I'd point out that *this* particular New Statesman piece was written by Jemima Kahn, who was one of the celebrity names who posted bail for him. I rather suspect she's formed her own opinion. Same goes for people like Heather Brooke, the Guardian, and the NY Times, who all had their own relationships with Assange before becoming critics.

It's not *all* people who read Domscheit-Berg's book.

wg

Bennett Haselton is no spammer. He's been involved in anti-censorship for nearly 20 years; he began in high school by investigating the block lists operated by the filtering software installed in many schools and libraries.

Not a spammer.

wg

Yes, and they have no existing habits or knowledge to unlearn.

wg

That's certainly how I've always felt - the existential thing and the fear of death. As I'm approaching 60, however, the thing I'm also learning to fear is the deaths of friends and family - one thing that's often left out of these discussions.

I've certainly never thought I'd be bored, no matter how long I lived.

wg

...I've thought for a long time that it was stupid and wasteful that airlines don't harness the assistance of their experienced flyers in emergency situations. The more people who know what to do the better for all concerned. And experienced flyers are less likely to make mistakes about what is and is not an emergency. I'd take this course like a shot if the airline I fly with most often offered it.

wg

At this year's Young Rewired State - a week for kids under 18 to do cool stuff with code and then present the results - @pixelh8 on Twitter had a bunch of kids under 10 at the Ipswich center. They didn't appear at the eventual presentation, but he did and showed this video (YouTube) of them explaining what they'd learned and doing a little programming. He explained how he did it in his talk: 1) he made it fun for them; 2) he took the group outside and they had many play breaks; 3) he used a *lot* of metaphors to explain. I thought it was immeasurably cool that he was able to do this.

wg

Just curious: does "all stakeholders" include the kids themselves? Since the kids are the ones who bear the brunt of both the filtering *and* whatever harassment/bullying is dished out, I'd have thought they'd have views worth taking into consideration. Probably the youngest kids would struggle to articulate that, but even a kid of 10 is going to have some comprehension of the issues and perhaps quite strong opinions.

wg

Same here. I've been running Communigate with Spam Assassin since 2003, and most of the time it just works. Every few years there's a painful day when I reinstall the whole thing on a faster machine, but it seems a small price to pay to own my own email. The biggest issue I encounter is the occasional DSL outage (which includes power outages). For that, I have the MX record configured so that email fails over to a different address/server. I've used Gmail for that once or twice, but I don't *like* it. Yes, every so often I do have to get the server off someone's RBL, but it's an infrequent issue.

wg

While it's absolutely true that you really do have to test the obvious...it is also true that there has been a definite growth in what some of my academic friends call the "Least Publishable Unit". The structure of academic careers - the metrics by which people are promoted, get raises, prestige, etc. - often rewards quantity over quality.

wg

There's also apparently no algorithm for date-sorting; a friend and I were talking about this on Twitter this week. It's my view that as search engine use has become mainstream they've been increasingly optimized for consumers, not researchers. There is a real niche for a researchers' search engine.

wg

Isn't it time to update your thinking to include quotes from The Big Bang Theory?

wg
It's a Saturnalia miracle!

Well, several things wrong with it.

1) That is enough information for someone already possessed of the necessary technology to clone a copy of your passport, which could be used to do all sorts of things that would eventually be traced to you.

2) That information would be of great assistance to someone wanting to uncover more information about you, either mechanically (which researchers showed in 2009 SSNs can be reliably derived from your birth date and birth place) or as leverage to acquire other information - you don't know what other information about you it can be matched to, probably plenty even just in a Google search, let alone other public/private databases.

3) The *key* issue is that the culture in which such data is kept and is accessible to rogue employees - who will always exist - is endemic and dangerous. I'm sure it was done in the name of barring English (and other) football hooligans from attending the events. In theory, all the ticket office needs to know is that you are not one of the people on the banned list when you buy your ticket, and for that retaining the data shouldn't be necessary. I was under the impression that such "fans" were barred from traveling - surely the more effective way to stop them is at the border or when they're buying plane tickets. In any event, this sort of data breach demonstrates the problems that we will have with other, larger, more sensitive data stores should governments/companies/etc. create them.

wg