In case anyone missed it President Sarkozy recently decided to attack the Burka In our country we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home. The burka is not a religious sign. It [...]

Dear World: We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of ideals of democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4. Early tests of the newly installed program indicate [...]

Listening to the radio this morning and heard that Karim Massimov, the Prime Minster of Kazakhstan started his private, yet official blog on 9th January and apparently has been so happy with the result that he has ordered his minsters to start personal blogs. A politician starting a blog is hardly worth mentioning and starting [...]

Two online debates in Sweden have been rather interesting. The larger one has been about the need for harsher copyright legislation. Those involved have managed to sink to bitter entrenched positions and started using underhand methods such as lobbyists appearing in the media as “impartial” news reporters and, even more interestingly, attempting to control the [...]

There is a very interesting article by Chris Colin over at SFgate called Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com it’s about the group that attempts to maintain order and rules among Fickrs thirty million members who have posted 2.8 billion images. At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the [...]

Here is another examples why trusting professionals to actually know what they are doing is scary. It concerns the 700 billion dolllars needed to survive the bank crisis. The number is repeated with absolut confidence and the decision is being reviewed before a final decision is taken. But who sat down and worked out that [...]

Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern. [...]

Thankfully the term “war on terrorism” seems to have fallen out of fashion. Unfortunately the threat of terrorism is being used to systematically and creatively remove civil liberties. At some point a society must ask itself if the security needed to prevent terrorism is in itself an act of terrorism and repression. Unfortunately all the [...]

The Times has an article on the recent proposal has been put forward in England to create a massive government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public. Naturally this is all being done in the effort to fight crime and terrorism. Against what? Systems such [...]

Milton Glasher and Mirko Ilic’s The Design of Dissent is a phenomenal repository of political poster art (and more). The book contains 200+ pages of explosive and provocative political art divided into sections that range from “Ex-Yugoslavia” to “Food” to “U.S. Presidential Election”. The images are part historical testament, part marginalized voice, and part pop [...]

The FSCONS conference was really good. I managed to speak to many interesting people and my presentation turned into a very good interactive discussion with the audience. The only thing that is wrong is that I am unable to attend the second day which is today. The reason for this is that my grandmother is [...]