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This is a request to readers who may have contacts at Amazon, or work there. Amazon recently inexplicably raised the price for the Kindle version of my book Democracy and Political Ignorance from the initial $15.37 to 20.19, even though (judging by Amazon’s own rankings) the Kindle version was doing well at the initial price. […]

I trust that most of you remember the rather astonishing events of late 2011/early 2012, during which something resembling an Internet insurrection helped stop the Administration’s proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA) dead in its legislative tracks.  [I was pretty actively involved in the efforts, and blogged about the events on a number of occasions […]

An interesting episode from a new PBS special on the role of neuroscience in criminal law, featuring Nita Farahany. I tend to be skeptical about the usefulness of this sort of evidence, but it’s an interesting issue.

RIA Novosti reports: A “passionate argument” about 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, renowned for his treatises on ethics, “deteriorated into a fistfight” between two men waiting in line for beer during an outdoor City Day event in the southern Russian metropolis of Rostov-on-Don, police said Monday. The argument ended when one of the debaters pulled […]

Two straws in the wind for the Snowden flap: 1. When Silicon Valley corporate leaders are grilled over their view NSA by an outraged Michael Arrington, he uncovers a remarkably diverse set of views and ends up complaining, ”I’m not getting anyone to care so far on stage.” 2. When Joseph Menn of Reuters does a […]

Competitive parenting anxiety dreams.

According to the MIT Technology Review, a short-lived security flaw in the anonymousTor network allowed researchers to analyze and categorize the traffic that Tor was protecting.  The results weren’t pretty: The Tor network is an online service that allows users to surf the web anonymously. Its main benefit is to reduce the chances of network surveillance […]

I’ve been giving speeches lately on cyberespionage, the attribution revolution, and how it helps corporate boards and general counsels to think about the cybersecurity problem without trying to do the Chief Information Security Officer’s job.  Video of a recent speech is embedded below: Another version of this speech can be found here. And a somewhat […]

That’s RadicalCartography.Net, by Bill Rankin; click on “Projects.” What a lovely way to waste time!

Sometimes it is hard to know what one is supposed to do or say about a tragic event. Yesterday a manager of a Marriott hotel here in San Diego put out coffee and mini-muffins for half an hour in the morning, “in memory of those we lost on 9/11.” Somebody offended by this posted a […]

AP reports. Florida pastor was arrested Wednesday as he drove a pickup truck towing a large barbecue-style grill filled with kerosene-soaked Qurans to a park, where the pastor had said he was planning to burn 2,998 of the Muslim holy books — one for every victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Sheriff’s deputies […]

The GMU Law and Economics Center has just announced a slate of new programs for law professors.  This year the LEC will be doing special programs in “Risk, Injury, Liability, and Insurance,” “Public Choice Economics,” “Empirical Methods for Law Professors,” and, of course, the LEC’s traditional two-week summer seminar on “Economics for Law Professors” (to […]

For those who recall the initial proposal for the CFPB, one of the cornerstones of the agency’s agenda would be the power to provide preferential treatment for so-called “plain vanilla” financial products that lenders would be required to offer to consumers.  This proposal was a non-starter on Capitol Hill and was quickly dismissed from the […]