parker higgins

The incredible botmaster Darius Kazemi has a popular GitHub repository called “corpora“, which contains, well, collections of all kinds of things. It can be really handy to have access to a list of words that all fall into a certain group, and so Kazemi makes it available completely freely and with a CC0 waiver to place it in the public domain.

Over on Techdirt, I wrote a short piece about how uncertainty surrounding ridiculously long copyright terms is likely keeping newspapers from the 1920s onward out of major archives. We’re very likely in the midst of a sea change in journalism, but future generations may not be able to study what we’re producing and exploring as likely business shifts make the copyright question even thornier. From the article:

Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

I. You used to call me
A. on my cell phone
B. late night
C. when you need my love

I spoke last weekend at Wikicon USA about the several months I’ve spent learning about—and making more publicly available—the pomological watercolor collection I wrote about in these pages last April. The talk is now online, and is about 20 minutes (and a bit frenetic).

I’m a Firefox user, but I was very interested to read Chris Palmer’s guide to privacy and security settings in Chrome. One thing he did that really intrigued me was enabling Javascript only on secure sites. It ends up being a pretty good default not just because it prevents attacks that rely on Javascript injection—like the ads that Comcast and AT&T have inserted into pages accessed on their hotspots, or the massive man-on-the-side attack the government of China apparently conducted against Github—but also because a site going through the effort to authenticate itself is also a reasonable proxy for the kind of stuff I’d allow anyway.

The article I published about the (qualified) public domain victory in the Happy Birthday case this week was my 200th post on EFF’s blog Deeplinks, an event that—like the 100th post two years ago—calls for a little reflection. I’ve picked out some of my favorites in posts 101-200, below.

There was a major order in the Uber class action case today: the class was certified, which means that the suit can be on behalf of 160,000 drivers, instead of just the handful putting their names on the documents. Big deal!

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Born To Run, I decided to watch Cory Arcangel perform his classic Glockenspiel Addendum. He’s posted videos from a 2008 concert to YouTube, so it should be no problem, right?

Who says online users are a bunch of anti-social geeks?