MetaFilter Saved My Pals From Sex Traffickers—Exclusive Interview | Mother Jones. motherjones.com (2010-05-22):

How an online community mobilized to rescue two young Russian women.

Forget the irritating title and summary. Besides being needlessly sensationalistic, the rhetoric of “saving” or rescuing women from sex trafficking is infantilizing and intensely unhelpful; also, it’s just inaccurate as a description of what actually happened.

What is awesome about this story, crappy headlines aside, is how a good friend and an Internet community managed to not only alert two young Russian women that the “agency” was lying to them, that the replacement jobs they’d been promised were actually at a skeazy strip club, and — even more important — while government “hotlines” and “counseling” proved to be alienating and more or less completely useless, an ad hoc group of folks on MetaFilter managed to come together to connect the women with information, a safe place to stay in New York, a friend to advocate for them and help them out, and leads on getting help to secure straightened-out visas — meaning practical solidarity and mutual aid, through an ad hoc distributed grassroots network, scattered throughout cities all across the continent, which managed to foil a gang of lying traffickers, helped two women get themselves out of a really dicey situation, and provided with plenty of resources to help them land on their feet.

(Story thanks to a private correspondent.)

Dude, Where’s My Data? (The Sequel) snellspace.com (2010-05-12):

DeWitt Clinton: I have my music collection stored on a file server, and I’d like to be able to play it remotely via my Android device. Local network only is fine. Storing personal stuff on home networks is cumbersome and annoying. I have pictures, movies, music, and many other types…

Technological civilization is awesome. But it’s not awesome enough yet. The fact that Dropbox’s remote servers are currently easier to work with than a server 3 feet away from where I’m sitting is one of the unremarked scandals of computing.

As Snell says, The fundamental technologies to make all this happen already exist. Someone just needs to make it happen. Please.

theoriginofthe<blink>tag (www) www.montulli.org (2010-05-11).

A brief history of the most hated tag in the history of the Web.

Farewell to the notification area. Canonical Design (2010-04-23):

Ubuntu is phasing out the notification area (a.k.a. "system tray"), because of its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior. Many programs that previously used the notification area should use other notification mechanisms instead. Some notification area items will be replaced by various system status menus we're…

Good riddance to bad interface elements.

• timbray: Some travel-biz group should start organizing civil disobedience. Polite firm en-masse refusal to go along with security theatre. Twitter / timbray (2009-12-28). timbray: Some travel-biz group should start organizing civil disobedience. Polite firm en-masse refusal to go along with security theatre. (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• How Automakers Abuse Intellectual Property Laws To Force You To Pay More For Repairs. Techdirt (2009-12-29). “… as cars become more sophisticated and computerized, automakers are locking up access to those computers, and claiming that access is protected by copyrights. Mechanics are told they can only access the necessary diagnostics if they pay huge sums — meaning that many mechanics simply can’t repair certain cars, and car owners are forced to go to dealers, who charge significantly higher fees. There is no legitimate basis for this at all. It’s a clear misuse of intellectual property laws — which were never designed for this sort of thing — to prevent independent auto mechanics from repairing newer cars.” [R.G.: Right on, except that it’s not a “misuse.” The whole point of Intellectual Protectionism always has been to lock out independents from peacefully competing with privileged incumbents. The thing itself is the abuse.] (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• Touché mesofunny, Epic Win FTW (2009-12-20). Submitted by: dunno source via Submission Page (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• Advisor: Deleting emails could make you happier. Lisa Katayama, Boing Boing (2009-12-03). If people were just more aggressive about deleting irrelevant things and relevant things aren’t that important, they would probably be happier. Because I’m happier. So there must be something to it. Emails only take up virtual space, not literal square footage, so it’s easy to let them pile up. But… (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)
• RIAA, MPAA and US Chamber of Commerce declare war on blind and disabled people. Boing Boing (2009-12-29). Intellectual Protectionism Vs. Technological Civilization and Accessibility for the Disabled (Linked Tuesday 2009-12-29.)