ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), as many of you know, is that organization in charge of domain names and IP addresses. While they claimed to be an international group, and had an international board of directors, they worked on behalf of the US Government and that tie was known to be a […]

Spacing Wire is one of my favourite blogs. It’s all about public space and partly about Toronto but mostly about public space. Back on April 15, they had a post about the transforming properties of architecture and cited Lisa Rochon who said:

These days, in the city of Toronto, architecture is understood as a major transformer. […]

Comedies of Fair U$e

This is about as “fun” as the Friday Fun Links get…

Carl Monday, an investigative reporter at a TV station in Cleveland recently did an extremely sensationalistic sweeps-week sting operation (link to video clip) where he used a hidden camera to catch a twenty-something man masturbating at the local public library on a public access terminal. […]

Enjoy happy ad-free interneting with the Firefox AdBlock plug-in! No more ads! Happy life!

After you’ve installed the ad-on, you can right-click on an ad, select the “block ad” option and ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, you’re good to go and the ad disappears.

One tip: if you want to block a whole ad-supplier, you can trim the source address […]

So I mentioned in yesterday’s post that the Communities & Libraries interest group was one I hadn’t heard about before and here’s why: they were founded about a month ago at the CLA conference. At the moment, there are about 20 members, apparently, and 10 interested “others”. The problem of restrictive fees always comes […]

SOLS/OLS-N (too much acronym to spell out, just go to the site) have put out an excellent pathfinder of Community Development Resources.

I also discovered that the CLA has a Libraries and Communities Interest Group which I hadn’t heard about before. Here is an excerpt from the terms of reference:

Concerned primarily with socially excluded […]

YouTube recently updated their terms of service to say that by uploading content to them, this gave them a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website.” The link above clarifies exactly what this means […]

This is all over the web today - I saw it on Boing Boing this morning and Metafilter tonight (which was cited as being found on Digg.)

Here’s the Top 5:

1. Reclaim the term ‘hacker’. If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in more ways than intended by the […]

Recent news in the copyright world is Yahoo’s leaving digital rights management (DRM) off Jessica Simpson’s new song and making the download of the song playable on most platforms (my first guess was that they’re doing it because the song is so terrible that this is the only way they’ll be able to get people […]