Culture
Abstraction Comics
There’s some webcomics that have a tidy way of explaining a concept.
Anonymity
The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Rights of Humans in a Digital Age
- We must all have the right to anonymity
- Not every human activity can be measured
- The ceaseless pursuit of data to quantify the value of any endeavour is catastrophic to true understanding
- The barrier between public and private must remain unbreachable
- We must all have the right to disappear
Privacy
Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA)
Canadian guidelines
GDPR
Hilarity
Painting the Bike Shed
Programming Languages
Joke password policy
(I’ve forgotten where I found this)
For immediate issue: Password changing guidelines V2.2b
Due to new security policies, the following guidelines have been issued to assist in choosing new passwords. Please follow them closely.
Passwords must conform to at least 21 of the following attributes.
- Minimum length 8 characters
- Not in any dictionary.
- No word or phrase bearing any connection to the holder.
- Containing no characters in the ASCII character set.
- No characters typeable on a Sun type 5 keyboard
- No subset of one character or more must have appeared on Usenet news, /dev/mem, rand(3), or the King James bible (version 0.1alpha)
- Must be quantum theoretically secure, i.e. must automatically change if observed (to protect against net sniffing).
- Binary representation must not contain any of the sequences 00 01 10 11, commonly known about in hacker circles.
- Be provably different from all other passwords on the internet.
- Not be representable in any human language or written script.
- Colour passwords must use a minimum 32 bit pallette.
- Changed prior to every use.
- Resistant to revelation under threat of physical violence.
- Contain tissue samples of at least 3 vital organs.
- Incontravertible by OJ Simpsons lawyers.
- Undecodable by virtue of application of 0 way hash function.
- Odourless, silent, invisible, tasteless, weightless, shapeless, lacking form and inert.
- Contain non-linear random S-boxes (without a backdoor).
- Self-escrowable to enable authorities to capture kiddie-porn people and baddies but not the goodies (“but we’ll only decode it with a court order, honest”).
- Not decryptable by exhaustive application of possible one time pads.
Due to the severity of the restrictions, if the password is entered incorrectly three (3) times at login time, you will be asked if you would like to pick a new one.
Grim Meathook Future
Greyball
Uber created a program to deliberately avoid individuals/institutions critical of Uber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyball
Movies
Good movies for the computer geek
- Hackers
- The Net
- Sneakers
- Pirates of Silicon Valley
- Swordfish
- Johnny Mnemonic
- Freedom Downtime
- Tron
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Blade Runner
- War Games
- The Matrix
Cyberpunk
Books
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- Burning Chrome by William Gibson
- Simulacron-3 by Daniel F. Galouye
code of conduct
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
Retrocomputing
https://computer-literacy-project.pilots.bbcconnectedstudio.co.uk/beeb