Monthly Archives: September 2010

James Grimmelmann and Paul Ohm have published “Dr. Generative Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the iPhone,” a spot-on review of Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet that fills in some practical blanks left by the original.

Malcom Gladwell’s New Yorker piece about his skepticism of social media’s role in social change has brought out the heavyweights, and in the past few days there’s been some really great writing about the idea. Anil Dash, in particular, raises the point that the actions of the Maker community are actually political, even though it [...]

Stories like the discovery of Bing Crosby’s copy of the previously lost Game 7 of the 1960 World Series are fun, and not totally uncommon. Earlier this year the National Jazz Museum acquired the Savory Collection of about 1,000 discs of radio broadcasts of jazz greats that had been recorded from radio broadcasts by an [...]

William Safire’s 1994 response to the Clipper chip works as a smart and poignant response to the Obama administration’s reported proposal to weaken encryption so “secure” communications can be wiretapped. The Safire piece is too good and too short to excerpt. The story of the “crypto wars” and the Clipper chip in the 80s and [...]

Hey Twitter: Give us our Tweets A call for tweet data older than what is available on the site. It's nice to make the call, and it's great if Twitter listens, but unless you own your own data or have some control over the services you use, you're beholden to a corporation to make decisions [...]

BBC News – Stuxnet worm 'targeted high-value Iranian assets' Stuxnet is the craziest malware since Conficker, and if you believe the hype, it's way crazier. Four hitherto unseen Windows zero-days and it targets PLCs! Some researchers are suggesting it was built by a nation-state level entity to target Iran's nuclear power plants, but Schneier in [...]

Alex Payne — The Very Last Thing I'll Write About Twitter Some very smart thoughts on #newtwitter and decentralization by Alex Payne, who should know. I think it's a bit silly to refer to general micro-blogging as "lower case 't' tweeting", but I understand it and actually think it might be the most intuitive conceptualization [...]

KNIFE TRICKS: 10 Brief Responses To 700 Comments About Refusing To Answer Questions At Passport Control These are 10 really smart and well-reasoned responses to criticisms levied against this US citizen who refused to answer questions upon re-entering the country. Surprisingly effective in communicating what initially seems like an obnoxiously hard-line position. (tags: america government [...]

Neo-Minimalism and the Rise of the Technomads – Boing Boing Good introduction to the concept of technomadism and the new minimalism. I'm not sure if these things merit -isms, but I do agree that I need to have less stuff. (tags: technology travel minimalism nomad stuff seanbonner boingboing) The Secret Lives of Big Pharma's 'Thought [...]

Several months ago, I decided that the most responsible relationship to have with Facebook was none at all. I deactivated my account.  After a rocky five years of ups and downs, I just couldn’t take their arcane and irresponsible positions on privacy. But now, as so often happens after a sudden break-up like ours, “it’s [...]