Arguing for the precautionary principle: evaluating projects and plans by numerical risk assessment is unscientific, and systematically leads to too much risk.

The precautionary principle is easy to apply when "do nothing" is a fine alternative to the project being evaluated. Often that is the case, but it gets more difficult when inaction is dangerous too. Also, it has to be applied with a sense of proportion. Walking downstairs might result in a fall, but it would be absurd to reject a project because implementing it would require someone to walk downstairs.

Reverse-engineers defeated a Microsoft system of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) for Windows applications.

I would cheer for them, except that even once these applications' DRM is removed, they remain proprietary software — you use them at the cost of your freedom. An unauthorized copy of a proprietary program is a rather bad thing, almost as bad as an authorized copy of the same program.

To protect your freedom, you need to refuse to run the program. And refuse to run Windows, too.

Please don't refer to unauthorized sharing as "piracy". It is propaganda for the enemy.

New National Academy of Sciences Report on Encryption Asks the Wrong Questions.

When Facebook sought advice about how to offer its dis-service to children, it consulted the experts that it funded, while giving independent analysts too little time to respond to the plan.

Oxfam staff in Haiti are accused of threatening a witness to demand silence about their activities with prostitutes.

Hiring sex workers is not wrong; it is one of those things that prudes condemn for no good reason, and then try to drag everyone else into condemning too.

The danger of retribution by prudes is real and substantial, so the fear of retribution is rational. Sad to say, that fear leads some people to commit real wrongs, such as threatening violence.

To illustrate the general point, this used to be the case for homosexuals. It is not wrong to be homosexual or to have homosexual sex, but prudes condemned that for no good reason, and manage to drag society along with that prudery. To be a closeted homosexual was truly dangerous, and they were vulnerable to being blackmailed and coerced into doing real wrongs.

That is mostly no longer a problem for homosexuals in liberal countries today, because prudish prejudice against homosexuals no longer receives much open support. Instead we see the new prudish campaign against sex workers and their customers. That too can coerce people into doing real wrongs. You can see the campaign here.

The article is incoherent — argument from juxtaposition with derision. The closest it comes to validity is when it points out that Haitians may do sex work because they live in desperate circumstances.

It draws the wrong conclusion from that. The problem those Haitians suffer is not sex work as such, it is their desperate poverty. Sex work is one of the ways they cope with it. To help them would mean giving them improved circumstances in which they could easily avoid sex work, if they wish to.

The poverty of Haitians was not caused by Oxfam. Rather, it is the result of centuries of oppression: first slavery, then decades of war for independence, then the huge indemnity that France demanded in exchange for Haiti's independence, followed for many decades by tyranny supported or imposed by the US, from the Duvalier family to the presidents that the US selected after the US kicked out Aristide for the second time.

To get out of this desperate situation, Haitians need humanitarian aid, such as Oxfam provides, but above all they need self-government that is honest.

The prudish article does identify one practice of Oxfam which will tend to cause problems: giving its foreign staff a luxurious villa to live in, and more generally a life of luxury compared with the local people.

The problem is not a matter of any specific luxury they might pay for. It is that their lifestyle tends to distance them from the people they have come to serve. That can lead them to look down at the local people and consider their work nothing more than a career to make money from. In effect, they forget the point of their being there. That doesn't automatically cause them to act badly, but tends to lead them in that direction.