What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

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Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them.

The short answer is that OpenID is the worst possible "solution" I have ever seen in my entire life to a problem that most people don't really have.

That's what's "wrong" with it.

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OpenID is not flawed in some minor product way that requires just a few tweaks, it is so massively flawed (perhaps in its very conception) that anyone in their right mind would immediately know that it could never possibly be successful, the very notion that there's merely "something wrong" with it is a Joseph Goebbels -"Big Lie"-style question wherein the nerds who came up with it have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that it could somehow ever be a viable thing that real people would want to adopt.

Samtidigt tas reklam- och prenumerationsfinansierade tjänster som Spotify emot varmt i den massmediala debatten, då de dels avspeglar en svensk nationell stolthet som industrination, dels målas upp som en sorts universsallösning på "fildelningseländet". Men man bör minnas att Spotify har ett relativt begränsat utbud, som knappast kan sägas gynna mer perifera, okända artister, samt att tjänsten ger väldigt blygsamma inkomster för de medverkande upphovsmännen.

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Vad medielandskapet behöver är tjänster som bättre syftar till att lyfta fram det mindre kända. Sverige behöver en tydligare formulerad kulturpolitik som tar dessa nya förutsättningar i beaktande, och inriktar stödet mot att lyfta fram det som skapas i periferin, snarare än att gynna existerande oligopolliknande formationer såsom Bonniersfären, SF och Spotify.

"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."

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He also bemoans the proliferation of net-connected apps on the Apple iPhone and other smartphones. "The tendency for magazines, for example, to produce smartphone 'apps' rather than Web apps is disturbing, because that material is off the Web. You can’t bookmark it or e-mail a link to a page within it. You can’t tweet it. It is better to build a Web app that will also run on smartphone browsers, and the techniques for doing so are getting better all the time."

Someone who knows how to search for code examples and how to learn from the work of others will be more or less self-sufficient. They can learn and grow their skills on their own without needing someone else to do it for them. The ability to learn and grow your knowledge is the single most important skill for any developer. Without the ability to grow you will find yourself quickly deprecated. I do expect people to know how to use the language and/or framework they were hired to work in, but I judge them primarily based on the work they submit. A guy who can figure out how to do things that he doesn’t know how to do, on his own, on the fly, is a real programmer.

A Fox News contributor and former state department adviser has accused WikiLeaks of conducting "political warfare against the US" and called for those behind the whistleblowing website to be declared "enemy combatants" so they can be subjected to "non-judicial actions".

In addition to Google's own app marketplace, Amazon, Horizon and Vodafone have all announced that they are creating their own app stores for Android. So there will be at least four app stores on Android, which customers must search among to find the app they want and developers will need to work with to distribute their apps and get paid. This is going to be a mess for both users and developers. Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.

Not to argue with The Steve or anything, but if a single app store, controlled by a single corporate entity, is better than many, then I guess we also need only one web site, and only one newspaper, and only one political party. Apple's classical "1984" commercial is getting more and more ironic.

IS CYBERWARFARE (a) one of the biggest threats of the 21st century or (b) an elaborate hoax designed to extract money from gullible governments? Stuxnet, the computer worm running rampant in Iran's nuclear facilities, tells us the answer. An analysis

of the worm by computer security company Symantec makes it abundantly clear that a few lines of malicious computer code can trip electricity grids, burn out power-station generators, pollute water supplies and sabotage gas pipelines. That cyberattacks can become real-world attacks is no longer a matter of conjecture.

The idea of the reset style sheet is to globally target every markup element and set all of its possible attributes to zero, default or inherit. This gives the developer a “clean slate” with no browser default styles. Many say that this is the first thing you should add when you start building a web page, but I firmly disagree.

I’m sure that I am one of the small minority of web developers who’s saying this, but reset style sheets are bad practice, and it’s time to stop using them.

Software obeys the laws of entropy, like everything else. Continuous change leads to software rot, which erodes the conceptual integrity of the original design. Software rot is unavoidable, but programmers who fail to take conceptual integrity into consideration create software that rots so so fast that it becomes worthless before it is even completed. Entropic failure of conceptual integrity is probably the most common reason for software project failure. (The second most common reason is delivering something other than what the customer wanted.) Software rot slows down progress exponentially, so many projects face exploding timelines and budgets before they are killed.