Brianna Ghey and stable-door logic
A few years ago I wrote an article on what I called “stable-door logic”: the tendency, after a disaster or atrocity, to look for ways to make sure that said disaster could not have...
Category: Tech
Threads: Strangled at Birth
Today Instagram, a division of Meta which also owns Facebook and WhatsApp, launched their social media app, Threads. This has been marketed as a “Twitter killer” for several weeks as Elon Musk continues to...
Age like wine, age like milk?
This morning I was alerted to a video on Twitter by an Internet personality who calls himself “The Sunnah Guy”, a young man with no apparent qualifications dishing out advice to whomever might be...
Clients made Twitter what it is
Today it was finally made official that third-party Twitter clients are to be locked out of the system, rendering them useless unless they are rewritten to use other social media platforms, such as Mastodon...
Twitter’s collapse would be a great loss
This weekend, Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, shuttered the company’s headquarters and told staff they would have no access until Monday. This has prompted widespread fears that the site is about to...
On the takeover of Twitter
So, this past week the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, the CEO of the Tesla car company, finally went through. Musk has announced that he plans to reform the rules of Twitter to...
Did Linux succeed? Did BSD fail?
This morning, I had a Quora digest with a set of tech questions, including the usual number of plainly stupid ones that asked why something was true that wasn’t or why something happened that...
Carrier indemnity must stay
In the most recent episode of the BBC tech series Click, it was revealed that the new US president Joe Biden is seeking to repeal the law that indemnifies “big tech” from what people who use their services say.
Garmin’s four-day outage reflects incompetence
Last Thursday when I started work, driving a truck for a flooring company, I attempted to connect my new Garmin sat-nav to get software updates. It told me it couldn’t connect to the update...
Guardian Daily: nice new app, shame about the upgrade
Yesterday The Guardian published the new version of its “daily” app (which delivers the digital version of the printed Guardian and Observer newspapers, as opposed to the news app which delivers most of that...
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...
Yes, we need our hands-free phones.
Last week it was reported that the UK Parliament’s transport select committee (a committee of MPs drawn proportionally from each party with seats in the Commons) had recommended that consideration be given to the...
The distraction of in-car touch screens
From Popular Mechanics, via OSNews: When I’m in charge of a car company, we’re going to have one strict rule about interior design: Make it so it doesn’t cause you to crash the car. ...
Yes, he is a thug
There’s an image which has been circulated on Facebook which compares two articles about violent crimes in London. One refers to a ‘thug’ named Kersan Euell who kicked a female police officer into the...
WordPress 5.0
So, a few weeks ago the new version of WordPress, the content management system I use to run this site, came out. Its major (if only) new feature was the new block-based editor, developed...
On mental health care and staying connected
A few years ago I wrote a post on here (The Importance of Staying Connected) about how the Internet had changed from being a niche service which few people outside academia had access to,...
Why did I just lose 25 followers?
The other day I logged onto an unfollower tracker and discovered that I'd lost 19 followers, which is rather unusual (I often lose a few over the average week, often suspended accounts — which...
Why I’m not closing my Facebook account (yet)
Since the scandal broke about Facebook data being leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a New York-based political consultancy which served the Trump and Brexit campaigns and used the data to channel propaganda to susceptible voters,...
Swype dies unnoticed
Swype, for a long time my favourite keypad to use on Android phones which I first encountered on my Samsung Galaxy S back in 2011, has been killed off after years of slow development...
280-character Twitter just isn’t Twitter!
So, last night Twitter announced that they are trialling a new 280-letter Twitter format, and that certain people had been selected to try it out (I wasn't one of them). The company's blog post...