I joined an episode of the Dorm Room Tycoon podcast, which you can check out here.
Hossein Derakhshan was a key blogger in Iran who was jailed for his writing, and recently released. He has entered a new world:
I miss when people took time to be exposed to opinions other than their own, and bothered to read more than a paragraph or 140 characters. I miss the days when I could write something on my own blog, publish on my own domain, without taking an equal time to promote it on numerous social networks; when nobody cared about likes and reshares, and best time to post.
That’s the web I remember before jail. That’s the web we have to save.
You should read the entire article (it’s long) on the Guardian. Hat tip: Kevin O’Keefe.
Merry Christmas!
I hope it’s filled with lots of comfortable sweaters, like this one.
.
Curious about what the famous Wapuu character came from, and the alternative designs for it? The Wapuu Fan Club has a great write-up of the origins of Wapuu, much of which I had actually forgotten already even though I was there.
Calypso for Linux
We just announced and released the Linux version of the desktop client for WordPress.com, also known as Calypso. Also all of the code behind the desktop client itself (built on Electron) is now available as open source too.
By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. […]
My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical. That is very much working in support of a particular ethos, and one simply hasn’t called it forth.
From The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists in the Atlantic.
If you’re curious what I sound like in German, here’s an interview with the German version of Wired about the future of the web and WordPress, complete with a Gutenberg reference.