Blame with equal gratitude.

The first mandate of hacker ethic concerning the freedom of information is completely valid. People should know what is going on. Our beloved hacker friend in Cuckoo's Egg shows us a potential problem with this mandate: bias. He only sought out millitary secrets, and as a result could only expose those secrets. He doesn't paint a full picture.

I do beg issue with the second mandate. Not with decentralization itself but the negating prefix of de. This strict negativity casts a gloomy shadow over otherwise worthy ambitions. Certainly there comes a time for demolition, but it must be purposed by new construction. We can decentralize organizations, but not without accepting their responsibilies.

Wiki leaks and wistleblowers alike gather attention because exposing secrets is sexy and appealing. But when this exposure dominates the informational canvas we are left only with the erotic. I challenge hacktivists to continue exposing government secrets, but to also equally expose their good deeds. Not so easy is it? Exposing good deads has little sex appeal, but a healthy society requires it.

Zeus hates the NSA

The NSA's new massive spy center in Bluffdale Utah is on the slowest fast track in recent history. Engineers and contractors bypassed many quality standards and practices to get the site up and running as fast as possible. Unfortunately for them, huge lightning bolts tear between components causing 10 meltdowns in the past 13 months. I find myself scoffing at these "clearly unintelligent" contractors while they scramble to get the facility online. For shame. How often to I find myself trying to "fast-track" a project by cutting corners only to find myself cursing, debugging, and cursing? Giving into the lie of "finish it now, deal with the consequences later" only causes pain and personal anguish. Stop the nonsense and think, plan, enact, and repeat.

The t-word.

It is safe to say that we are all pretty good at shoes. We know that our foot goes in the top and the laces--or straps, I don't judge--keep the shoe firmly attached. So when someone says, "I'm not a technological person." You can say, "You're shoes say otherwise." This may sound pretty fussbudgety, but people need to be more exact. I don't see much difference between saying, "I hate technology." and, "I hate Indians." Latitudinous statements like that make you sound ignorant and foolish, because we both know that you spend 66.7% of your life interacting with technology. We spend the remaining 33.3% asleep. So next time, resist the urge to drop the t-word and try saying something like, "Geez, this spreadsheet stuff is hard."

The search box.

Facebook revamps it's "graph search" feature to include searching posts, status updates, and almost everything you ever upload to Facebook. That's great for Facebook, but what does it mean for the user experience? Why do we want quick searches? The crushing amount of information on the web drives this necessity, but I believe there is something more going on. The search box is the paradigm of the simplest and most far reaching human interface we have created. Combo boxes, radio buttons, and other UI widgets have their place, but as we move forward towards better natural language processing and machine learning the computer to human to computer interface will have less clicking and more talking. The question is not "How do read my email?", the question is "How do I communicate with other humans using computers, and how will I talk with computers like human beings?"