I wanted to learn more about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service (wikipedia), and perhaps also figure out how I feel about it. Named after a historical faked chess-playing machine, it uses the Web to allow people around the world to work on short low-pay ‘micro-tasks’. It’s a disturbing capitalist fantasy come true, echoing Frederick Taylor’s ‘Scientific [...]
(This post is written in RDFa…) To the best of my knowledge, Ludovic Hirlimann‘s PGP fingerprint is 6EFBD26FC7A212B2E093 B9E868F358F6C139647C. You might also be interested in his photos on flickr, or his workplace, Mozilla Messaging. The GPG key details were checked over a Skype video call with me, Ludo and Kaare A. Larsen. This blog post [...]
This is a followup to my Syndicating trust? Mediawiki, WordPress and OpenID post. I now have a simple implementation that exports data from WordPress: the F2F plugin. Also some experiments with consuming aggregates of this information from multiple sources. FOAF has always had a bias towards describing social things that are shown rather than merely [...]
Fancy title but simple code. A periodic update script is setting user/group membership rules on the FOAF wiki based on a list of trusted (for this purpose) OpenIDs exported from a nearby blog. If you’ve commented on the blog using OpenID and it was accepted, this means you can also perform some admin actions (page [...]
It’s hard to keep secrets in today’s increasingly interconnected, networked world. Social network megasites, mobile phones, webcams and inter-site syndication can broadcast and amplify the slightest fragment of information. Data linking and interpretation tools can put these fragments together, to paint a detailed picture of your life, both online and off. This online richness creates [...]
From Twitter in the last few minutes, a chaos of echo’d posts about army moves. Just a few excerpts here by copy/paste, mostly without the all-important timestamps. Without tools to trace reports to their source, to claims about their source from credible intermediaries, or evidence, this isn’t directly useful. Even grassroots journalists needs evidence. I [...]
Busy sysadmin week. The main FOAF site is back, now hosted on Amazon EC2. Thanks to Stephane Corlosquet for all the time he spent fixing up the Drupal installation, after the recent server compromise. I’ve also moved over danbri.org (well, DNS is propagating), and migrated my blog into a completely fresh WordPress installation. The FOAF namespace [...]
A must-read for those who care about standardised access to non-public Web data.
“Because most of the targeted employees were male between the ages of 20 and 40 we decided that it would be best to become a very attractive 28 year old female. We found a fitting photograph by searching google images and used that photograph for our fake Facebook profile. We also populated the profile with [...]