Archive for Technology

A Cellphone’s Missing Dot Kills Two People, Puts Three More in Jail

The terrors of typography. Flipping through Tumblr, I came across this rather tragic story and reminder to make sure your punctuation is perfect, lest you offend someone and cost people both their freedom and their lives. The money quote from Gizmodo:

The surreal mistake happened because Ramazan’s sent a message and Emine’s cellphone didn’t have an specific character from the Turkish alphabet: the letter “ı” or closed i. While “i” is available in all phones in Turkey—where this happened—the closed i apparently doesn’t exist in most of the terminals in that country.

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

Read more here.

New Telecomm Provider Would Put Privacy First

Ed Krayewski of Reason.com posts some potentially great news for privacy advocates! A telecommunications company to be formed under the auspices of the Calyx Group is promising that their ISP will not give your personal info to the government. If this turns out to be both legal and feasible, expect them to become huge quickly.

Tim Berners-Lee urges government to stop the snooping bill

One of the godfathers of the Internet, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is not pleased with government intrusion in the creature he helped to spawn. The Guardian has an article notice his displeasure here.

17 Popular Universities That Are Using WordPress

This article is about three years old now, but I find it to be a good demonstration as to what any organization can do with WordPress. The CMS program just gets better and better, and I’m thrilled to be able to tell anyone who will listen about the virtues of this platform. It’s not hard to learn, very flexible with add-ons, and has a really loyal fan-base who are willing to help other bloggers and website designers perfect their pages.

Scrub SOPA

The Editorial Board at National Review is thoroughly against SOPA, PIPA and any other lame piece of trash that blocks creativity and censors the end user. I understand that Anonymous wants to make a point by shutting down and attacking websites, this will end up backfiring on them in the end. The reality is that conservative (not “Conservative,” per se) voters and lawmakers who understand business are going to be more effective in crafting laws that would be far more equitable for everyone. When an educated voting populace learns how business works, good laws protecting copyright will emerge. You need the laws to protect and motivate businesses to grow, including those in the arts. Still, common sense should also be used regarding sharing files, blogging, getting off of the backs of podcasters, and leaving those people who might download an out-of-print album alone. Do I have a problem going after rogue governments who blatantly rob intellectual property? Hell, no I don’t! But I do have a problem not being able to share an out-of-print album of progressive rock or jazz or classical music because some worm at the RIAA insists I’m stealing something from their organization.

Take the time to read National Review’s commentary here.