Monthly Archives: January 2012

HOWTO: Transfer OTR private keys between Adium and Pidgin

posted on 30 January, 2012 with tags , , , , , ,

I recently re-installed Ubuntu on my home computer, and wanted to move my office Mac’s Adium OTR key and collected fingerprints over to the new install. I had some trouble, but got it eventually, so I wanted to document the process. The first step is to make sure you’ve got Pidgin and Pidgin-OTR installed on [...]

Twitter’s best-in-class censorship reveals weaknesses in centralized corporate communication channels

posted on 29 January, 2012 with tags , ,

Twitter made some waves this week when it announced a new feature — granular country-by-country censorship of Tweets. It was probably a tactical misstep to make this announcement in the wake of the anti-SOPA blackout protests, and initial reactions ran accordingly hot, but cooler heads have since, for the most part, prevailed. The reality is [...]

Paul Carr’s “Angry Nerds” piece is wrong about everything

posted on 29 January, 2012 with tags , , , ,

There is so much aggressively wrong with Paul Carr’s recent “Angry Nerds” piece that it is hard to know where to begin. To summarize: Carr is shocked to see that the very same tech community who rallied against SOPA and PIPA is now rallying behind 37 Signals in a case involving blatant design plagiarism — [...]

Will last week’s blackouts reframe the conversation on copyright policy?

posted on 22 January, 2012 with tags , , ,

This online blackouts last week were not only the largest in recent history, but in a narrow sense, they might be the most effective ever. Imagine: online protests and the resulting media coverage and legislator calls led to the shelving of two “sure thing” bills over the course of two days. But the protests shouldn’t [...]

Voluntary obsolescence: checking out of the upgrade cycle

posted on 15 January, 2012 with tags , , , , ,

This week I purchased a new cell phone. I’ve been using my current phone, an HTC Desire Z (dubbed the G2 by T-Mobile in the US), for a little over a year and it’s time for an upgrade. Or maybe it’s a sidegrade. Instead of buying the newest model on the market (or waiting for [...]

What’s bothering John Lilly about the SOPA discussion

posted on 7 January, 2012 with tags , ,

Over on his blog, John Lilly provides the best sort of analysis of the SOPA conversation — reasonable and measured. The problem with the “dialogue” so far, he says, is that (1) it has basically consisted of each side calling the other names, (2) which isn’t going to help now, and (3) will set a [...]

Announcing: Iron Blogger SF

posted on 4 January, 2012 with tags , , ,

The first week of the new year: time to make resolutions about the sort of person you want to be, and the sorts of behaviors you want to have. Go to the gym, blog more, that sort of thing. Of course, these promises don’t usually pan out on the strength of the resolution alone; you [...]