Looks like Plaxo have fucked up again. I really don’t get the point of Plaxo. It seems to me to be almost completely useless, and this is strike two on the privacy front.
Colin McGinn on gay marriage: All this stuff about marriage being between a man and a woman: it’s just complete whooey. I really wonder what all those anti-gay-marriage twits out there think and feel when they see a picture like that. Do they feel their own marriages under threat because these two old ladies are finally able to tie the knot? I think we owe them an apology myself.
Can someone please open Jonathan Zittrain?
The BBC reports on Jonathan Zittrain’s comments, with frequent misuse of the word ‘hacker’. The report describes Zittrain as thinking that the very openness of the Internet is leading more and more people to switch to locked platforms like the iPhone, comparing this risk-free ‘sterile’ environment with a chaotic world of phishing, botnets, distributed denial of service attacks and illegal file sharing networks.
But I just don’t buy Zittrain’s argument. He sees the Internet as having only two sides - basically, insecure Windows installs or the iPhone. Experience shows otherwise: Linux, the BSD systems (including OS X and Darwin), Java, Apache, and open source. The very existence of these systems knocks a fatal blow in Zittrain’s argument. Windows is an anomaly that distorts the argument. And, to be honest, who even uses Windows anymore? Most of the people I know only have a Windows install so they can see how badly IE 6 renders their standards-compliant (X)HTML and CSS or play DirectX games. Even my parents don’t use Windows anymore. I remember back in 1997 when I first discovered FreeBSD, the idea that my parents would be using a computer running an OS I could ssh into was completely alien.
And the iPhone is an anomaly of an equal scale. I have a mobile phone in my pocket that is smaller than an iPhone, about as sexy, and for which I can write my own applications for (even if it requires me to use painfully bloated Java toolkits) - a privilege that I have exercised. The iPhone distorts this too. Most phones will not be getting significantly more closed. And Android, OpenMoko and the array of Linux phones seem to be pointing in the opposite direction. The fact that six million people downloaded Firefox 3 yesterday seems to suggest that people are perfectly at home with open platforms.
I meant to link to this the other day - Tim Bray on Wikipedia deletionists. I heartily agree. One of the reasons I use Citizendium is that Larry Sanger is a committed inclusionist.
Remind me again why I don’t do TeamSpeak. Perhaps because lots of Team Fortress 2 nerds can get together and sing My Heart Will Go On. My ears!
What? You want another reason to never read the Washington Times?
Jesus has taken the reins at Stuff God Hates for a discussion on sandals. Be sure to read the comments.
