USA Court Rules NSA Spying Illegal
Edward Snowden risked his life and freedom to bring to the world’s attention that the American government illegal (and unethically) spies on innocent people everywhere on the planet. Many Americans…
technology
Mozilla Launches an Incubator to Fix the Internet
Due to increased consolidation of influential websites on the internet (like Google and Facebook scrapping content from other sites) the quality of the web has arguably decreased. To stymie this…
Distance Yourself From Evil, Not People
The Boycott Big Tech Movement Begins Here First rule: Question everything, and think for yourself. Second rule: Don’t support your slavers. (Gandhi, MLK and Thoreau would understand. It’s time for…
Video Calls: Communication In A Hyper-Connected & Deeply Dissociated Society
Thoughtful commentators to the Smithsonian and BBC recently “recommended limiting video calls to only those that are necessary. Petriglieri adds that positioning the video screen to your side may make…
Work and Workaholism: Puritanism, and A Day Off
This morning when I got up, feeling exhausted again from the on-going 30-year stint of sleeplessness and insomnia, I thought, I should take a day off – considering I pretty…
Covid-19: Lessons from and for Government Digital Service Groups
This article was written by David Eaves, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tom Loosemore, Partner at Public Digital, with Tommaso Cariati and Blanka Soulava, students at the Harvard Kennedy…
How We can Track COVID-19 and NOT Invade Your Privacy
To figure out the spread of COIV-19, or other diseases, the technique of contact tracing gets used by researchers to decipher who is likely to have been exposed. When too…
Folding@Home now Faster Than Fastest Supercomputer
Scientists can use your help folding. In particular they could use your computer to help understand how proteins fold. In order to understand viruses and ways to fight them it…
The doctor is out… of the province #nlpoli
Health minister John Haggie announced on Friday that doctors in the province could now start seeing patients remotely either by telephone or using video conferencing. Kinda bizarre, though, given that…
3D Printing Respirators to Fight the COVID-19 Pandemic
The Italian health care system finds itself short on parts due to the influx of COVID-19 patients. Due to the nature of the virus people with it are more likely…
Avoid these Evil Tech Companies
Tech companies have transformed from the stereotypical scrappy startup to the stereotypical megacorporation hellbent on making money before all else. Google is a great example of this transition from a…
Enjoyment of Life Increases by Deleting Facebook
It’s well known that Facebook is bad for your mental health, and let’s be honest it’s likely bad for humanity at large. The engineers at Facebook purposefully create algorithms to…
A Website Powered by the Sun
The world wide web consumes a lot of energy to keep running as it is. The energy sources we use to power the net can make a big difference in…
On Being a “Boomer”
Generations When I was growing up in the 1950s and onward there was not all this talk about generations that seems to have become a fascination of the last twenty…
Dead Laptops are Fantastic Sources for new Projects
E-Waste continues to be a growing problem in our waste streams. This is unfortunate since it doesn’t need to be this way as people can use computers for longer, or,…
A Map to find Organizations Fighting Climate Change
Climatescape is a new web-based database to help you find organizations around that world that are trying to save the planet from environmental destruction. It can be hard to find…
Canada to Update Digital Privacy Laws, Hold Companies Accountable for Breaches
Last year Canadians witnessed too many data breaches of their data and the federal government is reacting. Large Canadian corporations didn’t do enough to protect their databases against attackers and…
The Greatest MIstake Humanity Ever Made
There are those who argue that the greatest mistake we humans ever made was agriculture. And they have a point. For 200,000 years we lived a hunter-gatherer way of life,…
Tips for Remaining Anonymous in the Surveillance Age
Surveillance capitalism benefits companies who have large datasets about what people do and where they are – without the consent of those being monitored. The pervasive modern surveillance which is…