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Brogan BamBrogan has jumped back into the race to transform transportation. The engineer, who left Hyperloop One amid a wild legal battle last summer, has launched his own effort to build a network of tubes and pods to fling people about the planet at near-supersonic speeds. It’s called Arrivo (Italian for “arrived”), and it plans to put you—or at least your stuff—in a working hyperloop in just three years.

As CEO, BamBrogan (yes, that’s his legal name) says the new Los Angeles–based company has lined up funding and is in talks to produce hyperloop systems for a variety of clients. Without revealing where those projects are, he says he plans to start by moving cargo, a good way to prove the system works and iron out the kinks without killing anybody, all while bringing in some revenue.

BamBrogan is a respected engineer who spent years at SpaceX before cofounding Hyperloop One with venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar in 2014. In July, he and three coworkers sued the company, alleging shenanigans like breach of fiduciary duty, violating labor laws, wrongful termination, and infliction of emotional distress. Hyperloop One countersued, accusing BamBrogan et al. of an attempted mutiny. In November, the aggrieved parties reached a confidential settlement and dropped the suits, which involved details like an overpaid fiancée, drunken shouting, a nightclub bouncer, and … um … a noose.

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The French Polynesian government, earlier this year, officially signed an agreement with The Seasteading Institute to cooperate on creating legal framework to allow for the development of The Floating Island Project. The legislation will give the Floating Island Project it’s own “special governing framework” creating an “innovative special economic zone”.

French Polynesia signs agreement for Floating Island Project

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Hmmm; maybe it also that folks are tired of dealing with the patent process that is extremely costly by the time your patent is approved; not to mention the time to push things through.


Litigation and prosecutions that rely on patents (failure to resolve disputes, e.g. by sharing ideas, out of court) is down very sharply, in part because firms that make nothing at all (just threaten and/or litigate) have been sinking after much-needed reform.

The past half a decade saw gradual improvement in assessment of patents in the United States, but there is a growing threat and pressure from the patent microcosm to restore patent maximalism and chaos.

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It seems the dark web is now making it easier for disgruntled employees to take their revenge to the next level, we learn from the KrebsOnSecurity article, “Rise of Darknet Stokes Fear of the Insider.” The article cites Gartner analyst Avivah Litan; she reports a steep increase in calls from clients concerned about vindictive employees, current or former, who might expose sensitive information on the dark web. Not surprisingly, companies with a lot of intellectual property at stake are already working with law-enforcement or private security firms to guard against the threat.

How, exactly, is the dark web making worker retaliation easier than ever before? Writer Brian Krebs explains:

Noam Jolles, a senior intelligence expert at Diskin Advanced Technologies, studies darknet communities. I interviewed her last year in ‘Bidding for Breaches,’ a story about a secretive darknet forum called Enigma where members could be hired to launch targeted phishing attacks at companies. Some Enigma members routinely solicited bids regarding names of people at targeted corporations that could serve as insiders, as well as lists of people who might be susceptible to being recruited or extorted.

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The article does bring up many of the same points that many have raised with self driving cars; and folks still don’t seem to understand that we have thousands if not millions of laws in the US alone that must be reviewed and possibly changed to address this technology on the roads. When you look at every state, each county, and each town or city’s laws around driving on their roads; it could be a long and painful period for companies and consumers before the legal side of things catch up.


Self-driving car technology is not yet ready for prime time. Driver assist is.

The Legal challenges and potential liability are immense.

How to play the hype.

Currently, self-driving cars are the rage in technology circles. We do believe that, in certain environments, they could work well (such as closed-loop environments, i.e., a mining operation or a shuttle service on a closed track at an airport). But like other fads (Google glasses, nano tech, 3D TVs), we think self-driving cars will take more time to mature than many realize due to their inherent legal issues and safety concerns.

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Friedman argues that man is actually a fairly adaptable creature. The problem is that our capacity to adapt is being outpaced by a “supernova,” built from three ever faster things: technology, the market and climate change.

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10–15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations; but what good is that when technology becomes obsolete every five to seven years? The supernova is making a joke of both patent law and education. Governments, companies and individuals are all struggling to keep up.


Friedman’s main cause for optimism is based on a trip back to St. Louis Park, the Minneapolis suburb where he grew up. This is perhaps the most elegiac, memorable part of the book — a piece of sustained reportage that ranks alongside “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” Friedman’s masterly first book about the Middle East. He points out that the same communal virtues that made Minnesota work when he was young have survived — and are still useful. But somehow, the passages that lingered with this reader were the ones about the good old days that have disappeared — when baseball used to be a sport that everybody could afford to watch, when local boys like the young Friedman could caddy at the United States Open, when everybody in Friedman’s town went to public schools.

So you don’t finish this book thinking everything is going to be O.K. for the unhappy West — that “you can dance in a hurricane.” There is no easy pill to swallow, and most of the ones being proffered by the extremists are poison. But after your session with Dr. Friedman, you have a much better idea of the forces that are upending your world, how they work together — and what people, companies and governments can do to prosper. You do have a coherent narrative — an honest, cohesive explanation for why the world is the way it is, without miracle cures or scapegoats. And that is why everybody should hope this book does very well indeed.

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Nice article raising old concerns and debates on ethics. Synbio like any technology or science can in the wrong hands be used to do anything destructive. Placing standards and laws on such technologies truly does get the law abiding researchers, labs and companies aligned and sadly restricted. However, it does not prevent an ISIS, or the black market, or any other criminal with money from trying to meet an intended goal. So, I do caution folks to at least step back assess and think before imposing a bunch of restrictions and laws on a technology that prevents it from helping those in need v. criminals who never follow ethics or the law.


When artists use synthetic biology, are they playing God, or just playing with cool new toys? Scientists Drew Endy and Christina Agapakis weigh in on the ethics.

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Hmmm.


Technological and human rights implications for the world

China adopted the highly controversial cyber security law on 7th November 2016. The legislation which will take effect in June 2017 was passed by its largely rubber – stamp parliament emphasizing the ‘objective need’ of China as a major internet power. The stated objective of the law is to counter the growing threats such as hacking and terrorism. Overseas critics of the law are not amused as it has already triggered concerns among foreign business and rights groups that the law threatens to shut foreign technology companies out of various sectors which China deems as ‘critical’. The legislation also incorporates contentious requirements for security reviews and for data to be stored on servers in China.

China recognizes that cyberspace profoundly impacts many aspects of national security; it is a national space; a space for military action, important economic action, criminal action and for espionage. So it controls Internet through the world’s most sophisticated online censorship mechanism infamously known outside China as the Great Firewall. The human rights advocates contend that the law will further tighten restrictions on Internet which is already stifled by highly regulated governmental control. The legislation was in drawing board stage for long. Beijing released the draft Cyber Security Law in July 2015 to make all key network infrastructure and information systems ‘secure and controllable’.

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