"ethics" entries

Four short links: 2 June 2010

Four short links: 2 June 2010

WikiLeaks Ethics, Education Business Opportunities, Corewar Updated, Watch Google IO

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | June 2, 2010
  1. Wikileaks Launched on Stolen Documents (Wired) — Wired claims the first set of documents was obtained by running a Tor node that users connected to (“exit node”) and saving the plaintext that was sent to the users, without their knowledge. Reminds me of the adage that nothing big in Silicon Valley starts without being some degree of evil first: YouTube turning a blind eye to copyright infringement, Facebook games and spam, etc.
  2. VC Investments in Education — Cleantech investors are chasing a 3x larger market than Education and yet are putting 50-60x the money to work chasing those returns.
  3. Cells: A Massively Multi-Agent Python Programming Game — a sweet-looking update on the old Core War game.
  4. Google IO 2010 Session Videos Online — I’m keen to learn more about BigData and Prediction APIs, which seem to me an eminently sensible move by Google to play to their strengths.
Four short links: 6 May 2010

Four short links: 6 May 2010

Ethics, Regulation, TCP/IP, and Time Travel

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | May 6, 2010
  1. Ethics and Economics — This paper looks at the evidence that suggests that ethical behaviour is good for the economy.
  2. FCC to Regulate Broadband — Two FCC officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will announce Thursday that the commission considers broadband service a hybrid between an information service and a utility and that it has sufficient power to regulate Internet traffic under existing law.
  3. TCP/IP and IMS Sequence Diagrams — watch SYN, ACK, payload, etc. packets to and fro to understand what really happens each time you fetch mail or surf the web. This is what Velocity-type devops performance folks care about.
  4. How to Build a Time Machine (Daily Mail) — extremely readable article by Stephen Hawking about the possibilities of time travel.
Four short links: 21 April 2010

Four short links: 21 April 2010

8-Bit HTML5 Games, Cloud Morality, Global Data, Geo-tagged Notes

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 21, 2010
  1. Akihabara — toolkit for writing 8-bit style games in Javascript using HTML5. (via waxy)
  2. Google Government Requests Tool –moving services into the cloud loses you control and privacy (see my presentation on the subject), and one way is by making your mail/browser history/etc. easier for law enforcement to get their hands on. There’s new moral ground here for service providers in what services they build, how they design their systems, and how they let people make informed choices. Google is one of the few companies around that are taking actions based on an analysis of what’s right, and whether or not they fall short of your moral conclusions on the subject, you have to give them credit for responding to the moral challenge. Compare to Facebook whose moral response has been to reduce user control over the use of their data.
  3. World Bank Data — the World Bank has released a huge amount of data about countries and economies, under an Open Knowledge Definition-compliant license. (via Open Knowledge Foundation)
  4. Moes Notes — note-taking iPhone app that includes GPS reference, so you can associate a text/audio/photo/video note with time, date, or place. (via Rich Gibson)
Four short links: 18 December 2009

Four short links: 18 December 2009

Ethics, Parallel Matrices, Browser Math, and Open Source EtherPad

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | December 18, 2009
  1. In Character — a journal that addresses a different virtue each quarter. I’ve been thinking of practical philosophy a lot, lately, as we see ever-more-dodgy behaviour. (via bengebre on Delicious)
  2. Lessons from Parallelizing Matrix Multiplication — a reminder why low-level knowledge of your platform matters, and why motivating examples should be carefully chosen.
  3. MathJax — MathJax is an open source, Ajax-based math display solution designed with a goal of consolidating advances in many web technologies in a single definitive math-on-the-web platform supporting all major browsers. (via Hacker News)
  4. EtherPad Source — released as part of their Google acquisition. The announcement says: Our goal with this release is to let the world run their own etherpad servers so that the functionality can live on even after we shut down etherpad.com. This is the resolution to the bad reception of the news that EtherPad would close in March with no plan B for users. The cult of entrepreneurship worshipped the customers only as a vehicle to an exit, but I don’t believe that it’s moral to do well personally but leave your customers high and dry. This is a message that the EtherPad founders seem to have got loud and clear.