Berkman Buzz: April 11, 2014

It took me a long time to see past forever projects.

I told myself that making promises gave beginnings gravity. I labeled my newsletter a “lifelong project” not long after I started it. I called /mentoring a “movement” the day I announced it. Commitment marked a project as something worth talking about, I thought. This was how I would give my ideas escape velocity.

Escape velocity came, but at a cost. No amount of attention could spur perpetual motion. Once I’d set every expectation of permanence, disappointment loomed and glowered; inevitable.

In the @guardian I ask us all to stop Heartbleed bugs by doing right by open-source coders http://t.co/151RHgP48K
—Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

i don’t care if the media likes me.
i don’t even care if YOU like me.
(except that, in my own narcissistic way, of course i do. i am human and i need to be loved.)

here’s what i really care about:

i care that i can reach a hand out in the darkness and feel another hand.

i care that i have a friend nearby to share a bottle of wine with at a small table in whatever city I’m in so we can discuss the flood of our hearts. or a community that can provide the equivalent on a dark night, over the internet.
?sometimes you forget.

twitter is just a BUNCH OF PEOPLE.

Recently, I was at the Cambridge Public Library looking for divorce paperwork for Massachusetts (for more on why that happened, check out this post.) CPL doesn’t use filtering software on their computers (woo!) and has a clear and concise use policy as well as individual privacy screens. From that perspective, it was an ideal library computer experience.

However the short form financial statement (non-malware pdf at link), available from the MA court website and necessary for many court filings, was actually blocked by CPL’s anti-malware software. I tried a couple of different times to download it, including on different browsers, before eventually finding the form was available elsewhere on the Plymouth County Court website.

Heartbleed is a catastrophic bug in OpenSSL....

Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory -- SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to assume that it is all compromised. All of it.

"Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11.

I love this format of @EthanZ and @Erhardt posing a big question and reacting to scholarship on it http://bit.ly/QedozQ —J. Nathan Matias (@natematias)

“The Internet is a battlefield.” This is how the Internet is portrayed in Cuba. While the US State Department waxes about the free flow of information and knowledge, Cuban authorities speak of an ideological cyberwar, being waged by the United States, against Cuba and all it stands for. Last week's revelations regarding “ZunZuneo”, the USAID-created “Cuban Twitter”, suggests the Cubans may have a point.