Departing from my usual fare of long original content, here are three links to things I wish I’d said, but someone better got there first:

First, Bernie Goldbach (aka Inside View, formerly Irish Eyes) Please Steal My Wifi

… I do not require passwords. I run no encryption protocols. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet. That includes two neighbours and the occasional car that parks across the road from my bay window to suck on my service. …

I agree with this philosophical position (see also here [update here] and here, to which Bernie links), though (as I have said before on this blog, here, here and here) there are deep legal waters here.

Second, Daithí Mac Síthigh (aka Lex Ferenda) Legal news in Ireland

… It’s quite difficult to track down legal news in this jurisdiction. … Bailii (and the Irish outpost Irlii, again with UCC support) are open-access-to-law sites; this means that we can see court judgements soon after they are handed down – and the Courts Service itself now does the same at courts.ie (although it can be a bit hit-and-miss; one decision I’m waiting on was announced in March, published and read in court in November and still hasn’t appeared…)

Having blogged about that case based on the newspaper reports last March, I’m still waiting for it too.

Third, Simon Fodden on Slaw quoting Tom Hodgkinson for his post’s title: “I despise facebook”. Hodgkinson wrote in the Guardian:

With friends like these …

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as “a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? …

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s called talking.

Slaw, as I have said before, is one of my favourite group blogs; the link to this piece shows why.