Yahoo Mail Hacked

Uh oh!  From the CBC:

Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers ha
ve been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday.

Yahoo didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the United States.

All the people who apparently do not care about widespread dragnet surveillance and backdoors installed in software and hardware at the behest of government spy agencies, apparently do not realize that these same "tools" can and will be used by anyone at all. 

FinCEN Issues Two Rulings on "Virtual Currency"

A press release from the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network:

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today published two administrative rulings, providing additional information on whether a person’s conduct related to convertible virtual currency brings them within the Bank Secrecy Act’s (BSA) definition of a money transmitter. The first ruling states that, to the extent a user creates or “mines” a convertible virtual currency solely for a user’s own purposes, the user is not a money transmitter under the BSA. The second states that a company purchasing and selling convertible virtual currency as an investment exclusively for the company’s benefit is not a money transmitter. The rulings further interpret FinCEN’s March 18, 2013 Guidance to address these business models.

The two rulings will certainly help clear things up for miners and Bitcoin startups. 

Clueless Judge Thinks Government Can Be Trusted

Here's a funny little tidbit from the ongoing court case surrounding the former Lavabit secure email service. An appeals court judge believes that the government can be trusted not to abuse its powers.  From Ars Technica:

In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after any communication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit's SSL keys, which could decrypt the traffic of all of Lavabit's users. Ladar Levison, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit's users.

The first report of the appeals argument from PC World suggests that while Levison may be a hero with privacy advocates, he's going to have a tougher time convincing the judges on the appeals court. The case was “blown out of proportion with all these contentions” of what the FBI would do with the SSL keys, said US Circuit Judge Paul Niemeyer. "There’s such a willingness to believe” that the keys will be misused and that "the government will spy on everyone,” he said.

Regulatory Hearings on Bitcoin Begin in NYC

From the NYT:

A hearing on the regulatory future of Bitcoin on Tuesday turned into a forum on the shortcomings of the traditional banking industry.  The hearing, called by New York State’s top financial regulator, Benjamin M. Lawsky, gave five Bitcoin advocates the chance to enumerate what they view as the advantages Bitcoin could provide over current systems of moving money around the world. 

“Solutions don’t really come from the current industry,” said Cameron Winklevoss, who, with his twin brother, Tyler, has invested in Bitcoin companies. They were early players in Facebook.  Even Mr. Lawsky got in some digs when he complained that it takes three days for his bank to transfer money to pay a credit card bill at the same bank.

When Mr. Lawsky asked about efforts by banks to create their own Bitcoin alternatives, Fred Wilson, a leading venture capitalist at Union Square Ventures, said “no one is going to build on top of JPMorgan Chase’s Bitcoin.”

Bitcoin Company Operator Arrested, Big Bank Money Launderers Continue to Walk Free

From Business Insider:

The CEO of BitInstant, a Bitcoin exchange, has been arrested at JFK airport and charged with money laundering.  Charlie Shrem, along with a co-conspirator, is accused of selling over $1 million in bitcoins to Silk Road users, who would then use them to buy drugs and other illicit items.

Meanwhile, global money laundering operations like those at HSBC skate by with a cost-of-doing-business fine and no arrests.  From Reuters:

U.S. regulators continue to find weaknesses in the way HSBC Holdings tries to prevent money laundering, according to people familiar with the matter, even after the British bank was forced to pay nearly $2 billion in penalties and invested millions in increasing its compliance.

Navy Experimenting with Virtual Reality

From the Daily Mail (yes, the Daily Mail, so try to avoid retching if possible):

The US Navy has given a glimpse into the future of war - and it has gone virtual.  In this stunning image researchers show off the first attempt at a virtual ship's command centre. Using the Oculus rift headset, it shows a soldier on a virtual ship.

However, the Navy has remained tight-lipped about its plans for virtual training. The project, codenamed Blueshark, it testing how technology can be used by the Navy in 2015. It's official description is: 'a mix of near-term and further out technologies. It is an ongoing conversation about what the future of collaboration will be like, and how technology can assist in that endeavor.'

Google Considering Bitcoin Integration or Not

Some mixed messages from Google regarding Bitcoin.  From Forbes:

Google’s Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra . . . Gundotra wrote [Malik] back. He also forwarded Malik’s query to another Google staffer and started a series of email exchanges that  led to one Googler telling Malik that the company is indeed pondering how it can make use of the world’s first form of decentralized digital cash.

“We are working in the payments team to figure out how to incorporate bitcoin into our plans,” wrote Google Senior VP of Ads and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy at one point in the email exchange that Malik forwarded to me. He promised to get back in touch “when we are a little more sure.”

However, the company told a slightly different story to Forbes:

I reached out to Google, and the company responded in a very different tone, but didn’t deny that the comments Malik posted to Reddit were real. “As we continue to work on Google Wallet, we’re grateful for a very wide range of suggestions,” a spokesperson writes. ”While we’re keen to actively engage with Wallet users to help inform and shape the product, there’s no change to our position: we have no current plans regarding Bitcoin.”

T-Mobile Takes on the Money Changers with Mobile Money

The so-called "underbanked" segments of the population will be well served by such a service.  Hopefully it and similar services will help to undermine the parasitic banking sector.  From Engaget:

T-Mobile's latest service seems to fit its 'UnCarrier' agenda perfectly, since it has little connection to wireless and doesn't actually require users to have the company's phone service. Called Mobile Money, the personal finance product combines a smartphone app (iOS or Android) with a branded prepaid Visa card. Without paying a single fee, T-Mobile wireless customers can deposit checks into their Mobile Money account by taking a picture of them with their smartphone, withdraw money from 42,000 in-network ATMs and reload the cards with cash at T-Mobile stores (non-T-Mobile customers would pay additional fees). There are also no maintenance fees, minimum balances or activation fees.

Use of Online Privacy and Anonymity Tools on the Rise

From the Guardian:

Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.

On these figures, Tor could be regularly used by as many as 45.13 million people. Its biggest userbase appears to be in Indonesia, where 21% of respondents said they used the tool, followed by 18% in Vietnam and 15% in India. 

Indonesia also has the world's highest penetration of general anonymity tools among its internet users, with 42% using proxy servers or virtual private networks known as VPNs, which disguise the location of the user's internet connection - their IP address - and therefore bypass regional blocks on certain content.

The US, UK, Germany and Ireland meanwhile all report 17% penetration, with Japan the lowest at 5%. The data includes those aged 16-64 for the last quarter of 2013.

NYT Profiles Ross Ulbricht

From the NYT:

Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the s
cience fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

The goal of the arrest, at 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the world’s largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2 billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD. 

50 Python Resources for Beginner and Intermediate Programmers

This is the third post in our recent series for beginning Python programmers.  In the first post, I detailed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers.  The second post then laid out learning benchmarks for the project on the basis of MIT's Introduction to Computer Science course.  Today's installment provides a categorized list of Python resources for beginner to intermediate programmers.  Add any others you've found helpful in the comments and I'll update the list.  Enjoy!

Textbooks
Think Python: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
The Art and Craft of Programming: Python Edition
A Byte of Python
Code Like a Pythonista: Idiomatic Python
Python Programming WikiBook
Python Style Guide
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Building Skills in Python: A Programmer's Introduction to Python

Tutorial Textbooks
Learn Python the Hard Way
Dive Into Python
Hacking Secret Ciphers with Python
Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
Making Games with Python and Pygame
A Beginner's Python Tutorial: Civilization IV

Intro Web Tutorials
Learn Python in Ten Minutes
Code Academy: Python Track
Python-Course: Intro to Python
Google Developers: Python Introduction
pGuides: Python
New Coder Python Tutorials
Tutorials Point: Python

Video
Python Video Index
43 Short, Targeted Intro Python Video Tutorials 
A Hands-on Introduction to Python for Beginning Programmers 
Python for Programmers: A Project-Based Tutorial
Google Developers' Python Class
Learn Python Through Public Data Hacking
Growing Python with Spreadsheets
Python for Hackers: Networkers Primer

Targeted Web Tutorials
How to Use the Reddit API in Python
Intro to Python Web Scraping
Python Network Programming
Sockets in Python: Into the World of Python Network Programming
Sockets Programming in Python
Python gnupg (GPG) Example

GUI Programming
An Introduction to Tkinter
Getting Started with wxPy
Creating an Application in Kivy 

Web Programming
Hacked Existence Full Django Website Tutorial Series
How to Tango with Django

Targeted Textbooks (Advanced)
Natural Language Processing with Python 
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in Python 

Reference
Python Standard Library
Python Package Index
Effbot Guide to the Python Standard Library
Python Module of the Week
Python Cheat Sheet (quick reference guide)
Ivan Idris' Almost a Hundred Python Resources

Projects and Sample Code
Karan's Python Mega Project List
Active State: Popular Python Recipes

Is Your Refrigerator Spying on You?

And here you thought you felt guilty because of what you were eating.  A press release from Proofpoint:

outsideperception.wordpress.com

Proofpoint, Inc, a leading security-as-a-service provider, has uncovered what may be the first proven Internet of Things (IoT)-based cyberattack involving conventional household "smart" appliances
. The global attack campaign involved more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks. As the number of such connected devices is expected to grow to more than four times the number of connected computers in the next few years according to media reports, proof of an IoT-based attack has significant security implications for device owners and Enterprise targets.

Children Easily Bypass UK's Internet Censorship Filters, Parents Still Incompetent

Why won't these children think of the children?! From the BBC:

Filters put in place by parents to stop children viewing inappropriate content are easily bypassed by the youngsters themselves, according to a nreport from regulator Ofcom.

It found that 18% of 12-15-year-olds know how to disable internet filters.
Almost half of children aged 12-15 know how to delete their browsing history and 29% can amend settings to mask their browser activity.   Some 83% of eight to 11 year-olds said they knew how to stay safe online. . . . 

According to the report, many parents feel their computing skills are far inferior to their children's.  Almost half (44%) of parents with children aged between eight and 11 say their child knows more about the internet than they do. That rises to 63% for parents of 12-15-year-olds.

In other words, hysterical helicopter parents and safety fetishists have succeeded only in preventing themselves and their technophobic peers from accessing "objectionable" content online.

Amazon Warehouse Workers to Vote on Unionization

From GigaOM:

A group of Amazon warehouse workers in Delaware will decide Wednesday on whether to create a union. The vote covers just a tiny sub-set of the retail giant’s workforce but has heavy symbolic significance at a time when Amazon faces ongoing criticism over its labor practices.

The vote comes after the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers filed a petition on December 6 on behalf of  30 equipment maintenance and repair technicians in Middletown, Delaware. If a majority of the workers vote in favor, it will be the first Amazon union shop in the U.S.

Firefox: Open Source Security Solutions to Internet Surveillance

From Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla:

Mozilla has one critical advantage over all other browser vendors. Our products are truly open source . . . As Anthony Jones from our New Zealand office pointed out the other month, security researchers can use this fact to verify the executable bits contained in the browsers Mozilla is distributing, by building Firefox from source and comparing the built bits with our official distribution . . .

To ensure that no one can inject undetected surveillance code into Firefox, security researchers and organizations should:

• regularly audit Mozilla source and verified builds by all effective means;
• establish automated systems to verify official Mozilla builds from source;
• raise an alert if the verified bits differ from official bits.

In the best case, we will establish such a verification system at a global scale, with participants from many different geographic regions and political and strategic interests and affiliations.

Security is never “done” — it is a process, not a final rest-state. No silver bullets. All methods have limits. However, open-source auditability cleanly beats the lack of ability to audit source vs. binary.

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

The Internet Strikes Back: Protest Mass Surveillance

From The Day We Fight Back:

In January 2012 we defeated the SOPA and PIPA censorship legislation with the largest Internet protest in history. A year ago this month one of that movement's leaders, Aaron Swartz, tragically passed away.

Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.
If Aaron were alive, he'd be on the front lines, fighting against a world in which governments observe, collect, and analyze our every digital action.

Now, on the eve of the anniversary of Aaron's passing, and in celebration of the win against SOPA and PIPA that he helped make possible, we are announcing a day of protest against mass surveillance, to take place this February 11th.

Press release:

A broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms will hold a worldwide day of activism in opposition to the NSA's mass spying regime on February 11th. Dubbed "The Day We Fight Back", the day of activism was announced on the eve of the anniversary of the tragic passing of activist and technologist Aaron Swartz. The protest is both in his honor and in celebration of the victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act two years ago this month, which he helped spur.

Participants including Access, Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Free Press, BoingBoing, Reddit, Mozilla, ThoughtWorks, and more to come, will join potentially millions of Internet users to pressure lawmakers to end mass surveillance -- of both Americans and the citizens of the whole world. . . . 

HOW INTERNET USERS CAN HELP:

1. Visit TheDayWeFightBack.org
2. Sign up to indicate that you'll participate and receive updates.
3. Sign up to install widgets on websites encouraging its visitors to fight back against surveillance. (These are being finalized in coming days.)
4. Use the social media tools on the site to announce your participation.
5. Develop memes, tools, websites, and do whatever else you can to participate -- and encourage others to do the same.

Stalkware App Can Use Facial Recognition Technology to ID Strangers

Make sure you have your masks and makeup handy if you want to keep your online profile separate from your person.  From CNET:

Soon your face could be your calling card. An upcoming app for Android, iOS, and Google Glass called NameTag will allow you to photograph strangers and find out who they are -- complete with social networking and online dating profiles.

Spot someone out and about that you want to identify, and you can capture their face using your device's camera. The app will send the photo wirelessly to NameTag's server, where it will compare the photo to millions of online records and return with a name, more photos, and social-media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, where the person (or their friends) might have publicly posted photos of themselves.

And, if you're interested in that person in a more-than-passing fashion, the app's creator -- FacialNetwork -- is working on technology that will allow scanning of profile pictures on online dating sites, such as Plenty of Fish, OKCupid, and Match.com.

Texas Republican Senate Candidate Accepts Bitcoin Donations

From NPR:

Stockman visits the NYC Bitcoin Center.

When Texas Rep. Steve Stockman announced recently that he'll accept donations in bitcoins, he raised some eyebrows. . . . Stockman appeared in a Dec. 31 expressing support for the virtual currency: "I really think digital money is more about freedom,Business Insider, he said his Senate campaign would show support by accepting Bitcoin donations.
" he said, adding that bitcoin is "a fixed amount of currency at a fixed rate, so very good for the markets." According to

Setting aside the question of Stockman's longshot candidacy, his announcement raised a question that has rarely been asked before: In political campaigns, what are bitcoins worth?

Car Hacking on the Rise

From Auto Express:

An increasing number of cars are at risk from computer hackers because of the advanced Internet enabled systems they offer – and the problem could be potentially life-threatening. That’s the warning from technology firm Harman at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Modern cars have a number of electronic control units (ECUs), which not only control infotainment services, but also the operation of the engine, transmission and safety features such as stability control and anti-lock brakes.

If someone can hack into the connectivity system, they then have access to all the car’s other ECUs because there is currently no physical or electronic barrier between them.

Lawsuit Alleges Facebook Privacy Violations

From PC World:

Facebook has been accused of intercepting private messages of its users to provide data to marketers, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California.

The social networking company scanned plaintiffs’ private messages containing URLs (uniform resource locators) and searched the website identified in the URL for “purposes including but not limited to data mining and user profiling,” according to the complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The company does not engage in the practice to facilitate the transmission of users’ communications via Facebook, but to enable it to mine user data and profit by sharing the data with third parties such as advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators, the complaint said.

Facebook is said to have violated the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy laws by its intentional interception of electronic communications.  The complaint cites third-party research to back its claim that Facebook is intercepting and scanning the content of private messages.

Torrent Search to Be Included in Ubuntu by Default

From Torrent Freak:

A new scope set to be included in Ubuntu by default will allow users of The Pirate Bay to conduct BitTorrent searches directly from Unity desktop. The tool’s creator informs TorrentFreak that while there is still work to be done, the aim of the scope – which is endorsed by Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth – is to embed Free Culture directly into the Ubuntu user experience.

In early December 2013 there was a nice announcement for Ubuntu users. Software developer David Callé revealed that a new torrent scope (search addon) for the Debian-based Linux OS was now available.

In the first instance Callé was skeptical about having the scope included in Ubuntu by default since it would inevitably turn up unlicensed content, something he feared would “generate a lot of FUD for Ubuntu.” However, Callé’s fears were quickly addressed by Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth.

Pirate Bay to Go P2P

From Torrent Freak:

The Pirate Bay’s PirateBrowser just hit 2.5 million downloads but the notorious torrent site has much bigger plans in store for the new year. The team behind the site is developing a new tool that doesn’t rely on domain names or server farms. Instead, users will serve as the P2P hosts of the sites, with the system running its own alternative DNS. Today, the Pirate Bay team shares some more details on the technology.

Benchmarks: Teach Yourself Python in Less than Four Months, Part II

In the first post of this series, I developed a self-study time table for beginner Python programmers, using MIT's free online Introduction to Computer Science course as my general guide.  The present article will look more closely at the MIT course to set up learning benchmarks on the basis of the course's problem sets and quizzes.  The next post in the series will provide links to related but alternative text and video resources available for free on the web.

Before jumping in though, let's take a step back for a moment.  MIT is consistently rated one of the top universities in the world for computer science and information systems.  It's courses are challenging, to say the least. But, more importantly for the current context, we should also keep in mind that its courses are geared toward students who are completing degrees in engineering, physics, biology, chemistry and the like. And this orientation is reflected in its Introduction to Computer Science class in the course's focus on scientific computing, and in the choice of topics emphasized in its problem sets and quizzes.

Working through the course on their own, many people may find this aspect of the course intimidating or uninteresting, or simply irrelevant to their own individual learning goals.  The next post in this series will therefore provide alternative resources to supplement the course materials that may prove of interest to people whose primary focus is not on scientific computing. 

In the previous post, I worked out a time table for completion of the course which began by assuming a person would devote 10 hours of work to this project every week, and  finish the course in 15 weeks.  (You can also consult that post for alternative time lines.)  That ten hour weekly work load was broken down in the following manner:

      • Watch the lectures (2 @ 50 mins): ~2 hours
      • Textbook and background reading: ~2 hours
      • Recitation/discussion video tutorial: ~1 hour
      • Homework problems and exercises: ~2 hours
      • Free study tutorials or reading: 1-2 hours
      • Free study independent projects: 1-2 hours

With that in mind, let's set up some learning benchmarks using the course's 3 quizzes as our primary guide, with the interstitial space filled in by its 12 problem sets.  To begin, let's note when the quizzes are scheduled and what topics they cover.  Then we'll have a general sense of how much work-time is necessary to grasp those topics.

Quizzes

Quiz #1 follows the 9th lecture in the course.  You can find its topic list here.  It covers:

• • Basic computer science terms and definitions: syntax, semantics, straight line vs. branching vs. looping programs etc.
• • Basic aspects of Python: values, types, expressions, statements, control-flow, functions, scope.
• • Basic algorithmic techniques: guess and check, linear, bisection, approximation, Newton's method.
• • Binary representation of numbers
• • Debugging protocols
• • Orders of growth  

Quiz #2 follows the 19th lecture in the course.  You can find its topic list here.  It covers:

• • Big O notation and orders of growth
• • Sort and search methods and algorithms
• • Python: values, types, (im)mutability, control flow, functions/methods, recursion, objects/classes, simulations
• • Basics of statistics: standard deviation, confidence, linear regression
• • Data abstraction, debugging

Quiz #3 is the course final, and follows the 26th lecture in the course.  You can find its topic list here.  It covers those topics found in the first and second quizzes, and it adds the following:

• • Call stacks, exceptions, polymorphism
• • Algorithms: divide and conquer, basing, orders of growth
• • Simulations
• • Basic statistics and computational models
• • Optimization strategies  

Problem Sets

The course also has 12 problem sets.  Here we'll simply note when each is due, and what it covers:

• 0) Due lecture 2: install python, set up IDLE, write a basic program to get user info, print out that info

• 1) Due lecture 4: simple debt calculator, bisection search

• 2) Due lecture 6: successive approximation and a word game, i.e. Newton's Method and Hangman

• 3) Due lecture 7: debugging, implementing two versions of game introduced in lecture

• 4) Due lecture 10: implementing a version of the Caesar Cipher

• 5) Due lecture 12: implementing an RSS feed filter

• 6) Due lecture 14: simulating a Roomba, using classes

• 7) Due lecture 16: simulating spread of disease and virus population

• 8) Due lecture 18: optimization, topic cont'd from previous assignment

• 9) Due lecture 20: schedule optimization

• 10) Due lecture 22: clustering to analyze census data

• 11) Due lecture 24: optimization, finding most direct route between two points

Note: Detailed information on each of the problem sets can be found on the page for the lecture when that problem set is due.  So, the information for problem set 0, which is assigned in lecture 1, is actually on the page for lecture 2. 

Benchmark Summary

Let's now cross-reference the quiz schedule with the problem set schedule, and estimate the number of hours necessary to complete those assignments on the basis of our time table above.  We see that:

• quiz #1 coincides with problem set #4 and lecture 10: ~ 40-50 hours of work
• quiz #2 coincides with problem set #9 and lecture 20: ~ 90-100 hours of work
• quiz #3 coincides with problem set #11 and lecture 26: ~ 150 hours of work

In the next post in this series, I will detail alternative text and video resources that can be used to supplement the materials offered in the MIT course.  

Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP

From Microsoft:

Microsoft has provided support for Windows XP for the past 11 years. But now the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources toward supporting more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences.

As a result, after April 8, 2014, technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available, including automatic updates that help protect your PC. Microsoft will also stop providing Microsoft Security Essentials for download on Windows XP on this date.

If you continue to use Windows XP after support ends, your computer will still work but it might become more vulnerable to security risks and viruses. Also, as more software and hardware manufacturers continue to optimize for more recent versions of Windows, you can expect to encounter greater numbers of apps and devices that do not work with Windows XP.

Falkvinge: 5 Predictions that Won't Shock the World

Over at Private Internet Access, Rick Falkvinge makes some fairly conservative predictions for the new year:

So here are my five predictions for privacy in 2014: Snowden will continue to shock those who understand what he’s saying, oldmedia will continue to not care, the average person hasn’t understood what’s going on and will continue to not understand, politicians will continue to pretend nothing happened, and laws enabling the mass surveillance won’t change or will go the wrong way, unless politicians lose their jobs over it.