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Sorry Twitter, your buttons have to go: Apparently it's impossible for social media networks to be non-evil or even non-sneaky. Area536 doesn't feature Facebook buttons because those buttons track your movements across the internet without your consent, invading your privacy without your knowledge. Until today Twitter didn't pull any such shenanigans, so I tolerated their buttons on my site for convenience. Today, however, that changes.
And now: something completely different: A news article I casually read on the internet today made me angry enough to write a blog about what we, the Dutch, have been on the 4th of May for generations. In short: we remember our casualties of war and opression. It's a custom many countries adopted after WWII. Read on after the break to see why I'm angry right now.
Tearing down your firewall could be A Good Thing: Much like the fortresses of old became utterly obsolete with the advent of bomber airplanes, so may the firewall that currently surrounds your precious LAN. Your walls are thick, the gate is strong, but what if someone told you the enemy was already among you? Continuing to hide behind a crumbling wall could be very bad for business indeed.
What I brought home from intra12: Part of my day job is to have a somewhat founded opinion about the intranet we have running. This year's edition of the Congress Intranet in Utrecht confirmed one such opinion I've held since I started in this job a few months ago: we are doing it wrong. Not hideously what-were-they-thinking-wrong, but we're apparently missing out on a lot of opportunities that could directly improve the company's bottom-line. A situation shared among most of the participants, so we're in good company and we have no reason to be ashamed just yet.
A fresh taste of raspberry: My regular readers know I'm often saddened by trends towards closed systems and walled gardens in computing. It should come as no surprise that the sudden success of the Raspberry Pi product brings a big smile to my face. The first batch of 10.000 units was sold out before the project's website had time to properly recover. Not bad for a dirt-cheap credit card-sized device that doesn't even come with a case to hold it.
Embrace IPv6 today, be your own cloud: The not-so-new IPv6 protocol will force change upon the internet as we know it today. Humans tend to intensely dislike change, especially the unavoidable kind. That's probably the main reason why IPv6 has been languishing in the far corners of the internet for years. The new protocol does have a lot going for it, though.
Why I dropped Drupal: Right now you're looking at the second incarnation of this website. It started out as an experiment to see whether I would like blogging, and whether I'd enjoy using Drupal. The conclusion is simple: I'm still writing, but the site's back on my trusty old TYPO3 CMS.
UEFI SecureBoot ends commodity computing: Geeky websites around the world are ablaze with Microsoft's new policy concerning the mandatory use of UEFI SecureBoot. A move that will lock millions of tinkering hacker enthusiasts out of their hobby -including the hardware they bought and paid for- and will effectively bar the way for any kind of new grass-roots operating system on the ubiquitous PC platform.
Why Facebook is evil: Whether or not there's any substance to Anonymous' threats (or lack thereof) to 'destroy Facebook', I'd like to give you my take on the world's biggest anti-social network ever and it is a great danger to both its members as well as the open and free (as in freedom) internet as a whole.
You're not going anywhere today: Computer hardware has always had the tendency to get smaller (and faster) over time. Most people would call this a good thing, and I would wholeheartedly agree with them. However, along with this tendency to shrink comes a tendency for hardware manufacturers to become more and more secretive about their gear. There isn't a single cell phone you can buy over the counter today that would allow users to install their own homebrew OS without voiding every warranty under the sun. This tendency, I think, is evil.

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