1
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 470 posts.
2
3
4
No More Fear
Here’s the country I want to be a citizen of: the one that decides to buy comfort and convenience by deploying courage.
5
1960s IT department
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
6
7
8
You Should Self-Publish
Your experience has been an inspiration to me, Joe, as I've noted on my own blog . I've always believed that self-publishing was the mark of permanent amateurism. Now, I've self-published my own book, Dead Furst . I've sold... next to nothing. But I'm obscure, and patient, and have a lovely Carl Graves cover. So…
9
Touching Your Junk: An Ontological Complaint
(I've redrawn it, because, seriously, who does a line diagram as JPEG? Original here .)
10
11
12
Emotional Rescue
To discount the emotional appeal of Apple’s products is to ignore the entire point of Apple’s products.
13
Putin Orders Russian Move to GNU/Linux
This looks huge: Глава правительства Владимир Путин подписал план перехода властных структур и федеральных бюджетников на свободное ПО. Сог...
14
What is Traitorware?
Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera's serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy...
15
Google Engineer bails out student in jail
The whole experience of what happens pre-trial was a real eye-opener. One of the things which I learned was that if one uses a bail bondsman in the US they require a 10% payment which they keep even if you do show up for court. That makes getting out of jail phenomenally expensive.
16
Who Writes Wikipedia?
Part 1: Wikimedia at the Crossroads Part 2: Who Writes Wikipedia? Part 3: Who Runs Wikipedia? Part 4: Making More Wikipedians Part 5: Making More Wikipedias Part 6: Code, and Other Laws
17
A Censorship-Resistant Web
Imagine someone put a document up at http://pentagonpapers.com/volumes/1.html that a) some people want to read and b) some people want to keep you from reading.
18
19
Schneier on Security: Recording the Police
I’ve written a lot on the “War on Photography,” where normal people are harassed as potential terrorists for taking pictures of things in public. This article is different; it’s about recording the police: Allison’s predicament is an extreme example of a growing and disturbing trend. As citizens increase their…
20
21
Android Developers Blog: It’s not “rooting”, it’s openness
News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.
22
Why Facebook never happened in the UK. The case of FitFinder.
Update: FitFinder has been Relaunched as Floxx with Doug Richards as an Investor. Good luck Rich! Back in April this year, I heard of a little UCL based startup (FitFinder) that was gaining ‘Facebookearlydayslike’ traction in some UK Universities. It was a location based public/flirting service. The founder pitch
23
24
Unhosted - Freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms
This website describes a technology, unhosted web apps, which we find so important that some of us quit our day jobs and other spend their evenings and weekends to work for the higher goal of free technology, not just as a job that pays the bill. Why do we work for free? Why are unhosted web apps so important? Why…
25
A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning
Chelsea Manning enlisted in the United States Army in 2007. Back then, she was known as Bradley Manning and struggled with gender identity disorder. This identity crisis made it difficult for Manning to fit into the military’s masculine and patriarchal environment. Throughout Manning’s career in the military, it was…
26
27
Governments shouldn’t have a monopoly on Internet governance
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
28
29
Security in 2020
There’s really no such thing as security in the abstract. Security can only be defined in relation to something else. You’re secure from something or against something. In the next 10 years, the traditional definition of IT security—that it protects you from hackers, criminals, and other bad guys—will undergo a…
30
Amazon Taking Down Erotica, Removing From Kindles
On December 9, 2010, I was contacted by CreateSpace (Amazon’s Print on Demand service) who publishes my print books. They informed me that m...