In the wake of the Paris terrorist shootings, David Cameron has said that he wants to ban encryption in the UK. Here's the quote: "If I am prime minister I will make sure that it is a comprehensive piece of legislation that does not allow terrorists safe space to communicate with each other."

This is similar to FBI director James Comey's remarks from last year. And it's equally stupid.

Cory Doctorow has a good essay on Cameron's proposal:

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

Building a smart home should be fun. You should be excited about how easily you can set the lights to turn on when you enter the house, and tell the thermostat to turn down when you leave for the day, and get the doors to automatically lock at the end of the night. These are all little things — and they've all been possible for years and years and years — but only this year are they starting to be things that a lot of people are actually going to want to learn how to do.

What finally changed? There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that the smart home, for now, is beginning to coalesce around controlled ecosystems that are guaranteed to work and are easy to jump into — two of which are made by Apple and Google.

The newcomer...

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