some great points about multi-tasking – not as great as it's cracked up to be…

s access to the internet a human right? The right to speak, to be heard, to organize, to air grievances are all rights protected under the universal declaration of human rights. When we defend those rights nowadays, we defend them online as well as offline, because the public sphere includes the digital as well as the physical. I think the notion of an internet shutdown is viscerally uncomfortable to US audiences because it suggests a thuggish government willing to silence all dissent if possible. But human rights are being much more enthusiastically violated by the riot police beating demonstrators, dragging them into vans and leaving them by roadsides in the desert. If an internet shutdown is what it took to get Americans to realize that Egypt – a nation we support with $1.3b of military aid a year – has a serious human rights problem, then we just aren’t paying attention.

this come in very handy! Information is power.. in this case to get the best deal.

this is the dark side of data tracking and monitoring… and one of the reasons I am involved in Personal Informatics/Quantified self movement is to highlight privacy and data ownership issues. 

one of the best critiques of login UI/UX process. priceless!

looks like I'll be on a panel about patient self-management and personal informatics…

for the record, as it were

I heard many good things about Quora from people whose opinion I value so not writing it off just yet. Just finding that this post says some sensible things…

amazing story. Why doesn't it surprise me that TSA didn't come out of this well. But kudos to the pilot and to the airline that didn't punish him for his compassion.

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks

What I find missing from the recent (last 5 years) of the development and evolution of the web is lack of concern for what the 'markets' might want. There is little of the original hacker spirit that aims to solve a problem rather than herd and sell to users. It may often dwell in unsocial places but it certainly gave rise to one of the most collaborative and social place known to man. Organising principle is – the stronger the individuals in a society, the stronger the society, this is especially true if the society is networked. 

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://torrentfreak.com/truly-decentralized-bittorrent-downloading-has-finally-arrived-101208/?utm_source=feedburner

one of the presentations at the January meetup of the London QS group. 

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?scp=2

excellent article! Glad someone like Glyn Moody is taking Lanier down as his original article is a rant that gets as many things wrong as it builds strawmen to attack… 

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/01/why-you-should-always-encrypt-your-smartphone.ars/2

Annotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/01/why-you-should-always-encrypt-your-smartphone.ars

Important point ahead – "The information relationship has shifted, but the power relationship has surely not. We have more knowledge, but are we able to, do we have time to, indeed do we really want to act on it? Will our security services now act any differently? Are our banks acting any differently? Once they have sorted out their online filtering system, will our diplomats and governments act any differently? Everything has changed and nothing has changed."

definitely worth a browse!