Thoughts from a Bafta nominated Podcaster, Blogger, Writer and Commentator.
While a bundle of start-ups and incubators are ‘on crunch‘ to finish the betas of their replacements for Google Reader, there’s probably one bit of software that could do the job even better than Google Reader. GCHQ and NSA must have some really good RSS plug-ins for reading websites. If we’re going to ignore the implications of the data trawling, could we at least benefit from the code that our taxes paid for?
Over on Wired, Moxie Marlinspike addresses the cliched question of ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ when discussing security issues. It might be focused on America, but the principles still stand, and the view is especially relevant in the current climate. If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.
Admittedly you would need an all pervasive intelligence gathering network to prove that Cardinal Richelieu said this quote, but that’s just the ironic icing on the cake: If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
Michael Arrington on the NSA PRISM story: For my part, I don’t give a damn that Senator Feinstein and others in our government say that this is “called protecting America.” It doesn’t, it’s Orwellian and it kills liberty and freedom on a scale never seen before. It’s not a way to stop terrorism. It IS terrorism. My emphasis, but Arrington nails it.
It’s all very nice everyone getting excited about Fluid, little OS X utility that turns a web app (Facebook, Gmail, Last.FM, Boo.com, and so on) into launchable icons on your desktop… …but didn’t everyone else do this ages ago with the Prism plug-in for Firefox, now marketed as WebRunner? Most of my Asus Netbook’s functionality came from these web-apps-as apps. What’s changed now? Oh yes, the Apple fans can claim it as their own.
