Bits and Bytes

Today's Bits and Bytes starts out with an article about Bitcoin.  As the New York Times reports, Bitcoin is facing two challenges -- from regulators who want to bring the virtual currency under the umbrella of traditional market regulation and from hackers who disrupted one of the largest Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox.  The flaw was, apparently, not in the mathematics that create the currency but, as you would expect, a weakness at the exchange.  This seems a universal truth -- the weak spot will always be at the human/code interface. Meanwhile Citizen Lab in Canada has released a second report on Hacking Team.  Hacking Team markets an allegedly untreaceable surveillance software.  According to Citizen Lab they have traced the untraceable and now identify 21 countries that are using the software to monitor their own citizens: "We suspect that agencies of these 21 governments are current or former users of [the Hacking Team program]: Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, and Uzbekistan." Finally, I thought I'd shout out this interview with Nuala O'Connor, CDT's new President and CEO.  You will be particularly amused to learn that her twitter handle is @privacymama.