Linked List: December 1, 2010

Wednesday, 1 December 2010

Please Read: A Personal Appeal From the Outlaw Josey Wales 

I would pay to put this on Wikipedia.

Update: Safari extension from Troy Gaul.

Missing the Point of WikiLeaks 

Will Wilkinson:

With or without WikiLeaks, the technology exists to allow whistleblowers to leak data and documents while maintaining anonymity. With or without WikiLeaks, the personnel, technical know-how, and ideological will exists to enable anonymous leaking and to make this information available to the public. Jailing Thomas Edison in 1890 would not have darkened the night.  

Yet the debate over WikiLeaks has proceeded as if the matter might conclude with the eradication of these kinds of data dumps — as if this is a temporary glitch in the system that can be fixed; as if this is a nuisance that can be made to go away with the application of sufficient government gusto.

How Joe Lieberman Got Amazon to Drop Wikileaks 

I have mixed feelings about WikiLeaks, overall — at least regarding their latest drop of U.S. diplomatic material. But Amazon’s cutting them off from their web hosting at the behest of Senator Joe Lieberman seems wrong to me. It’s very unclear, for one thing, whether WikiLeaks’s publishing of this material is against U.S. law. Amazon should comply with the law, not the demands of a politician. And it’s futile, anyway — the WikiLeaks website is already back up.

‘Project’, New iPad Magazine 

New iPad-only magazine from Richard Branson’s Virgin Publishing. Interesting, but given that it’s iPad-only, I expected better on-screen typography and navigation.

Update: After spending more time with the premiere issue, I’m pretty sure they’re using the same InDesign-based Adobe production tools that Wired and other Condé Nast magazines are using. But why? The appeal of these tools for print magazines is that they hook into their current production workflows. But I doubt that’s optimal for a new digital-only magazine like Project. Again, the typography (and type rendering) are poor in Project. And I find the navigation to be frustrating. You swipe left-right to page between different articles, and up-down to “scroll” between the pages of a multipage article. But frequently — not just in Project but also in other iPad magazines using this format, like Wired — I find myself on page N (where N is greater than 1) of an article, and accidentally going left or right when I wanted to go down to the next page of the current article. Then, when I go back to the article I never meant to leave, I’m back on the first page of that article, not the page I was reading when I inadvertently swiped to a different article. I find it to be a frustrating reading experience.

Old Navy Now Using Apple’s iPod Touch-Based Point-of-Sale System 

9to5 Mac confirms that Gap is “piloting Apple’s iPod based POS system at a few” Old Navy stores.

Nielsen Survey on the U.S. Smartphone Market 

Two things stick out to me. One, by gender, there’s a big gap for Android with men and women: 32.6 percent of men say Android is the OS for their next smartphone purchase, versus only 22.8 percent of women. With the iPhone, the numbers are close: 28.6 for men, 30.9 for women. And the numbers are even closer for BlackBerry — Android is the only one of the big three U.S. mobile OSes with a big gender gap. I wonder how much of that is due specifically to Verizon’s Terminator-esque branding for “Droid”.

The other thing that sticks out is the difference between the results from current featurephone (i.e. dumb phone) owners and existing smartphone owners. The iPhone jumps from 25 to 35 percent, BlackBerry from 11 to 15 percent, and Android gets the same number from both (28 percent).

Modern Espionage and Sabotage 

Riveting story by Ed Barnes on Stuxnet, the extraordinarily clever and complicated Windows virus that apparently successfully targeted Iran’s nuclear program. He gets the definition of “zero day exploit” very much wrong, but it’s a great story. This has the NSA written all over it.

‘I, Reader’ 

Lovely piece by Alexander Chee on books and reading.

The Insanity Virus 

Douglas Fox, writing for Discover:

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.

Same for multiple sclerosis. Fascinating and compelling theory.