Crossposts from Google+
I backed the digispark kickstarter earlier this year, which makes super cheap little Arduino-speaking USB sticks.
My first project was to hook it up to a motion sensor I had lying around, and now my monitor turns on automatically when I sit down in front of my computer.
I can also imagine having it take a picture with the webcam and email it to me if my phone's GPS isn't at home, and the like.
More information.
I spent a couple days making a text editor for Google Drive.
Quite minimal at the moment, but fun to see how the various Google APIs are meant to fit together.
Cory Doctorow stopped by the UW to talk about tech policy issues this afternoon. Promoted us to develop new takes on opportunistic encryption to improve privacy, and on the need for privacy as a differentiator for applications.
He feels, I think rightly, that there is a distinct lack of code being written solving privacy problems. His take is that people have given up trying, but that there are still easy ways to change norms. He pushed on changing browsers to not accept 3rd party cookies by default as a way to change norms. (I have a chrome patch sitting around somewhere that goes further, but never figured out how to surface an appropriate UI.)
The FreeDOM paper I wrote with +Raymond Cheng is available online.
Finding the level of privacy we are okay with as a society is one of the blurriest lines I've found. It seems clear that there is no single answer, but as technology shifts the balance we're certainly getting less comfortable with our ability to control our privacy.
This is a sweet inspirational mash-up of Neil deGrasse Tyson's plea to congress to keep funding NASA.
