blag.dh

Privacy isn’t a question of hiding, privacy is a question of control. Smartphones have brought all the world’s information to our fingertips, but not the information being collected about us, or even a solid answer of how much of it is.

The information age has become the surveillance age. The technological capacity of modern states has become so sophisticated that Orwell’s Big Brother would not so big in comparison. Some would ask what we have to fear if we have nothing to hide, but what exactly makes you think you get to choose whether you do? In the age of mass data retention, why would anyone care not to record everything you do “just in case?”

That choice, to control our own conversations by consenting who it is heard by has become so easily overturned by the same machines that enable our speech that it can only demand an equally radical alternative. What would that be, exactly? Go live on a mountain outside the range of any cell tower?

No. We go back to the drawing board, rebuild the machinery of voice communication in the design of our ideals: Decentralized connectivity. Transparency through open source software and hardware. Privacy by design. A schism in the centurion history of telecommunications.

No cleartext.

No backdoors.

No cell tower.

No god-mode, no master switch.

Oh, and while we’re at it: Better battery life and robust design.

2013-06-10

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden: 'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things' – video

Fuck Superman. This is what a real hero looks like.

2013-06-01

Happy Caturday.

(via ever-onward)

Source: etsy.com

2013-05-29

darkmindbrightfuture:

Holy Other - Yr Love

Source: darkmindbrightfuture

2013-05-27

We think we’re at a point where we get to choose our own adventure here. So, do we go the way of Apple and gets thousands of patents on things and argue with lawyers? Or do we continue on the path of open hardware and figure out a way to share and grow and help everybody together?

Catarina Mota & Dustyn Roberts’s State of Open Source Hardware address from World Maker Faire.

2013-05-26

I think it’s a responsibility for any artist to protect freedom of expression and to use any way to extend this power.

Ai Weiwei.

Source: friendsofaiweiwei

2013-05-25

radiomaru:

Waaaaaaaaa~*

Happy Caturday.

Source: zetsubou-matsuda

2013-05-21

Smartphone Rants, Part II: The Broken Glass Age

I’ve barely started to read Snow Crash, but from what my philosopher roommate tells me, Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age has neo-Victorians in it. OG Victorians believed in human perfectibility, defined according to an overly specific code of manner and dress that made everyone look and act identical and boring. Steve Jobs would have had a lot of common ground with that crowd, at least on some fundamental business principles. His clothes even all look the same.

So do all your phones.

Since the iPhone’s inception, variation in the design of handsets (to borrow a term from The Good Old Days*) has by and large become a race to graft a rough base of “iPhone-like” Android or Symbian with bullshit added to it to make certain features be “more” than the iPhone. Bigger screen than the iPhone, more megapixels than the iPhone, more jigabytes, and always less battery life. Fewer physical keyboards, stylii, external antenna (because no one ever has reception problems) or screens that don’t turn into finger-shrapnel the minute someone drops it, which people do because humans are imperfect and so is Apple’s product design.

As if to take a cue from it’s less imaginative competitors, Apple did little more than make its latest iPhone taller and slightly thinner than it’s predecessor. Why thinner? Because “more thin than the Galaxy class Nexus SIII with Nutella Crepe Slushie.” Why taller? “More app icons on screen.” I can’t wait for the iPhablet! Ugh.

The quest for “more” makes the fundamental assumption that the direction of a design decision was the correct one to begin with and unfortunately, Apple’s competitors are happy enough to copy the same mistakes into their designs. Smartphone users without engineering backgrounds are also not making the connection between these design decisions and their need to hold the phone a certain way, buy an external battery pack, curse at auto-correct and slap on some sort of protective case.

Meaningful innovation in mobile device design is stagnant, not in terms of which combination of uncomplementing off-silver colors a phone is or which stupid widgets you’re forced to look at, but in terms of making things work, work well and handle imperfect humans in imperfect situations.

Continued in Part III: A Tracking Device that Makes Phone Calls

* The age of Palm OS (not to be confused with WebOS). Those days weren’t actually good outside of Palm OS though, and were already ending well before iOS or Android.

2013-05-17

simurai:

Tried to make a Brushed Metal style in CSS3. The texture is done by using 3 repeating-gradients with different length. That makes it look somewhat random. For the linear version, browser support is pretty ok, but for the radial one it’s not quite there yet. I think only in Safari 5.1 and Chrome Windows.

In addition I tried to add a conical gradient for the circle with just faking it with ellipse gradients. It’s ok for low contrasts and if you cover the middle part with an icon or so.. hehe.. ;-P A much more real looking technique is used in this experiment, but I believe it currently only works in Safari and Chrome Windows. Let’s hope that CSS4 will add support for real conical gradients.

See demo.

Source: simurai

shapeways:

at Shapeways LIC

Source: shapeways