Crowdsourcing Evil

This was inevitable:

a friend in Iran that I have been in touch with via Skype (which seems to work very well)” told him that a specific Web site, Gerdab.ir, is being used by the Iranian government to identify protesters by crowd-sourcing.

It's a tool: like all tools, it can be use for good...or not.... (Via @cshirky.)

Microsoft's DreamSpark - What a Giveaway

On Linux Journal.

Pootling Around with PDFs

I'm no big fan of PDFs, but if you've got to use them you may as well do it properly with some open source tools, such as those included here.

Trouble at 't Mill

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the sticky stuff that holds the Web together; without it, the whole caboodle would slowly come unstuck, fraying into lots of proprietary strands.

So this kind of posting, which seems to indicate problems at the heart of the W3C, is deeply worrying:

I believe for our society to progress it's essential that our culture, our knowledge, and our society itself are as accessible as possible to everyone; web standards are how we choose to achieve this on the World Wide Web, and for us to communicate, especially if we have special needs or novel ideas about information access, it depends on compliance to web standards. With this in mind I became interested in assuring standards compliance on the Web and involved in the development of tools meant to help in this respect at the World Wide Web Consortium seven years ago.

I now have to discontinue my participation in this area at the W3C and would like to explain how the World Wide Web Consortium failed to provide what I think would have been and still is necessary to advance the tools and services to an acceptable level, which will explain why I am leaving now.

(Via Slashdot.)