What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?
A developer I know recently told me that he wasn’t interested in any new opportunities in the short term because his team were about to adopt Fred George’s post-agile concept of Programmer Anarchy…
UK courts have not been forthcoming with access to website blocking orders
A few weeks ago, ORG published the website 451unavailable.
The Economics of a Hit TV Show
Making a pilot for a new TV show can cost over $125,000 a minute. Netflix just paid $100 million for a new show, sight unseen. Why is finding the next hit show so darn expensive?
Is work necessary?
I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:
Senator Feinstein Admits the NSA Taps the Internet Backbone
We know from the Snowden documents (and other sources) that the NSA taps the Internet backbone through secret agreements with major US telcos., but the US government still hasn’t admitted it. In late August, the Obama administration declassified a ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Footnote 3…
The Elsevier boycott one year on
A few days ago was the anniversary of the beginning of the Cost of Knowledge boycott of Elsevier. It seems a good moment to take stock of what the boycott has achieved and to think about what progr…
Legal Weed is Hurting San Francisco's Hippies
Legalized weed is putting California's drug dealers out of business, as well as its hippies.
Argentina's Currency Black Market
Argentina's largest Black Market has been around for over a decade and still offers only one commodity; money. The market has become so huge that Argentinians and foreigners no longer head to the bank for transactions, but hit the streets instead.
NSA E-Mail Eavesdropping
More Snowden documents analyzed by the Guardian—two articles—discuss how the NSA collected e-mails and data on Internet activity of both Americans and foreigners. The program might have ended in 2011, or it might have continued under a different name. This is the program that resulted in that bizarre tale of Bush…
One day offices will be a thing of the past
Richard Branson's blog - where he shares his thoughts on business, Virgin news, leadership, life, family and the global issues he cares about the most
A plea for better open source etiquette
Update: this post kicked off a lively debate over at HackerNews. As a result of doing consulting, I’ve been hopping between a large number of OSS tools and libraries for the past few years. A…
Mozilla launches massive campaign on digital surveillance
Additional Perspectives from Mozilla: Mitchell Baker’s post, “Total Surveillance” Ben Adida’s post, “No User is an IslandR
License Haiku
I think that people really use software licenses to express intentions, and don’t really read the details of the licenses. So I think that licenses should be made as simple as possible, so that they don’t disagree with intentions… thus, haiku licensing:
EFF Pioneer Awards: Aaron Swartz, James Love, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras
San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is pleased to announce the distinguished winners of the 2013 Pioneer Awards: late digital rights activist Aaron Swartz, international access to knowledge advocate James Love, and Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – the journalists behind the...