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Found this on Chaotic Utopia... It’s a truly amazing and thought-provoking exposition of what the Web — no, scratch that, what we who are on the Web are doing to change the way we communicate, think, and learn.
Guy Kawasaki, one-time Macintosh evangelist, lists Ten Things to Learn This School Year (actually, twelve of them):
- How to talk to your boss
- How to survive a meeting that’s poorly run
- How to run a meeting
- How to figure out anything on your own
- How to negotiate
- How to have a conversation
- How to explain something in thirty seconds
- How to write a one-page report
- How to write a five-sentence email
- How to get along with co-workers
- How to use PowerPoint
- How to leave a voicemail
If you’re in school now — or if you’re not — it’s worth reading the whole post.
In February 2006, the popular weblog BoingBoing was banned from the computer screens of hundreds of US companies and schools, as well as in many repressive countries, by an asinine decision made by a single purveyor of web-filtering software:
At fault in most of these cases is a US-based censorware company called Secure Computing, which makes a web-rating product called SmartFilter. But SmartFilter isn’t very smart. Secure Computing classifies any site with any nudity—even Michaelangelo’s David appearing on a single page out of thousands—as a “nudity” site, which means that customers who block “nudity” can’t get through.Last week, Secure Computing updated their software to classify Boing Boing as a “nudity” site. Last month, we had two posts with nudity in them, out of 692—that’s 0.29 percent of our posts, but SmartFilter blocks 100 percent of them. This month, there were four posts with nudity (including the Abu Ghraib photos), out of 618—0.65 percent.
In fact, out of the 25,000 Boing Boing posts classed as “nudity” by SmartFilter, more that 99.5 percent have no nudity at all. They’re stories about Hurricane Katrina, kidnapped journalists in Iraq, book reviews, ukelele casemods, phonecam video of Bigfoot sightings (come to think of it, he doesn’t wear clothes either), or pictures of astonishing Lego constructions.
In response, Mark Christian created Distributed BoingBoing, which allows users who browse the web from behind the so-called SmartFilter to access BoingBoing via alternate sites. I’ve just set up DBB on this site, and it is accessible at http://dbb.thinkingmeat.net. Enjoy.
And Secure Computing… bite me.
The good folks at BoingBoing discovered that their site was being blocked in many US organizations and foreign countries by a ham-handed content filter. Their response? Compile an extensive list of ways to defeat censorware. Read the rest of this entry »
It was hardly as exciting as rescuing a hard drive with a pooched Master Boot Record, but I had occasion to use the Knoppix live CD to fix a minor problem with my Ubuntu PC.
I awoke Sunday, turned on the Dell Optiplex, and came back to a warning that the window manager session had lasted less than ten seconds. Not good. Read the rest of this entry »
