Reading

[ This is a crosspost from my professional blog at Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). I encourage you to use that copy of the post as the canonical linkage for this essay — I crossposted here merely for posterity and to reach a wider audience. ]

Two schools of thought about the purpose of copyleft have been at odds for some time. Simply put, the question is: are copyleft licenses designed primarily to protect the rights of large companies that produce electronics and software products, or is copyleft designed primarily to protect individual users' rights to improve, modify, repair, and reinstall their software?

Someone tell Boris Johnson: you can’t bake your ‘oven-ready deal’ and then remove a key ingredient (even if it’s a sausage)

Ask a stupid question and you get a stupid answer. The Northern Ireland protocol is a stupid answer: it imposes a complex bureaucracy on the movement of ordinary goods across the Irish Sea. But it is the only possible response to a problem created by Boris Johnson. The reason it keeps coming around again and again, like a ghoul on a ghost train, is that it requires Johnson and his government to do something that goes against the grain of the whole Brexit project: to acknowledge that choices have costs.

There used to be a gameshow on American radio and TV called Truth or Consequences. It was so popular that a whole city in New Mexico is named after it. It’s where we live now. In each episode, the contestant was asked a deliberately daft question – and when they failed to answer it, they had to perform a zany or embarrassing stunt.

Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times

Involving central banks in allocating money on the basis of “greening” compels them to make political decisions for which governments should be held accountable. The UK government’s new climate remit for the Bank of England is thus a further step in its abdication of responsibility for ensuring a healthy, sustainable economy.

It all started when I was eating breakfast one morning. I looked over the top of my breakfast bowl at the world map on the placemat I was using (we have a 3 year-old, so we have 'educational' placemats). I noticed a collection of islands to the north of Europe, and I wondered what they were. Greenland looks huge (though it's not really) and was clearly labelled, and I knew Iceland was the small island to its south-east, but I didn't know what these other islands were or who they belonged to. So I investigated!

Polish version of this entry has originally been published by Oko Press.

Excessive use by the media of words “hacker”, “hacking”, “hack”, and the like, whenever a story concerns information security, online break-ins, leaks, and cyberattacks is problematic:

1. Makes it hard to inform the public accurately about causes of a given event, and thus makes it all but impossible to have an informed debate about it.
2. Demonizes a creative community of tinkerers, artists, IT researchers, and information security experts.

Uninformed public debate

The first problem is laid bare by the recent compromise of a private e-mail account belonging to Michał Dworczyk, Polish PM’s top aide.

Vitreous humor lines the backs of our eyeballs. We are born with a full supply of the stuff, but as we age, it begins to dry out or evaporate or some damn thing—the ophthalmologist shining a beam into my eye wasn’t overly explicit on this point.  Sometimes the stuff detaches and comes to the front […]

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Talkin’ ‘Bout Tina

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