The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. (…) Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?
Bill Keller: The Twitter Trap
Dropbox et la confidentialité de nos données en ligne
Dropbox aurait menti sur le niveau de sécurité des données que nous lui confions. Plus exactement, ils auraient menti sur le fait que personne chez eux ne pourrait lire le contenu de nos fichiers sans disposer de notre mot de passe utilisateur.
Si cela se confirme, cela soulève quelques questions. Mais pas forcément de quoi crier au scandale comme certains se sont empressés de le faire. En fait, en ce qui me concerne, cela ne remet pas en cause l’usage que j’en fais. Laissez-moi vous expliquer ça.
Mark Shuttleworth’s Keynote
We have to be honest about the fact that iOS and Android have created a transformative ecosystem in the face of a monopoly from Microsoft, and we haven’t. Right. In order to understand that, we need to be willing to tackle some sacred cows.
(Mark Shuttleworth (@18’22))
Didn’t I tell you Mark was reading my blog 😉
Eben Moglen
I’m not suggesting it [Facebook] should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.
(…)
people who are investing in the new enterprises of unfreedom are also the people you will hear if you hang out in Silicon Valley these days that open source has become irrelevant. What’s their logic? Their logic is that software as a service is becoming the way of the world. Since nobody ever gets any software anymore, the licenses that say “if you give people software you have to give them freedom” don’t matter because you’re not giving anybody software. You’re only giving them services.
Well, that’s right. Open source doesn’t matter anymore. Free software matters a lot because of course, free software is open source software with freedom. Stallman was right. It’s the freedom that matters. The rest of it is just source code. Freedom still matters and what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.
Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.
All sorts of freedom goes over perceived convenience. You know this. You’ve stopped paying for things with cash. You use a card that you can wave at an RFID reader.
Convenience is said to dictate that you need free web hosting and PHP doodads in return for spying all the time because web servers are so terrible to run.
More info + Q&A, and a full transcript.
Pourquoi tu parles-pas de DSK ?
Sans blague, c’est la question que vient de me poser quelqu’un qui s’étonnait que je ne fasse pas circuler de tweets à ce sujet. Là, je vous l’avoue : je reste sur le cul. Un mec est accusé de quelque chose et je devrais en parler ?
Si je ne l’ai pas fait, ce n’est pas parce que j’étais hors-ligne (même si j’étais effectivement hors ligne).
Alors, pourquoi ?
Parce que je ne suis pas le policier chargé de l’enquête, ni le juge qui doit juger.
Parce que je ne suis pas un journalisteun de ces pisse-copies qui sautent sur tout ce qui bouge — ahaha — du moment que ça fait vendre du papier ou du temps d’antenne, ou encore buzzer sur Twitter/Facebook/MonCulEnLigne.
Parce que j’ai horreur des lynchages.
Parce que je crois dur comme feradamantium à la présomption d’innocence.