Tony Quiroga:

At roadside cafeterias in France, next to the napkins, cutlery, and plastic trays, are baskets of free dinner rolls. Hungry? Take as much as you want; bread is as free as air. We have to assume that this is a legacy of the French Revolution. No need to steal, Jean Valjean. The struggle is over. Everyone is equal and no one will go hungry. Put away the guillotine.

Parked outside the cafeteria is a 2015 Volkswagen GTI, the ­seventh generation of the hatchback that brought a taste of speed, in a dinner-roll-shaped package, to the common man. It’s not free bread, but it does represent a revolution. The super Golf was and remains the great egalitarian performance car, the first to so effectively combine power, economy, handling, practicality, and price. And, like all breakthrough ideas, it spawned imitators, all promising the same mix of virtues.

Volkswagen has not slacked off ?for its seventh GTI. A new ­platform called MQB is both lighter and stronger than before. At a glance, it does look a lot like its predecessor, but the metal is more tightly folded and the roof?is lower. Longer in wheelbase and overall length by 2.1 inches, the GTI is within an inch in other dimensions. There’s more space inside, and the interior décor, while familiar, is also completely updated.

Much more on the Focus ST and GTI, here.

Sally McGrane:

Marc Clemens, founder and chief executive of Sommelier Privé, an online wine service, gave up owning a car a year and a half ago. When he wants to drive to work in the morning, he checks his smartphone to see where a particular BMW, Smart car or Mini is parked and takes it.

Once he gets to his destination, Mr. Clemens parks the car on the street and forgets about it.

He relies exclusively on two car-sharing services, DriveNow and Car2Go. “I use this three to four times a day,” he said, as he dropped off a colleague in front of a wine bar in the German capital’s Mitte district on a recent Sunday evening. “To get to work, for business meetings, going out to a bar. I like it because it’s one-way.”

Car sharing has been around for decades in Europe and has caught on in the United States with Zipcar. These station-based car-sharing services require members to pick up vehicles from a particular place, which may or may not be convenient. Users usually need to reserve cars in advance for prearranged, prepaid blocks of time and, when they are done with the car, they have to return it to the same place — all factors that have limited car sharing’s attractiveness.

Berlin, though, has become the largest one-way, car-sharing city in the world. One-way or free-floating services, which recently started in the United States, use GPS and smartphone apps for far more flexible car sharing. Cars are parked on city streets, and users pick up cars parked nearest to them. Instead of bringing the car back to a lot, users leave it wherever they find parking near their destination. They are charged for the amount of time they spend driving.

Heidi Moore:

Bernanke has been brutally honest with the market, repeating his targets time and time again. And in return, the market has been brutally honest with Bernanke, with investors stomping out of the bond market at the slightest whisper of rising rates.

In both cases, neither side is dissembling or misleading the other. But there’s also a certain pain they hope to inflict on each other, hoping to manipulate the other side to come around to its own way of thinking. Bernanke wants the market to be prepared for the Federal Reserve to stop supporting its profits; the markets want Bernanke to know that investors will do anything to protect their profits, up to and including to hurting the wider economy.

No one’s lying, but no one’s being cautious, either. As the British Conservative politician Richard Needham once said, “people who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty”. That’s where the relationship between Bernanke and the stock markets stand.

Thomas Guignard:

In the wake of the disclosure of the National Security Agency’s mass digital surveillance program, a group of Austrian students have filed a series of formal complaints with a number of European data protection agencies. The case could become the first legal proceeding challenging disclosure of non-American data to the American government on the basis of alleged violations of European Union data protection law.

The students filing the complaints are all members of an advocacy organization called “Europe vs. Facebook,” which for over two years has been encouraging Facebook users worldwide to request copies of whatever data Facebook holds on each of them. Ars profiled this effort, and its leader, Max Schrems, in December 2012.

“[The goal of this effort] is to see if it is legal for a European Union company to forward data to the National Security Agency in bulk,” Schrems told Ars. “[and] to get more information, because they will have to disclose stuff in a preceding here. The US gag orders are not valid here. Both might be another puzzle piece for the good of mankind.”

Jakob Augstein:

Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that assumption into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.

On Tuesday, Barack Obama is coming to Germany. But who, really, will be visiting? He is the 44th president of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. He is an intelligent lawyer. And he is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

But is he a friend? The revelations brought to us by IT expert Edward Snowden have made certain what paranoid computer geeks and left-wing conspiracy theorists have long claimed: that we are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching.

Matthew Schofield:

Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.
“You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/26/195045/memories-of-stasi-color-germans.html#.Ucwg81W9LCR#storylink=cpy

Filip Molcan:

I live in The National Park Bohemian Switzerland in Czech Republic. In the last few years of my life I had spent almost one of it in USA. My relationship to this country where nearly everybody wants to live went through several stages:

1st visit “Superb nature, superb country, however those Americans are really a bit crazy.”

2nd visit “I want to live here!”

3rd visit “Everything has its pluses and minuses.”

I had seen more of USA than most of the Americans, I had visited Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Florida, California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming but most of my time I had spent in California, therefore I will relate all my conclusions to it. It is my own opinion formed from my own experience and conversations with locals. Sure enough the situation will be different in other states and you also will have different point of view.

What is my relationship to the United States then? Would I live there? What is great about it and what kind of things I don’t like?

Douglas Sternberg at Lumosity.com:

Economists and urban researchers tend to analyze the collective intelligence of cities based on socioeconomic variables like income and education levels. Last year, Lumosity published its first Smartest Cities rankings based on our own database of users’ performance on cognitive training exercises. Our 2012 rankings measured the cognitive performance of over a million people around the country. The 2013 rankings are based on data from nearly three times as many people, with over 3 million users included in the study. Given the larger scale, this year we introduce additional and more granular rankings, including Core-Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs, also known as Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas), Combined Statistical Areas, and the direct city and state output by the IP geolocation database, in addition to the Designated Marketing Areas used in the 2012 list. We have also made some adjustments to our methods that we hope will improve the validity and reliability of our results, and provide new lists separated by age group. This whitepaper provides information about the methods employed in creating the rankings, along with summary tables. Our data is also available in the form of an interactive map that makes it easy to explore how cognitive performance varies geographically across the United States. The full rankings for CBSAs are provided in the appendix of this document. If you are a researcher who is interested in using the complete set of aggregated scores and rankings for your own research and analysis, please contact us.

Margareta Pagano:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a dream. It’s this: he wants us to celebrate the restaurant owners, the taxi drivers, the market traders and carpenters and all the other risk-takers who put their skin in the game and who drive the economy for the rest of us.

“Let’s call it a National Entrepreneur Day,” declares the author of the best-selling The Black Swan, and have a day devoted to entrepreneurs, because they are the heroes who at times take suicidal risks for the mere survival of the economy: “Optionality makes things work and grow – the UK and the US have a fantastic history in risk-taking, in trial and error, without shame in failing and starting again. We need to recover that spirit.”

Indeed, if modern society is to progress, Taleb says we must honour the “ruined” risk-takers with as much respect as we do soldiers. Just as there is no such thing as a failed soldier – dead or alive, so there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur.

It’s a sweet dream and a great idea – No 10 are you reading – and just one of many secrets for success that Taleb sets out in his latest work, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, which is published in paperback next month. And after reading the book, which draws so much on his exotic Levant background, it’s no surprise that skin in the game is so vital to his radical world view. In Antifragile he tells the story of when he was a child and his father was stopped at a road check during the Lebanese civil war. His father refused to do as demanded and the militiaman got angry with him for being disrespectful. So he shot him in the back and the bullet stayed in his chest for the rest of his life.

Karl Koscher, Alexei Czeskis, Franziska Roesner, Shwetak Patel, and Tadayoshi Kohno

Modern automobiles are no longer mere mechanical devices; they are pervasively monitored and controlled by dozens of digital computers coordinated via internal vehicular networks. While this transformation has driven major advancements in efficiency and safety, it has also introduced a range of new potential risks. In this paper we experimentally evaluate these issues on a modern automobile and demonstrate the fragility of the underlying system structure. We demonstrate that an attacker who is able to infiltrate virtually any Electronic Control Unit (ECU) can leverage this ability to completely circumvent a broad array of safety-critical systems. Over a range of experiments, both in the lab and in road tests, we demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on. We find that it is possible to bypass rudimentary network security protections within the car, such as maliciously bridging between our car’s two internal subnets. We also present composite attacks that leverage individual weaknesses, including an attack that embeds malicious code in a car’s telematics unit and that will completely erase any evidence of its presence after a crash. Looking forward, we discuss the complex challenges in addressing these vulnerabilities while considering the existing automotive ecosystem.