Abby Shulman, Author at JusticeHub Innovation Lab

Trans-Pacific Partnership steeped in controversy

February 5, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Economy, Government, Trade

Nearly half of the world’s GDP teeters on the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 622-page document between the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries. Opponents consider it “the dirtiest trade deal you’ve never heard of” due to the secrecy surrounding the negotiations. The 11 other countries included in the deal include Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam.

Negotiations that started in 2010 were kept fully secret until a 2013 Wikileaks release of the document’s chapter on Intellectual Property Rights. The leak exposed what was to come in terms of copyrighting, digital rights management (DRM) and torrenting—the downloading and sharing of large files. Copyright infringement would be met with “criminal procedures and penalties… of sufficient severity to provide a deterrent” for further offenses.

The US Electronics Frontiers Foundation commented on TPP, saying,“We have to do everything we can to stop this agreement from getting signed, ratified, and put into force.”

The agreement was completed in October 2015, but each of the 12 countries needs to pass the contract in their respective countries. On the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s website, the TPP is advertised as “leveling the playing field for American workers and American businesses.”

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) writes the rules for global trade—rules that will help increase Made-in-America exports, grow the American economy, support well-paying American jobs, and strengthen the American middle class,” the website writes.

Article via CNET, February 6, 2016

Photo: Eimskip Ship via Corey Templeton [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Bitcoin is alive and well, many argue

January 31, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Collaborative Economy, Tech

Mike Hearn’s recent declaration that Bitcoin is a failed experiment has been met with staunch opposition from many of the currency’s key developers. Hearn has been accused of hyperbolizing the situation because he personally disagreed with decisions made by other developers; many have also said that he is guilty of self-promotion for his new company R3CEV.

Throughout its years of operation, Bitcoin has alternately been considered the future of money and a wasted project. Hearn is the current voice behind the dissolution of Bitcoin, causing those like BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen to tweet about Hearn’s farewell essay, “That was one whiny ragequit. He’s epically wrong on almost all technical points.” Greg Slepak published a point-by-point refutation of Hearn’s blog post; Sam Patterson similarly refuted a Washington Post article written from a pro-Hearn perspective.

The main controversy about Bitcoin’s demise stems from an original debate about block size. Blocks are virtual files that transaction data is permanently stored in, assembled in a linear sequence to form a “block chain.” The most recent block contains a very difficult mathematical puzzle that requires a correct answer in order to add a new block to the chain, thereby “unlocking” new Bitcoins. Currently, there’s a size limitation to the blocks, which limits the currency’s overall capacity.

Hearn and two others want to split the block chain in two, a move colloquially called the “hard fork,” whereas the other key developers have a different plan, alternatively titled “the roadmap.” The root of the issue, however, is more than technical jargon. Bitcoin is divided because it’s unclear as to who should govern the system. Hearn said that the virtual currency was “meant to be a new, decentralized form of money.” Yet without any centralization, Bitcoin remains a feud between opinionated elite software developers. Which out any form of governance, Bitcoin loses its opportunities at progress.

Then there are those who believe that without Hearn, a feud no longer exists. Mike Komaransky, an employee of the Bitcoin firm Cumberland Mining, tweeted, “Bitcoin Hearn Paradox- With him, consensus is hard to reach, [bitcoin] suffers. [Without] him, consensus is easy to reach, bitcoin prospers. he can’t win.”

Article via TechCrunch, 23 January 2016

Photo: Bitcoin by CoinDesk [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Bitcoin declared a failure

January 28, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Collaborative Economy, Economy

Two years ago, British software developer Mike Hearn quit his job at Google so that he could dedicate himself to developing the new online currency, Bitcoin. The currency’s value and prevalence has fluctuated considerably these past two years, but it suffered perhaps its largest blow yet on Jan. 14: Hearn announced Bitcoin to be a failure and admitted that he had sold his entire collection of Bitcoins. The value of the currency fell 10 percent within a day.

In the blog post he wrote about the failure of the system, Hearn wrote, “Bitcoin has gone from being a transparent and open community to one that is dominated by rampant censorship and attacks on bitcoiners by other bitcoiners.”

Yet the need for an effective virtual currency is still great. Venezuelan citizens grapple with hyperinflation that devalues the paper money they own and makes buying simple products at the supermarket nearly impossible. Migrant workers sending money to families in Mexico, India and Africa lose 5 to 12 percent of their earned salary to money-transfer companies. Even in the United States, citizens lose 1 to 2.5 percent in each transaction with a credit-card company.

Bitcoin failed largely because it was unregulated. Criminals and drug users exploited the anonymous nature of the currency; venture capitalists invested millions in Bitcoin start-ups that were forced to navigate the changing value of the currency. Above all, Bitcoin was dominated by an elite few, and therefore it lost its egalitarian potential to help people in countries suffering from hyperinflation or working far from home.

“It (Bitcoin) has failed because the community has failed. What was meant to be a new, decentralized form of money that lacked ‘systemically important institutions’ and ‘too big to fail’ has become something even worse: a system completely controlled by just a handful of people,” said Hearn on his blog post.

Article via The Washington Post, 19 January 2016; The New York Times, 14 January 2016

Photo: Bitcoin by Tiger Pixel [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Top 1 percent own more than the other 99 percent

January 22, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Economy, Human Rights, Tech

Oxfam International, a coalition of 17 organizations dedicated to reducing world poverty, just released its newest report on global income inequality. Fittingly titled “An Economy for the 1%,” the report states that the globe’s top 1 percent of earners now own more than the other 99 percent altogether. Moreover, the 62 richest people in the world own as much as 50 percent of the planet’s population.

Since the year 2000, income inequality has skyrocketed. The bottom 50 percent of the population have experienced a decrease in wealth of 41 percent—over a trillion dollars—and the top 1 percent has accumulated half of the total increase in global wealth since 2000. This occurs even as new technologies are brought to developing countries in order to improve their economies and help individuals.

The largest share of blame, according to the report, should be dealt to wealthy individuals who circumvent taxes through the use of consultants and offshore accounts. However, the increase in income inequality is also partially due to improvements in technology that increase capital gains.

“One of the key trends underlying this huge concentration of wealth and incomes is the increasing return to capital versus labor. In almost all rich countries and in most developing countries, the share of national income going to workers has been falling,” said the report. “This means workers are capturing less and less of the gains from growth.”

This issue is augmented by modern intellectual property laws, which drive out competitors and increase prices. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, spent over $228 million in 2014 on lobbying campaigns.

World Economic Forum Founder Klaus Schwab talked about the “fourth industrial revolution” that has resulted from the developments of new technologies. “Those who are entrepreneurs, who have talents, will push innovation—will gain from the revolution—and those who are on the other side, particularly in service positions, will lose,” he said.

From another perspective, this means that entrepreneurs in developing countries have a newfound shot at success. Half as many people lived below the extreme poverty line in 2010 than in 1990. According to the Oxfam report, however, the number of people living in extreme poverty “still remains unacceptably high.”

Article via The Washington Post, 21 January 2016

Photo: Boss by Santiago S.V. [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Nuclear facilities unprotected against cyber attacks

January 16, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Cybercrime, Government, Security

A new report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative found that twenty countries with either nuclear weapon materials or power plants “do not even have basic requirements to protect nuclear facilities from cyber attacks.”

The report draws relevance from a recent cyber attack that caused a power outage in Ukraine—the first blackout ever induced by hackers. The event created international concern about the industrial sector’s susceptibility to cyber attacks.

According to Page Stoutland, NTI’s vice president for scientific and technical affairs, countries with developed nuclear programs have established safeguards against hackings whereas nations with burgeoning programs have greater gaps in their regulatory policies. “What we have observed is what I call enormous unevenness on the global stage to address this issue,” he said.

The United States, for example, takes several precautions to keep nuclear power plants secure. Plant systems are disconnected from the Internet and specialized hardware separates business computer systems from nuclear operation computer systems to prevent hackers from infiltrating operations through the Web.

“Nothing suggests that a cyber attack executed through the Internet could cause a nuclear reactor to malfunction and breach containment,” stated a 2015 report by the Department of Homeland Security.

Other groups disagree. According to a 2013 CNN report, command and control systems of nuclear power plants could be navigated online. Moreover, a 2015 report by the London-based think tank Chatham House stated that there was an “element of denial” among nuclear power plant operators about the likelihood of cyber attacks.

“Often, nuclear facilities will have undocumented connections to the internet” that hackers can use to infiltrate nuclear systems, said Chatham House.

Article via The Washington Post, 15 January 2016

Photo: Central nuclear de Trillo by Tonymadrid Photography [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]