Dishonest miners could conceivably gain control of Bitcoin, the distributed electronic currency, say two Cornell University computer scientists in a recently published paper. In an article titled Bitcoin is Broken, the problem is explained in layman’s terms. The problem the paper identifies is that a dishonest pool of miners could be more successful than the… Continue reading
Educational Project: People's Political Economy
People’s Political Economy Francisco Mello Castro: “The PPE propose is to Empower people from different communities to understand the political and economical fundamentals of the economic crisis through democratizing the discussion. By doing so, they allow people to better engage the problems Europe faces today, and t0 look for new solutions. They started study groups… Continue reading
The Failure of For-Profit Couchsurfing
Couchsurfing made a deal with the devil – venture capital money – and lost its base. It’s a lesson to any social network that aims to connect people in meaningful ways. Excerpted from Nithin Coca: “As a long-time Couchsurfer, I felt that once management put the values of venture capital funders over the organic, self-organized… Continue reading
The over-scaling of the neoliberal period dooms it to its demise
Excerpted from a talk by Natalia Fernández of lasindias.net: (we recommend reading the whole article) “What is optimal scale? The optimum size for the use of resources, starting with capital itself, that are used as means of production. Logically, scale is optimal for a particular market size and for a given technology. If markets do… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Collective Intelligence and Neutral Point of View in the Case of Wikipedia
Abstract An increasing number of organizations or communities today are harnessing the power of collective intelligence to tackle problems that are too big to be solved by themselves. While several prior studies have shown that collective intelligence can lead to high-quality output in the context of uncontroversial and verifiable information, it is unclear whether a… Continue reading
Yochai Benkler on the Role of New Media for 21th Cy Journalism
Excerpted from an interview conducted by the Harvard Law Record, on the occasion of Benkler’s role as witness in the Manning trial. The rest of the interview covers mostly surveillance issues. OTR: Could you discuss the role New Media plays in the 21st century and the future of Journalism? YB: I think a core feature… Continue reading
The Bank Guarantee That Bankrupted Ireland
Excerpted from Ellen Brown: The Irish have a long history of being tyrannized, exploited, and oppressed—from the forced conversion to Christianity in the Dark Ages, to slave trading of the natives in the 15th and 16th centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century “potato famine” that was really a holocaust. The British got Ireland’s food exports, while… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Democracy and the Commons
In today’s video Michel Bauwens interviews Marvin Brown and Smàri Mc Carthy buy cialis in australia The interview was produced by Alain Ambrosi, at the Economics and the Commons Conference which took place in Berlin from 22 to 24 May 2013. For more videos on the commons see http://www.remixthecommons.org/
Fred Breinersdorfer’s One-Stop Film License proposal
Extracted from Techdirt Interesting proposal by someone actually working within the content industry. Breinersdorfer suggests a license which would allow for authorised copies of films to be freely available on online platforms… as long the proceeds are shared with the content creators. As soon as the usual terms of protection for theatrical release after the… Continue reading
Educational Project: The School of Open
The School Of Open = “a community of volunteers from around the world passionate about peer learning, openness, and the intersection of the two”. “The School of Open is a community of volunteers focused on providing free education opportunities on the meaning, application, and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to… Continue reading