According to leaked documents France's Ministry of Interior is considering two new proposals: a ban on free and shared Wi-Fi connections during a state of emergency, and measures to block Tor being used inside France.

The documents were seen by the French newspaper Le Monde. According to the paper, new bills could be presented to parliament as soon as January 2016. These proposals are presumably in response to the attacks in Paris last month where 130 people were murdered. — Ars Technica

Architectural photography is supposed to be different from the airbrushed images of nude women that are about to disappear from the centerfold of Playboy magazine. But what if an edited photograph of a building doesn't just crop out visual clutter like street lights but alters the contours of the building itself? What should we think about an architectural award that was bestowed on the basis of such a doctored image? — Blair Kamin | Chicago Tribune

In Detroit, there were 3,500 sales of single-family homes in 2014. Only 462 of them received a mortgage. That means that nearly 87 percent of sales were in cash — and that doesn’t include homes sold in foreclosure auction. Comparatively, the overall metro area saw only 53 percent in cash sales the same year. Nationwide, it was 43 percent.

“The number one issue that we, in the end, identified in Detroit is that it’s incredibly hard for homebuyers to get a mortgage right now,” say Svenja Gudell.. — Next City

[Elsie Owusu] alleged that the election [for Riba’s vice-president of practice and profession] was rigged in favour of a rival candidate, and in a complaint to Riba’s president, Jane Duncan, she claimed it was “tantamount to institutionalised racism in my view”. [...]

“The banter, discrimination and treating black people worse than other staff goes through architecture like a stick of rock. It’s absolutely disgraceful and it starts at the top with Riba." — theguardian.com

Mr. Adjaye’s public architecture often poses questions about the value systems historically associated with building types. [...]

His explorations into African textile patterns, tribal mythologies, the legacy of slavery and postcolonial modernism are far from predictable sources for architecture. [...]

...the collection of images provides a fascinating look at the transmogrification of European ideas into African shapes. — wsj.com

The short history of autonomous vehicles has already shown us that in a closed environmement, cars that drive themselves are pretty great...the problems only begin when you introduce them to real world, non-autonomous environments [...]

So Google's new patent makes sense: it contains some new idea on how the cars can communicate with pedestrians on the road as a kind of replacement for all the hand-waving and other non-mechanical signals used by drivers in road situations. — City Metric

NBBJ calls the concept No-Shadow Tower, though it would be more accurate to call it the Smaller-Shadow-From-One-of-Two-Towers, since it depends on a pair of buildings separated by an open space. For that reason, the technique is an awkward fit for New York — NY Magazine

Thanks to Big Data, it is now next to impossible to reside anonymously in a modern city.

Why?

Because data anonymization itself is almost impossible without using advanced cryptography. Our every transaction leaves a digital marker that can be mined by anyone with the right tools or enough determination. — Cities of the Future

“In the last 20 years, maybe 25 years, there’s a huge cultural shift in people that ultimately affects gyms,” said Bryan Dunkelberger, a founding principal of S3 Design, which has worked for clients like Equinox and the Sports Club/ LA. [...]

And the millennials, these are the special children. They expect all the amenities... Privacy, they expect.” [...]

“It’s funny, they’re more socially open with everything — Facebook, social media — yet more private in their personal space” — nytimes.com

Look closely and you might find that the two operations are connected: Bureaucracy turns out the statistical slurry, and architecture reconstitutes it into built form. And since the actual process of making architecture occupies the lower half, as it were, of this digestive cycle, it is generally held to be an ancillary thing, tedious and occult. — Ian Volner | Art Forum

Many urban planners think abundant parking goes hand in hand with LA's perpetual traffic woes, pollution, and lack of density. The perception that there will always be available parking leads drivers to neglect public transportation options, contributing to traffic, as well as to the increase in pollution caused by circling the block in search of a spot. Additionally, zoning codes obligate real estate developers to build a certain number of spaces with every project — la.curbed.com