This one's worth circulating far and wide – police using the various powers they've been given over the last while to suppress a peaceful protest.

There's plenty of non-geek stuff in today's pile of links. Just skip past this one.

Highlight " Because as software becomes a medium through which the city is accessed and made social, the paired need for both open software and hardware is clear. The design of the open public space is dependent on the design of the open software which is, increasingly, dependent on the design of open cities."

Might be handy in future projects – one of the first things I almost invariable do it set up a user class to handle logins and similar rubbish, and it'd be nice to have a handy boxed-up model to do all that with.

Matt Jones identifies the really interesting thing about yesterday's Iphone 3.0 announcement, and it's not copy-and-paste.

This looks like a fairly decent starting point, anyway. Of course, that's probably just what the government wants me to think.

Today is "everything you didn't need to know about intelligence, and weren't afraid to ask" day.

Fascinating espionage-related stuff I had never heard of before now.

I probably don't need the little finger on my left hand, you know…

Scary looking maths for doing user-ratings based ranking that doesn't fall into a couple of common traps.

Insight into why password security may be a flawed model for websites.

How to take a simple sentence, and turn it into something that reads like David Foster Wallace.

Very pretty means of searching Flickr.

Sit down, shut up, and listen to the greatest living Englishman.

I think I may have to get along to this.

A little slice of the future that will be incomprehensible/irrelevant to most of you. It's an app hosting environment for RoR developers that pushes the apps out into a computing cloud rather than relying on single/multiple servers. If there was a PHP version, that was as easy to set up, I'd be signing up right now.

Yes, it's true. Newspapers are fucked. Hardly radical thinking, but a very cogent summary of exactly why they're fucked, and what we might, maybe, get instead. But here's the key bit: "When someone demands to be told how we can replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution." You could replace "newspapers" with "the music business", "the TV industry" or even just plain old "copyright" and still be on the money.

Programmable coffee maker *with a built-in grinder*. Gimmegimmegimme.

Not driectly realted to this link, but I was chatting with a friend whose job places him firmly on the side of the PRS in the Youtube/PRS debate, and I find myself wondering: for how long will the notion of musicians getting paid for re-uses of their recordings last? I mean, the basis of my employment is that I continue to create new code and assign the copyright in a manner that allows others to use it. I am not paid based on the number of people that use my code, except in an indirect sense. But when the need for new code runs out, so does my job and the money. What's the argument for treating musicians as a special case?

Iain Sinclair talks with typical eloquence about living in Hackney over the last 40 years. It strikes me that I would be entirely happy if I were in a position to do this about Tooting.

"Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who did this with our IP?' instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."

Spot on.

Everyone's already blogged this pile of ace. I'm blogging it as context for another link. If you've been under a rock, and haven't seen it, this guy has created something truly astonishing by editing together loads of other people's youtube videos.

Everyone and their dog is linking to this today. And do you know why? Because it's *fucking awesome*.

Everyone and their dog is linking to this today. And do you know why? Because it's *fucking awesome*.

PHP code of no interest to anyone but me. Move along. This is just so I can find it another time

"We have failed in our duty to open up alternate forums for technology to express itself and touch our lives beyond productivity and efficiency. Blinded by our quest for 'smart technologies' we have forgotten to contemplate the design of technologies to inspire us to be smarter, more curious, and more inquisitive."