Design with Intent | Analog hole

Instructable: One-Touch Keypad Masher

By Dan Lockton ⋅ March 3, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

It’s been a long time since I last wrote an Instructable, but as I’ve resolved that 2009’s going to be a year where I start making things again (2008 involved a lot of sitting, reading and annotating, and in 2007 most of what I made was for clients, and thus confidential), I thought I’d write [...]

The Hacker’s Amendment

By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 17, 2009 ⋅ 3 comments

Congress shall pass no law limiting the rights of persons to manipulate, operate, or otherwise utilize as they see fit any of their possessions or effects, nor the sale or trade of tools to be used for such purposes.
From Artraze commenting on this Slashdot story about the levels of DRM in Windows 7.
I think it [...]

Paper Rights Management

By Dan Lockton ⋅ June 20, 2008 ⋅ 8 comments

This delivery note from Springer informs me that the book I’ve bought “must not be resold”. Good luck with that. So have I bought it or not? Or have I bought a licence to read it? What if I give it away?
Many companies would love to be able to control what users can do with [...]

Sarah Burwood: Tumble Sums

By Dan Lockton ⋅ June 14, 2008 ⋅ 4 comments

We’ve covered teaching machines and programmed learning textbooks a few times on the blog, and I’ll admit to a general fascination with analogue computing and similar ideas, ever since reading John Crank’s Mathematics and Industry as a teenager, after finding it in a skip (dumpster) along with a lot of other very interesting books*. It [...]

Smile, you’re on Countermanded Camera

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 9, 2007 ⋅ 13 comments

Image from Miquel Mora’s website
We’ve looked before at a number of technologies and products aimed at ‘preventing’ photography and image recording in some way, from censoring photographs of ‘copyrighted content’ and banknotes, to Georgia Tech’s CCD-flooding system.
Usually these systems are about locking out the public, or removing freedoms in some way (a lot of [...]

The right to click

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 4, 2007 ⋅ 14 comments

English Heritage, officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, and funded by the taxpayer and by visitors to some of its properties, does a great deal of very good work in widening public appreciation of, and engagement with, history and the country’s heritage.
But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the [...]

No photography allowed

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 22, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A couple of recent stories on photography of certain items being ‘banned’ – Cory Doctorow on a Magritte exhibition’s hypocrisy, and Jen Graves on a sculpture of which “photography is prohibited” – highlight what makes me tense up and want to scream about so much of the ‘intellectual property debate’: photons are no more [...]

Digital control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Some developments in – and commentary on – digital architectures of control to end 2006:
Peter Gutmann’s ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ (via Bruce Schneier) looks very lucidly at the effects that Vista’s DRM and measures to ‘protect’ content will have – on users themselves, and knock-on effects elsewhere. The more one reads, [...]

Locking out IE users

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 31, 2006 ⋅ 5 comments

UPDATE: The code being used is from the Explorer Destroyer project, which has an explanation of its rationale here. It’s worth noting that it’s not just ‘Get Firefox’, but ‘Get Firefox with the Google Toolbar’, hence the $1 referral fee… I’d much rather have Firefox with some degree of privacy, to be honest. Thanks [...]

BoingBoing podcast – direct link

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 19, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Here’s the direct link for that new BoingBoing podcast – www.archive.org/download/…/boingboingboing_1_64kb.mp3 .
BB were almost the last people I’d expect to wrap up their audio in a Flash interface! Still, ‘View Source’ is a lot easier than having to use a Flash decompiler to extract the link.
Maybe an OGG version will be available for the next [...]

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