016) – Kim Zetter in Wired; See the ACLU’s complaint (pdf available at the link; 47 pages) and the ACLU release
Section 1201 of the DMCA Cannot Pass Constitutional Scrutiny and Research and Remixes the Law Won’t Allow (July 21, 2016) – EFF; See also Statement on DMCA lawsuit by cryptographer and Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the complaint (pdf; 32 pages) in the lawsuit. Related: A Dozen Bad Ideas That Were Raised At The Copyright Office’s DMCA Roundtables (May 18, 2016) – TechDirt
Tech Companies Fight Back After Years of Being Deluged With Secret FBI Requests (June 21, 2016) – Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept
Why Notice-and-Takedown is a Bit of Copyright Law Worth Saving (June 21, 2016) – Los Angeles Times Op-Ed by law professors Chris Sprigman and Mark Lemley
At JustSecurity, a series of July posts on “secret law”: It’s Time to Come to Terms With Secret Law: Part I and Part II by Dakota S. Rudesill, and Secret Law, Targeting, and the Problem of Standards: A Response to Dakota Rudesill – Jonathan Hafetz
The Intriguing Legal Ramifications of Pokémon GO (July 25, 2016) – Bretterpstra.com; Also see The University of Washington Tech Policy Lab’s white paper – Augmented Reality, a Technology and Policy Primer (pdf at the link; 12 pages)
Mary Meeker’s 2016 Internet Trends Report
Reweaving the Web; A Slew of Startups is Trying to Decentralize the Online World (June 18, 2016) – The Economist
EU-related developments (other than Privacy Shield): Apple Joins Wide Array of Tech Companies in Fight to Kill EU’s ‘Cookie Law’ (July 6, 2016) – AppleInsider; European Union’s First Cybersecurity Law Gets Green Light (July 6, 2016) – Bloomberg; and The European Union is Updating its Electronic Signature Laws (June 30, 2016) – The Verge. See also the EU release on the new electronic signature laws.
MIT Researchers Unveil New Anonymity Scheme That Could Rival Tor – David Bisson at GrahamCluley.com
General Interest
Groundbreaking ‘Atomic Memory’ Could Cram Unimaginable Amounts of Data Into Your iPhone (July 19, 2016) – AppleInsider, and Atom Wranglers Create Rewritable Memory (July 18, 2016) – Nature; See the related academic paper: A Kilobyte Rewritable Atomic Memory (pay $ download at the link)
Quantum Computing: A Primer – Andreessen Horowitz video (28 minutes) at the link, plus a good list of further reading on quantum computing
Why Computer Vision Has Become a Major Investment Theme for Me (June 16, 2016) – VC Mark Suster, and The Voice UI has Gone Mainstream (June 6, 2016) – Ben Bajarin
My Time with Richard Feynman (July 11, 2016) – Stephen Wolfram
The Millions’ 2nd Half of 2016 Book Preview (fiction)