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Before Netscape: the forgotten Web browsers of the early 1990s
When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, the enterprise had hired him to upgrade the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. But almost immediately, the inventor of the modern webpage noticed a problem: thousands of people were floating in and out of the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," Berners-Lee later wrote.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Magazine - The Atlantic
Y vette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman , would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running.
National - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - It's Not Just Porn: Why Ultra-Orthodox Jews Fear the Internet
At Citi Field Stadium this Sunday, 50,000 religious men gathered to discuss the dangers of the Web. An organizer explains why the digital era is so challenging for the people of the book. Attendees at Sunday's rally used binoculars to watch rabbis deliver sermons about the Internet.
"You Get On The Internet And Pretty Soon You’re Drunk": The Orthodox At Citi Field
While the ultra-Orthodox steadily streamed down the 7 train platform and onto the pavilion, a group of four teenagers sat around the big red New York Mets apple, waiting for their friends. This was last night, an hour or so before the Citi Field gates opened. Outside the stadium, a few hundred ultra-Orthodox Jewish men stood around, waiting for the masses to arrive to this rally about the dangers of the internet.
Frank Warren is the creator of PostSecret, one of the internet’s most successful sites. But is he qualified to handle his readers’ most private confessions? Answering night-time calls at a suicide hotline in Washington DC some years ago, Frank Warren found himself using The Voice. Addressing callers’ problems and telling them where they might seek help, he noticed, was not nearly so important as adopting a certain tone: soothing, hypnotic, passive. Nowadays, Warren regularly speaks before hundreds of people; he says he sometimes slips into The Voice at these public events, but from what I can tell he seems to talk this way all the time. Whether he is discussing one person’s trouble tuning in to a radio station, or another’s difficulty with childhood sexual abuse, he projects relentless and unflappable sympathy.
America’s confessor | Prospect Magazine
ANYONE can publish on the web, but it would be better if some people didn't; the world does not need another site that provides advice on how to unlock an iPhone or find cheap car insurance. Now new evidence shows that search engines have upped their game to make sure their results are not dominated by such low-quality sites. Search engines are meant to pick out high-quality sites amid the sea of knock-offs, but even they get overwhelmed.
Inside search engines' war on bad results - tech - 15 December 2011 - New Scientist
How an omniscient Internet "sextortionist" ruined the lives of teen girls
In the spring of 2009, a college student named Amy received an instant message from someone claiming to know her. Certainly, the person knew something about her—he was able to supply details about what her bedroom looked like and he had, improbably, nude photos of Amy. He sent the photos to her and asked her to have "Web sex" with him.
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying - Jared Keller - Technology - The Atlantic
By harnessing the vast wealth of publicly available cloud-based data, researchers are taking facial recognition technology to unprecedented levels "I never forget a face," goes the Marx Brothers one-liner, "but in your case, I'll be glad to make an exception." Unlike Groucho Marx, unfortunately, the cloud never forgets.
Cryptocurrency - Technology Review
W hen the virtual currency bitcoin was released, in January 2009, it appeared to be an interesting way for people to trade among themselves in a secure, low-cost, and private fashion. The Bitcoin network, designed by an unknown programmer with the handle "Satoshi Nakamoto," used a decentralized peer-to-peer system to verify transactions, which meant that people could exchange goods and services electronically, and anonymously, without having to rely on third parties like banks. Its medium of exchange, the bitcoin, was an invented currency that people could earn—or, in Bitcoin's jargon, "mine"—by lending their computers' resources to service the needs of the Bitcoin network. Once in existence, bitcoins could also be bought and sold for dollars or other currencies on online exchanges.IT HAS been a rocky year for Bitcoin, the online peer-to-peer currency , with the exchange rate soaring from a few cents to over $30 per coin before crashing after a string of thefts, hacks and other setbacks . Coins have since regained a value of around $5. But it is becoming clear that the software could prove at least as useful as the currency itself, underpinning a number of important new technologies. First, it could be used as a form of "carbon dating" for digital information - something that would make electronic voting more secure. This is possible because of the way Bitcoin records transactions, says Jeremy Clark , a computer scientist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Bitcoin online currency gets new job in web security - tech - 17 January 2012 - New Scientist
Illustration: Martin Venezky In November 1, 2008, a man named Satoshi Nakamoto posted a research paper to an obscure cryptography listserv describing his design for a new digital currency that he called bitcoin. None of the list’s veterans had heard of him, and what little information could be gleaned was murky and contradictory. In an online profile, he said he lived in Japan. His email address was from a free German service. Google searches for his name turned up no relevant information; it was clearly a pseudonym.
The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin | Magazine
Why It’s Good that the Internet Is Changing Our Brains - Technology - GOOD
Things are easier said than done, or so the old adage goes, and we couldn't agree more. That's why we do The GOOD 30-Day Challenge ( #30DaysofGOOD ), a monthly attempt to live better. Our challenge for August? Get off the internet at 8 . There’s nothing like an article about how the internet is changing our brains to really freak people out. Studies show our thought process is adapting to the constant influx of media.It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today.
Infinite Stupidity | Conversation | Edge
Online echo chambers: A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought. - Slate Magazine
This is of particular interest to me. In 2008, I wrote True Enough , a book that argued that digital technology is splitting society into discrete, ideologically like-minded tribes that read, watch, or listen only to news that confirms their own beliefs. I’m not the only one who’s worried about this. Eli Pariser, the former executive director of MoveOn.org, argued in his recent book The Filter Bubble that Web personalization algorithms like Facebook’s News Feed force us to consume a dangerously narrow range of news. The echo chamber was also central to Cass Sunstein’s thesis, in his book Republic.com , that the Web may be incompatible with democracy itself.Last week, as he paced around the stage at the f8 Developers Conference , Mark Zuckerberg declared with wide-eyed optimism that Facebook was "helping to define a brand-new language for how people connect." "When we started," Zuckerberg explained, "the vocabulary was really limited. You could only express a small number of things, like who you were friends with.
The Rise of the Zuckerverb: The New Language of Facebook - Ben Zimmer - Technology - The Atlantic
Web Utopia No More
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