• Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • News
  • Events
  • Media
  • Video
  • Glossary
  • Contact
  • Download
  • RSS

Future of the Internet

« Previous Entries

Breaking the 140 barrier

June 24th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, twitter  |  7 Comments

Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet.  The founders explain that they expected interconnection with mobile phone text messaging — SMS — from the start, and that it could be expensive to have longer tweets broken into mutiple messages when people pay per SMS.  As Dom Sagolla explains:
Messages longer than 160 characters (the common SMS [...]

Why the PC matters

June 18th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Book, Future of the Internet, iran cyberwar  |  5 Comments

One less examined piece of what’s going on in Iran this week goes beyond the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms — beyond what people can do with a basic browser.  And that’s the role of the humble PC — the personal computer, whether Windows, Mac, or GNU/Linux. What makes the PC so crucial [...]

Experts say …

June 18th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  2 Comments

This blog isn’t that active — I haven’t quite figured out the right rhythm, and what should count as blogworthy enough to post.  The past couple days have been active, though, with the events unfolding in Iran.  I’m part of OpenNet, which tracks Internet censorship around the world, and we just released an update to [...]

New OpenNet Report on Iran

June 16th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, filtering, opennet initiative  |  1 Comment

We’ve just released our OpenNet Initiative 2009 study of Internet censorship in Iran, including new data from the most recent rounds of testing there.  We’ll try to augment some of the findings there with data coming in over the past few days, including reports to the Herdict Web network blockage tool.

If you’re finding there are [...]

Commencement video

June 16th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, university, wikipedia  |  1 Comment

…on Star Trek, Charlie Brown, and Wikipedia:

(Text available here.)

Could Iran Shut Down Twitter?

June 15th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, Generativity  |  29 Comments

That’s the question Andrew Sullivan asks as part of his blog’s extraordinary coverage of the events now taking place in Iran.  The NYT has a story out with a roundup of the use of social media during the crisis, while Publius at Obsidian Wings worries that Twitter can be blocked just like any other service.
Our [...]

Musical interlude

June 12th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  Click to comment

My brother Jeff, who loves music more than I love the Internet, just played in a Bob Dylan tribute show, and there’s now video available:

I was sorry to be on the wrong coast for it.  I’ll be visiting at Stanford again this fall — a great piece of West Coast life for me is to [...]

Reflections on ten years of Code

May 6th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  3 Comments

Larry Lessig wrote the epic Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace ten years ago. Cato is marking the anniversary with a debate at Cato Unbound. Declan McCullagh’s lead essay is here. My response is here, and below.  

E Pluribus Facebook

April 17th, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet  |  8 Comments

Facebook boasts more than 200 million active users, with an astounding 100 million logging in at least once per day. Its prominence is not just in numbers of users. It’s what they do: many share intimate and sensitive details about themselves. That not only means that the service is susceptible to privacy panics (both [...]

Federalizing cybersecurity?

April 2nd, 2009  |  by jz  |  published in Future of the Internet, cybersecurity  |  2 Comments

The Washington Post has reported that the U.S. Congress will shortly take up a bill to “empower the government to set and enforce security standards for private industry for the first time.”
Today’s conventional wisdom in cybersecurity circles is that:

we’re very much open to attack (defined lots of ways; often people mean: PCs attached to the [...]

« Previous Entries

RSS Tweets from Z

  • Herdict showing WordPress now inaccessible in Guatemala http://bit.ly/LRyMY
  • Wow, unadvertised Internet available on Delta flight
  • Delayed in Atlanta. Renewing vow never to take connecting flights.
  • Herdict showing inaccessibility of Google and Gmail in China: http://www.herdict.org/web/explore/detail/id/CN/1780

Blog Archives



Creative Commons BY-NC-SA Jonathan Zittrain unless otherwise noted.
Powered by WordPress using Gridline Lite.