"wikileaks" entries

Four short links: 12 April 2013

Four short links: 12 April 2013

Wikileaks Code, Account Afterlife, Digital in Museums, and Companies and Conferences

  1. Wikileaks ProjectK Code (Github) — open-sourced map and graph modules behind the Wikileaks code serving Kissinger-era cables. (via Journalism++)
  2. Plan Your Digital Afterlife With Inactive Account Manageryou can choose to have your data deleted — after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. Or you can select trusted contacts to receive data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube. Before our systems take any action, we’ll first warn you by sending a text message to your cellphone and email to the secondary address you’ve provided. (via Chris Heathcote)
  3. Leo Caillard: Art GamesCaillard’s images show museum patrons interacting with priceless paintings the way someone might browse through slides in a personal iTunes library on a device like an iPhone or MacBook. Playful and thought-provoking. (via Beta Knowledge)
  4. Lanyrd Pro — helping companies keep track of which events their engineers speak at, so they can avoid duplication and have maximum opportunity to promote it. First paid product from ETecher and Foo Simon Willison’s startup.

Planning a better whistleblowers' site: a review of Domscheit-Berg's book "Inside WikiLeaks"

Commentators tend to treat WikiLeaks as some kind of pure emanation of
the Internet, ignoring the vast legal, financial, media, and other
systems that make it possible. Second, they either praise or criticize
its mission, but rarely ask how it could be improved. For these
reasons, I find Daniel Domscheit-Berg’s new book, Inside
WikiLeaks
, an important contribution to current politics.

Four short links: 30 December 2010

Four short links: 30 December 2010

Systematic Voice, gTLD Branding, Haikuleaks, and PS3 Code Signing

  1. Groupon Editorial Manual (Scribd) — When introducing something nonsensical (fake history, mixed metaphors), don’t wink at the reader to let them in on the joke. Don’t call it out with quotes, parenthesis, or any other narrative device. Speak your ignorance with total authority. Assert it as fact. This is how you can surprise the reader. If you call out your joke, even in a subtle way, it spoils the surprise. Think of yourself as an objective, confident, albeit totally unqualified and frequently blatantly ignorant voice speaking at a panel you shouldn’t have been invited to. It’s interesting to see a quirky voice encoded in rules. Corporates obviously need this, to scale and to ensure consistency between staff, whereas in startups it emerges through the unique gifts and circumstance of employees (think Flickr’s Friendly Hipster voice). (via Brady Forrest on Twitter)
  2. Deloitte Corporate gTLD (Slideshare) — Deloitte one of the early bidders to buy their own top-level domain as a branding move. The application fee alone is $185,000.
  3. Haikuleaks — automated finder of haiku from within the wikileaked cables. (via Andy Baio on Twitter)
  4. PS3 Code-signing Key Broken — the private keys giving Sony a monopoly on distributing games for the PS3 have been broken. Claimed to be to let Linux run on the boxes, rather than pirated games. Remains to be seen whether the experience of the PS3 user will become richer for the lack of Sony gatekeeping. There’s even a key generator now. (via Hacker News)
Four short links: 23 December 2010

Four short links: 23 December 2010

Illusion of Government, Sterling on Wikileaks, Useful AR, and Real World Programming

  1. There Is No Such Thing as the Government — absolutely spot on there is no spoon moment for government. And that matters. It matters because once you recognise that fact, you can start to do things differently. People do, of course, recognise it at the level of caricature I have described here and nobody will admit to believing that they can get things done simply by pulling the levers of power. But inactions speak louder than words and the myth of the lever is harder to eradicate than any of us like to admit.
  2. The Blast Shack (Webstock) — Bruce Sterling on Wikileaks. No hacker story is more common than this. The ingenuity poured into the machinery is meaningless. The personal connections are treacherous. Welcome to the real world. No army can permit this kind of behavior and remain a functional army; so Manning is in solitary confinement and he is going to be court-martialled. With more political awareness, he might have made himself a public martyr to his conscience; but he lacks political awareness. He only has only his black-hat hacker awareness, which is all about committing awesome voyeuristic acts of computer intrusion and imagining you can get away with that when it really matters to people.
  3. Word Lens — finally, useful AR: it replaces foreign language text with translations.
  4. Staging Servers, Source Control, Deploy Workflows, and Other Stuff Nobody Teaches You — this guy has a point: when you emerge from programming school, you’re unlikely to have touched this kind of real-world programming.
Four short links: 26 July 2010

Four short links: 26 July 2010

Maturing Wikileaks, Connectivity as a Right, Music from Proteins, Preserved Source

  1. Is Wikileaks Growing Up? — I linked earlier to FAS commentator Steven Aftergood, who had ripped Wikileaks as irresponsible and dangerous. The latest leaks, however, get grudging respect. “the latest dump deals with a perfectly newsworthy topic and — judging from my initial glances at the news coverage — Wikileaks itself has acknowledged the necessity of withholding certain portions of the documents that might endanger individuals who are named in them. If so, that is commendable.” (via jayrosen_nyu on Twitter)
  2. Open Connectivity and Open Data — is access to the Internet a human right? Video of a presentation by Jon Penney, the InternetNZ CyberLaw Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.
  3. ProteoMusictwisted music inspired by genomes and proteins. (via christianbok on Twitter)
  4. MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Donated to Computer Museum — source is as much a historical artifact worthy of preservation as hardware, and will be increasingly so. Should Library of Congress require submission of distributed computer code the same as for published books? (via Andy Baio)
Four short links: 29 June 2010

Four short links: 29 June 2010

Literary Mashups, Hardware+App Store, Wikileaks Criticism, Online Style Guide

  1. The Diary of Samuel Pepys — a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell)
  2. The Tonido Plug Server — one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store.
  3. Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review — interesting criticism of Wikileaks from Federation of American Scientists. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most-power without accountability-is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” (via Hacker News)
  4. Yahoo Style Guide — a paper book, but also a web site with lots of advice for those writing online.
Four short links: 2 June 2010

Four short links: 2 June 2010

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

  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 EducationCleantech 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: 24 May 2010

Four short links: 24 May 2010

Google Docs APIs, Wikileaks Founder Profile, DNA Hacking, and Abusing the Numbers

  1. Appscale — open source implementation of Google App engine’s APIs built on top of Amazon’s APIs, from UCSB. You can deploy on Amazon or on any Amazon API-compliant cloud such as Eucalyptus.
  2. Information Pioneers — the Chartered Institute for IT has a pile of video clips about famous IT pioneers (Lovelace, Turing, Lamarr, Berners-Lee, etc.).
  3. This Week in Law — podcast from Denise Howell, covering IT law and policy. E.g., this week’s episode covers “Google Books, Elena Kagen, owning virtual land, double-dipping game developers, Facebook tips, forced follow bug and fragile egos, embedding tweets, Star Trek Universe liability, and more.”
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Four short links: 23 January 2010

Four short links: 23 January 2010

Wikileaks Fundraising, Internet Censorship, Unfree as in Video, and Museums Online

  1. WikiLeaks Fundraising — PayPal has frozen WikiLeaks’ assets. Interesting: they need $600k/yr to run.
  2. The Great Australian Internet Blackout — online protest to raise awareness about the Great Firewall of Australia.
  3. HTML5 Video: Problems Ahead — YouTube and Vimeo won’t support a free codec (file format). The web is undeniably better for Mozilla having entered the browser market, and it would have been impossible for us to do so if there had been a multi-million-dollar licensing fee required for handling HTML, CSS, JavaScript or the like. It’s not just a matter of Mozilla licensing formats such as H.264 for browsers and their users: sites would have to license to distribute content.
  4. History of the World in 100 Objects (BBC) — a radio show, telling the history of humanity in 100 objects from the British Library. Exquisitely high quality commentary (available in original audio and in textual transcript), hi-resolution images, maps, timelines, and more. It’s growing day by day as episodes air, and shows how a quintessentially offline place like a museum can add to the online world.
Four short links: 25 November 2009

Four short links: 25 November 2009

Sexy HTTP Parser, 9/11 Pager Leaks, Open Source Science, GLAM and Newspapers

  1. http-parserThis is a parser for HTTP messages written in C. It parses both requests and responses. The parser is designed to be used in performance HTTP applications. It does not make any allocations, it does not buffer data, and it can be interrupted at anytime. It only requires about 128 bytes of data per message stream (in a web server that is per connection). Extremely sexy piece of coding. (via sungo on Twitter)
  2. Wikileaks to Release 9/11 Pager Intercepts — they’re trickling the half-million messages out in simulated real time. The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its revelation will lead to a more nuanced understanding of the event and its tragic consequences. (via cshirky on Twitter)
  3. Promoting Open Source Science — interesting interview with an open science practitioner, but also notable for what it is: he was interviewed and released the text of the interview himself because his responses had been abridged in the printed version. (via suze on Twitter)
  4. Copyright, Findability, and Other Ideas from NDF (Julie Starr) — a newspaper industry guru attended the National Digital Forum where Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums talk about their digital issues, where she discovered that newspapers and GLAMs have a lot in common. We can build beautiful, rich websites till the cows come home but they’re no good to anyone if people can’t easily find all that lovely content lurking beneath the homepage. That’s as true for news websites as it is for cultural archives and exhibitions, and it’s a topic that arose often in conversation at the NDF conference. I’ve been cooling on destination websites for a while. You need to have a destination website, of course, but you need even more to have your content out where your audience is so they can trip over it often and usefully.