The Stallman affair and what it means for Open Source
Last week the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard M Stallman, who was also a visiting professor at MIT (right), resigned from both of those roles after remarks he had made on an...
Category: Online culture
Not the good old days
In today’s Guardian, there is a feature on people’s experiences from the early years of the public Internet, in the mid 1990s to the very early 2000s; the feature consists of user-submitted stories edited...
What is, and what isn’t, a pyramid scheme?
So, the other day I responded to a tweet by the author of Existential Comics which read: A pyramid scheme is a scam where the people at the top get the money from the...
What is and what isn’t ‘gaslighting’?
‘Gaslighting’ is a term coined fairly recently to refer to a kind of behaviour displayed by abusive individuals (particularly domestic and intimate-partner abusers) in which they use tricks to cast doubt on their victim’s...
Let’s investigate “death threats”
So, in the wake of Mary Beard’s ill-considered (patrician, soft-racist) tweet last week about how she wouldn’t go out to a disaster zone and do what those brave Oxfam staff (accused of sexually exploiting...
Cerebral palsy blogger “David Rose” exposed as fake
This post is also published at Same Difference, and you can comment there or here. Back in August, a blog was set up titled “Dave on Wheels”, purportedly by a young disabled man called...
Online bullies’ abuse is censorship, not free speech
Back in the days when Usenet was the main place online for discussion (if not the only), before web forums and blogs had been heard of (or at least, were anything like as sophisticated...