May 14th, 2007
A news article in the Scotsman entitled “Half children using web ‘face online abuse’” leads with the fact that more than half of children using social networking sites on the Internet have had an “unwanted experience”. (By more than half, they mean 50.4%). According to the NSPCC, who published the report, an “unwanted experience” could mean “anything from being bullied or threatened to being asked to perform sexual acts”. (The Sun predictably puts the sex abuse thing first in the list).
The article goes on to mention that the majority of these kids are using the Internet to keep in touch with friends, or make new ones. And 60 per cent of them use it to avoid feeling isolated and 53 per cent use it to share their problems. These facts are far too positive to lead the story with though. Best stick to demonising. Then maybe this Internet thing will go away and we can go back to the good old days where print newspapers had the monopoly on information (and advertising revenue)
My experience is that over 90% of children face bullying and threats at school. Probably a similar number of adults experience bullying and threats, and often sexual abuse in the workplace. Ipso facto, the Internet is better than school and work. Just try and avoid the news web sites.
Posted in News, children, internet, nspcc, social-networking, web | 1 Comment »
April 2nd, 2007
Seth David Schoen introduced Bruce Schneier at the EFF pioneer award ceremony last week, and he read out a bunch of facts from the Bruce Schneier fact database. Seth’s blog entry here and audio recording of the speech here.
Posted in ELER News, bruce schneier, eff | No Comments »
March 27th, 2007
There has been some heated discussion on the Wikipedia Hans Reiser article. It’s about including a link to the ELER comic about Nina Reiser’s disappearance. Nobody there really seems to quite grok the strip.
Five months on and maybe this is a good time to explain that the strip isn’t about what a lot of people might think it’s about. It’s not actually about Nina Reiser’s disappearance, it’s more about the reactions to it. Immediately after the news hit, even with scant information provided mostly by sensationalist local media, there was widespread suspicion of Hans’ involvement. I doubt you’d find many people who didn’t have the thought cross their mind, however fleeting.
The strip doesn’t say what people think it does. Reiser isn’t showing any obvious signs of anxiety (no “umming” or “ermming”) and there are reasonable explanations for everything you see (Lime is used to speed up composting) yet commenters came from far and wide to complain about us suggesting what they thought we suggested.
As one clued-in commenter defended: “If you read accusations in to this comic, they are simply pouring out of the twisted depths of your own subconscious mind.”.
Posted in Blog, comic, eler, reiser, wikipedia | No Comments »
March 24th, 2007
I’ve just deployed a slightly fancier shop app. It brings the basket logic away from PayPal and back into the site, only the checkout now goes to PayPal. This allows us to handle delivery costings a bit better, which we’re going to need for some new products we have planned.
Also, we now offer another delivery type: World Surface mail. This is far cheaper than Airmail but can takes a good few weeks. Worthwhile if you don’t need your order urgently. Good timing too because the delivery costs just went up (in-line with our postal service, Royal Mail).
We’ve now added two new t-shirt designs: Bruce Schneier and Che Stallman. Plus stickers of those and Knuth design.
Posted in eler, shop | 1 Comment »
March 19th, 2007
A guy called Rob Weir responded to Miguel de Icaza’s blog about the standardisation of the Microsoft Office Open format.
What amused me was Miguel’s response to this, and then Rob’s follow up.
Miguel writes:
I actually *wrote* a spreadsheet and I actually *know* how the formula implementations came to be.
…snip…
Other than trumpeting ODF, have you actually contributed *ANY* code to OpenOffice, or you are just another armchair general?
Rob responds:
I prefer to let my words and logic stand for themselves. A resume is a poor substitute for a sound argument.
But if you think it makes a bit of difference, I joined IBM as part of their purchase of Lotus, and over the past 17 years I’ve coded on SmartSuite, Lotus Components, eSuite, K-Station, Portal and Workplace, among some of the more notable projects.
Along the way I’ve done a good deal of file format work, with SmartSuite formats, with the legacy binary Office formats, with ODF and with OOXML. I also was part of the team that made the Xalan XSLT engine and contributed that to Apache. So I have some basis for my opinions, based on practical experience as well as clear thinking. You are free to accept or reject either or both.
Posted in Blog, microsoft, odf, office, office-open, ooxml, open-office | No Comments »
March 5th, 2007
Linspire’s CEO Kevin Carmony responds to Eric Raymond’s Goodbye Fedora hissyfit.
Applying the usual CEO-compression algorithm, it translates to:
- Eric Raymond doesn’t work for Linspire
- We didn’t know he was going to do what he did
- It didn’t help us
- It really didn’t help us
- Eric Raymond doesn’t work for Linspire
In summary: “he’s so gone as soon as we can make it all quiet”.
Where will ESR take his one man rage circus now? Will Novell take him?
Posted in News, eric raymond, fedora, linspire, redhat, ubuntu | 1 Comment »
February 24th, 2007
I’ve rolled out a new version of the Schneier Facts software. It now supports fact searching, doesn’t use any cookies, fixes a voting bug and looks a bit different.
I’ve also approved a freaking boatload of suggested facts I seem to have been ignoring since August. Still lots more in the queue too, which I’ll approve over the next few days.
It’s the same code now used on the ESR Facts page. I plan on releasing the code so anyone can set up a similar project easily. Needs a bit of prep to be release ready though.
Posted in ELER News, bruce schneier | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2007
“Eric Raymond annexed the Jargon File and added terms only he uses and that support his political outlook… with his bare hands”
“Eric S. Raymond does not suffer from the ‘Curse of the Gifted’.”
“An hour of “Vulgar Raymondism” with an ugly teenager will only cost you $20 in Thailand.”
Eric S. Raymond Facts.
Posted in ELER News, eric raymond | No Comments »
December 31st, 2006
The Free Software Foundation has launched a campaign against Microsoft Vista. Bad Vista aims to expose how the new version of Windows harms a user’s privacy and security and promote free software alternatives that don’t. In other news, an attractive girl (pictured right).
For more details, see the ZDnet Bill Gates / Paris Hilton blog posting.
Posted in News, microsoft, vista, zdnet | 1 Comment »
