I am amazed and saddened by the apparent and growing technological complacency we, technology people, find ourselves in. Ever more often we’re fascinated by blinky-thingies and shiny toys, falling out of our engineering mindframe that used to induce us to hack together great things – thankfully, in that regard the Warsaw Hackerspace is a shining exception.

A simple example. Not long ago Telecomix released 54GiB (!!) of Syrian Internet censorship equipment logs. A moment before that Apple had yet another of their conferences. Let’s compare those, shall we, taking Slashdot comment numbers into account?

• News From Apple’s iPhone Event
  – 392 comments;
• Telecomix Releases 54GB of Syrian Censorship Logs
  – 51 comments.

A shiny new toy versus release of extremely important and complete, up-to-date information on human rights violations and Internet censorship in Syria, and on technology utilised to that end, gathered “red hot” in an area of a social conflict that’s most probably a defining moment for this decade, all that during an on-going discussion about implementing Internet filtering in Europe.

Shiny new toy wins with an almost 8-fold advantage.