Here's rogue archivist Carl Malamud's five-minute Ignite Sebastapol talk on "Code City": the democratic necessity of making all of the nation's laws and codes free to read, download and analyze: "The laws that most directly touch our daily lives are not supreme court opinions or bills of landmark legislation, they are the public safety codes: building, electrical, plumbing, and other technical standards. Yet, these laws are the most inaccessible.
Open standards make better infrastructure, and if we open sourced our public safety codes, our laws would be not only more relevant, but the law would be better."
UC Berkeley researcher and artist Eric Paulos and his students continue their explorations of “cosmetic computing” with a new prototype and paper about “Human Hair as Interactive Material.” If you’d like to coif your own computational locks, they’ve posted a how-to guide on Instructables. From their research page: Human hair is a cultural material, with […]
South Wales Police announced they were able to access a WhatsApp user’s photos through a backdoor, then extract fingerprint data from a picture of a weed dealer’s hand to help convict 11 involved people.
Five years ago, Steve Ballmer said “we can make Windows devices once again the devices to own.” Last week, Microsoft announced that Windows will no longer be a standalone unit at Microsoft, ending a division dedicated to personal OS that started in 1980. Via Ben Thompson at Stratechery:
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Most of us understand that when we visit a website, we’re subjecting ourselves to surveillance by trackers. And, while these tools are usually used for innocuous purposes, like determining which ads to show you, they can be leveraged for much more nefarious goals, and they have the potential to tank your browsing speed as well as […]
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