Adam Thierer has posted a thoughtful review of the Future of the Internet. He picks up on something that others have mentioned that I don’t realize I appear to suggest: that my distinction between sterile and generative technologies appears to be too much of a dichotomy, and that I think that only generative technologies are [...]

A lot of my recent work concerns how vulnerable the Internet is to bad code — in particular, how easily the generative PCs hooked up to it can find themselves reprogrammed for worse, in a heartbeat, either by drive-by downloads that sneak onto the machine or by code that the user affirmatively (but foolishly) asks to install.

CAPTCHAs are those squiggly words we’re asked to type in, designed to tell computers from humans on the Net, e.g.

Wired just published a short Q&A about my forthcoming book. I thought I’d share a little bit more of the argument in the meantime, since it’s awfully hard to get across a book’s worth of argument in just a few hundred words of a Q&A — which, of course, was much longer before it [...]