Edward Samuel's Illustrated History of Copyright A fascinating illustrated historical tour, looking at how different technologies have shaped how we think about copyright and intellectual property.
posted on Jan 31, 2008 - View this thread

Google takes on Wikipedia with Knol. The web responds. Invite only, of course.
posted on Dec 14, 2007 - View this thread

In the same spirit as the Open Net Initiative and Committee to Protect Bloggers that both track global internet filtering, Sami ben Gharbia's Access Denied Map tries to track the blocking of sites like Blogger, Flickr, YouTube and others by governments, as well as efforts by activists to keep them accessible or to challenge their blockage.
posted on Nov 19, 2007 - View this thread

Happy Birthday :-) 25 years ago, communications were changed forever. Story in Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette
posted on Sep 19, 2007 - View this thread

E-motional breakdown: The state of e-mail misery. Is email finally at the breaking point? My inbox is so oversaturated I need professional advice to avoid bankrupcy. Or maybe I'll just wait it out -- the kids might know best.
posted on Jul 23, 2007 - View this thread

Reality Sandwich is a new web magazine whose subjects "run the gamut from sustainability to shamanism, alternate realities to alternative energy, remixing media to re-imagining community, holistic healing techniques to the promise and perils of new technologies." Daniel Pinchbeck, the author of Breaking Open the Head, is the editorial director of the site. [Via Disinformation.]
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread

Email used to be the ultimate application of the Internet, and there are still some interesting artifacts of that left behind today: As a source of randomness Email Roulette (which we've seen before) is my favorite application of email. TPC Remote Printing Service, a free mail-to-fax gateway, is pretty useful in a pinch and is something of an Old Internet institution with a history predating the web. Nearly as venerable is the more frivolous Internet Pizza Server from the days when the very idea of making a purchase over the Internet was funny, and the idea of browsing the web via email didn't seem so peculiar as it does today.
posted on May 18, 2006 - View this thread

Bob Parsons of Go Daddy warns about the proposed contract between VeriSign and ICANN, allowing VeriSign a permanent monopoly on .COM and price increases without regulation.
posted on Feb 20, 2006 - View this thread

The Internet Is Broken -- Part 2. We can't keep patching the Internet’s security holes. Now computer scientists are proposing an entirely new architecture.
posted on Dec 21, 2005 - View this thread

Google blacklists CNET reporters? An article about privacy issues that highlighted the potential for abuse if logs of search terms linked with IP addresses are combined by search companies with address and phone data, angered Google CEO Eric Schmidt enough to blacklist CNET reporters for a year, at least according to the bottom of this CNET story. The article begins with information about Schmidt found via Google searches, and goes on to "question Google's ability to adequately balance the heavy burden of safeguarding consumer privacy rights with the pull toward intermingling and mining data for ever more lucrative targeted advertising."
posted on Aug 7, 2005 - View this thread

"A look at the average number of page views per title reveals that Microsoft gets about half as many page views per title as compared to Google and Apple" a strong indication of where reader interest actually resides." - ZDNet. Intelliseek's Blogpulse reveals similar numbers: #1 Google: 473K, #2 Apple: 381K, #3 Microsoft: 262K. Venture capitalist, Ed Sim, says: "While the OS is important, Microsoft has lost its complete and utter dominance as we move to a service-oriented world where broadband is everywhere, apps are in the cloud, and the browser becomes king."
posted on Jul 27, 2005 - View this thread

Steven Levy and Mark Pesce on the future of television. Oh and Conan O'brien! :D [via]
posted on May 23, 2005 - View this thread

1968: The Year That Changed The Future. The roots of the VoIP insurrection trace back to four synchronistic events in 1968. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled MCI could compete with AT&T using microwave transport on the Chicago to St. Louis route. The same year, the FCC's Carterfone decision forced AT&T to allow customers to attach non-Western Electric equipment, such as new telephones, and modems, to the telephone network. The Department of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency issued a contract to Bolt Beranek and Newman for a precursor to the Internet. And in July 1968, Andrew Grove and Gordon Moore founded Intel. Innovation in the communication sector remained the proprietary right of AT&T for most the 20th century, but events in 1968 breached the barriers that kept the telecom and information technology industries apart. For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, AT&T had manned Berlin Wall separating telecommunications and computing, but eventually, these two enormous technology tracks would be unified. Absolutely fascinating - and admittedly long! - article, by Daniel Berninger on VoIP, on Om Malik's blog. Read the whole thing, as they say.
posted on Oct 5, 2004 - View this thread

Adults are picking up instant messaging in record numbers, with 50% of those over 35 using various systems. This study was funded by AOL, which has a major stake in the instant messaging market through its popular AIM software. But most people who use IM in the workplace are still using free and unsecured systems, despite the availability of secure versions in enterprise software and products like IM Secure.
posted on Sep 2, 2004 - View this thread

Let there be light - Canadian researchers have devised a new polymer material by manipulating buckyballs (carbon atoms that look like soccer balls). The technology could be used to create optical (light based) switches to replace electronic network switches. It could lead to an Internet based entirely on light.
posted on Aug 22, 2004 - View this thread

Blogging Festival in Iran: "Attempting to form a society of the web Persian content providers, this festival tries to improve the quality of the published information by the means of discussing sessions, roundtables and the exhibition. This festival, backed by the PersianBlog team, as the greatest Farsi weblog provider, and the National Youth Organization of Iran, is the first practical attempt for sponsoring the bloggers and internet magazines."
posted on May 25, 2004 - View this thread

Reflections On Our Media of Communication. Traditional news media vs. the internet. Are people really abandoning TV, paper, and radio news? Does the 'net really offer the best in free-press? The ever lovable Fred thinks so, and he's not afraid to tell you why.
posted on Apr 22, 2004 - View this thread

Catch some waves... for free! Wi-Fi Freespot will help. Via my roommate's co-workers, who keep sending this round e-mail circuits. I don't know why they include me. I hate technology.
posted on Feb 5, 2004 - View this thread

Blogshares has left the building Never really got into this, and not sure how much it will be missed, but that doesn't matter anyway as it's gone the way of the dodo. Too successful for it's own good it seems. I'm surprised that it hasn't been picked up by someone else yet...
posted on Dec 3, 2003 - View this thread

What happened to the Modem Guy? A great story on two partners and personal computer pioneers, Hayes (who got the fame) and Heatherington (who got the money).
posted on Dec 1, 2003 - View this thread

Client: "People don't know what links are on the web yet, you have to make it blink and say 'CLICK HERE!' " Web designer horror stories from the last days of the dotcom boom. (via the Spinnoff forums)
posted on Nov 19, 2003 - View this thread

Teenagers find the internet a frustrating experience A survey in the north east of England finds that teenagers are increasingly being alienated in their online experience because they aren't being given the skillsets to cope with finding or using the information. Seems to be the old story of schools buying computers but the kids not being engaged enough on how to use them (which has been the case since I was stuck in front of an Acorn Archimedes fifteen years go). Here is a similar article from Australia which describes how their eductation system is coping with the issue.
posted on Jul 23, 2003 - View this thread

Hot, or Not? (via Corante)
posted on Mar 7, 2003 - View this thread

Textfiles.com: Before the Web, before Google, we scoured Fidonet, absorbing the forbidden fruits of anarchy, occult and a lot of bad fiction. For better or worse, TEXTFILES are relics of that age.
posted on Jan 23, 2003 - View this thread

Lee Felsenstein, saving the world with wifi and a bike. This old school computer hacker built a human powered wireless internet station named as one of the best inventions of 2002. Now he needs to raise $25,000 to wire five villages of farmers to the web (to obtain weather info, pricing data) and to each other. This is another story that reminds me not all of this technology is for gadget geeks. It really can help improve peoples' lives, as shown by the varied projects coming out of the Tech Museum grant winners and groups like this.
posted on Jan 2, 2003 - View this thread

Is the Internet in danger of collapse from a disaster or terrorist attack? The Internet was a product of DARPA and designed during the Cold War because it was thought that the centralized phone system networks providing most or all of the National Defense communications networks- used at that time would not survive a nuclear attack disabling our ability to communicate with our troops. At the suggestion of the RAND Corporation and a number of Scientists the design scheme was to make the Internet a system with no central control in order to make it difficult for an enemy to disable our countries ability to communicate during a War. Has the decentralized Internet now become a threat to our very Centralized Goverment that initially created it-and other Goverments? Why would terrorist organizations want to destroy something that they in fact use themselves? Or perhap the researchers are right that the emergence of large centralized hubs brought forth by the increased commercialization of the Net has in fact made the Internet more vulnerable to attack or disaster! Perhaps there are lessons in this story regarding the whole Centralization/ Decentralization dichotomy that Goverments, and Individuals can learn from?
posted on Nov 26, 2002 - View this thread

"If you like surfing the web, it is probably because you believe people are basically good." That's the Economist interpreting the results of a recent study by IBM researchers of how cultural characteristics apparently affect people's readiness to adopt new communications technologies.
posted on Oct 8, 2002 - View this thread

Is self-regulation a legitimate approach to protecting copyright on the internet? This question is being debated at Spiked online which has commissioned responses from a variety of sources and also welcomes comments from readers.
posted on Sep 23, 2002 - View this thread

Employing a rather breath-taking counter, Netsizer claims to track the growth of the internet (users and hosts) in real time based on a methodology briefly and unsatisfyingly explained here. According to Netsizer the number of internet users already tops 800 million, but the Cyber Atlas is projecting 700-950 million users in 2004. Does anybody really know what's going on?
posted on Sep 1, 2002 - View this thread

The emerging internet operating system. Tim O'Reilly has seen the future. "It's just not evenly distributed yet." Alpha Geeks know things we'll all be learning soon: the Internet is an operating system. And they're busy building applications for it. Bonus:the article is heavily annotated for further reading!
Yes, he's talking to Apple developers, and applauds OS X, but this is not an Apple post. If you prefer, he makes the same points and applauds Sun in a speech to their developers.
posted on Aug 23, 2002 - View this thread

Buy SBC now. "In order to make sure the economy grows, we must bring the promise of broadband technology to millions of Americans,'' Bush said at a White House-sponsored economic forum. "Government at all levels should remove hurdles that slow the pace of deployment.''

Is the USTA happy about this type of talk? You bet. They would like to see passage of S.2430, also known as the Broadband Regulatory Parity Act of 2002. Others wouldn't. Some have studies (300K PDF) that argue local phone companies are slowing the growth of DSL for anti-competitive reasons.

Also, notice how the President said "bring the promise of broadband technology to millions of Americans", not all Americans? Might have something to do with the fact that rural DSL is really, really expensive to provide.
posted on Aug 14, 2002 - View this thread

Pressplay to start offering unlimited downloads of their online music database. While it still only (leagally) allows users to burn 120 songs to disc, there are rumors of allowing permanent d/l of songs, too. Is this a sign of the music industry finally starting to do what they should have done from the start, which was embrace the medium and capitalize on its benefits rather than try to stifle it? Regardless of whether or not pressplay suceeds with this tactic, is there anything legal online music services can do to compete with free p2p networks? Discuss.
posted on Aug 2, 2002 - View this thread

Sign up to fight the filters. As filters get piled upon filters it gets difficult to tell whether the document requests fail due to technical problems or due to active denial. These folk are developing a distributed application which will use idle cycles to map out the boundaries of filter space and help fight the cantonization of the Net.
posted on Jul 24, 2002 - View this thread

FBI enforcing the bandwidth CAP. With broadband caps spreading across North America, I wonder if we will see more stories like this, as users find they want to use more than 4 to 6 gigs a month.
posted on Jul 1, 2002 - View this thread

When will?? Asia-pacific surpass the US in Internet users? 2005 according to the good folks at BT Internet and their BTExact technology timeline
posted on Jun 13, 2002 - View this thread

Are national governments about to take over the Internet? Has ICANN done such a terrible job that they should be permitted to?
posted on Jun 13, 2002 - View this thread

Who Lost China's Internet? Here's a problem for your American company. You want access to the lucrative and growing Chinese information technology market but the Chinese government is demanding some questionable things from you. If you're Cisco you bend over backwards to make your routers filter subversive content. If you're Network Solutions you donate 300 viruses to study. If you're Yahoo! then you censor chat rooms, filter searches, and underreport your traffic. But if you're Microsoft you refuse to cough up your source code and call their bluff. Strangely, that puts Microsoft, The Voice of America, and the Cult of the Dead Cow on the same side. (via Peek-a-Booty)
posted on Mar 3, 2002 - View this thread

Iran Online. Can the opening of a countires 'cyber-borders' contribute to the liberalisation (small 'l') of the society? Iran has a rapidly increasing population, as well as a rapidly increasing online percentage, they have sports sites (they seem to like soccer), portals and the 'IranMania' search engine. Can un-censored access to the internet help build tolerance?
posted on Feb 22, 2002 - View this thread

First Monday has not been mentioned since September 16, 1999 (no comments), but it's still timely and intellectual. In this issue, "Technological and Social Drivers of Change in the Online Music Industry".
posted on Feb 19, 2002 - View this thread

Attack of the Luddites? A group from my high school visited Mendocino High School in the early 1990's to see how they were implementing internet access, as we were getting ready to do the same. We were, frankly, jealous of their "fat pipe," their all-wired classrooms and their much-vaunted community support. Things are apparently much different now. "Wireless Free Mendocino has been instrumental in defeating attempts to bring cell phone and a high-speed Internet service to the town's 1,000-odd residents. Now the group is trying to force the high school radio station to remove its antenna from the school roof -- a move that could sound the death knell for the struggling student outfit."
posted on Jan 23, 2002 - View this thread

Is The Economy Broken? It was one thing when it was the tech/Internet sector - the bubble burst, but now the wave continues with the 2002 recovery seeming like wishful thinking. If it's not layoffs, companies are cutting their 401k plans. Argentina's crisis seems like it will have ripple effects as well. Then you have numbers saying people are confident, so are we getting tanked by jittery Wall Street-ers? Oh, there's also a war on.
posted on Dec 31, 2001 - View this thread

Reid (shoe bomber) used Web top buy explosives Or so he has claimed. Who said the Web does not have its important uses? Should such purchases be allowed" Is there now a need for disallowing some items on the Net?
posted on Dec 28, 2001 - View this thread

Watch where you link. The recent court findings in the DeCSS case apparently included the ruling that linking to a site containing illegal material -- even if it's just to report that fact to others -- is not protected as free speech (and possibly illegal). [NYTimes link; login: metafi/metafi]
posted on Dec 14, 2001 - View this thread

As usual, when it's the U.S. turn, they play by different rules How come Russian and Scandinavian hackers can be charged under U.S. law for activities done in their home countries, yet when an American company gets a very reasonable request (IP tracking that it is done for web banners anyway) from a judge overseas, the U.S. grabs the free speech / local law argument.
posted on Nov 8, 2001 - View this thread

The W3C's RAND Patent Policy commenting deadline has been extended. At first glance, the new policies seem to encourage software patents, but after reading the whole thing and the W3C's response to current comments, it looks, to my admittedly naive eyes, as though the W3C is trying to make it so that companies using proprietary software are going to have to make it available to other people for licensing. Why is this new structure potentially a bad thing?
posted on Oct 2, 2001 - View this thread

URI terminology demystified Quasi-Socratic Q&A on what the hell URIs are. “Q: What a mess! Are you serious? For a technology so architecturally core to RDF and the Web, that’s quite a kludge-tower! A: What can I say? That's the state of the art as I understand it”
posted on Sep 22, 2001 - View this thread

Next generation emoticons or another step in tearing down cultural (and man-machine?) walls?
posted on Sep 8, 2001 - View this thread

Mappa Mundi is a magazine about information visualization and navigation with a focus on the web. What similar sites are out there? A second related question is when why are tools for finding stuff on the web so primitive? More inside.
posted on Sep 5, 2001 - View this thread

The only difference between Hotmail and Hailstorm is R and S... So what do the R and S stand for?

Reading this article a few months back, I was struck by how inappropriate the name "hailstorm" was for a feature whose sole intention is user-friendliness. It just seemed too aggressive. Then, while reading something which also referenced hotmail's recent security problems, I misread "hotmail" as "hailstorm."

Now, I hate to seem like a numerologist here, or even worse, a scrabble player, but how else can you explain the similarity AND the impropriety of the name? Getting to the point, does anyone have guesses about what the "r" and the "s" are brought to you by?
posted on Sep 5, 2001 - View this thread

The Death of TCP/IP?
An interesting (if not paranoid) article about internet security and Windows XP. Leaves me wanting to know more. [continued inside]
posted on Aug 3, 2001 - View this thread

Snapshots of san francisco: one man's view of the san francisco dot-com fiz-out. (more people should have websites, i can't get enough.) -- flash needed
posted on Jul 25, 2001 - View this thread

The Semantic Web is Coming.... There's a new web coming...and this one will surf you. Smart agents will be all the rage, managing your appointments and finding showtimes for movies they know you'll like. What do you want the internet to be? [From Scientific American]
posted on May 2, 2001 - View this thread

Say farewell to the geeky white guys. The new generation of Internet users looks a lot like the folks who cruise Wal-Mart-and then some. How the hell did that happen?
posted on Mar 20, 2001 - View this thread

Feeling short on brainpower? From air conditioning to space travel, Yarchive has enough information to transform you from a mindless idiot to a master of technological know-how.
posted on Mar 14, 2001 - View this thread

Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.

i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:

``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."

Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted on Mar 14, 2001 - View this thread

The Future of the Internet is the Web application!
From the USATODAY story:

The Internet will be less about going to big sites like Yahoo and Amazon.com and more about using specialized pieces of software that connect to the Net. Two current examples: Napster and the Miller Lite Beer Pager.

Wow, the future is now!
posted on Mar 2, 2001 - View this thread

All your .org's now belong to Verisign... ICANN strikes a deal with Verisign:
"Verisign will retain permanent control of the .com registry (they were supposed to separate the registry and registrar businesses), long-term control of .net (plenty of time to make that permanent too), and .org will actually be spun off. There are also apparently plans to reinstate the old limits on .org domains - if you aren't a non-profit corporation, you won't be permitted to register or keep a .org domain."
posted on Mar 1, 2001 - View this thread

"This stuff is still great." Paul Ford reminds us, as ever, why we're here, and thinks smart about the downturn: "We thought that Metcalfe's law on networks and Moore's law on processor power would change everything. But people don't change every 18 months; cultures don't start moving faster than processors. People don't increase their value with the increase in value."
posted on Feb 27, 2001 - View this thread

"I think it's dead. I think it's over with; it's gone. There is no long-term prognosis. The patient has died. There is no future." That's the web as content medium he's talking about. [more inside]
posted on Feb 3, 2001 - View this thread

the news versus e-mail news Is this link, an article about spreading news via e-mail and the net, an example of my present posting?
posted on Jan 29, 2001 - View this thread

A new wrinkle in the tale of TV vs. Telephone. Cable TV over your phone lines? I doubt it will fly, but who knows?
posted on Jan 23, 2001 - View this thread

Welcome to the blob. Please watch your step. It looks like Viacom's going to swallow up Yahoo! and all its assorted properties. What does this leave untouched, by partnerships or redistribution deals or what-have-you? Anything? (Who was it again who was predicting that one large company that controlled everything called Omnivox? I remember reading about it somewhere when I was, like, ten or so.)
posted on Jan 17, 2001 - View this thread

Not Dubbing the Simpsons The Office de la langue française and others are up in arms (ils capotent) about anglicisms in Internet discourse. Business 2.0 talked about it. Branchez-Vous writes a short, cutting article, giving those who pepper their French with English enough rope to hang themselves. («Dans la catégorie "Un mot français, un mot anglais et hop!," le prix revient à Rational Software France, the e-development company, qui a annoncé la nomination d'André Arich au poste de Partner Manager pour sa filiale française, ainsi que le lancement en France du programme de partenariat Rational Unified Partner Program (RUPP).») ¶ Strangely, French has a nicer word for E-mail than English does: courriel. (Grand Dictionnaire is the OLF's official bilingual tech dictionary.)
posted on Jan 5, 2001 - View this thread

Maybe I spoke too soon. A lot of semipro tech-zines, sort of like blogs except with specific subject matters to cover, are financed by ad networks. In the recent past a bunch of them have lost their funding when their ad networks went out of business. Now one of the biggest networks which remains is changing their terms to the detriment of the web sites. I gather that a lot of the ad networks were running at a loss, and of course new funding has dried up. [more inside]
posted on Jan 5, 2001 - View this thread

Blast from the past
Oh, those halcyon days of text-based real-time chat, before there was a Web. (I'm catching up on my link quotient....)
posted on Dec 10, 2000 - View this thread

Only nine days left to enter your website in the competition for SXSW 2001. All categories but one are for websites that are newly created in 2000 (the other category is for redesigned/relaunched websites).
posted on Dec 6, 2000 - View this thread

Poisons spam bots dead! "Wpoison helps to combat the junk e-mail problem by effectively thwarting the efforts of junk e-mailers who regularly scan web pages, looking for target e-mail addresses to harvest, which they then send junk e-mail to. "

Wow, does this really work? Has anyone tried it or something silimar? I hope it does work, I really hope it does. (sorry if its been posted already)
posted on Nov 21, 2000 - View this thread

Smellovision ("Digiscents") demoed at Comdex. Scan down to the fourth paragraph for an informal review.
posted on Nov 16, 2000 - View this thread

I don't recall having heard from anybody that the consumer experience of getting online required redefinition.
posted on Oct 5, 2000 - View this thread

What happened to the Open Directory? Does anyone know why this site has gone down?
posted on Sep 28, 2000 - View this thread

I was reading cryptonomicom last night ..and awoke this morning to read this online.. Deja vu, Datahaven! I'm glad they found good use for that antiaircraft deck.
posted on Aug 17, 2000 - View this thread

I wondered who invented the Internet. Some people would say Al Gore, but even after reading parts of the history of the Internet (first link), I can't figure it out. I think the "USSR" prompted us to do it when they launched Sputnik. Is this really the case?
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

Jargon Scout - In this age of web-building and domains of all sorts coming out the wazoo and email and new jargon all the time, there seems to be a lack of good jargon for emotional states. Two states that I think desperately need a word coined for them are: the anticipation for the propagation of and reticence to tell anyone about a newly registered domain; and the state where you get so starved for contact of any kind that you post your undisguised email to a half-dozen newsgroups and fanzines just so that there is something in your inbox. Anyone have any ideas for what these states should be called?
posted on May 17, 2000 - View this thread

I'm sure many of you have already seen this or are already familliar with it, but this article talks about bandwidth that really puts the pedal to the metal!

Amazing.
posted on Mar 26, 2000 - View this thread

This article at zdnet is all about how wireless web devices aren't that handy, and how our lives would suck if wireless web access was everywhere. I heartily disagree. I have a wireless 2Mb LAN connection at work and it's liberating (it's possible to code, listen to shoutcast mp3 streams, and check email outside or down at the coffee house next door). My PCS phone is useful too, I can surf a few important websites when I don't have a laptop around, getting news, weather, and email. Wireless access is certainly a Good Thing, and should make our lives easier, but the article's author is blaming the possible deluge of information on wireless, instead of the user. How would a wireless broadband connection make your life better or worse?
posted on Feb 1, 2000 - View this thread

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at HOME This isn't a new site, but there is a new version of the software. It's nice to be able to use your CPU to find ETs while your away from your machine. It is simple and doesn't crash. Check it out! I'm running in on both my NT box and my MAC G4
posted on Jan 27, 2000 - View this thread

Today on a web list I subscribe to, some members were complaining about spam and the need for sites to have privacy policies that promise not to sell your address. I have a hotmail address that I use whenever a site requires an email address and doesn't post a privacy policy. I hadn't checked my account in a month, but I did today and look what was in it. 74 useless messages in 30 days. Thanks spammers.
posted on Nov 21, 1999 - View this thread