newspeak

Freedom’s Just Another Word For “Nothing Left to Share on Facebook Without Fear of Government Retribution” | PandoDaily.

Book is better. The larger point: we use the Web, the Internet, and we use it, mostly, as if all our communications were narrowly cast, not broadcast into time and space. That in itself wouldn’t be bad–disorienting, vertiginous, perhaps–but what such casual broadcast does is make us vulnerable to our own words held against us at some unimagined time, in some unimagined place, by some unthought of people. It’s not a question of being paranoid or anxiogenic. It rather is a recognition that we have to be aware of the life history of our Web identity.

The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings – NYTimes.com.

Perhaps just me but I found this account extraordinary. It’s also the case that what counts as the history of the event is unfolding still–and will be for many years. It’s not even an onion; it’s rather that as more is revealed and publicized, more changes. Yes, we (the progressives) always knew that Iraq was always the target. But the extent to which that target’s life history was redacted to suit the narrative exigencies of public commissions is enormous.

The E Extensions to Java.

I’ve been looking into E lately: it’s fascinating. And immensely useful….

Newspeak.

Douglas Crockford’s Wrrrld Wide Web.

Inventor of JavaScript, JSON, and probably much else I use every day. And possessed of a sense of humour and insight into human communities. Then there are the games.

McGuinty government’s planned education overhaul will be catastrophic – thestar.com.

What Young People Think About Facebook And Instagram – Business Insider.

I would love to read the entire report. I cannot stand Facebook but find it nevertheless useful–And I find myself oddly agoraphobic in Google+–too much of not enough. So I spend (or waste) time on FB not being there. But my primary gripe with FB is its (crass?) marketing of interrelations as commercial occasions. It effectively seeks to colonize–replace? characterize?–“friendships” (laugh) with, as marketplace exchanges. (Putting my old hat on, and let’s change the name of FB to “Houe of Mirth”: no relation is not always already situated within the market, valued as it can be made valuable.) Do I see FB surviving as such? I see MSFT buying it in a year or so, or perhaps even Apple.

Eventbrite Manages More Republican Events Than Democratic Ones | TechPresident.

How unfortunate.

Revisiting Robbers Cave: The easy spontaneity of intergroup conflict | Literally Psyched, Scientific American Blog Network.

I came across the study many, many years ago, and reading it anew is refreshing. It’s actually quite important for anyone involved in building collaborative communities to read and understand.

Professional Archiving Solution | OPENARCHIVE.

Big Data is here to stay (though it’s not quite proven itself as useful as imagined) and it analyzing it–making sense of the data that are captured–is only part of the picture. It has to be stored, archived. How this is done is as much of interest as how the data are used (and by whom). And as with other things that are actually socially important, or can be, I’m in favour of commons-based solutions, open standards, open source. The interesting thing about open source and archiving, however, is related in OpenArchive’s Product Page (emphasis mine):

Features and functions of OPENARCHIVE

OPENARCHIVE offers all the functions of ARCHIVEMANAGER, except for two features. There can be no audit compliance according to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (GDPdu and GoBS in Germany) because publishing the  source code would be detrimental to those legal requirements. And, at the present time, no independent software manufacturers (ISV) have yet certified their applications for OPENARCHIVE.

That legal requirement is interesting. And it also flies in the face of my no doubt miserable understanding of the issues. For the security of the data are not compromised by making the code ensuring their security open. Openness relates to the elements making up the machine and even how it is supposed to function, not to the output. It’s worth investigating, I’d think, how Sarbanes-Oxley really intersects with open source issues here.