GG Update - January 2, 2015

Some items of interest:

The random darknet shopper.  A bot with a budget to randomly purchase items on darknet sites.  It had a budget of $100 in bitcoins to spend every week.  Here's what it bought.  BTW, the law is fairly squishy on bots that break the law.   Here's a Hungarian passport it bought.  --> This is an automated way to grief a specific individual (CEO, Judge, etc.).





Nanodegrees.   An attempt by Udacity to unbundle education so that you can learn just what you need.   This would only be of value if going to college was about education.  It's not.  Innovation like this might be possible within new economic networks (likely tied together by blockchains to prevent spoofing/scams).


Swatting.  Is there an upside to the militarization of the US police system?  There is if you want to attack a person using something called swatting.  Swatting is a fake call to 911 that prompts the police to send SWAT to take down the target's address. Swatting has been around for a looong while but it's only recently become a national epidemic (we don't now how bad it is because the FBI doesn't track statistics on it = who could have guessed that?).  


Stampedes.   Crowds are more likely to turn deadly when trying to enter a venue than exit it.  Why?  One reason is that entry is often restricted to collect tickets/etc or control timing (think Walmart on black Friday).  Exit options are often more fluid and open.  Another reason is that crowds often surge forward when there's reason to believe they are missing an opportunity (as we saw in the Shanghai stampede on new years night that killed 36 people).   




....  Art vs. ISIS