Biting the source that feeds you – "Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player."
The religious excuse for barbarity – "No, we don’t respect your desire to needlessly torment animals because some hallucinating desert nomads did it centuries ago. We don’t respect it at all. You can cry that we are “persecuting” you if we stop you committing acts of cruelty if you want."
Penn & Teller – Penn (of Penn and Teller fame) protests the new TSA rules.
Apple drawing 3.0 line in the sand for iPhone developers – This can only mean that the release is getting pretty close. And, significantly, that the APIs are stabilising — I had to rewrite almost everything I did with the first beta when the latest version of the developer kit came out.
DNA Database Doublecross – "Yet again this government shows its deep contempt for international courts, and demonstrates its profoundly cynical belief that the innocent simply haven't been proved guilty yet."
Jacqui Smith enlists high street help for ID cards scheme – Doesn't using high street shops to make ID cards make it substantially less secure? Wasn't the whole point that ID cards were an unbreakable scheme? This just gets worse and worse.
Objectified – New documentary from the people that gave you Helvetica. Looks interesting.
Georgia recalls Soviet crackdown – I visited ten years after this. It's a really beautiful country and such a shame that it keeps descending into civil war or getting into a scuffle with its northern neighbour.
Odds of Dying in a Terrorist Attack – "You are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist." Maybe the government should start protecting us from the police instead? (via Kottke.org)
A thought experiment – "This presents a problem for customers who are still running the 2.2.1 firmware: they can’t get your fix until they upgrade to the 3.0 firmware."
U.S. support for Detroit would buy 50 million Tata Nanos – "What else might we do with $100 billion in this industry? Assuming that we could get a wholesale price of $2000 per car, that’s enough to buy 50 million four-passenger 54 mpg Tata Nanos. The fuel savings from driving Nanos to the 7-11 instead of monster SUVs would save taxpayers $100 billion every year."
Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK's public databases, says report – "The report, Database State by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, says that more than half of Whitehall's 46 databases and systems have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness, and could fall foul of a legal challenge." And people wonder why I'm against ID cards and internet snooping laws.
Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington