The F Word has an informative post about men commenting on Feminist blogs [1]. Most of it applies to any situation where a member of a powerful group comments on an issue related to a minority group. Near the end they say: I’ll also paraphrase and flesh out the most useful piece of advice I ever read, when I made the effort to research white privilege: don’t expect the minority to trust you. Trust is earned, and you’re just another commenter who they can’t tell apart from any other commenter. You’re entering someone else’s space, where different rules apply. You get to have the rest of the world for people to assume you’re a wonderful person. Here, you’re just another one of ‘them’, and given the track record of ‘them’, it’s up to you to listen, learn and prove that you’re being thoughtful and honestly trying to examine your privilege.
Charles Stross wrote an interesting article about the possible uses for future low power computers [3]. He gets a bit over-excited about the possibilities for sensing – making a tiny computer that can sense so many things isn’t going to be easy (DSLRs are big for a reason). But having lots of powerful computers everywhere does provide lots of interesting and potentially bad opportunities.
Martin Bekkelund has an interesting article about Amazon wiping DRM infected books that it had sold to a customer without giving a refund or an explanation [4]. If you want to buy ebooks it seems that the sensible thing to do would be to immediately crack them or download them from The Pirate Bay so Amazon can’t steal them back.
Barry Eisler has written an interesting article about the corruption of journalists [6]. It’s really worth reading, some of the methods of corruption apply to even the more casual bloggers.
Krebs on Security has an informative article about the Microsoft Tech Support phone scams [7]
- [1] http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2008/06/men_feminism_ne
- [2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/07/30/is-the-sky-blue
- [3] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/08/how-low-power-can-you-go.html
- [4] http://www.bekkelund.net/2012/10/22/outlawed-by-amazon-drm/
- [5] http://edge.org/conversation/imaging-conflict-resolution
- [6] http://barryeisler.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/you-will-be-assimilated.html
- [7] http://krebsonsecurity.com/2012/08/tech-support-phone-scams-surge/