Please vote New School

We’re honored to be nominated in three categories for the Security Bloggers Awards:

  • Most Educational
  • Most Entertaining
  • Hall of Fame

On behalf of all of us who blog here, we’re honored by the nomination, and would like to ask for your vote.

We’d also like to urge you to vote for our friends at Securosis for “Best Representing the Security Industry.” We don’t think Securosis actually is the best representative of the industry today. But I think they represent what we all ought to aspire to be, a empirical, business-aware industry. So please consider them as a part of the broad “New School” sort of slate. We’d also like to put a word in for the ThreatPost podcast as a great mix of technical and non-technical content, and for Veracode for best corporate blog. We’re suggesting Veracode in large part for Chris Eng’s empirical and side-splittingly funny thought leadership videos, but also for a general avoidance of FUD in their blogging.

But whomever you like, please take a moment to vote.

(Cross-posted from the New School blog.)

Google+ is not a space for free expression

Earlier today I noticed something funny. My Google profile picture — the picture associated with my Gmail account, my GChat account, my Google+ account, etc — had vanished. A bug? Nope.

It turns out, Google — without telling me — went into my account and deleted my profile picture.

See “Dear Google+” for the details of why MG Siegler’s picture looks like this:
Gmg3
Yet another reason that we, retro-style, run our own blogs.

Relentless navel gazing, part MCXII

Two changes here at Emergent Chaos this weekend: first, a new, variable width theme which is a little tighter, so there’s more on a screen. Second, I’ve moved the twitter summary to weekly, as comments were running about 50-50 on the post asking for opinion. I think that may be a better balance.

And a bonus third: someone else’s navel for you to gaze at:

cute belly button

Twitter Tools? Feedback please

So about a month ago, I started flowing my tweets over here. I’d love your thoughts on if it’s helpful, hurtful, or you just ignore it in your reader.

[Update: currently arguments run 3:2 against continuing Twitter in the main feed. More (and civil) debate is invited.]

Twitter updates

I’ve decided to experiment with pushing my Twitter feed onto the blog. What do you think?

For non-Twitter users, the RT means “re-tweet,” amplifying things that others have said and MT means modified tweet, where the RT plus comment don’t quite fit.

If someone has php code to resolve t.co URLs into real URLs, that would be nice, and the Twitter Tools plugin seems easy to hack on.

Free Hossein Derakhshan

Apparently, the Iranian Government has sentenced Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan to 19.5 years in jail for “collaborating with enemy states, creating propaganda against the Islamic regime, insulting religious sanctity, and creating propaganda for anti-revolutionary groups.” If you think putting bloggers or journalists in jail is wrong, please, please take a moment to sign the petition to free him.

I’m shocked and appalled. I’d met Hoder once, when I was working with the Committee to Protect Bloggers on ways to help bloggers in repressive regimes protect their privacy and freedom of speech. He was a nice fellow, and helped me understand some little bit of the complexity of the Iranian blogosphere.

Regardless of our having met and him being a nice guy, the sentence can not be described except as insane and unjust.

No one should be in jail because of peaceful efforts to improve understanding between societies.

For more, please see the Free Hoder blog has an interview with Hoder’s mom, and there’s another blog Free the Blogfather, which is in French.

Please take a moment to sign the petition to free him, and ask your friends to do the same.

Bleg: Picture editor?

I used to use “Galerie” on my Mac to put nice pretty frames around pictures I posted here. (See some examples.) Galerie was dependent on … blah, blah, won’t work anymore without some components no longer installed by default. So I’m looking for a replacement that will, with little effort, put pictures in a nice frame for me as I post them.

I’m willing to spend a little money, but not a lot of time per photo.

Your advice please?