- Helpful chart explains the difference between good and bad hacking
Thanks to Annalee Newitz at io9 for sharing this surprisingly helpful chart. You have to visit the source article at IEEE Spectrum to actually filter the good, bad and neutral hacks. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the placements along the simple-innovative axis but overall this should prove a useful reference for dealing with people who have a perception of all hackers as doing only bad in the world. - Why has steampunk lasted so long?
Rob at BoingBoing linked to this excellent rumination by Jeff VanderMeer and several other authors. For me at least VanderMeer’s bona fides are impeccable; he co-edited the eponymous Steampunk anthology which included a wonderful essay expanding many of the themes he touches on in this SFSignal piece. Not surprisingly, I tend to agree most strongly with VanderMeer’s answer informed by a keen grasp of the relevant history and literature. - Study of virtual worlds may shed light on emergence of good and bad behavior
This Technology Review article discusses research being conducted at the conjunction of computer science and sociology. Constrained, and correctly so, by privacy concerns over combining too many distinct data sets, the researchers here have turned instead to a virtual world to observe the sort of cross network interactions that interest them. The conclusions are one of those wonderful counter-intuitions about how localized effects may lead to surprising outcomes and are well worth the read. - Seafloor identified as containing potential new sources of rare earth metals, Ars Technica
- Does network neutrality cover mobile tethering?, Ars Technica
- An open hardware and open source eight-bit gaming console, ComputerWorld via Slashdot
- Google wrestles with privacy bugs in its new social network, Slashdot
Exploring digital citizenry as a creator and a consumer.
RE: the chart you referenced.
Some of us are already sold on the idea that people are indivduals and have these indivduals have their own motivations that might be classed as either “good” or “bad”; however, there is a extreme lack of pushback within the hacker community itself agianst any “bad” hackers.
People who speak out against such “bad” hackers usally get ostricised from the “hacker” community. So what is the public supposed to think? The burden is on the hacker community to police the bad apples and improve its reputation. Othewise inaction speaks to tacit support of “bad” hackers and the term will forever be associeted with that bad rather then the good.