For those who grew up with the internet, the people they know online and the people they know offline are often one and the same. We interact all day on Facebook with friends we first met face-to-face, and we meet our Twitter followers for drinks. The internet is real life, and that’s all there is to it.

Summer Anne Burton explains to the dim why cheating online is just cheating.

But there is a major problem with evaluating information labeled “secret”: people tend to inflate the value of “secret” information simply because it is secret.

In an opinion piece in today’s New York Times, neuroscience researchers Leaf Van Boven and Charles M. Judd talk about research into people’s willingness to trust secret information simply because it is secret. I assume that one day we’ll have to add some sort of secrecy bias to the list of cognitive biases.

The spooks and the social media titans and the online commerce goliaths are collaborating to improve data-crunching software tools that enable the tracking of our behavior in fantastically intimate ways that simply weren’t possible as recently as four or five years ago. It’s a new military industrial open source Big Data complex. The gift economy has delivered us the surveillance state.

Andrew Leonard writes about the interaction of open source, private industry, and government intelligence agencies in Netflix, Facebook — and the NSA: They’re all in it together. I think the piece is perhaps a bit too negative, I’ll try to follow up on that later.

Graciousness looks easy, but of course it is not.

Nice little essay on graciousness from Esquire magazine. People who don’t aspire to be more gracious scare me.

A stark but recurring reality in the business world is this: when it comes to working with data, statistics and mathematics are rarely the rate-limiting elements in moving the needle of value.  Most firms’ unwashed masses of data sit far lower on Maslow’s heirarchy, at the level of basic nurture and shelter.  What is needed for this data isn’t philosophy, religion, or science — what’s needed is basic, scalable infrastructure.

M. E. Driscoll defines data engineering. This is my job. (By the way, if it sounds like something you’re good at, we are hiring at Etsy. Email me.)

After years of complaints about Cascading Style Sheets, many stemming from their deliberately declarative nature, it’s time to recognize their power. For developers coming from imperative programming styles, it might seem hard to lose the ability to specify more complex logical flow. That loss, though, is discipline leading toward the ability to create vastly more flexible systems, a first step toward the pattern matching model common to functional programming.

O’Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talks about the power of CSS. CSS selectors have won in the marketplace of ideas for good reasons.

Laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act make criminals of us all. Ludlow describes the inevitable consequences:

In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society.

Check out the whole post at NYTimes.com.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

Roger Ebert on death