Internet
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On digital distance
In July 2008, when I posted the photo above on this blog, some readers thought Santa Barbara Mission was on fire. It didn’t matter that I explained in that post how I got the shot, or that news reports made clear that the Gap Fire was miles away. The photo was a good one, but it… Continue reading
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The most important standard in development today
It’s P7012: Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, which “identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.” P7012 is being developed by a working group of the IEEE. Founded in 1963, the IEEE is the largest association of technical professionals in the world… Continue reading
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The Empire Strikes On
Twelve years ago, I posted The Data Bubble. It began, The tide turned today. Mark it: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. It has ten… Continue reading
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Is there a way out of password hell?
Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.† Think about how hard that job is. First, it’s impossible for developers of password managers to do… Continue reading
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Beyond the Web
Note: This post was updated on the morning of 17 October 2023 (the one when I am writing this) to help me prepare for the latest salon in the Beyond the Web Salon Series, themed Human +/vs. Artificial intelligence, which is happening at noon today, co-hosted by Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School, both at IU. To prep for… Continue reading
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How anywhere is everywhere
On Quora, somebody asked, Which is your choice, radio, television, or the Internet?. I replied with the following. If you say to your smart speaker “Play KSKO,” it will play that small-town Alaska station, which has the wattage of a light bulb, anywhere in the world. In this sense the Internet has eaten the station.… Continue reading
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Welcome to the 21st Century
Historic milestones don’t always line up with large round numbers on our calendars. For example, I suggest that the 1950s ended with the assassination of JFK in late 1963, and the rise of British Rock, led by the Beatles, in 1964. I also suggest that the 1960s didn’t end until Nixon resigned, and disco took off,… Continue reading
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Toward new kinds of leverage
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is said to have said. For almost all of the last four years, Donald Trump was one hell of an Archimedes. With the U.S. presidency as his lever and Twitter as his fulcrum, the… Continue reading
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How we save the world
Let’s say the world is going to hell. Don’t argue, because my case isn’t about that. It’s about who saves it. I suggest everybody. Or, more practically speaking, a maximized assortment of the smartest and most helpful anybodies. Not governments. Not academies. Not investors. Not charities. Not big companies and their platforms. Any of those… Continue reading
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Social shell games
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler, which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended. Because I wanted to see what’s… Continue reading
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The smell of boiling frog
I just got this email today: Which tells me, from a sample of one (after another, after another) that Zoom is to video conferencing in 2020 what Microsoft Windows was to personal computing in 1999. Back then one business after another said they would only work with Windows and what was left of DOS: Microsoft’s… Continue reading
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Bet on obsolescence
In New Digital Realities; New Oversight Solutions, Tom Wheeler, Phil Verveer and Gene Kimmelman suggest that “the problems in dealing with digital platform companies” strip the gears of antitrust and other industrial era regulatory machines, and that what we need instead is “a new approach to regulation that replaces industrial era regulation with a new more agile regulatory model… Continue reading
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The Future of Now
There is latency to everything. Pain, for example. Nerve impulses from pain sensors travel at about two feet per second. That’s why we wait for the pain when we stub a toe. The crack of a bat on a playing field takes half a second before we hear it in the watching crowd. The sunlight we… Continue reading
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Reality 2020.05.08
In The Web and the New Reality, which I posted on December 1, 1995 (and again a few days ago), I called that date “Reality 1.995.12,” and made twelve predictions. In this post I’ll visit how those have played out over the quarter century since then. 1. As more customers come into direct contact with… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
I posted this essay in my own pre-blog, Reality 2.0, on December 1, 1995. I think maybe now, in this long moment after we’ve hit a pause button on our future, we can start working on making good the unfulfilled promises that first gleamed in our future a quarter century ago. Contents Reality 2.0 Polyopoly… Continue reading
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Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible
This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally… Continue reading
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Do you really need all this personal information, @RollingStone?
Here’s the popover that greets visitors on arrival at Rolling Stone‘s website: Our Privacy Policy has been revised as of January 1, 2020. This policy outlines how we use your information. By using our site and products, you are agreeing to the policy. That policy is supplied by Rolling Stone’s parent (PMC) and weighs more than 10,000 words. In… Continue reading
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At Root an Evanescence
A Route of Evanescence, With a revolving Wheel – A Resonance of Emerald A Rush of Cochineal – And every Blossom on the Bush Adjusts it’s tumbled Head – The Mail from Tunis – probably, An easy Morning’s Ride – —Emily Dickinson (via The Poetry Foundation) While that poem is apparently about a hummingbird, it’s the… Continue reading