Linked List: October 2013

Hard Work

Bill Waterson:

It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves.

Find what you love to do, and do it.

Dropbox Clone with a Raspberry Pi and BTSync
Software Freedom Conservancy

Not-for-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Conservancy provides a non-profit home and infrastructure for FLOSS projects. This allows FLOSS developers to focus on what they do best — writing and improving FLOSS for the general public — while Conservancy takes care of the projects’ needs that do not relate directly to software development and documentation.

Jekyll Data Files

Just in time for my refactor of SimonGriffee.com/stories using the Jekyll static site generator.

The End of Hypocrisy American Foreign Policy in the Age of Leaks
Adverts in Front of Things Are Bad

Tim Bray:

I wait feverishly for your ad to finish loading so I can click on the X to dismiss it. The only exception is when I decide my life’s completeness does not depend on the pathetic page behind the awful ad, so I just kill the window.

I promise I will never read your stupid ad that’s in front of the things that I thought I wanted to see.

Ben Saunder’s Expedition to the South Pole is Underway!

I’m sponsoring Mile 890. Here’s their first blog post from Antarctica.

Glenn Greenwald Is, Hopefully, the Future of News

School’s the New York Time’s Bill Keller.

Paradise Lost First Contact Trailer

Looking forward to this.

qCraft

Mod that brings the principles of quantum physics to the world of Minecraft.

Magnific Popup

Responsive jQuery lightbox plugin.

Read This Before Installing LinkedIn’s Intro App

Intro reconfigures your iOS device (e.g. iPhone, iPad) so that all of your emails go through LinkedIn’s servers. You read that right. Once you install the Intro app, all of your emails, both sent and received, are transmitted via LinkedIn’s servers. LinkedIn is forcing all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own servers and then analyzing and scraping your emails for data pertaining to…whatever they feel like.

Permanent Paper Sign

There’s a Unicode sign for acid-free paper:

How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

Richard Stallman:

The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use.

If whistleblowers don’t dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last shred of effective control over our government and institutions. That’s why surveillance that enables the state to find out who has talked with a reporter is too much surveillance—too much for democracy to endure.

If we don’t want a total surveillance society, we must consider surveillance a kind of social pollution, and limit the surveillance impact of each new digital system just as we limit the environmental impact of physical construction.

Unintrusive JavaScript with Django
You Don’t Need a Million Dollars

All of science and technology and culture and learning and academics is built upon using the work that others have done before, Carmack thought. But to take a patenting approach and say it’s like, well, this idea is my idea, you cannot extend this idea in any way, because I own this idea—it just seems so fundamentally wrong.

x86 Emulator Written in JavaScript

Woah. Anyone know where to find old game disk images?

Codepoints

Site dedicated to all the characters that are defined in the Unicode Standard. Lovely typesetting work.

SecureDrop Open-Source Whistleblower Support System, Originally Written by Aaron Swartz

Here’s the project’s page.

How a CSS Triangle Is Made

And here’s a generator. Via selmnoo on HN.

RSS Feed Tracks Stars Reached by Your Light Cone

Light cone RSS feed.

Building CMS-Free Websites

Though I still worry about relying on external services for the dynamic bits.

Prose Content Editor for Github

Made by Development Seed, so should be good, and you can build and install on your own server, too.

Github Government

The revolution continues.

Rally Against Mass Surveillance in Washington D.C. on 26 October 2013

Spread the word.

Fan is a Tool-Using Animal

Fans improve our culture.

How to See Through the Cloud

The web isn’t magic. It’s not some faraway place we just ‘connect’ to, but a vast and complex system of computers, connected by actual wires under the ground and the oceans. Every time you open a website, you’re visiting a place where that data is stored.

Mozilla’s Server Security Recommendations Document
Alternative Internet

Collection of new networks and technology aimed at decentralization.

Mediastan Fifth Estate Challenger

This is journalism in extremis. This is how it is done. This weekend, instead of wasting your time and money on Hollywood propaganda, why not get all your friends around and spend your time watching MEDIASTAN instead?

Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part II
The Story of WikiLeaks Does Not End With ‘The Fifth Estate’

The most significant journalists and whistleblowers in the world (that) are either political exiles, political prisoners, or the targets of criminal investigations by an overreaching security state.

MacPaint in HTML5
Intro.js - Help People Use Complex Web Applications
Drum - Hacker News Clone Using Django Mezzanine

More excellent work from Stephen McDonald, the developer of Mezzanine. Much better, more elegant code than my attempt.

Run Any Script as an OS X Service

ThisService coupled with Title Case saves much time.

HTTP Archive - Track How the World Wide Web Is Built

Successful societies and institutions recognize the need to record their history - this provides a way to review the past, find explanations for current behavior, and spot emerging trends. In 1996 Brewster Kahle realized the cultural significance of the Internet and the need to record its history. As a result he founded the Internet Archive which collects and permanently stores the Web’s digitized content.

In addition to the content of web pages, it’s important to record how this digitized content is constructed and served. The HTTP Archive provides this record. It is a permanent repository of web performance information such as size of pages, failed requests, and technologies utilized. This performance information allows us to see trends in how the Web is built and provides a common data set from which to conduct web performance research.

Great Piece of Turf

Watercolor by Albrecht Dürer, 1503.

Sustainable Web Design

Web design also has a carbon footprint. The web runs on electricity.

Why The NSA’s Attacks on The Internet Must Be Made Public
Better It Happens On The Web Than On The Street
Mozilla Bug 923590 Pledge Never to Implement HTML5 DRM

Digital rights management (DRM) has no place in open web standards.

More from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can’t “Save As…” an image; where the “allowed” uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively “View Source” on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It’s a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It’s a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn’t just look up the details of all the “Web” technologies. They’d have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable.

Privacy, Not Prism

Key facts:

  • The UK Government is sifting through your internet activities. It shares this data with the US Government.
  • European citizens are affected too.
  • Before the leaks, neither the UK Government nor the regulators informed British and EU citizens of the extent of the surveillance.
  • We believe this is a breach of your right to privacy. The European Court of Human Rights can require a fairer system to be put in place.