Linked List: December 2013
Monday, 30 December 2013
- Glenn Greenwald Keynote at Chaos Communications Congress ✶
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Cory Doctorow:
Greenwald excoriated the press for failing to hold the world’s leaders to account, describing what he did with the Snowden leaks as challenge to the journalistic status quo as well as the political status quo. This is a leaping-off point for an extended riff on the active cooperation between the press and the national security apparatus, an arrangement calculated to give the appearance of oversight on surveillance activities without any such oversight (for example, BBC reporter expressed shock when he said that the role of the press should be to root out lies from senior spies, saying that generals and senior officials would ever lie to the public).
Greenwald draws a connection between private companies and spying, expressing hope that Internet giants will finally understand that their profitability is endangered by their collaboration with spies. He describes these companies as having “unparalleled power” to curb state spying.
He exhorted the hackers at 30C3 to do their best to make the Internet as secure for its users as possible, saying that without their contributions, all is lost. He urges them to strike back at Silicon Valley intelligence collaborators like Palantir, who pose as hip and technie to attract bright young people to help with their mission to attack privacy.
Here’s is a transcript of Glenn’s talk. More video’s from the conference can be found here.
- Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere Arrive at South Pole ✶
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And they’re now on their way back!
In short, I’m afraid to say – though it’s probably quite apt – that I concur with Captain Scott himself when he said of the South Pole “Great God this is an awful place.” For him, of course, there was nothing there at all. A patch of snow at the heart of a barren, deeply inhospitable continent. For us, it felt like walking into a cross between an airport, a junkyard and a military base. Or perhaps a scene that was omitted from a Star Wars film: skiing along with sacks swinging from our backs, futuristic mirrored goggles and hoods framed by coyote fur, we looked like two bounty hunters approaching some sort of outpost on a frozen planet.
Tuesday, 24 December 2013
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
- Visualization of Global Weather Conditions Forecast by Supercomputers ✶
- IETF Netiquette Guidelines (1995) ✶
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Still great.
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
- ArkOS ✶
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Project to help users self-host their websites, email, files and more. Decentralize your web and reclaim your privacy rights while keeping the conveniences you need.
Runs on the Raspberry Pi.
Monday, 16 December 2013
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
- State Surveillance of Personal Data Is Theft ✶
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More than 500 of the world’s leading authors, including five Nobel prize winners, have condemned the scale of state surveillance revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden and warned that spy agencies are undermining democracy and must be curbed by a new international charter.
Monday, 9 December 2013
- Reform Government Surveillance ✶
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Yes. Thank you, Edward Snowden.
Friday, 6 December 2013
- Nelson Mandela ✶
- Better Simulated War Than Real War ✶
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Great, if a little ironic, initiative by a Bohemia Interactive, creators of the Arma series of military simulators. Better simulated war than real war.
As part of our collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), we’ll also be handing out the Health Care in Danger Special Award. Given to the entry which covers the topic of ‘health care in danger’ the best, the winner(s) will go on a one-week trip to an ICRC mission in a foreign country, organized by the ICRC.
- Tab Closed; Didn’t Read ✶
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If you’re going to insist on obscuring your content with some stupid social shit, a promo for your shitty app or a full-page newsletter signup form, then I’m not going to read your content. Or click on your ads. Or help you generate revenue in any way.
Thursday, 5 December 2013
- Emphasis Paragraph Links Script ✶
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Great work open sourced by the New York Times. The Wordpress plugin came in handy in recent client work.
Wednesday, 4 December 2013
- Solar System Simulator in WebGL and JavaScript ✶
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Amazing. I was reading about Kepler in Sagan’s Cosmos and it is great to see the apparent retrograde motion in the simulation.
Tuesday, 3 December 2013
- Brck ✶
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From the blog:
It’s the end of making do with things designed for other people, from other places with other needs. We’re entering a time where good enough is no longer good enough. The BRCK is just one of many new products that are designed for us, by us and meets our needs.
And specifications:
The BRCK is a rugged, cloud managed, full-featured router with built in failover and programmable GPIO expansion. BRCK can connect to the internet through RJ47, GSM, Wifi Bridge, as well as Ethernet Over USB via the GPIO Breakout. It’s rugged build and cloud managed interface make it ideal for “away teams”, monitoring systems in remote locations, and businesses with challenging infrastructure. BRCK’s GPIO breakout provides 20 pins for digital and alaouge Read/Write as well as I2C, SPI and UART. This, combined with BRCK’s Arduino Profile, make it ideal for quickly connecting hardware to the Internet of Things.
- If We Don’t, Remember Me ✶
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Gif animations of classic film scenes.