Four short links: 9 November 2011:
- The Social Graph is Neither -- Maciej Ceglowski nails it. Imagine the U.S. Census as conducted by direct marketers - that's the social graph. Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.
- Anonymous 101 (Wired) -- Quinn Norton explains where Anonymous came from, what it is, and why it is.
- Antibiotic Resistance (The Atlantic) -- Laxminarayan likens antibiotics resistance to global warming: every country needs to solve its own problems and cooperate—but if it doesn't, we all suffer. This is why we can't have nice things. (via Courtney Johnston)
- Deep Idle for Android -- developer saw his handset wasn't going into a deep-enough battery-saving idle mode, saw it wasn't implemented in the kernel, implemented it, and reduced battery consumption by 55%. Very cool to see open source working as it's supposed to. (via Leonard Lin)