The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential [...]

Three great articles with themes and variations on FOI ideas:
Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus [...]

Here’s a copy of Monday’s NYT op-ed about cloud computing.  The Kindle/Orwell incident broke about ten minutes before the piece closed.  (The original new hook, somewhat oddly, was the announcement of the Google Chrome OS — not at all bad in itself, but a milestone on our progression from PC to cloud.)

I wrote up a few thoughts on Google’s announcement of its new Chrome operating system, designed to permit near-instant booting of a PC or other device to … a Web browser, and essentially only a Web browser.  The piece can be found here, and below:
Google and Microsoft are now officially fighting over you. They are [...]

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 [...]

I’ve agreed to be a guest blogger for a little while at the Chronicle of Higher Education.  I’ll plan to cross-post here and there.  My opening question:
I’ve recently written a book about the Future of the Internet (the
paperback version comes out this week).  The argument it makes has a lot
of moving pieces.  One of the [...]

BadwareBusters.org was officially launched today by StopBadware.org and Consumer Reports WebWatch. The latest of a string of Berkman Center projects that aim at garnering the wisdom of the crowd through the Internet, BadwareBusters facilitates an online community for people looking for help combating viruses, spyware, and other malicious software on their computers and websites. (StopBadware [...]

John Markoff’s article in the NYT about Internet vulnerabilities and projects like Stanford’s Clean Slate has been getting a lot of attention, including a thoughtful response from David Isenberg.  David’s right that a lot of the ideas in the NYT piece echo my book’s thesis.  Here’s my reply to David:
Suppose that we agree on a [...]

Amazon has just introduced its second-generation Kindle book substitute.  As a reader, I’m intrigued — I can download a bunch of books and apparently use it for days without a charge.  Looking at the overall IT ecosystem, I’m also intrigued, but for opposite reasons.
The downloading takes place over an “EVDO modem with fallback to 1xRTT; [...]

By Brendan Ballou
Some of you may know that the FCC is auctioning off the 2155-2175 MHz (AWS-3) band of spectrum later next month, which could open up a whole host of new wireless technologies to consumers. Right now the commission is considering a number of public-interest requirements for the eventual winner of the auction to [...]