As one of the millions of people who reuses passwords, I found this xkcd utterly brilliant: I wonder if it would be possible to program a web search that looks for the frequency of use of the words ‘xkcd’ and ‘brilliant’, ‘wonderful’, ‘utterly brilliant’, ‘amazing’ and ‘WTF?’ The results I Read more…
Internet freedom has a new name, and it is BlackBerry. It is hard to know when it happened, but at some point in the last month the BlackBerry became the enemy number one of those countries with strong Internet filters. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will ban BlackBerries, Read more…
The Turkish Internet has been crippled in recent weeks due to an unprecedented conflict between the Turkish courts and Google. If you are not familiar with the background to this case, you will find some excellent write-ups in various places (such as this BBC summary). In short, Turkey passed a Read more…
This is a tour de force speech by Eben Moglen. He talks about privacy in the age of the cloud, and how we need to create new services and architectures that free data from the likes of Facebook and Google. The speech has perhaps the best assessment of Facebook I Read more…
This is a wonderful parody video about plans by European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström to introduce a website blocking system in Europe. I find it amusing that some people believe that widespread filtering is usually advocated as a solution to minority behaviour that, while abhorrent, does not justify putting in place Read more…
Thanks to yesterday’s post about Wikileaks, the BBC World Service invited me to their program “World Have Your Say“. If you are bored, you can find the program here as a podcast. I’m on after 30 minutes or so (note to self: eloquence is not your forte, stick to writing). Read more…
In case you have not seen it yet, Wikileaks has released a video of an American helicopter crew opening fire on a group of men in Iraq, and later firing on a van that was trying to retrieve the wounded. I have been debating with myself whether to embed the Read more…
Several press outlets have been giving ample coverage to ChatRoulette, an online video chat service that connects two random people. What seemed to be a great idea, quickly turned into a service for online voyeurs, public self-gratification and much public outrage. It also prompted one of the funniest Daily Show Read more…
The COMMUNIA project has published The Public Domain Manifesto. I reproduce the preamble: “Le livre, comme livre, appartient à l’auteur, mais comme pensée, il appartient—le mot n’est pas trop vaste—au genre humain. Toutes les intelligences y ont droit. Si l’un des deux droits, le droit de l’écrivain et le droit Read more…
As anticipated, Her Majesty the Queen has announced the implementation of measures against file-sharers, including notices and disconnection. The measures will be part of the Digital Economy Bill, which also proposes tougher classification for video games, and new powers to Ofcom regarding local news services. While the Bill’s text is Read more…