Facts Are Sacred : A new Irish news site with some familiar names. ‘What is a fact? In philosophy, a fact is something that makes a statement true. In science, it is a verifiable observation. In our case, we take a fact to be something that we can provably demonstrate to be true. This means that we can check the truth of a statement about the current state of affairs but we cannot check claims about the future. Inevitably, as the evidence gets more granular, our view of a fact can change but we should take the scientific approach of going where the evidence leads us, rather than the all too common habit today of starting with a conclusion and looking for supporting data. We are holding ourselves to a high standard and we want you to call us on it where you believe we have fallen short. It is more important that, as readers and writers, we collaborate to put verifiable facts into our daily discourse rather than that we save face. We are looking forward to what we’re sure will be a challenging and rewarding experience and hope you enjoy the ride.’
(tags: science facts news ireland politics data writing)Censorship is inseparable from surveillance | Technology | guardian.co.uk : ‘In order to stop you from visiting www.jamesjoycesulysses.com, the national censorwall must intercept all your outgoing internet requests and examine them to determine whether they are for the banned website. That’s the difference between the old days of censorship and our new digital censorship world. Today, censorship is inseparable from surveillance.’ Very good point from Cory Doctorow
(tags: cory-doctorow censorship surveillance firewalls privacy internet freedom)Fault Tolerance in a High Volume, Distributed System : Netflix’s “DependencyCommand”, a resiliency system for SOA inter-service network calls, offering builtin support for threadpools, timeouts, retries and graceful failover. Very nice
(tags: netflix architecture concurrency distributed failover ha resiliency fail-fast failsafe soa fault-tolerance)**IMPORTANT** Copyright policy – boards.ie : Boards’ new post-SOPAIreland copyright policy, at least for the Rugby forum. Wonder how widespread this is to the rest of the site
(tags: boards ireland sopaireland sean-sherlock copyright rules forums linking)Irish Government signs disastrous (SOPA) law to reinforce online copyright laws | Manhattan Diary | IrishCentral : ‘This is Fine Gael Junior Minister Sean Sherlock. It’s probably not important that you remember his face because his career in Irish politics may soon be over. […] What’s particularly galling is the government’s high handed act. In the United States they dropped SOPA legislation because voters objected, but in Ireland they just waited for the controversy to die down and railroaded it through. I had hoped Ireland had learned enough in recent years to move beyond this style of governance.’
(tags: sopaireland sopa ireland law copyright emigrants)Danish Police Censor Google, Facebook and 8,000 Other Sites by Accident | TorrentFreak : ‘Lundberg said that his organization was sorry for the mistake and has now adopted a new system whereby blocked sites have to now be approved by two employees instead of one, although why that was not the case already for such a serious process is up for debate. The other question is how at the flick of a switch do 8,000 sites suddenly get added to a blacklist – for whatever reason – without any kind of oversight. Denmark’s IT-Political Association is critical and has called for ISPs to cease cooperation with the voluntary scheme which operates without any kind of judicial review. “Today’s story shows that the police are not able to secure against manual errors that could escalate into something that actually works as a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet,” the group said in a statement.’
(tags: censorship denmark internet filtering review google facebook blocking)YouTube bypasses the DMCA : more on the Rumblefish-owns-birdsong Youtube fiasco
(tags: youtube dmca rumblefish birdsong copyright)