Musings
20 Musings articles in total, showing 11 to 20
-
The word final should never appear in filenames
See if you recognize this syndrome. There is a file you need to read. Maybe it has some important stuff in it. A contract that went through a bunch of revisions. That sort of thing. Only, when you go to the directory on your company samba share there are 30 files that it could be.Inevitably at lea …
- Published:
-
Saturday at the 2014 Logan Symposium: my highights
On Saturday at the Barbican in London I attended the 2014 Logan symposium — a conference that was intended to bring together key figures in the fight against invasive surveillance and secrecy. The idea was to build alliances between progressive cyber-activists, hackers and journalists. Speaker …
- Published:
-
A day at IP Expo 2014
I recently attended the first day of IP Expo 2014, mostly because of the co-hosted Cyber security event that was happening concurrently, but also to see Tim Berners-Lee talk. And to browse the stalls a bit.The last time I was anywhere near London’s Excel centre, where the event takes place, …
- Published:
-
Browser tabs are not a do-list
Today, something of a rant. Or at least a reminder to myself not to do something that I do all too often. You see, I keep tabs open in my browser. Sometimes for weeks on end. Why, I don’t know, at least on a rational level. Whenever I try to close a tab, I get an overpowering sense of panic. …
- Published:
-
Trickle down totalitarianism: why everyone will be listening in soon
It has been just over a year since the Snowden revelations first confirmed what many of us had suspected for some time — the NSA and GCHQ were in the personal data collection market in a big way. And it wasn’t just targetted data (like of criminals or terrorists, for example) they …
- Published:
-
Three paradoxes of big data, first thoughts
In a thoughtful piece in the Stanford Law Review, Neil M. Richards and Jonathan H. King consider the problems of big data — the analytics and monitoring data relating to our behaviour on the web and in other regions of the internet by state and corporate interests. Three paradoxes of big …
- Published:
-
Programming with our communal exocoretex
There was recently a cartoon on xkcd that dealt with ineffective sorts. In the title tag it proposed the stacksort — a sort that searches StackOverflow for sorting functions and runs them until it returns a sorted array. Gregory Koberger liked the idea so much that he implemented stacksort. …
- Published:
-
The New Microsoft Logo and the Death of the PC
tl;dr — Microsoft doomed; I don’t care about their new logo; Apple will be our new corporate masters I was reading the Hacker News a couple of weeks back and someone had posted a story from the Seattle Times that said that Microsoft had gained a new logo for the first time since 19 …
- Published:
-
Vegan Chocolate Review: Black Widow Dark Naga Chilli Chocolate
This guest chocolate review first appeared on eleanorg.org.I’m going to come out with a bit of heresey in the very second sentence of this review. I’m not that fussed about chocola …
- Published:
-
Collusion: How UK protest websites help business and the police
Online privacy and anonymity should be important for all of us. Doubly so for activists who are likely to get up the noses of capitalist business and the police. Ideally, then, the websites of protest groups ought to steer clear of technology that shares the identities of visitors with advertisin …
- Published: