2019/01/30: The Local Contexts initiative began in 2010 when Kim Christen and I started to think more carefully about how to support Indigenous communities to address the immense and growing problems being experienced with copyright around Indigenous or traditional knowledge. We had both been working with Indigenous peoples, communities and organizations over a long period of time and had increasingly been engaged in a very specific way with the dilemmas of copyright that existed at the intersection of Indigenous collections in archives, libraries and museums. We were able to see more clearly the ways in which copyright has functioned as a key tool for dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their rights as holders, custodians, authorities and owners of their knowledge and culture.

Combining both legal and educational components, Local Contexts has two objectives. Firstly, to support Indigenous decision-making and governance frameworks for determining ownership, access to and culturally appropriate conditions for sharing historical and contemporary collections of Indigenous material and digital culture. Secondly, to trouble existing classificatory, curatorial and display paradigms for museums, libraries and archives that hold extensive Indigenous collections by finding new pathways for Indigenous names, perspectives, rules of circulation and the sharing culture to be included and expressed within public records.

Inspired by Creative Commons, we began trying to address the gap for Indigenous communities and copyright law by thinking about licenses as an option to support Indigenous communities.

Our initial impulse was to craft several new licenses in ways that incorporated local community protocols around the sharing of knowledge. Pretty quickly however we ran into a significant problem: with the majority of photographs, sound recordings, films, manuscripts, language materials that had been amassed and collected about Indigenous peoples, and that were now being digitized, Indigenous peoples were not the copyright holders. Instead, copyright was held by the researchers, missionaries or government officials who had done the documenting or by the institutions where these materials were now held. Or – at the other end of the spectrum, these materials were in the unique space that copyright makes – the public domain. This meant that not only did Indigenous peoples have no control over these materials and their circulatory futures, they also could not apply any licenses – either CC ones or ones that we were developing. This was a problem that we responded to by developing the TK Labels.

2018/10/02: BitTorrent usage has bounced back because there's too many streaming services, and too much exclusive content.

2019/01/29: Una delle peggiori annate di sempre per l'olivicoltura nazionale, con una produzione di olio di oliva più che dimezzata rispetto al 2017 ( -57%). È quanto emerge dalle ultime elaborazioni Ismea sulla base dei dichiarativi di dicembre, che collocano la produzione di olio di oliva del 2018 a 185 mila tonnellate, in ulteriore ribasso rispetto alle stime - già poco ottimistiche - presentate a ottobre, a frantoi ancora chiusi.

In particolare sono state le regioni del Mezzogiorno ad accusare le perdite maggiori, con la Puglia, che da sola rappresenta circa la metà della produzione nazionale, colpita da una flessione stimabile attorno al 65%, a causa delle gelate e dei problemi fitosanitari che hanno colpito gli uliveti.

2019/01/28: it became fashionable to pronounce that Macron, as a political phenomenon, was finished. Yet for all their airs of certainty, the hot takes failed to take into account a few crucial intangibles of French political life.

The first was that despite the outrage being directed against him, Macron faces next to zero chance of being forced out of office before his term ends in 2022. The second was that the Yellow Jacket movement — which has no identifiable leader, organizational structure or unified agenda — could just as easily turn into a liability for Macron's opponents. And the president, paradoxically, could turn out to be the big winner.

The Yellow Jackets were supposed to have killed off Emmanuel Macron, but they could end up making him stronger.

In particular, we're concerned about WhatsApp's August 2016 announcement of a new privacy policy that allows data sharing with parent company Facebook. This allows Facebook access to several pieces of WhatsApp users' information, including WhatsApp phone numbers and usage data.

Existing WhatsApp users at the time of the privacy policy switch had a grace period to change their settings and prevent Facebook from suggesting friends or serving ads based on WhatsApp data. New accounts, however, do not have the option to refuse these expanded uses of their data. Instead, the only option available to new users is whether to join WhatsApp at all under the new privacy policy and all of the data sharing it entails. Even though the company assures users it will not share their data directly with advertisers, this nevertheless presents a clear threat to users’ control of how their WhatsApp data is shared and used.

In addition we're concerned with WhatsApp's web app. WhatsApp provides an HTTPS-secured web interface for users to send and receive messages. However, as with all websites, the resources needed to load the application are delivered each and every time you visit that site. So, even if there is support for crypto in the browser, the web application can easily be modified to serve a malicious version of the application upon any given pageload, which is capable of delivering all your messages to a third party.

2019/01/19: What do I feel when I watch it?

Nothing really. Neutral. Slight positive because it lifts some issues such as bullying and sexual harassment. Slight disgust at capitalist opportunism disguised as idealism. Thinking I’ve seen all of the situations in the ad and do recognize that most men in most situations do indeed not stand up and call folks out. Still it all comes out a bit silly, as commercials generally do.

To the offended party: I think you’re all wrong, folks. And I think that your reaction says more about yourselves than about the commercial. I think you are exact equivalents of the non-constructive, bitter, bitchy kinds of feminists and anti-racists whose toes are always perpetually stepped upon by one wrong word, some naked skin, one commercial or another.

I’m calling you out, guys: you’re being over-sensitive. You’re taking part in a silly hysteria.

I am only comfortable with a postfeminist position *if* it successfully transcends and includes feminism – in particular the undeniable and empirical aspects of inequality and relations between the genders. Otherwise it isn’t real postfeminism. The proof that the folks offended by the ad weren’t true postfeminists? None of them bothered to check if the world actually *does* work according to the assumptions of this ad. Which it does. More proof? Their message is indistinguishable from that of the classical conservatives. How much is this post-anything? And how much is it simply social conservatism? Nothing wrong with it, but that’s what it is.

I want us to move towards a “neomasculist” position, one that *is* tough and manly but is still friends with feminism. One that doesn’t get “offended” at every corner, isn’t over-sensitive. One that lifts itself, by virtue of character and understanding, above the trench wars of the gender issues and identity politics at large. One that lands in a paradigm of emotional and sexual development.

Feminism and masculism need one another. They are two sides of the same equation.

2017/02/06: all this encryption breaks Deep Packet Inspection.  All the IDS's, IPS's and NGFW's that we bought are becoming obsolete.  They can't inspect the encrypted packets.  Of course they try to hold onto this technology by introducing technologies like SSL inspection (aka SSLbump).  This technology basically breaks the trust model of Internet encryption by acting as a man-in-the-middle.  The place where you work spoofs itself as the encrypted site you are going to.  Because they control your computer, you don't even know it is happening.  Then they decrypt your Internet traffic to use DPI on it and then re-encrypt it back to the Internet.

Instead of holding onto deep packet inspection, I think we need to transition to new methodologies for detecting bad things on the network. Telemetry data is one of these ways through passive monitoring of netflows or DNS queries  By looking at traffic on your network and determining what looks anomalous, you may be able to determine where the nefarious activity is happening.  By looking at your DNS queries and investigating Passive DNS with Bind RPZor using OpenDNS you can cut down on a huge amount of bad sites on the Internet and interrupt phishing campaigns and malware.

2019/01/11: "Born-in the Cloud" workloads might be designed to be platform-agnostic now, but that doesn't mean it will always be the case, as hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure continue to add specific and unique functionality to their hosted services.

2019/01/04: a master list of topics related to the use of new technologies in education of potential operational relevance to the World Bank in its strategic advice, lending activities and research going forward

2018/11/26: a wake effect from upwind wind farms that can reduce the energy production of downwind neighbor turbines. We highlight the need for coordinated development and awareness of the big picture to maximize wind energy generation nationwide.