Geeks

At some point in the past decade, geeks became cool.

Like the products they created, geeks began to be marketed as friendly and helpful types that everyday people could turn to to solve problems or get more out of life.

Sometimes they even seemed to be attractive to women. The Social Network should go some way to ending all of this.

Continue reading "Social network geeks aren’t cool, just angry losers" »

The image below is map of Australia but it’s not just any map, it is taken from a social media website called ijustmadelove.com. Yes, it’s a map logging the location, time and date of where people have had sex.

It also allows them to detail what type of sex they had, whether it was inside, outdoors or on a boat and to rate it using a 5 star system.

It is, in many ways, a sign of the increasing trend within society to reveal more and more private information and explains why in 2008 Webster’s dictionary had to create a new word – “overshare”.

Continue reading "You just did what? The rise of the oversharers" »

Computer nerds hate Senator Stephen Conroy’s plan to filter the Internet so that material which is refused classification (RC) becomes harder to access. But instead of moaning about how it might slow the Net or limit freedom of speech, they should just build a better filter that actually works.

Don’t doubt that geeks can do it. Napster, the late-90s phenomenon that shocked the music industry by enabling music piracy on a vast scale was written by a lone teenager. BitTorrent, the protocol currently used by millions of people around the world to share illegal copies of films and TV shows, was also created by a lone geek. Twitter was whipped up in few days of frenzied programming.

Sadly, some of the tools that geeks have created are now favourites of the perverts, criminals and hatemongers who want to access the vile material that Senator Conroy wants Internet Service Providers to block. Perverts uses these tools because they are far harder to detect than other methods of finding Internet nasties, leading to entirely justified criticism that the filter is a largely futile exercise that will drive creeps underground.

Continue reading "Hey geeks, stop the whining and build a better filter" »

A few years ago, I worked in a co-working space called Silicon Beach House - it was our play on Silicon Valley - and everyone there was either a developer, a web designer, or running a web start-up. It was a little harem of geeks. And then there was me.

My original MySpace page (yes!) is evidence that I really had no idea what I was doing back then. I still use it in presentations to show people what NOT to do on the web. I am also yet to live down the day I replaced the batteries on my mouse with rechargeable ones and had everyone in the office spend a good 20 minutes giving me tech support, before I sheepishly made the discovery.

It may have happened two years ago, but when I asked my Twitter followers the other day if they had any idea why my second screen wasn’t working, someone still suggested I check the batteries.

Continue reading "How to get along with geeks: A seven-point guide" »