"An extraordinary atmosphere of sullen, baffled evil"

[drwex]

If you thought my LJ was boring when I dove into American electoral politics you'll probably skip past most of what I have to say in 2014. The world we live in has changed, in a gigantic climate-change-scale way. Like with climate change it's possible for some people to deny it, some to ignore it, and for it to be scary as hell for some. I'm pretty squarely in group 3.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/01/how-the-us-almost-killed-the-internet/all/
Steven Levy, who has made a career of writing about Big Tech Things, brings us his take on the state of the world. The NSA, and its cronies at the FSB and GCHQ, pretty nearly broke the Internet. It's not clear to me what level of breaking will happen or how much of it we'll be able to work around.

http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2014/01/07/five-companies-to-fear-fondly/
Mark Morford has his usual snarky take on things.

I'm now on Wickr (https://www.mywickr.com/en/index.php). If you'd like to connect with me there that'd be cool too.

Comments

[psybelle.livejournal.com]

I'm right there with you in group 3. (though I'm not quite losing sleep (http://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/72759474218/we-are-huxleying-ourselves-into-the-full-orwell) over it all yet)

[drwex]

Yeah, Corey seems to be having more problems with the W3C ramming DRM into HTML5 than anything else. I'm not quite so unhappy about that as he.

[psybelle.livejournal.com]

Well… I get (and agree with most of) his anti-DRM arguments; and the idea that DRM might be enshrined in a ubiquitous protocol like HTML5 is really bothersome both on the face of it and in the camel=>tent sense.

And then there's all the tinfoil-hat-territory stuff associated with having less control over what happens on a local machine, how much snooping might be allowed (and how easy it might be for non-MPAA entities to snoop), and … I could go on…..

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

wickr looks great, given that advisory board. I'll probably wait for the desktop version, though.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

The Morford piece is excellent. Thanks for the link.