Sky’s Blog

{File under Boomer tales}

Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.) (continue reading…)

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Cory Doctorow posted a BoingBoing article about a recent National Security Letter requiring the Internet Archive to reveal user information to the FBI. In case you’re not familiar with this process, certain government agencies can issue these letters under the PATRIOT act, which require you to disclose information about your online users, and you can be required not to disclose even the existence of the NSL to anyone else – not your board of directors, not your employees, not even your dog. You can tell your attorney, otherwise this would violate due process of law because you would be denied legal representation. EFF stepped into this^[1] as legal adviser to the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle. The legal grounds on which they contested this was that the Internet Archive is a library (recognized by the State of California) which is exempt from these requirements under US law. The provisions apply to providers of Internet communication services (such as ISPs, duh, by definition).

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

(continue reading…)

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Neat idea – go to ReclaimPrivacy.org and get a “bookmark” that contains code that you can use to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see exactly how private you might not be!

I thought I had most everything set pretty well, but I was a bit surprised at my results. What’s more, this piece of code can fix the settings for you – simple as clicking a button. (continue reading…)

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Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are described as a geek it’s not exactly a compliment? (I always mean it as a compliment, comeon!) That’s because people don’t fully understand the words nerd, dork, dweeb and geek. Here’s the explanation as a cool Venn diagram.

Thanks to Xeni at BoingBoing for pointing it out. And click the diagram to see how the terms relate.

Also see Traveling Geeks. Not Traveling Dweebs, Traveling Nerds or Traveling Dorks.

And here’s an interesting bestiary of geekdom, listing many different types of geeks. I know a few who fall into some, but not all, of the categories.

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