Washington Post

There's a huge threat looming over the way people's data are protected right now — and Google is testing out a way to guard against it. The threat is a still-experimental technology called quantum computing, and Google announced that it was taking the first step toward protecting user's browsing data against it. The search giant is testing out a Web encryption method called "New Hope," which is designed to help fend off potential quantum attacks for a small number of Chrome browser users when they connect to Google's servers.

The Defense Department is hosting a huge hacking competition in August to highlight vulnerabilities in the world’s growing network of “smart” devices — what is sometimes called the Internet of things. The contest, hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is designed to pit machine against machine in what DARPA calls the “world’s first automated network defense tournament.”

Smart televisions, wearable technologies and home appliances that can be connected to the Internet aren’t always designed with cybersecurity in mind. More important, critical connected infrastructure such as traffic lights, utility systems and power grids may be susceptible to cyberattacks, according to DARPA.To address these weaknesses, it may be necessary to automate the process of identifying and fixing software vulnerabilities, but the machines making the fixes must perform as well as human experts, DARPA officials said.

[Commentary] Open Internet advocates celebrated long and loud in June when a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s “net neutrality” rules that prohibit broadband-access providers from blocking websites or accepting payment to prioritize traffic. But consumers and businesses should look beneath the rhetoric to see larger dangers lurking in the FCC’s actions. The new limits and the uncertainty over how the agency will interpret them could seriously constrain future evolution of the Internet. But the bigger danger comes less in the rules themselves than in how the FCC finally got them past the courts.

To overcome explicit congressional limits on Internet regulation, and at the insistence of the White House, the FCC began this time by “reclassifying” broadband access as a public utility. The commercial Internet has become crucial in virtually everything from business and employment to civic engagement and social interaction. But there is a world of difference between essential services and public utilities. Food, clothing and shelter are also essential, yet none of them are regulated as public utilities. That legal designation, codified in the late 19th-century Progressive Era, has always been limited to a small class of basic infrastructure, such as electricity, gas and water, which shared unique economic features, including a need for universal availability and extremely high financial barriers for potential competitors. For the Internet, regulation as a public utility represents a dangerously poor fit.

[Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy]

Facebook hoped that the raw immediacy of live-streaming might help coax its users to share more about their personal lives. On July 6, a woman in the passenger seat of the car where Philando Castile lay dying, shot in the arm by a Minnesota cop during a traffic stop, used Facebook Live to show the world the shooting’s gory aftermath.

hen Facebook introduced Facebook Live, it was likely anticipating safe viral moments like Chewbacca Mom or the Buzzfeed watermelon explosion. Instead, Facebook found that livestreaming is a lot more than that. Like real life, livestreaming can have a light side and a dark side. It also has a long history of use as a powerful medium for accountability. This is what Diamond Reynolds did on July 6. Reynolds’s video disappeared from Facebook the night of July 6, before reappearing with a warning that it showed “graphic” imagery. Facebook later said that the video was temporarily taken down because of a “technical glitch” without explaining further. But the sudden loss of access raises questions about whether Facebook is ready to judge which raw, visceral moments that its users broadcast may stay on the site, and which will go. As Facebook’s users continue to stream their varieties of experience through Live, the company is going to have to make decisions about which of these the world can – or can’t – see, particularly when those experiences contain both graphic imagery and vitally important information. Reynolds’s stream is an example of this, and of its power: it transformed how the story of Castile’s death – and her grieving of his death – is told. Her perspective from inside that car became that of her viewers, and she relied on no one else to tell it.

By now, everyone's aware that Donald Trump wandered off message June 5 and told an audience in Raleigh (NC) that Saddam Hussein, for all his sins, "killed terrorists." So what was different about June 5? Hillary Clinton's campaign said it was different. In Politico, we learn that Trump's Hussein praise "finally caught up with him" because "Hillary Clinton's campaign tore into his latest comments." NBC News notes that Trump said this at a rally with Sen Bob Corker (R-TN), which could lead to a clash and some awkward questions; otherwise, the only new thing is that "Hillary Clinton's campaign seized the opportunity to once more paint Trump as unfit for office." And so on.

The story is not that Trump argued that the United States would be better off if a dictator had been allowed to stay in power in Iraq; the story is that things are different now, because the presumptive Democratic nominee is whacking him for saying it. By consistently covering Trump's argument over time, and by following up on it, media outlets did their job to inform voters. That was why June 5's collective Captain Renault moment was so strange, and so demonstrative of why many media consumers are skeptical of what they're hearing. Instead of a debate on the facts -- should Hussein have been removed? Did he "kill terrorists," in a contradiction of what Americans were told before the war? -- there was manufactured outrage, straight from a rival campaign.

[Commentary] The Ninth Circuit has handed down United States v. Nosal (“Nosal II“), a case on the scope of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The court held 2-1 that former employees of a company who had their company accounts revoked violated the CFAA when they subsequently used the passwords of a current employee, with the current employee’s permission, to access the company’s computers. I think that the majority’s result is right on its facts but that its analysis is less helpful than it could be. This post explains my thinking, and it then explains the likely importance of the Ninth Circuit’s still-pending case in Facebook v. Power Ventures.

[Orin Kerr is the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at The George Washington University Law School]

FBI Director James Comey said that his agency will not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private e-mail server as Secretary of State, but called Clinton and her staff “extremely careless” in handling sensitive data.

Director Comey said the FBI investigations into thousands of e-mails by Clinton determined that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.” The findings now go to the Justice Department. The announcement — which came only about 72 hours after FBI agents interviewed Clinton — in some ways lifts the cloud that has been hanging over Clinton’s presidential campaign for months. But it will almost certainly spark criticism that the outcome of the high-profile probe was a foregone conclusion, influenced heavily by political considerations. Director Comey said Justice Department prosecutors also must make a final determination, though he was unequivocal in stating his view. “We are expressing our view to Justice that no charges are appropriate in this case,” he said.

[Commentary] The New York Times has endorsed Tim Wu, the progressive candidate for New York lieutenant governor, in its editorial pages. The endorsement is a sign that technology, long relegated to the fringes of political discussion, has finally become a dinner-table issue and the basis for a viable campaign platform.

As the Web keeps taking over ever larger chunks of the economy, the policies that govern it have become increasingly relevant to the average consumer. Large, public debates like the one involving SOPA and PIPA, or cellphone unlocking, or net neutrality, have a direct effect on what Americans can do with their connected devices and the services layered on top of them. And that's made tech a hot-button issue.

Microsoft, getting a jump on the fall political season, took out full-page ads in the Outer Banks Sentinel, Martha's Vineyard Times and Rehoboth Beach's Cape Gazette to remind Washingtonians on vacation about e-mail privacy laws.

The ads are part of an ongoing campaign by Microsoft to convince lawmakers to reform the laws. Microsoft and other tech firms are also calling on Congress to debate these issues and settle the matter with legislation, rather than leaving it up to the courts to decide.

A kill switch allows a smartphone user to remotely wipe the contents of their phones and make them unusable in case they get stolen.

So what could change about your phone if it gets a kill switch? Possibly not that much.

In fact, many smartphone owners already have the capability. Between Apple and Samsung apps, at least 68 percent of US smartphones already have something akin to the "kill switch" capability.

And that number is only expected to grow: Google and Microsoft have also announced plans to put these kinds of features in their Android and Windows Phone systems. Doing so would essentially offer the option to all smartphone buyers, regardless of what state laws require.