“In trying to do good, we have been living beyond our moral resources and have fallen into hypocrisy and self-righteousness” — William V. Cannon, commenting on the Vietnam War, New York Times, February 6, 1966 “Conquer the angry man by love, Conquer the ill-natured man by goodness. Conquer the miser with generosity. Conquer the liar with truth.” — The Dhammapada ...
Many of my friends have been asking me how can they send Google+ invitations to their friends. So I thought I’d write a quick post on it. Right now, Google has taken off the “Send Invites” feature that is supposed to look like the picture below and is supposed to appear on the Right-hand-side bar. [...]
Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Brief The Centre for Policy Alternatives, the institutional anchor of Groundviews, released today a report co-authored by Shilpa Samaratunge and I on hate speech online, looking at Facebook in particular. The report is the first in Sri Lanka to focus on hate and dangerous speech in online fora, contextualising the growth of this disturbing digital ...
This year marks the 10th birthday of WordPress.com and our parent company, Automattic. We are proud to have served this community of millions: from writers, photographers, artists, and small and large publishers, to business owners and entrepreneurs. A quick bit of history: WordPress itself started as an open source project in 2003. WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg then built our ...
Maybe Better If You Don’t Read This Story on Public WiFi
We took a hacker to a café and, in 20 minutes, he knew where everyone else was…Continue reading on Medium »
Photo courtesy BBC World Service Sunila Abeysekera passed away earlier today after a long battle with cancer. Sunila has a profile on Wikipedia but reading it would deeply frustrate anyone who knew her. A far better profile about her life can be read on Peace Women’s website. In the days, weeks and indeed, years to come, Sunila will be ...
Escorts make $100 a hand job — but entrepreneurs like me? We make $5,000 a night. How I hacked the new economy of the oldest professionContinue reading on Medium »
Recently, women in three Kilinochchi villages were subjected to coercive population control. This incident occurred on August 31, 2013 – at the Veravil government divisional hospital in Kilinochchi. The affected women reside in Valaipaddu, Veravil and Keranchi[1] ; all three are coastal villages. On August 30, the hospital staff and volunteers attached to Veravil divisional hospital informed community members ...
People all over the world were horrified last week when they saw the picture of a dead Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, being picked up from the beach in Turkey. His family’s attempt to escape the brutal civil war in their country had ended in tragedy. From Calais to Kos to Lampedusa, the blogging community has been following the refugee crisis in Europe — ...
Concerns about online privacy and illicit government snooping are at the top of users’ minds, now more than ever. We appreciate that your trust us to safeguard your sensitive information on WordPress.com, and Automattic has a long-standing commitment to defending your rights and holding firm against legal bullying and over-reaching government requests. We work to have the most stringent, user-friendly policies possible within the ...
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is committed to diversity: providing a platform for everyone to publish on the web and building a diverse, distributed workforce around the world. A collaborative effort between Accelerate with Google and Automattic, the Accelerate.LGBT conference series is designed to help diverse businesses and nonprofits optimize their web presence, empowering professionals through focused workshops and hands-on, one-on-one support from ...
It’s no secret that I love to pore through the street photography tag in the WordPress.com Reader and share images that catch my attention. Join me on another trip around the world as seen through the eyes (and lenses!) of these seven skilled photographers. This arresting image of a bird in a car — juxtaposed against the unknowing elderly man ...
It is so easy to turn everything into a matter of faith. Take a man. Any man will do. Make him a symbol of faith. Pay no attention to the man underneath the robes - be he good, bad, sick, twisted or downright evil: once he is a symbol of faith, his actions are justified. In time, people even forget what the faith stands for. All that matters is the living symbol.
Automatticians, the people who build WordPress.com, participate in events and projects around the world every day. Periodically, they report back on the exciting things they do when not in front of a computer. Earlier this month, Happiness Engineers Kathryn Presner and David Cole, Theme Wrangler Michelle Langston, and Community Organizer Jen Mylo attended the inaugural Tech Inclusion conference in San Francisco, CA. ...
Some people begin life with a running start, quite often backed by wealth, an expensive education and rather well-connected parents. Tharindu Wijesekara is not one of them. He modestly describes himself as a typical Sri Lankan, and his story is indeed as Sri Lankan as you can get. Nevertheless, Tharindu’s pretty unusual. He’s an artist, a designer and a video ...
April is National Poetry Month, and we love each day’s flurry of new posts tagged #nationalpoetrymonth in the WordPress.com Reader and across the internet. WordPressers are busy in the #napowrimo tag as well, participating in NaPoWriMo, Maureen Thorson’s annual project that encourages and challenges poets to write a poem a day in April. Let’s look at some poetry we’ve stumbled upon recently across the WordPress.com community. ...
Photo by Deepal V. Perera taken off the late Mel Gunesekara’s Facebook page Our Sunday morning was shattered by the horrible news that journalist friend Mel Gunasekera was found murdered in her suburban home in Battaramulla. She had been alone at home after parents went to church. The motive for this senseless killing is not yet clear. Initial report: http://www.dailymirror.lk/top-story/42446-journalist-murdered.html Mel ...
