Hello there. How are you today? I'm good. Totally haven't been going through your Facebook wall, photos, mutual friends, attractive non-mutual friends, and interests for the past hours. It's great to see you again - it's been such a long time! This article is about that - and a little bit about robots, hacking, internet vigilantes.
Indiana Codes
Excellent long read on the nature of things that disappear from the web. While instant duplication and redistribution can save something from ever disappearing, we still lose things to the ocean that is the internet. If a major host of something goes down or removes that thing, there might be duplicates out there - simply too deep, unindexed, on the ocean floor of the web.
A great historical read on one of the most important women in space computing history.
Japan will be the first to open a fully automated lettuce farm.
This is a short thoughtpiece on the nature of technology at scale and how to make it right.
Hacksalot
Online vigilantes track down and shame child pornography consumers and sites. A look at the psychology of such a person - and the dangers of doing the dirty work outside of the law.
Whoa! This is a pretty awesome hack. It works on phones with Siri or Google Now that have earbuds with an attached mic connected by sending electromagnetic waves to the earbuds' wire, which acts like an antenna.
Interesting peek at the scale of computing required to stop hackers from infiltrating massive systems.
GhostSec and CtrlSec target "Islamic extremist content" from behind the guise of the internet. It's democratically and legally ambiguous, but it also makes for great reading.
Social Media Anxiety
Oh, just another Minority Report-is-actually-a-futureactive-documentary blog post about Peeple and China's social reputation system.
While the white hats in this article were pentesting an untechnical person with little to no security knowledge, that describes many of us - not just those of us who are in old generations. Tell your loved ones to change their passwords!
There's definitely some stuff online I'm not proud of (for instance: being a preteen on the internet). The worst part about this is that people are so frequently unable to perceive the depth or change in another person. A lack of perception of changing sense of identity in others - a difficulty understanding that you at one time may not even be tangentially similar to you in another time except in name and face.
I've been thinking a lot about scale lately, which had an interesting run in with this article. It seems like scale, city-congregation, and the "squashing" of space caused by ubiquitous, service-based technology are fundamentally changing the way that we interact, date, and socialize. I have a weird 90s-kid nostalgia for a past that I never experienced (thanks Hollywood), but it seems like we might have to start planning for an interpersonal future that's vastly different. Bring me my headset.