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The Internet's Original Sin

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. What we’re asking for today is another chance. 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. Related:  Internet

Free PDF Search Engine 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.

Cypherpunks (book) Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a 2012 book by Julian Assange, in discussion with internet activists and cypherpunks Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. Its primary topic is society's relationship with computer security. In the book, the authors warn that the Internet has become a tool of the police state and that the world is inadvertently heading toward a form of totalitarianism. They promote the use of cryptography to protect against state surveillance.[1] In the introduction, Assange describes the book as, "not a manifesto. There is not time for that." The book is published by OR Books[4] Its content derives from discussions in June 2012 with Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann on Assange's TV show World Tomorrow.[5] [6] [7]

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. The continent has 1.1 billion people, more than three times the population of the United States. 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.

Little Brother » Download for Free Official Downloads: Above you’ll find links to downloadable editions of the text of Little Brother. These downloads are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which lets you share it, remix it, and share your remixes, provided that you do so on a noncommercial basis. Some people don’t understand why I do this — so check out this post if you want my topline explanation for why I do this crazy thing. It’s kind of a tradition around here that my readers convert my ebooks to their favorite formats and send them to me here, and it’s one that I love! If you’ve converted these files to another format, send them to me and I’ll host them, but before you do, make sure you read the following: Only one conversion per format, first come, first serve. Fan conversions: ePub: EPUB file (Thanks, Hadrien Gardeur!)

The Internet as we know it is dying It was a week of rage, nostalgia and despair on the Internet. Sure, you could say that about any week on the Internet. But last week delivered some prime material. Check out this gamer exploding in fury at the rumor that Google — “The King Midas of Shit!” All is not well on the Web. At Twitch TV, the gamers are worried that Google’s “copyright monster” will tame their freewheeling Wild West and obliterate years of work. It’s a big mess. That’s easier said than done. If you’re not an avid gamer, the kind of person who enjoys watching other gamers narrate their own adventures through the latest first-person shooter, you’ve probably never heard of Twitch TV. But for the gamers who produce much of the content, the idea that Google’s copyright cop, ContentID, might suddenly be patrolling their world is a nightmare. From a copyright holder’s point of view, bringing a new sheriff into town probably seems entirely just and proper. But that’s not entirely fair. But the indisputable fact remains.

CWC Books : Evasion A 288 page novel-like narrative, Evasion is one person's travelogue of thievery and trespassing across the country, evading not only arrest, but also the 40-hour workweek and hopeless boredom of modern life. The journey documents a literal and metaphorical reclamation of an individual's life and the spaces surrounding them—scamming, squatting, dumpstering, train hopping and shoplifting a life worth living and a world worth the fighting for. “. . . then life began, and since then we remember each dumpster, abandoned house, and foot-chase by retail security. “Evasion offers many beautiful stories about surviving in voluntary squalor that are human and touching, yet liberatory and hopeful at the same time.” the insurgent, October 2001 “The nameless author could best be described as the Thoreau of the alley—one who lives/writes deliberately, and without regrets.” Bad subjects , January/February 2001 “And the book is a pleasure to read.

The 10 best words the internet has given English My book Netymology: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World is about the stories behind new words. I've been an etymology addict since I was a teenager, and especially love unpicking technological words. It's a great reminder of how messily human the stories behind even our sleekest creations are – not to mention delightful curiosities in their own right. 1. This word for our digital incarnations has a marvellously mystical origin, beginning with the Sanskrit term avatara, describing the descent of a god from the heavens into earthly form. Fusing notions of virtual world-building and incarnation, it's the perfect emblem of computers as a portal to a new species of experience. 2. In 1920s America, the # sign served as a shorthand for weight in pounds (and they still call it the pound sign). 3. Computing can be as much combat as collaboration between people and machines, and the Scunthorpe problem is a perfect example. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

How To Become A Hacker Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed this vital question, so I started this one. A lot of hackers now consider it definitive, and I suppose that means it is. Still, I don't claim to be the exclusive authority on this topic; if you don't like what you read here, write your own. If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of this document. Numerous translations of this document are available: ArabicBelorussianBulgarianChinese, Czech. The five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram that decorates this document is called a glider. 1. 2. 3. 5. 2.

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