How Americans are(n't) responding to the dangers of the Heartbleed bug; mobile politicking's unconquered territory; how some of Silicon Valley is embracing the "nerd prom"; and much, much more. Read More

Secure communication online is possible; it’s still just really hard. Take for instance secure chat tools. Jabber (aka XMPP) is a chat protocol that has been a part of facebook chat and gchat over the years, but although it features a number of extensions that allow for encryption, there’s no guarantee they’ll get used, or that users will even know they exist. A server experiment by Nick Merrill at the Calyx Institute hints that the secret to greater adoption might be a matter of employing a behavioral insight enunciated by noted technology scholars DEVO in 1980: freedom of choice is what you got, freedom from choice is what you want. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: How the NSA is breaking the Internet; a peek at the inside of the GOP's new Data Center; campaign contributions in bitcoin; and much, much more. Read More