Selected on 16.12.2007

Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"
It is a first-person account of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah, a Yemeni man, who was kidnapped to a CIA "black site" torture camp and remained imprisonned without any charges leveled against him for 19 months.


Google debuts Knol, "author-driven knowledge" project
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably.

Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain
How wikipedia blacklisted 1000 men to get to the one and for what...


INTERNET PIRACY IS GOOD FOR FILMS
Evgeny's article on how an indie film with under USD 200,000 budget turned to be a cult thanks to internet piracy.

A Big List of Sites That Teach You How To Do Stuff
..there are a large number of very helpful sites that teach you how to do things. These are do-it-yourself sites, but we're not talking about building a deck or baking a cake -- the web is full of more general interest sites that give quality instruction on all sorts of fun and useful projects. Including, sometimes, how to build a deck or bake a cake.

Homophily
In the 1950s, sociologists coined the term “homophily” — love of the same — to explain our inexorable tendency to link up with one another in ways that confirm rather than test our core beliefs.

I'm The U.N. Undersecretary Your Mother Warned You About
..I came here to do two things: advance the cause of economic equality, and get some tail—and I'm all set on economic equality. Spend a couple General Assembly sessions with me and I can teach you things no air-dropped pamphlet decrying the dangers of unprotected sex in developing countries ever can. These special envoys, they've never seen anything like me. I'm a bona fide, high-ranking ambassador- and lady-killer.