The following is a rundown of the day’s news drawn from other media sources with topics curated just for Money and Markets readers: Personal security and freedom, Obamacare and technology!
Personal security and freedom
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World of Spycraft: NSA and CIA Spied in Online Games
Online gaming is big business, attracting tens of millions of users worldwide who inhabit their digital worlds as make-believe characters. What the intelligence agencies feared, however, was that among these clans of elves and goblins, terrorists were lurking.
State Surveillance of Personal Data: What Is the Society We Wish to Protect?
Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common — optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance? Not that anybody asked us.
World’s Leading Authors: State Surveillance of Personal Data Is Theft
The signatories, who come from 81 different countries and include Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, Orhan Pamuk, Günter Grass and Arundhati Roy, say the capacity of intelligence agencies to spy on millions of people’s digital communications is turning everyone into potential suspects, with worrying implications for the way societies work.
How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter
If all you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life.
Protest Planned Against Last-Minute Bloomberg Push for Mandatory Flu Vaccines
“The Bloomberg administration is wildly exaggerating the benefit of the flu shot and we think they are wildly underestimating the risks involved with it,” said John Gilmore, the executive director of the Autism Action Network, speaking more broadly than the controversial claim that links vaccines to autism.
Obamacare
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Obamacare Could Force Thousands of Volunteer Fire Departments to Close
Since the Obamacare law doesn’t specifically carve out an exemption for them, fire departments where 50 or more people work — either as volunteers or officially as employees — are expected to provide health insurance for every one of them.
New York Times: Obamacare Is More Expensive Than Obama Claims
On Monday, the Times discovered that all this happy talk from Obama, Democrats and, well, The New York Times about “affordable” health care is just like the rest of Obamacare — not even close to the truth.
Mutliple State Exchanges Vulnerable to Wi-Fi Attack
Multiple state-run health-care exchanges are vulnerable to a type of Wi-Fi attack that can allow hackers to intercept usernames and passwords.
Can You Even Keep or Afford Your Medicine Under Obamacare?
First consumers found they couldn’t keep their existing health-insurance plans. Then they learned they couldn’t keep their doctors. Now it’s possible that under Obamacare, some won’t be able to keep their medications, or at least not afford them.
Colin Powell Pitches Single-Payer Health Care in U.S.
“We are a wealthy enough country with the capacity to make sure that every one of our fellow citizens has access to quality health care,” Powell said. “(Let’s show) the rest of the world what our democratic system is all about and how we take care of all of our citizens.”
Technology
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Curiosity Rover Zeroing In on Best Place to Hunt for Life on Mars
The latest results from the probe tell scientists that the site it’s exploring at Gale Crater was once an ancient and habitable lakebed on Mars. Moreover, the findings could point to the best places for scientists to find telltale organic molecules, if they exist.
Chinese Scientists Upbeat on Development of Invisibility Cloak
The technology would have obvious military uses such as developing stealth aircraft, but Beijing believes the research could lead to wider technological breakthroughs with broader uses.Â
Google Wants a Ban on Amazon’s Drones
“How would you feel,” Google Chairman Eric Schmidt asked in the Guardian last April, “if your neighbor went over and bought a commercial observation drone that they can launch from their back yard. It just flies over your house all day. How would you feel about it?”
Facebook Joins NYU in Artificial Intelligence Lab
Facebook unveiled plans Monday on a partnership with New York University for a new center for artificial intelligence, aimed at harnessing the huge social network’s massive trove of data.
Darpa’s Giant Folding Spy Satellite Will Dwarf All Other Space Telescopes
MOIRE stretches to 68 feet across once it reaches 22,000 miles above Earth. From orbit, MOIRE could view 40 percent of the earth’s surface at once while recording high-resolution images and video, making it the ultimate spying satellite.
Best wishes,
The Money and Markets Team
