Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility

This is an article from January that has popped up a couple of times in my stream recently. After I mistakenly accused the Jisc website of having a carousel I was reminded of it again. The tide does seem to be turning against this feature on home pages and hopefully that trend continues.

Open source preference blunted in UK Government guide

I’ll be honest I think this is a real shame. I am a huge fan of the GDS Service Manual – I think it is a seriously useful resource for anyone running large websites particularly in Government but the previous strong endorsement of open source really could have been game changing – this not so much.

Why ‘I Have Nothing to Hide’ Is the Wrong Way to Think About Surveillance

The fall out from PRISM continues and this in particular is a really interesting essay on why the ‘nothing to hide’ argument is simply not appropriate in this case. There was also a very good article from Clay Shirky in the Guardian about the scale and capacity that the NSA are likely to have from a technology stand-point – weirdly it was in response to something from David Simon, creator of the Wire and former journalist but not really an expert on surveillance of this scale as far as I am aware – now if it had been Lester Freemon speaking that would have been a different matter.