Distributed Human Sorting of Internet Objects. I learn a lot from reading Ed Felton. In A Spoonful of Sugar he describes an absolutely brilliant method being used at Carnegie-Mellon to “label all the images on the web”…. [Discourse.net] —— it is my understanding that this is somewhat similar to the way spammers bypass visual control […]

More, and Worse. Last night, sometime around 9.30, there was a knock at my door. I live in a faculty residence on campus, so I knew that this was going to be a student, but I also knew immediately that something was wrong, because my students never just drop by. Standing on my… [Planned Obsolescence] […]

USPTO acts against Eolas patent. A report by Robert McMillan (IDG News Service) says that on 25 February, the US Patent Office took a first step toward revoking Patent Number 5,838,906 issued in 1998 to Eolas Technologies for embedding interactive program elements in webpages (plug-ins).Last… [InternetPolicy.net] ——- invalidating patents is appropriate more times than not […]

Portable Spy Station: Grundig Yacht Boy 400. JOEL JOHNSON — The Grundig Yacht Boy 400PE is ostensibly a portable marine device for tuning in AM/FM and shortwave radio stations (as the 'Yacht… [Gizmodo] —– i've wanted one of these for quite some time.

Schneier on Security As a Delusion: “Security always involves compromises. As a society we can have as much protection as we want, as long as we're willing to sacrifice the money, time, convenience, and liberties to get it. Unfortunately, most of the government's measures are bad trade-offs: They require significant sacrifices without providing much additional […]

The Libraries That Time (and Budgets) Forgot. Michael Winerip’s On Education: At Poor Schools, Time Stops on the Library’s Shelves is a deeply depressing story, and the sort of journalism we need don’t get nearly as often as we need. It seems that in poor neighborhoods — predominantly black neighborhoods — the schools have been […]

Introduction to the Gumstix tiny linux computer. 10 Mar 2004: Rich Gibson reviews the Gumstix tiny linux computer.”The Gumstix computer (also see Gumstix.org) is a tiny 200 or 400 Mhz single board computer based on the Intel XScale processors. with Linux Kernel 2.6.0 in flash ram. They have 64 mb of RAM. You can get […]

sometimes it is difficult not to assign subjectivity to nature….

The ignorance society. Today I submitted a column in which I discussed the so-called 'information society' or 'knowledge society'. Perhaps we are not building a knowledge society at all, and instead are moving from 'data society' towards 'ignorance society'. Those who decide what kind of society we live in the future are more interested in […]

Questions Raised About Ashcroft's Fundraising. by TChris Did John Ashcoft tell a fib to the Federal Election Commission? By renting out a political mailing list,… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime] —– it seems he is fine with law breaking when it is him breaking the laws. the whole bush administration seems to have an 'above […]