Department of Slightly Pointless Government Regulation

Slow Clap of the Day: Delivery firms refuse to use new postcode system

Oh, fantastic – ‘Delivery firms refuse to use new postcode system’. The introduction of Ireland’s new postcode service will be as problematic as Irish Water, some of the country’s biggest transport delivery firms confirmed. The Freight Transport Association of Ireland said the planned new Eircode service would be “useless” to its members. […] The randomly-generated […]

Environment

I’ll just leave this here.

Global greenhouse gas emissions will need to fall to zero by the end of this century if the world is to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, according to the UN’s leading scientists. In its latest report, released today in Copenhagen, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also calls for the unrestricted […]

Freedoms Internets Privacy

Facebook: Now available on Tor

This is significant: The Facebook onion address (accessible only in Tor-enabled browsers) connects users to Facebook’s Core WWW Infrastructure, so as to provide end-to-end communication, directly from the browser into a Facebook datacentre, allowing for private and secure browsing sessions. An SSL certificate issued by Facebook to visitors confirms to them that they’re indeed accessing […]

Computing History Internets

First (ARPANet) Post!

“Lo.” Inauspicious, perhaps, but then an infant’s first word generally is. Besides, no one on Professor Leonard Kleinrock’s 40-person team suspected that they were starting a revolution of global proportions on Oct. 29, 1969. That was the day Kleinrock and a student assistant, Charley Kline ’70, M.S. ’71, Ph.D. ’80 sent the first “host-to-host” message […]

People

Hero

You know who is my goddamn hero these days? Anita Sarkeesian. She's right, brave and not backing down. All my respect and admiration. — John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 15, 2014 Anita Sarkeesian, Video Game Critic, Cancels Speech After Threats of Massacre (NYT) On Monday evening, members of the administration at Utah State University received an […]