It’s our duty — all of us — to fight for the open web When you use an app, or a platform like a mobile phone, or a social network, or a web service — whether it’s from Google or Apple or Amazon or Facebook — do you think about the extent to which it is open or closed? Or do you just think about how it looks, or what it lets you do, or whether your friends are using it? Most of us probably fall into the latter category, but as veteran blogger Anil Dash and others have pointed out recently, there are some good reasons why we should care about the future of the open web, and be concerned about a trend towards more closed networks. As natural as that trend might be from a commercial point of view, it is the antithesis of what made the internet so powerful. 1) Control over our online identities 2) Control over our personal data 3) Control over where our content appears If you don’t care whether it’s open, who will? But the garden is so beautiful, and the walls so distant Why should we care?
The population of the internet, in one map How big is the internet? This map from the Oxford Internet Institute shows where the world's internet users live: This is a cartogram, a map in which the area of each country is proportional to its online population, based on 2011 data. So countries with large land areas but small populations — like Canada and Russia — appear shrunken, while dense, well-connected areas like South Korea and Belgium appear larger than life. The most striking region is Africa. That's likely to change in the coming decades. While the United States is more wired than much of the world, the US is not a world leader when it comes to internet penetration. Further reading Who created the internet? In 1973, software engineers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn began work on the next generation of networking standards for the ARPANET. During the 1980s, funding for the internet shifted from the military to the National Science Foundation.
Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family First published Sat Nov 6, 2004; substantive revision Mon Oct 21, 2013 Historically, few of the philosophers who defended justice in the public political realm argued for just family structures. Instead, most viewed the family as a separate realm that needed to be protected from state intrusion. The private sphere and the public sphere were dichotomized into separate realms with the latter beyond the reach of public action. Where these philosophers did not legitimate private power in the family, they simply ignored it. John Stuart Mill was a notable exception, arguing in The Subjection of Women, that the inequality of women in the family was incompatible with their equality in the wider social world. 1. Feminists argue that the so-called private realms of family, sex and reproduction must be part of the political realm and thus subject to principles of justice for three distinct reasons: Families are not “natural” orderings, but social institutions backed up by laws. 2.
Post "Good Google", Who Will Defend The Open Web? In a recent discussion on Hacker News, user andyl made the following comment: “Before Google+ came along, Google had many great products and embraced the OpenWeb. Now Google has abandoned Open Standards like RSS and CalDAV, and I think Google is more interested in building their own walled garden.” My first thought was: “Bingo, you nailed it.” My second, third and subsequent thoughts were something like this: This is a *very* unfortunate development, as Google were uniquely positioned to be great defenders of the Open Web, and - for quite some time - seemed to *be* defenders of the Open Web. Sadly, there are not a lot of obvious candidates. It won't be Microsoft, you can bet on that. Red Hat are a moderately powerful company, but they aren't *that* big and could wind up acquired by Oracle tomorrow for all we know. Mozilla have a lot of clout on the browser side, but arguably much less so than in years past, as their market share has slipped. Amazon? Facebook? LinkedIn? Sun? IBM? Wolfram?
The Internet's Original Sin Ron Carlson’s short story “What We Wanted To Do” takes the form of an apology from a villager who failed to protect his comrades from marauding Visigoths. It begins: What we wanted to do was spill boiling oil onto the heads of our enemies as they attempted to bang down the gates of our village. But as everyone now knows, we had some problems, primarily technical problems, that prevented us from doing what we wanted to do the way we had hoped to do it. There’s little suspense in the story—the disastrous outcome is obvious from the first paragraph—but it works because of the poignancy of the apology. The fiasco I want to talk about is the World Wide Web, specifically, the advertising-supported, “free as in beer” constellation of social networks, services, and content that represents so much of the present day web industry. The talk is hilarious and insightful, and poignant precisely for the reasons Carlson’s story is. I use the first personal plural advisedly.
And Read All Over jamellebouie.net Readability An implicit network, not overt racism, keeps tech writing dominated by white men. This article was first published in The Magazine, Issue 7 Click through to the “about” page of any technology magazine, website, or blog, and you often find individual or group pictures of the staff and regular contributors. What’s noticeable is so in its absence: You find precious few brown people. The quantity isn’t zero, of course. Quite a few people of color have high-level postings. The writers at Macworld are mostly white and mostly male, and a glance at staff photos at websites like The Next Web, The Verge, Engadget reveals few people of color. If the majority of technology users belonged to a select demographic group, this would make more sense, but that’s not the case at all: Gadgets are used by everyone. So why aren’t more of them writing about tech? The problem There are problems of access and representation, but in general, Asian-American bylines are easy to find among tech sites and magazines.
Identity and The Independent Web Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we’ve come to call the web? I believe the answer is yes. I’m fascinated with how our society’s new norms and mores are developing – as well as the architectural patterns which emerge as we build what, at first blush, feels like a rather chaotic jumble of companies, platforms, services, devices and behaviors. Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape. One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.” The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. A Shift In How The Web Works? Facebook does the same, building a page each time you click, based on increasingly sophisticated data and algorithms. What’s My Independent Identity? Imagine if nearly all sites used such services. Can’t we do better?
The internet is fucked In a perfect storm of corporate greed and broken government, the internet has gone from vibrant center of the new economy to burgeoning tool of economic control. Where America once had Rockefeller and Carnegie, it now has Comcast’s Brian Roberts, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, and Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, robber barons for a new age of infrastructure monopoly built on fiber optics and kitty GIFs. And the power of the new network-industrial complex is immense and unchecked, even by other giants: AT&T blocked Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s Hangouts video chat services for the preposterously silly reason that the apps were "preloaded" on each company’s phones instead of downloaded from an app store. Verizon and AT&T have each blocked the Google Wallet mobile payment system because they’re partners in the competing (and not very good) ISIS service. We’re really, really fucking this up. But we can fix it, I swear. We can do it. Go ahead, say it out loud. None. This is nonsense, of course.