Tweeting has become a foundational Internet technology. It’s not even dependent on the World Wide Web — people can send and receive tweets without having to visit twitter.com. And the act of tweeting isn’t even unique to Twitter — many other Internet platforms are seeking to compete by allowing people to “emote” an update to […]
I saw these two stories today — or is it one story? From Slashdot: “Turnkey CPU upgrades aren’t just for mainframes anymore. According to Engadget, OEMs (including Gateway) are selling computers with the Intel Pentium G6951, which can have extra cache and hyper-threading enabled through a $50 software unlock called Intel Upgrade Service.” Also from […]
Lately I’ve been interested in both cybersecurity and human computing. The former increasingly relies on PATRIOT-missile-style automated defenses against attacks as cyberattacks happen, and ideally are repelled, in mere nanoseconds. The latter involves taking tasks normally mundane enough for computers and turning them over to people to do — in ways that enable to tasker […]
Not exactly an Internet topic, I know, but I was struck by the Daily Dish’s call out to a post by Karl Smith: Most people are afraid of death in a way that they are not afraid of non-existence. Thinking about the world just after your death tends to be at minimum unnerving. Thinking about […]
In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokol published an article in Social Text, a cultural studies journal. It was called “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” and as the name suggests, it’s pretty impenetrable. You can check it out here. Soon after it came out, he published an article in the […]
Google CEO Eric Schmidt created buzz (and some shock and criticism) when he suggested in a recent Wall Street Journal interview that, in the not too distant future, “every young person…will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media […]
There’s some movement in the U.S. network neutrality debates under a rather dry heading: “Further Inquiry Into Two Under-Developed Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding.” So far: a couple weeks ago Google and Verizon announced a “legislative framework proposal” to “preserve the open Internet and the vibrant and innovative markets it supports, to protect consumers, […]
This week there’s an online symposium at Concurring Opinions about the Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It. I’ll be blogging there; in the meantime here’s my opening entry.
Last week the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Reverb Communications, a firm that describes its business as a: … full service videogame agency that provides public relations, marketing, and sales services through one integrated campaign to the interactive entertainment and music industry. Using precise messaging and calculated marketing campaigns, we are able […]
I’ve been trying to figure out what the Google/Verizon announcement means. It’s not easy to do, in large part because the announcement doesn’t precisely announce anything. It’s titled a “legislative framework proposal.” That is, on its own terms it’s not an agreement between two companies — neither is bound to do anything by it, which […]
