Google Developers talks to Tantek about IndieWebCamp. Video.
Google Developers talks to Tantek about IndieWebCamp. Video.
Looking good, Google Maps. I’m pretty sure the Victoria Embankment Gardens isn’t in the River Thames.
The final step in the Brony life cycle is complete: the ponies have turned into human—albeit cartoon and exceptionally annoying—girls.
Bronies claim to be all about undermining and subverting gender roles. That’s cool. But why do it through My Little Pony? I don’t get it.
In the United States, only 51% of LGBT people consider themselves religious. I’m surprised it’s that high given the centuries of psychological abuse from the Bible slinging crowd…
Barry Cryer reckons ‘Vicious’ is homophobic. I wouldn’t go that far. The problem with ‘Vicious’ isn’t that it’s homophobic, it’s just that it’s a bit crap.
Which, given the considerable talents of Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi, is rather sad and disappointing.
Hacker News has an amazingly stupid-ridden post from a wannabe entrepreneur. This is what happens when idiots go around saying things like “all you need to be a successful entrepreneur is passion and hard work, and anyone can do it, go for it”… some people will believe it. Unfortunately, some of those will have major Dunning-Kruger issues.
Here’s a hint: in order to be a successful entrepreneur, it helps if you have some common sense and some idea of the market you are going into. Passion and hard work takes you so far, but having a working brain is necessary too.
This weekend, I had a wonderful time at BarCamp Berkshire 2. Mostly.
But there’s one thing that marred the experience, and it mars the experience of most events I seem to go to.
That is the behaviour of a small number of photographers who seem to think it’s okay to take photographs of people while asleep. After a long day at the event, I settled down for some rest last night. I got changed and into a sleeping bag and conked out almost immediately. Upon awaking, a friend of mine informed me that three people came into the room I was sleeping in during the night and took photos of me while I was asleep.
Seriously. What the fuck.
What the fuck do I have to do to get some fucking privacy while I’m asleep in the middle of the fucking night?
Apparently, my sedated frame is an object of considerable fascination among the snapping crowd. And the presence of a sleeping bag, a closed door and the lights being out is not enough to stop them from taking photos without the very minimal standards of consent we ought to have for such situations.
When we are conscious, we have the right to opt-opt of photographs and can do so by actively non-participating with the photographer: putting our hands towards the lens, asking them to not take a photograph and so on. But when we are asleep, there is no such option. For most of us, sleeping is something we do not do communally very often: we either sleep alone or with our romantic partner. Shared sleeping arrangements require a little bit of sensitivity, a little bit of give and take.
And I don’t think it’s too much to ask that if you are in a darkened room at 3am, one of those things is that other people attending the event forfeit the right to take your photo completely unaware. There was an age of innocence, when we were all about the Flickr tagging and blogging and sharing and all that. And then Reddit Creepshots happened. We’re in a time of lost innocence online. It sucks, but it’s the reality we find ourselves in.
Now, I’m fairly laissez-faire about things like this. I live my life pretty openly, and I don’t really give too much of a fuck what people think about me. But I’m pretty far at the end of a bell curve. Most people care more rather than less about privacy than I do.
When Yahoo! Hack Europe was on, we had a similar incident. I observed staff members from Yahoo! go into the darkened sleeping area on numerous occasions and take photos of sleeping attendees on their phones. On Twitter, I pointed out to Yahoo! that this is fucking shitty behaviour and they… sorted it out. They understood immediately why it was shitty. They asked the staff members involved to remove the photos from their cameras and they apologised.
And here I am, at a technology conference, and the same shit is happening. Not from the crew, but from attendees. I don’t know what we do. I don’t think I’m being oversensitive here. I don’t think that most people who come to a technology event that has an overnight component would want to be photographed by people they’ve only just met in a darkened room, while they are asleep, without their consent.
There are plenty of people who have perfectly good and rational reasons why they don’t want to leave a photographic trail across Facebook and Flickr and Twitter of what they look like and what they were up to. Stalking and harassment victims, closeted LGBT people, people with kids, people working for employers with overly strict social media policies, and many more.
The fact that geeks at conferences can’t seem to see that the people they photograph non-consensually might be a member of a group that has suffered from marginalisation or problematic behaviour that might give them pretty compelling reasons to not want to be publicly photographed shows that they are both entitled and lack empathy. It shows they value snapping a photo for their Flickr or Instagram stream far more than they value the consent and comfort of their fellow attendees. That’s fucking shitty behaviour.
There are people who I know who, if they asked me whether they should attend BarCamps or hack days, I’d be compelled to say “no” to, for their own safety. Before this weekend and before Yahoo! Hack Europe, I wouldn’t have said “no”, I would have said “yes”.
Let’s stop this now. It’s souring me on technology events and the entitled fucking attitudes that it demonstrates makes me tire of the crowd of people I hang out with. I don’t really care about it for me—it’s annoying—but I do care about it because it’s the sort of attitude that keeps a lot of otherwise awesome people away from events.
Also see Being Asleep is Being Private by Paul Clarke.
Hello, I’m testing my site to show off indieweb stuff at BarCamp.
#bcb2 “Is it creepy for my husband to take photos of me while asleep?”—a question I just saw asked. Apparently, it’s fine if it is a complete stranger at a tech conference…
Fathers4Justice campaigner vandalizes portrait of the Queen. I’m no monarchist, but what a complete bellend. I’m sure the family courts will consider the addition of a criminal damage conviction to his record good grounds for giving this responsible, loving father access to his children.
At Modern Jago for The Critters.
GeoGit, a distributed version control system for geographic data. The name is rather misleading: it isn’t compatible with Git, but it applies the same approach that Git does to dealing with geo data.
Want to live rent-free in Brighton? Dress up as a walrus for two hours a day and you can live with some creepy old dude…
G8 protests in London today: see StopG8 Twitter, website, news coverage.
Interestingly, they are using OpenStreetMap for Mapping The Corporations. Which is probably sensible given they believe Google are “Capitalist hipster scumbags attempting to monopolise all information on the internet, data-mine users’ personal data and use it for profit” according to this.
New MacBook Airs look awesome. The press will no doubt be disappointed that Apple didn’t announce any of the silly touch toys that people get ridiculously over-excited about… but making laptops with 512Gb SSDs and 12 hour battery life is a big fucking deal if you actually use your computer for shit rather than playing Angry Birds. Impressed.
A friend has just told me that Xbox One games may be as much as $100. And that’s on top of $499 for the console. Plus all the cost of subscriptions and DLC and all that. Playing video games suddenly got really fucking expensive.
Count me out. I got me a PlayStation 2 and a stack of really awesome old games. Enjoy Call of Duty: Ripoff Edition.
I agree with Psythor on his post about internet hegemony, to some extent, but I think his is essentially a counsel of despair.
Whilst I could setup my own website in this internet free speech utopia listing status updates on what I am doing, I’m not arrogant enough to think my friends are going to go out of their way to find me.
Not only can you, but you should, if you can. That’s what us crazy indiewebsters have been doing. Syndicating out to services like Twitter, Facebook and app.net but keeping the canonical copy locally (POSSE) means you get the best of both worlds: absolute freedom and independence to say what you like, but syndicating your stuff out to services like Twitter.
The more people join in, the more we can start building a viable alternative to the corporate social networks. Existing efforts like Diaspora have failed precisely because they tried to out-Facebook Facebook. The way the web will win is if we out-web Facebook rather than attempt to build a better Facebook than Facebook, which is a task we’ll never win.
