There’s a war brewing against the Internet, and it’s not just SOPA (the bill in Congress that threatens to break the Internet in the name of fighting overseas content piracy). It is, in the words of Cory Doctorow, a “war on general-purpose computing.” (read his post, “Lockdown,” on BoingBoing if you haven’t already).
What he means is that in trying to clamp down on a very specific problem on the Internet (the wide availability of pirated movies, music, and other content on foreign servers beyond the reach of U.S. laws such as the DMCA), laws like SOPA start messing around with the inner workings of the Internet such as blocking DNS servers. Applying special-purpose rules to a general purpose technology messes it up for everyone. Doctorow explains the difference between general-purpose and special-purpose technologies with a parable of the wheel: → Read More
“They have Internet in Europe?” my friend in the US joked via Facebook Messenger, as I checked into Foursquare from the Athens airport.
Yes Virginia, they do have Internet in Europe, or Greece specifically. In my case I had to buy an expensive worldwide data plan for my iPhone before I left the US, and then watch it like a hawk so I don’t go over my allotted 340 MB of data. $99 to stay connected. → Read More
It was twenty years ago today/ Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play/ Although 20 years ago he would have sworn/ That there wouldn’t have been so much porn. That’s right – the world’s first website, a placeholder page written by Sir Berners-Lee way back on August 6, 1991 in the then-nascent Hypertext Mark-Up Language, is celebrating its 20th birthday today. And, on this important anniversary, we ask what hath the web wrought?
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We’ve all been there; You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google Plus or Yammer or what ever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever “gone to the bathroom” in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?
Remember when the critical mass of smokers used to leave the table or meeting in groups to go indulge their habit? I straight up open my laptop at bars and parties, and then feel more guilty about that than drinking. → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by (@msuster) Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Any company who develops products reliant on iOS spends weeks crapping their pants before WWDC. No vacation schedules allowed for weeks before or weeks after. The announcements come out in one day and then even if you survive the annual release announcements you often still have to scramble to make sure your product is ready to work on time.
It’s madness. → Read More
Are the kids alright? Probably not, if you follow this study from the University of Maryland that says students today all but admit to being addicted to the Internet and media consumption. One student in the study likened prolonged separation from the Internet drug addiction, saying she was “itching like a crackhead” after not using the Internet for a bit. Not healthy, no. → Read More
Sometimes humor is the best mechanism to explain an opaque topic. Public Knowledge, a group that concerns itself with defending consumer rights in “the emerging digital culture,” has released a report today entitled “Peak Bandwidth.” Keep in mind today’s date, is all I have to say. The report says that the “era of plentiful, low-cost bandwidth is approaching an end. The supply of bits, the raw material of our information economy, is rapidly dwindling… unless mitigation is orchestrated on a timely basis, the economic damage to the world economy will be dire and long-lasting.” You hear that, we’re running out of bits! → Read More
The various cases of Internet use may be divided into four different classes. Though each class will be found to have many symptoms in common, yet there are variations so marked that there will be little-difficulty in placing each patient in his proper class for treatment. When this division is made and the characters peculiar to each described, it will be well to give the various local and constitutional measures which have been found useful in all—therapeutical agents which are indicated in all, and then point out the special indications which belong to each particular class. → Read More
There are a lot of people we have to thank for our current Information Age, not least Paul Baran, one of the founding fathers of Arpanet, the precursor to the Internet as we know it. While working at RAND in the 1960s, Baran created a system for information exchange called “packet switching” that was able to send “message blocks” from node to node in an electronic network. The packets could route around damage, a primary requirement for maintenance of data transmission during catastrophic failures (read “nuclear explosions”) on the physical network. → Read More
The United States government is now in the business of professional trolling. The Guardian has discovered a program referred to as “Online Persona Management,” the goal of which appears to be to manipulate online conversations so that they’re seen as being more “pro-American.” The Pentagon says the program doesn’t have an English language component, and that it merely exists to combat misrepresentations found on Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu language Web sites. → Read More
Australia’s Special Broadband Service has warned that the steady increase in broadband speed, and its increasing availability, may lead to “digital ghettos.” The premise is simple: faster and more reliable broadband means that more and more people can participate effectively online. As affordable broadband access spreads to different ethnic groups, argues the SBS, these communities could form tight-knit “communities” online—ghettos, in other words. Instead of broadband, and more generally the Internet, bringing people together, it threatens to further separate different groups of people from each other. → Read More
The days of cookies surreptitiously tracking your every movement online could be coming to an end. A European law goes into effect this May that would require Web sites to get “explicit consent” from its users before putting a cookie, or cookies, on their system. A reasonably big deal, yes. → Read More
The complete internet shutdown this week in Libya involved a new way to turn off web access for an entire country. Earlier this year, the total internet blockade in Egypt backfired and emboldened the protesters. China is well known for blocking internet services, but it’s not just China. Of course, having the government turn off the internet could never happen in the United States. We couldn’t condemn the action in other countries while at the same time plan it here. No one would even suggest such a thing, right?
Wrong. The topic came up last June when Senators Joseph Lieberman, Susan Collins and Thomas Carper introduced the controversial “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010″. [PDF] One vague provision in the bill gave the President the power to “authorize emergency measures to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited.” It became known as the internet “kill switch” bill even though the words ‘kill’ and ‘switch’ are not found in the bill. → Read More
Good ol’ government, spreading freedom and whatnot. The U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said yesterday that the government plans to invest a cool $25 million in order to help people get around Internet “thugs, hackers, and censors.” The money will go toward developers so they can build the tools necessary to fight Internet tyranny across the globe. → Read More
Continuing our series of Valentine’s Day-related posts, let’s take a moment to talk about security. Valentine’s Day is a particularly onerous time of year when it comes to keeping your computer safe from malware and other maladies. “Hackers” (or whatever you want to call the people who craft and disseminate malware, steal private information, etc.) prey upon people’s emotional vulnerability, sending phony “I love you” e-mails, mass blasting messages across dating sites that lead to phishing sites, the whole nine yards. So, what can you do to keep yourself as safe as possible over the next week or so, and how many of these skills can you then use throughout the year? Let’s find out! → Read More
This is just what Alone Together predicted: people, particularly young people, feeling more comfortable with themselves online than they are offline. Black is white, up is down, and the Mets are a well-run organization. The study comes to us by way of Kidscape, a children’s charity. → Read More
What happened recently to trigger the U.S. government’s sudden interest in Internet-policing? We saw the Department of Homeland Security seizing Web sites’ domain names last week, despite the fact the those Web sites weren’t based in the U.S. Odd. Now there’s word that the U.S. is wheeling and dealing over the right to approve any and all new top-level domains. You know, things like dot com or dot org. What’s at stake, essentially, is who’s in charge of the Internet? → Read More
According to a BusinessInsider interview, Gogo in-flight wireless is doing well and just raised another $35 million in capital to keep the lights on and the in-flight Wi-Fi flowing. Aircell, Gogo’s parent company, says that the service served 3 million sessions between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. Google offered free Gogo on all flights during this period. → Read More
Canada’s Internet innovation-killing usage-based billing scheme may already be dead in the water. The Toronto Star says the decision has been made to reverse the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s plan to implement the controversial billing method, which would have led to a situation where people there could have expected to pay up to CDN$2.35 per gigabyte. The CRTC is expected to make its case in front of the House of Commons later today. → Read More
How much good will Twitter and Facebook do your revolution once the government completely shuts down Internet access? “Not much good” is the correct answer. (Can something similar happen here in the U.S.?) That’s why it’s high time we pay homage to some of the old technology that’s really making this Egyptian situation tick: ham radio, fax machines, and good ol’ fashioned dial-up modems. Remember those? → Read More
