Life and business in occupied Palestine are tangled in hundreds of absurd Israeli regulations, each with its own excuse, but all designed simply to make life poor and difficult.

How the nebulous idea of "cloud computing" led millions of internet users to lose their privacy.

The one flaw in the article is that it presumes we have all fallen for the trap. For example, "When the technology industry embraced 'cloud computing' and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain." Maybe you made that bargain — I never did. I hope you will join me in rejecting it now.

Some kinds of services are acceptable to use in specific ways. But if you adopt a policy of trusting a service without first carefully checking who you would be trusting with what, you'll be mistreated over and over. This is why I have adopted the policy of not identifying myself to businesses I deal with except under very narrow conditions (for instance, the company that hosts stallman.org knows it's mine).

In other words, you've got to stop thinking that there is a "cloud", and start thinking about each particular service.

Advice for Americans dealing with debt collectors.

Protests Erupt in Nicaragua over Interoceanic Canal.

The canal raises two issues. One is that farmers who will lose their land don't trust that they will be compensated. There is an obvious solution: start buying their land at a fair price now.

The bigger and harder issue is that of potential ecosystem damage. I don't know if there is a way to prevent that.

A cinema in the UK called the thugs to arrest some 12-year-olds for bringing iThings with them to the movie.

The fact that they did not in fact record the movie is a side issue. What if they had done so? Since that is not a crime in the UK, the only complaint the cinema could make is that they violated its rules. That should not qualify as an "emergency" — the thugs should have refused to come.

This is in addition to the general point that laws against sharing copies of published works are an injustice.