wonk
« Previous EntriesSelling Democracy (Slight Return)
Thursday, November 17th, 2011Writing about the influence of the Internet on pro-democracy movements earlier this year, I observed: As individual control over the flow of information rises, central control wanes. And this, obviously, is the crux of the dilemma facing businesses and governments across North Africa and throughout the world. They are belatedly coming to realise that they [...]
Mystery & Wonder
Sunday, November 6th, 2011According to Andrew Sullivan, Alexis Madrigal claims that flocking behaviour is “… a beautiful phenomenon to behold. And neither biologists nor anyone else can yet explain how starlings seem to process information and act on it so quickly.” That second sentence is just false, as even a quick visit to wikipedia is sufficient to discover: [...]
Remembering Steve Jobs
Thursday, October 6th, 2011Okay, look: Gallows humour aside (for the moment), Steve Jobs doesn’t deserve our reverence. He deserves our respect, yes, for being one of the only people in the industry to actually think about how people used hardware. He was a great hardware designer in part because of his obsession with detail and his absolute inability [...]
Warring Stories
Sunday, August 7th, 2011[Note: Tim Bray is conducting an interesting exercise in public debate over on Google+, testing its commenting capabilities to see how it fares in civil discourse on contentious political topics. His efforts are well worth following. I'm re-posting one of my comments below for posterity - as much for my own benefit as anyone else's.] [...]
On Pseudonymity
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011My friend Skud (yes, Skud) recently had her Google+ account suspended, apparently for not using her ‘real’ name. The section of Google’s privacy policy dealing with the issue of names says only this: To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if [...]
Canonical is Failing
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011A word of advice to FOSS geeks: If you must recommend Ubuntu Linux to others, recommend nothing later than 10.04, the last LTS release. 10.10 saw a number of minor but irritating bugs creep in that show a significant shortage of testing and forethought. There were countless small things like context menus no longer working [...]
A Novel in Three Links
Friday, February 11th, 2011This + this + this = an opportunity to change the way we communicate, and history as well.
The freedom that we experienced on the Internet of the ’90s is waning. Governments and commercial interests take ever-increasing steps to circumscribe people’s ability to communicate digitally. The only way to change this tide from ebb to flood is to fulfill a promise that was first made in the ’90s.
We need to disintermediate the network. It’s an ugly duckling of a word, but cutting out the middle man matters more now than ever.
The Internet ≠ the Network
Monday, February 7th, 2011Douglas Rushkoff just posted a piece with which I largely agree, but which indulges in some remarkably lazy language in the process: “Some of us might like to believe that the genie is out of the bottle and that we all have access to an unstoppable decentralized network. In reality, the internet is entirely controlled [...]
Infowar – A Case Study
Friday, February 4th, 2011[This weekend's Opinion column in the Daily Post] The recent decision by the Mubarak regime in Egypt to cut off all Internet access for its citizens is a textbook example of using a silver bullet to shoot oneself in the foot. The whys and wherefores of how they’ve gone about doing so provide a useful [...]
Pavlov's Light Bulb
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010In a discussion about using small frequency changes in LED light bulbs to transmit data, someone mentioned that companies are already using this technology in supermarkets and other large stores to dynamically change prices on their products. Which led me to a little though experiment: What if retailers could change the price of a product [...]
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