Aaron Swartz once said, “It’s no longer OK not to understand how the Internet works.”
He was talking to law-makers, policy-makers and power-brokers, people who were, at best, half-smart about technology — just smart enough to understand that in a connected world, every problem society has involves computers, and just stupid enough to demand that computers be altered to solve those problems.
Paging Theresa May.
Theresa May says that last night’s London terror attacks mean that the internet cannot be allowed to provide a “safe space” for terrorists and therefore working cryptography must be banned in the UK.
Longish sensible destruction of Theresa Mays request to break all crypto on the Internet.
https://boingboing.net/2017/06/04/theresa-may-king-canute.html
Blogging about it not because I am political in anyway (you know me, I don’t understand people, how in the world then can I ever hope to understand politics?), but because these people are in some position of power, they can ‘force’ software engineers to do or not do things.
(I have likewise stayed away from the Net Neutrality ‘war’ that has been going on over here).
No, I am blogging about it to just raise awareness. I feel totally powerless to do anything about any of this, but figure that more people should know about some of the dangerous stuff that gets spouted about as knee jerk reactions to horrible events.
Had a ‘run in’ with a software developer once that thought like this. Without reading the manual, he just instinctively knew how every Opto command worked. When his code did not do what he expected, he complained to me that the core firmware should be changed so that the command worked how he wanted it.
No questions asked. He was right, Opto was wrong. This was a solid fact.
“Its no longer Ok not know how the core functions of our life work.” Thebaldgeek – June 2017.
