A lot of people are tired of advertisements. For example, some of us are using ad blockers now when we’re surfing the web. A lot of people mute the TV when they see an ad, others may use different technics to avoid ads. But what we’re facing now, is advertisements that are not specifically tell us what they are.
If you see a billboard in a street recommending something, you can tell it’s an ad, but what if your favorite football player recommends something? Imagine Leo Messi posting a picture of himself drinking Pepsi. How would you know if it’s really his preference or it’s just a paid ad?
Such thing can affect our decision on choosing stuff.
I believe referring to a free software as an alternative to a proprietary software is not right. Most free software are not created to replace something. They have been created to satisfy a need for a service or software and are licensed free (as in freedom) to respect users’ rights.
I wouldn’t refer to a software as an alternative to another software, unless the creators specifically mention it.
June 23 is Alan Turing’s birthday. He was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist.
Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalization of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer.
Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Despite these accomplishments, his accomplishments and true potential was never fully recognized in his home country during his lifetime due to his sexual orientation. Also because much of his work was hidden from public by the Official Secrets Act.
During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code breaking center that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis.
He devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.
A true legend and a wonderful person. May you rest in peace, father of our computers.
There’s a lot of reports that some web sites are blocking users’ access if they are on private browsing mode. One of these web sites is The Washington Post, who chose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its motto. It’s very funny that the very news agency that claims to fight for democracy and freedom is tracking its users and collects their personal information.
If you visit The Washington Post web site with private mode activated on your browser, you’ll see such notice:
We noticed you’re browsing in private mode.
Private browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers. Turn off private browsing to keep reading this story, or subscribe to use this feature, plus get unlimited digital access.
I do support asking for subscription or limiting the amount of articles a user can read on free plan but limiting people from using private mode is not acceptable. The point of private browsing is to not being recognized nor followed.
This is actually much more worrying that this is a bug from browsers. A browser should not let websites know if a user is browsing web in private mode. Not being tracked should not be a luxury. A user should be in private browsing mode by default and if they wanted, they can turn it off.
Tracking people in private mode should be considered as a violation of people’s privacy and browsers should be forced to put more effort to make private browsing much more safer and easier for users.
There’s some crazy internal US politics right now that threatens Open Technology Fund, who funded Let’s Encrypt, Certbot, Tor Project , Guardian Project, Signal, and a lot more.
Looks like a couple proprietary software companies are trying to take over this free software money. Please sign on to the campaign to try to stop it.
Some people in United States have taken down some statues of slave owners in Washington, D.C. and some other cities. I believe there’s no good point in having them statues up. Protesters have set them on fire and I’m really glad this happened as it can be a symbol of people’s anger towards racism and racist people.
I also believe nobody should harm a racist person and the only good way is to talk to them and educate them and if it wasn’t enough, then leaving them alone. If they have no harm, then leaving them is not a bad idea. However, harm is not only physical. If a person harms another person, he should be punished, of course in a proper humane way.
We should respect human liberties no matter if they are offensive to us. Punishment is not against human rights but we should not punish people in a way that it violates their humanly rights.
On 2000 December 04, the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 55/76 decided that, from the year 2000, day of June 20 would be celebrated as World Refugee Day. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. It is commemorated to honor all refugees, raise awareness and solicit support.
African Refugee Day had been formally celebrated in several countries prior to 2000. The UN noted that the Organization of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on June 20.
Each year on June 20 the United Nations, United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and countless civic groups around the world host World Refugee Day events in order to draw the public’s attention to the millions of refugees and Internally displaced persons worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes due to war, conflict and persecution.
The annual commemoration is marked by a variety of events in more than 100 countries, involving government officials, humanitarian aid workers, celebrities, civilians and the forcibly displaced themselves.
Many countries, specially European countries and Australia, are facing refugees crisis. Instead of helping people, they have decided to get involved in dehumanizing them. They closes their borders and there’s a lot of reports that these countries have left many refugees in distant areas from the countries or keep them homeless to die.
Just in April 2000, five boats carrying approximately 2000 migrants to Europe sank in the Mediterranean Sea, with the combined death toll estimated at more than 1,200 people.
Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the atom bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it would have robbed itself of its only power over us — which is fear of it, the being afraid of it.
Our danger is not that. Our danger is in the forces of the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery — giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for.
That is what we must resist, if we are to change the world for man’s peace and security.
It is not men in the mass who can and will save Man; it is Man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power and the will to choose right from wrong, and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving.
Man, the individual men and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to choose between justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self — who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and pity and compassion are done.
So never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.
If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.
In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.
For years, we have used passwords to protect our security. We used different kinds of passwords. From mechanical locks and keys to digital ones and of course current passwords for our accounts.
Setting passwords helped us to secure our accounts but as we had progress in safe passwords, others made progress to break them. For years, we protected our accounts and goods against humans but what we’re facing now is computers.
We’ve been trained to set passwords hard to remember for humans but easy for computers to find. This should be changed.
