Interesting Things on the Internet: Mar 2nd 2014 Edition

Some really good things in this edition (not that they aren’t all good, but, you know…):

• Our Comrade the Electron. A fantastic talk from Maciej Ceglowski, including a right on the money rant about how we've built the surveillance state by accident.
• Escape from the 'sink' estate "Either you believe that people who are born into Britain's disaffected underclass are born with criminal proclivities - a belief which I hope you find bigoted and ridiculous - or you accept that the criminal behaviour of the underclass is the direct consequence of environmental factors."
• Google lobbying for unsafe driving - A good point about how, in lobbying for their tech to be allowed when driving, Google should then be held partly responsible for any subsequent accidents caused by that change.
• Another less-than-glowing article about Google, Georgina Voss talking about arts patronage, following the launch of the Google DevArt programme. I know Georgina, some of the artists initially announced with the DevArt programme, and also one of the Google developer advocates who helped pull it together. I think, as ever, there's an element of clumsy manoeuvring from the big corporation rather than any real malice, but the article raises good points.
• Continuing the somewhat anti-corporate-tech slant: a long, but interesting look at the growth of Amazon, particularly from the book-world viewpoint.
• Privacy Icons. It's good to see projects like this which try to help non-techies understand what's happening behind the scenes with the digital services that they use, and give all of us ways to make better decisions about which ones we trust.
• Urban data: From fetish object to social object looks like an interesting one-day conference, organised by the excellent Adam Greenfield. Annoyingly I'm already busy on the 14th, otherwise I'd be heading along.