periegetes writes: This idea has been bugging me for a while. It takes months to organize a physical election, and several days to count the results, so it makes sense that we don't organize elections every day. However, with the computing resources at our disposal, it would be child's play to setup a site where every citizen could vote for (or against) proposed laws themselves, and could even change their vote at all times, cutting out the middle man and restoring true democracy to the world. That last part may be a stretch, but I, for one, would feel more involved in my government if I didn't have to watch it screw up for years before getting another say in it. I've found precious few articles discussing the matter, which usually means I'm missing an obvious problem. Why, in the age of Big Data and petaflops, don't we consider continuous voting?

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Peter "brokep" Sunde, co-founder of The Pirate Bay, has built a machine that makes 100 copies per second of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," storing them in /dev/null (which is of course, deleting them even as they're created). The machine, called a "Kopimashin," is cobbled together out of a Raspberry Pi, some hacky python that he doesn't want to show anyone, and an LCD screen that calculates a running tally of the damages he's inflicted upon the record industry through its use. The 8,000,000 copies it makes every day costs the record industry $10m/day in losses. At that rate, they'll be bankrupt in a few weeks at most.

An anonymous reader writes: U.S. authorities blocked a British Muslim family from boarding a plane at London's Gatwick airport. They were flying to Los Angeles on a trip to visit Disneyworld. "U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials provided no explanation for why the country refused to allow the family of 11 to board the plane, even though they had been granted travel authorization online ahead of their planned 15 December flight." This comes at a time when prominent groups and individuals within the U.S. are arguing in favor of blocking entrance for all Muslims. The refusal, and the U.S.'s unwillingness to explain, is raising concern within the UK government. The family is out $13,340 for their plane tickets.

Lasrick writes: The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists offers a pretty thorough run-down of the pros and cons of the Paris climate accords. William Sweet examines not only the political machinations behind the agreement but much of what the agreement entails and how it got there after 21 years of COP meetings. "As for the tighter 1.5-degree standard, this is a complicated issue that the Paris accords fudge a bit. The difference between impacts expected from a 1.5-degree world and a 2-degree world are not trivial. The Greenland ice sheet, for example, is expected to melt in its entirely in the 2-degree scenario, while in a 1.5-degree world the odds of a complete melt are only 70 percent... But at the same time the scientific consensus is that it would be virtually impossible to meet the 1.5-degree goal because on top of the 0.8–0.9 degrees of warming that already has occurred, another half-degree is already in the pipeline, 'hidden away in the oceans,' as Schellnhuber put it." In an additional audio recording of a teleconference briefing given to the Bulletin's Science and Security Board and other leading scientists and policy makers, Sivan Kartha and Richard Somerville (both on the S & S Board) explain what was accomplished (and not accomplished).

An anonymous reader writes: The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) has finally approved the new 451 status code for HTTP error messages involving web pages which have been repressed or removed for legal or political reasons. The initiative was proposed in 2013, and gained interest from various groups, such as Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects), who see the potential of the Bradbury-inspired code to help develop comprehensive indexes of censorship on the internet. Mark Nottingham, chair the IETF HTTP Working Group, says, "It'll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now."

PolygamousRanchKid writes with news that staffers for the Bernie Sanders campaign improperly viewed the voter data gathered by Hillary Clinton's campaign by exploiting a software error. "The discovery sparked alarm at the DNC, which promptly shut off the Sanders campaign's access to the strategically crucial list of likely Democratic voters. The DNC maintains the master list and rents it to national and state campaigns, which then add their own, proprietary information gathered by field workers and volunteers. Firewalls are supposed to prevent campaigns from viewing data gathered by their rivals." On Wednesday, while the software was being patched, it briefly opened access to all of the restricted voter data. The Sanders campaign fired the staffer responsible for viewing the data, Josh Uretsky. The campaign says their access was simply part of an investigation to determine their own exposure, and blames the vendor (and those who hired it) for improperly securing the data.

mdsolar writes with news that city officials in Woodland, North Carolina have taken issue with being ridiculed by the internet and want to set the record straight. According to the article: "Usually what happens in Woodland stays in Woodland, a town 115 miles east of Raleigh with one Dollar General store and one restaurant. But news of the Northampton County hamlet's moratorium on solar farms blew up on social media over the weekend after a local paper quoted a resident complaining to the Town Council that solar farms would take away sunshine from nearby vegetation. Another resident warned that solar panels would suck up energy from the sun. As outlandish as those claims seem, town officials say the Internet got it wrong."

New submitter h33t l4x0r writes: Presidential candidate Marco Rubio recently "fired off a letter (PDF) to the Federal Communications Commission asking the agency to allow states to block municipal broadband services." The municipal services offer cheaper, faster broadband alternatives to the large telecoms. Rubio's campaign has taken large donations from AT&T, and the article notes that other providers, "fearing competition, have used their influence in state government to make an end-run around local municipalities. Through surrogates like the American Legislative Exchange Council, the industry gets states to pass laws that ban municipal broadband networks, despite the obvious benefits to both the municipalities and their residents."

MarkWhittington writes: An argument about class warfare has broken out over the notion of a commercial Mars colony. It started when Elon Musk, who is said to be planning to retire on the Red Planet, mused that World War III could ruin his plans to settle Mars by destroying the Earth or at least damaging civilization sufficiently that space exploration has to be put off indefinitely, Newsweek, taking up the theme of another sort of planetary disaster, accused Musk and other space-minded billionaires of plotting to abandon the planet to the ravages of global warming while they go to Mars to live the good life.

Patrick O'Neill writes: Carly Fiorina wants the government to be able to "work around" encryption to aid intelligence agencies and law enforcement in their investigations, she said on Monday. The Republican presidential candidate and former HP CEO shifted the focus of her campaign to national security two days before the last Republican debate of 2015. Fiorina is the latest but not the first presidential candidate to weigh in on the encryption debate that has taken on a new life since terrorist attacks in Paris and California.

New submitter scrote-ma-hote writes: From stuff.co.nz, news comes that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is now able to solemnize marriages. The registration was listed in the NZ gazette yesterday. The Registrar-General decided that the Church met the criteria in New Zealand for solemnizing marriages, as per the Marriage Act 1955, namely that the "principal object of the organization was to uphold or promote religious beliefs, philosophical or humanitarian convictions."

An anonymous reader writes: New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is investigating ISP speed and service claims. He's asked consumers to help by testing their broadband speeds and reporting the findings. "New Yorkers should get the Internet speeds they pay for. Too many of us may be paying for one thing, and getting another," Schneiderman said. "By conducting these tests, consumers can uncover whether they are receiving the Internet speeds they have paid for."

An anonymous reader writes: On Saturday, world leaders completed an ambitious international agreement to address climate change. But when the officials received the first copy of what was supposed to be the final draft, a one-word mistake threatened to derail their progress. Part of the agreement involved language that encouraged wealthy nations to provide monetary aid to poorer nations in order to help transition to more sustainable systems. But the draft used the word "shall," which would have made it a legally-binding requirement. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry pushed back on the change, noting that previous versions of the document had used the word "should" instead. Officials tried to quickly figure out whether the swap had been made intentionally. Ultimately, they classified it as a typo, and hurriedly prepared a corrected version of the document, which was adopted without incident.

mdsolar writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: The citizens of Woodland, N.C. have spoken loud and clear: They don't want none of them highfalutin solar panels in their good town. They scare off the kids. "All the young people are going to move out," warned Bobby Mann, a local resident concerned about the future of his burg. Worse, Mann said, the solar panels would suck up all the energy from the Sun. Another resident -- a retired science teacher, no less -- expressed concern that a proposed solar farm would block photosynthesis, and prevent nearby plants from growing. Jane Mann then went on to add that there seemed to have been a lot of cancer deaths in the area, and that no one could tell her solar panels didn't cause cancer. "I want information," Mann said. "Enough is enough."

Lauren Weinstein says there are smart people in government, "who fully understand the technical realities of modern strong encryption systems and how backdoors would catastrophically weaken them," but asks So why do they continue to argue for these backdoor mechanisms, now more loudly than ever? The answer appears to be that they're lying to us. Or if lying seems like too strong a word, we could alternatively say they're being 'incredibly disingenuous' in their arguments. You don't need to be a computer scientist to follow the logic of how we reach this unfortunate and frankly disheartening determination regarding governments' invocation of terrorism as an excuse for demanding crypto backdoors for authorities' use.

theodp writes: The WSJ's Yoree Koh reports that computer science has been recognized as important an academic subject as math and English in the new Every Student Succeeds Act, putting it on equal footing with other subjects when state and local policymakers decide how to dole out federal funds. The law is likely to be a boon for tech companies, Koh adds, which constantly face a shortage of engineers to hire, and have backed Code.org to lobby for computer science teaching in schools. "This legislation will increase access to STEM and computer science learning nationwide and will advance some of the goals outlined in Microsoft's National Talent Strategy," said Microsoft in a blog post. "ESSA makes a number of significant improvements to expand access to computer science education by diverse populations in urban, suburban, and rural areas," explained the ACM. As far as CS and STEM goes, the bill calls for "increasing access for students through grade 12 who are members of groups underrepresented in such subject fields, such as female students, minority students, English learners, children with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students."

jones_supa writes: 195 countries have adopted the first global pact to fight climate change by reducing emissions. Countries will have to publish greenhouse gas reduction targets and revise them upward every 5 years, while striving to drive down their carbon output as soon as possible, under the ambitious climate-change pact announced Saturday morning at UN talks in Paris. The agreement commits countries to keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius and hopes to limit it to 1.5 C, with the goal of a carbon-neutral world sometime after 2050. The 31-page text called the Paris Agreement (PDF) was distributed to countries for them to assess, then agreed to at a plenary session.

HughPickens.com writes: CBS reports that hot on the heels of its campaign against ISIS, the shadowy hackers' collective known as Anonymous is going after a new target: Donald Trump. The latest Anonymous operation — #OpTrump — was announced in a YouTube video featuring a masked activist claiming to speak for the group. In a computer-generated voice, he takes aim at Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States, claiming "This is what ISIS wants." He goes on to say that "the more the United States appears to be targeting Muslims, not just radical Muslims," the more ISIS will be able to recruit sympathizers. The video concludes with Anonymous' now-familiar threat: "You have been warned, Mr. Donald Trump. We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. Expect us."

After a video message was posted, the website of Trump Tower in New York City went down for at least an hour. However the campaign has yet to have much success. Despite the group's apparent distributed-denial-of-service attack, which aimed to take down a web server by flooding it with fake traffic, the Trump Tower website was up and running by 11 a.m. and the alleged damage might not have been apparent, to visitors to the page, because a cached version of Trump's site was programmed to hold the fort in the event of an attack or maintenance issues.

blottsie writes with this story from The Daily Dot that the President met with encryption advocates on Thursday and is expected to make a statement on his official stance before the end of the year. From the story: "The Obama administration plans to clarify its stance on strong encryption before Washington shuts down for the holidays. Administration officials met Thursday with the civil-society groups behind a petition urging the White House to back strong, end-to-end encryption over the objections of some law-enforcement and intelligence professionals. Kevin Bankston, director of New America's Open Technology Institute and the coalition's organizer, told the Daily Dot that it was a 'very hopeful meeting.'"

Mike Godwin worked as the first staff counsel of the EFF and served as general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation. He has been a contributing editor of Reason magazine and was elected to the Open Source Initiative board in 2011. Mike is probably best known however for coining the internet adage Godwin's Law. He is currently general counsel and director of innovation policy at the R Street Institute. Mike has given us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question (and one comparison involving Nazis or Hitler) per post.