What I Am Reading 3/4/2014

What's Gone Wrong With Democracy - The key to a healthier democracy, in short, is a narrower state—an idea that dates back to the American revolution. “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men”, Madison argued, “the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Hackers hijack 300,000-plus wireless routers, make malicious changes - Researchers said they have uncovered yet another mass compromise of home and small-office wireless routers, this one being used to make malicious configuration changes to more than 300,000 devices made by D-Link, Micronet, Tenda, TP-Link, and others.

Microsoft tries to get users off Windows XP with migration tools and warnings - Microsoft really wants Windows XP holdouts to upgrade before official support ends in a month's time, and it's providing some last-minute incentives to get those people moving forward. The company will soon let XP users download a free copy of Laplink's PCmover Express to migrate their data to newer Windows releases.

How the world came to hate Silicon Valley - With their displays of excess and arrogance, the tech industry's masters of the universe are now battling pickets, protests and bricks through the window.

Researchers Find That Twitter Can Locate HIV Outbreaks - This study provides the first set of evidence for how real-time social media data might be used for extracting, detecting, and remote monitoring of health-related attitudes and behaviors,” writes the UCLA team. “Results suggest the feasibility of using data from real-time social networking technologies to identify HIV risk-related communications, geographically map the location of those conversations.”