parker higgins

For some reason I’ve never been able to not see this.

Eric King recently posted a link to London’s Oyster Card FAQ page explaining Transport for London’s policy on requests for information from police — it rejects 5-10% of requests for providing insufficient information.

This post is cross-posted from the EFF Deeplinks blog.

I can’t believe six months has already passed, but I realized the other day that I’ve been running Iron Blogger SF for half a year now. A lot has happened: we’ve added a bunch of members and lost a few, too. We’ve had great meetups, gotten to know each other a bit better, and with a convention of the Global Iron Blogger Council this month,¹ we’ve even expanded the rules to establish reciprocity for members of different global chapters. Very nice.

Two articles that crossed my desk today described the difference between the two kinds of hackers. Howard Rheingold offered this distinction in his memoir of the WELL:

I’m not much for drawing, but I’m working on a set of minimalist representations of San Francisco icons for a project right now. I’ll post more about that project later. For now, here’s my rough take on the Golden Gate Bridge.

My written one-to-one communication patterns can be grouped into three major categories: longform, synchronous shortform, and asynchronous shortform. For the most part I use email, IMs, and SMS, respectively, for those purposes.

Bruce Schneier has a great cautionary quote about technology and its tendency to be subverted:

It can be hard to point a finger at exactly what is so offensive about the way the copyright lobby pushes its agenda. The rhetoric is sometimes charged, but I don’t think the problem lies in the moral foundation of intellectual monopolies (although some people certainly object to them on ethical grounds). I also don’t think it’s a fundamental business problem. Some have argued that nobody cares about content creators’ fixed costs, and that their fixation on that number is misguided, but I think that premise falls apart a bit at the margins: when fans feel a connection to a creator, they do care about her fixed costs, and want to help her make the record or book or film.