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On Anonymity
Yesterday I encountered a blog whose comment section wasn’t linked up with Facebook or Disqus. It was just a pure email/display name system from years past – one where no one had any interest in tracking your activity across the entire interwebs. Putting in a display name that maybe wasn’t your full name – first and…
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SiteChat: a postmortem. Or, the rise and fall of a society.
About a year ago I built a Chrome extension called SiteChat -- the premise was simple: turn every website into a chatroom. The app was an instant success, and over the following year I watched entire societies emerge and die off inside the bizarre ecosystem that I had created. Genesis and
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Responding to Beggars
In the late 70s, a beggar outside Harvard Square station asked for a quarter to take the subway. I gave him one. As I walked down the stairs I noticed that he was not coming along. Instead he was asking another person for a quarter to take the subway. I looked at him for a minute to show him I knew he had lied to me.
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The Strange Case of John Dillinger and the Fraudulent Apple ID
Programming Zen is a blog about programming and emerging technologies, authored by Antonio Cangiano, a Software Development Manager and AI Evangelist at IBM.
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How I ended up with so much Hacker News karma
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
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Urban trees reveal income inequality
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
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EU court: Reverse engineering OK, API not protected by (c) and more
This case (SAS v WPL) has a lot in common with the Oracle v Google case in the US.
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Doctorow & Stross's "The Rapture of the Nerds" creative commons edition released
We promised it, and here it is (slightly delayed by a signing tour and epic-level jet lag): "The Rapture of the Nerds" by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross is available as a Creative Commons licensed download right here: The Rapture of the Nerds .
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The Quiet Wikideath of BBS History
Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I sp…
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UK'S shadow Internet minister says she is "particularly stupid"
I remarked earlier about Helen Goodman MP and her total lack of technical knowledge. An MP being a bit behind the times isn't the greatest shock - but she's Labour's Shadow Minister for Culture, Media, and Sport - that's a big deal! This year, Claire Perry MP produced an "independent" report into online child…
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Unicode is, in 2012, still “cutting edge.”
Note: These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards . They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in…
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Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain
(Here’s a version of the text of a submission I just made to BoingBong through their “Submitterator”) Harvard University has today put into the public domain (CC0) full bibliograp…
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The Gift of Death
Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it.
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European Parliament Blocks Copyright Reform With 113% Voter Turnout
In an unexpected turn of events, one of the key committees in the European Parliament voted recently to weaken a reform of the copyright...
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“She doesn’t deserve to be alive”
What is success? When do you reach it? Is life different? Are you happy? And if it's not the shining golden star that it ought to be, is it still worth it?
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