Today, the UK government has published a report on digital privacy supporting the compulsory mass collection of data for both domestic and “extra-territorial” web traffic. The government tasked David Anderson, an independent UK lawyer, to investigate how the country's anti-terrorism and espionage laws work in practice and what needs to change. The report titled A Question of Trust supports the bulk collection of internet traffic and user data, including information held on servers outside of the UK. An excerpt reads: “Pending a longer-term and more satisfactory solution, the extraterritorial effect in DRIPA s4 should be maintained.” The “extra-territorial effect” is …

MaidSafe founder David Irvine asked the U.S. government in June 2014 to create and enforce a monopoly on his behalf. On January 1 of this year, the U.S. government agreed to do so. The monopolistic grab goes by another name, too: patent. The following computing process is what Irvine now claims he owns: “A method of storing data from a first node on a peer-to-peer network. The method includes creating a public and private key pair for a data item. The method also includes determining a hash value for the public key and assigning the hash value as a user …

Well, almost everything. Joining the ranks of Ethereum and MaidSafe as hopefuls to decentralize the software part of the Internet, Nxt has at least one leg-up over either of those protocols: it’s already been launched. To get an idea of what the Nxt team wants to offer, check out this interactive technology tree. Using the brand NxtInside, the team hopes that software developers will choose to build future product and service offerings on top of the Nxt protocol. A seal of NxtInside is meant tell the customer “what’s under the hood”—that the digital underpinning of the app is open-source and …

The development team at MaidSafe, a protocol to decentralize the Internet, is turning to the community in search of an official design for the network’s “engine oil,” Safecoin. The winner, whose design will be picked by company employees and members in the MaidSafe forums, will win 5,000 Safecoins and a cash award of US$700. Designers are to enter their submissions for the cryptocoin’s logo on the site 99 Designs. The basic groundwork for MaidSafe actually began in 2002, long before the first blockchain-based currency Bitcoin was released. MaidSafe’s concept creator, David Irvine, was seeking a way to run the Internet …