Year: 2013
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OKDG Discussion — Developers and designers as ethical gatekeepers
Photo c/o Shane Austin These are the resources for the discussion at OKDG tonight: codingfreedom.com by Gabriella Coleman IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black Adversarial Design by Carl DiSalvo The Real Privacy Problem by Evgeny Morozov How Designers Destroyed the World (video) by Mike Montiero The Battle for Power on the Internet (video) by…
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Never played a wizard — a review of Of Dice and Men
Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It by David Ewalt Although he warns old timer D&D players (and grognards) not to get bound up in the rules because this is a story to introduce people to fantasy roleplaying games, David Ewalt has succeeded in writing a…
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Quarterly review: FY14Q3
Below are links to all the off-the-cuff reviews of books and film from this quarter. I didn’t add to my list of more in depth reviews. During 2013Q3 I did not read as many books, but read a few comics and got addicted to Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga (vol 1, vol 2) and Matt Fraction’s…
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Rides
You can sure find some interesting rides at the Armstrong Fair every year. There is a midway, but that is boring. This year my wife and I took a helicopter tour. Last year my daughter and I rode a camel: Wonder what we will get to ride next year?
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Towards an information-centric political philosophy
It took about 100 years of the Industrial Age before Karl Marx introduced a revolutionary new political philosophy centered on the most important issue affecting citizens of the day: labour. One hundred and fifty years later, nearly a half century into the Information Age, we have yet to move on. The increasingly numerous knowledge-worker proletariat…
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Quarterly review: FY2013Q2
Below are links to all the off-the-cuff reviews of books and film from this quarter, besides my more in depth reviews. During 2013Q2 my family spent 7 weeks in Japan, so there was quite a spike in my media consumption. I do not even list the television series that I watched while they were away.…
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4 more horsemen — a review of Cypherpunks
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet by Andy Greenberg NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. This book is really a footnoted conversation between Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann, some big names in the internet/activist/anarchist/online security communities. It would have been great to see this as a video, but in some…
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Unbridled optimism — a review of Abundance
Abundance: The future is better than you think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler Abundance is a book of two parts, with a sprinkling of Singularity University and XPRIZE promotion and some nice little autobiographical tidbits. The first part introduces the arguments against abundance (Thomas Malthus, Club of Rome, etc.) and attempts to brute force…
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The New Banality — a review of The New Digital Age
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen Since I read This Machine Kills Secrets first, this book seems particularly dangerous to the web as a whole. Universal User Registration? A supranational committee for quarantining non-conforming IPs? This is a company guy and a government…
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ʎɥɔɹɐuɐoʇdʎɹɔ — a review of This Machine Kills Secrets
This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information by Andy Greenberg NOTE: Originally posted on Medium. “Hacker culture” is often characterized by curiosity, meritocracy, independence and self-reliance. It is no wonder that libertarianism enjoys such prevalence in Silicon Valley. “Freedom through encryption” is the clarion call of a…