By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: August 30, 2005
Tuesday, 30 August 2005
- Cheesesteak of Suffering ★
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Dashboard widget that “lets you know, up to the second, just how long it’s been since either the Flyers, Eagles, Phillies or Sixers won a championship.”
The last Philly team to win a championship was the 1983 Sixers. Good thing I’m a Yankees fan. (Via Red Sox and Patriots fan Rich Siegel, via AIM.)
- Free Opera Licenses ★
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Opera is giving away free licenses for its web browser to celebrate the company’s tenth anniversary. Today only.
- MacInTouch: NewerTech MiniStack Review ★
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Ted Silveira reviews the MiniStack FireWire drive enclosure, which is intended to stack underneath a Mac Mini, for MacInTouch:
In addition to performance, we were curious about three things going into the review:
Heat: With the miniStack positioned directly under the Mini, would the heat from the 3.5” hard drive cause the Mini to run too hot?
Noise: Although the Mini does have a fan, it’s very quiet in operation, even in a room with no other computers or noisemakers. Would the miniStack’s fan preserve that quiet?
Fit and finish: The Mini is a good-looking box in its understated way. Would the miniStack live up to that standard and really look like it fit in, or would it look like tennis shoes under a tuxedo?
- The Transparent Society ★
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An excerpt from David Brin’s non-fiction The Transparent Society, published in Wired back in December 1996:
In opposing this modern mania for personal secrecy, let me first emphasize that I happen to like privacy. Moreover, as a novelist and public figure, I need it, probably as much or more than the next guy. All my instincts run toward reticence, to protecting my family from invasions of our private space. Going back to the earlier example, I would find it hard to get used to living in either of the cities described in those early paragraphs.
I don’t care to be peered at by hovering cameras.
But a few voices out there — Stewart Brand, Nick Arnett, and Bruce Sterling, for instance — have begun pointing out the obvious: that those cameras on every street corner are coming, as surely as the new millennium. Nothing will stop them.
(Cf. the aforelinked interview with Brin.)
- NYT: Motorola-Apple Cellphone ‘Imminent’ ★
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Supposedly coming next week; made by Motorola, sold by Cingular.
- Inequality and Risk ★
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Paul Graham:
Like all illicit connections, the connection between wealth and power flourishes in secret. Expose all transactions, and you will greatly reduce it. Log everything. That’s a strategy that already seems to be working, and it doesn’t have the side effect of making your whole country poor.
I’m reminded of a clever interview in Wired magazine from several (many?) years ago, in which the subject of the interview, a security expert, adamantly and convincingly pushed the idea that if we’re going to cover our cities’ public spaces with surveillance cameras, then we ought to make the footage available publicly as well. Privacy goes away regardless if access to the surveillance footage is limited to law enforcement authorities; but if the footage is available to everyone, then it can’t be abused.
Wish I could find a link to the interview, but, alas, Google is failing me.
If anyone can find a link to that interview, let me know.Update: Got it; it was this interview with David Brin. Thanks to everyone who sent the link. - Use Option+Delete to Trash Tracks Selected in an iTunes Playlist ★
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I did not know you could do that. Useful.