About a week ago I published a post cautiously praising the work of Boulder, Colorado based SafeArx, the company behind a smartphone app called Cell 411 claiming to cut down on the need for police: Let me be clear that I love the idea of a decentralized emergency alerting response platform. I think it’s incredibly …
Tag Archives: technology
Cell 411, the “de-centralized” smartphone app that “cops hate” is neither de-centralized nor hated by cops
If you’re following anti-police brutality activists, you might have heard about a new smartphone app that aims to cut down on the need for police. Cell 411 is touted as “the decentralized emergency alerting and response platform” that “cops don’t want you to use.” There’s only one problem: its central marketing claims aren’t true. Cell …
HowTo: Download movies, games, books, and other digital media freely and anonymously using BitTorrent with public proxies
Note: This guide assumes you never used BitTorrent before, and that you want to start learning about it with a safety focus from the outset, but it does assume you understand basic computer and Web lingo like “website address” and “downloading.” If you’re new to BitTorrent and don’t care about staying private, then LifeHacker’s “A …
How would you design an online social network that was hostile to abusers?
Everyone realizes that the Internet’s public squares have a harassment problem. No one seems to know what to do about it. I argue that’s because they don’t know how to think about online harassment and abuse—or even power, more generally. I argue that I do. But don’t take my word for it. Take my ideas, …
Continue reading “How would you design an online social network that was hostile to abusers?”
A case study in cyberbullying using Tumblr’s broken “Report Abuse” feature
Earlier this week, I wrote “Tumblr is not a safe place for me,” in which I make the claim that the “report abuse” feature on corporate-controlled social networks fundamentally empowers cyberbullies, not their targets. (Here’s an archived copy in case it gets taken down.) Predictably, I just received a vaguely threatening email from Tumblr Support …
Continue reading “A case study in cyberbullying using Tumblr’s broken “Report Abuse” feature”
“How I Explained Heartbleed To My Therapist”
This is an important post by Meredith L. Patterson: “Remember back around April or May, when you had to change your passwords on all the websites you use? Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, everywhere?†He nods, vigorously. “Do you remember hearing the word ‘Heartbleed’ back around then?†A blank look. Maybe I should have worn the T-shirt. …
Continue reading ““How I Explained Heartbleed To My Therapist””
Your Consent Is Not Being Violated By Accident
unquietpirate: When you start looking for examples of nonconsensual culture in technology, you find them absolutely everywhere. – Deb Chachra, Age of Non-Consent About a month ago, someone sent me this lovely rant and asked me to publish it anonymously. I’ve been sitting on it mostly because I got wrapped up in other things. But …
Continue reading “Your Consent Is Not Being Violated By Accident”
“Bitcoin can’t lead on its own to a disintermediated society,” and other uncomfortable truths about BitCoin
We live in an epoch of techno-utopianism with a strong drive for techno-cracy. The former means that many believe that technology alone determines certain outcomes, while the latter believes it is a good thing that flawed human processes are replaced by ‘clean’ technological processes. Both attitudes are very dangerous. First, distributed technologies do not necessarily …
Shall. We. Play. A. Game? Predator Alert Tool as a game theoretic simulation of countermeasures to rape culture
In “Strategies Without Frontiers,” one of this week’s BSides LV information/security conference talks, software engineer and co-originator of the language-theoretic approach to computer security Meredith L. Patterson used Predator Alert Tool as an example of “an organic response against predatory [societal] games.” Or, in simpler words, Predator Alert Tool was cited as an example of …
Turn your Android phone into a full fledged programming environment
These days, mobile phones are basically computers. And not just any computer. If you have a smartphone, then it’s the same kind of computer as a regular ol’ laptop. Sure, the two look different, but once you get “under the hood” they look and feel remarkably similar.
My mission, which I chose to accept, was to see if I could turn my Android phone into a fully fledged web development console. Lo and behold, I could. And it’s not even that hard, but I did have to do some digging.
That’s because searching the ‘net for phrases like “web development on Android” mostly returns information on how to code and debug websites for mobile browsers, rather than how to use mobile phones as your environment for developing websites. Once I figured out which tools were suited for the task (and my personal tastes), though, everything else fell into place.