It is now my suggestion that many people may not want information, and that they will avoid using a system precisely because it gives them information… not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it.
— Calvin N. Mooers, Mooers’ Law (1959)
What is Lohutok?
Lohutok is the name of a small town in Southern Sudan. When I was in the area, the town was the local transportation hub, with a working airstrip, so it was the source of supplies and news. It seemed like a fitting name for my home network, and then for my home page after a friend bought the domain for me as a birthday gift.
Who is Allison Randal?
Allison’s first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa, but her love of coding led her away from natural languages to artificial ones. In over 30 years as a developer, she has worked on everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, and shipping fulfillment, to hardware security, compilers, hypervisors, database replication systems, deployment automation, mobile apps, and talking smart-home appliances.
She is chair of the board at the Software Freedom Conservancy, vice-chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders. At various points in the past she has served as chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, board member at Open Usage Commons, chair of the board at the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and OpenStack projects, and currently works on hardware and software security.
Rumors that she may actually be Shirley Jackson living out yet-another identity, à la Adaline Bowman, are greatly exaggerated. She declines to comment other than to confirm that she is older than you think she is.