11.30.15: Demystifying Cryptography, The Shame of Technology, & Subtlety Stinks

We all use encryption technology to keep our data and credit cards safe. ISIS does too - for communication and recruiting. The Obama Administration and some lawmakers want tech companies to provide access to encryption codes, but would making data more vulnerable make us safer? We’ll take a look into the complicated issue of encryption. Then, a tech researcher conducted a two-year study on how families maneuver the digital world and found that restricting screen time is unrealistic and counterproductive. An argument for why parents shouldn’t be ashamed of technology. 

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We all use encryption technology to keep our data and credit cards safe. ISIS does too - for communication and recruiting. The Obama Administration and some lawmakers want tech companies to provide access to encryption codes. But would making data more vulnerable make us safer? Rob Fleischman is Principal Engineer at Akamai Technologies and joined us to explain the complicated issue of encryption.

Take a moment and picture this quaint, family scene: a smiling toddler sits alongside a wide-eyed eight-year-old. Beside them, a dutiful teenage son is flanked by two loving parents: they are all gathered around a laptop. While that image may make some recoil, tech researcher Alexandra Samuel argues that it shouldn't. She conducted a two-year study on how families maneuver the digital world and discovered that restricting kids' screen time is not only unrealistic, but counterproductive. She wrote about her findings for The Atlantic: "Parents: Reject Technology Shame".

When you look up at the sky the last thing you probably think about is the law. But space is exactly where the next frontier of law is being played out. Kirsten JusewiczHaidle and Rebecca Sheir from the podcast Life of the Lawbring us the story.

You can listen to this segment again at PRX.org.

Ham-fisted, painfully obvious, a little too on-the-nose; whether written in The New Yorker or said at a dinner party, professional and arm-chair  critics have used these as shorthand to deride films, books, theatre productions, and TV series. Yes, when it comes to art-criticism, heavy-handedness is gauche, and subtlety reigns supreme. But should it?  Forrest Wickman is a senior editor at Slate and a writer for its culture blog, Brow Beat, where we found his latest article, "Against Subtlety: It Sucks."