Events
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#MyTerms at #CPDP2026
CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year’s CPDP is “Competing Visions Shared Futures.” The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services. Consent is what cookie notices speciously obtain from your clicks on the forced choices that interrupt your first experience… Continue reading
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Graduation Day
Go refigure Trying to watch the Thunder-Lakers game, which ABC.com says is live now, with a button to watch. After logging in (using my credentials as a Dish Network customer), ABC gives me NBC News, not the game, which is on WRTV/6, which I can get on my TV over our outside antenna. But not… Continue reading
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Your Future Starts Monday
Your private future, that is. Your present isn’t private. Not in the digital world. Not while you always agree to their terms, and not them to yours. With MyTerms, they agree to your privacy terms. Ones that, for example, disallow being tracked everywhere like a marked animal. There’s a standard for this now: IEEE 7012,… Continue reading
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Thisday
Blurp I am told that Santa Barbara’s beaches are covered with velella now. I mean a lot like the one above, See you there A couple of nights ago, a friend and reader of mine said he didn’t understand what today’s talk by Judith Donath would be about. “Signaling theory?” he said. “What’s that?” To him, signals… Continue reading
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Furlsday
See you there! Eli Pariser will address the question What Might “Public Parks of the Internet” Look Like? at 4 pm Eastern today. Register to attend here. And here is the Zoom. Brief observations of a perfect place Photos of Pink Sands Beach on Harbour Island: January 31st, February 2nd. Continue reading
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Back and (Go) Forth
Apologies for the relative silence. Between travels and slow recovery (still far from over) from cataract surgery for my left eye, looking at screens and writing on them hasn’t been easy. But things are improving. Had a productive Monday at the Summit on Human Agency. My talk was a 15-minute interview by Sheila Warren of Project Liberty,… Continue reading
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Blurs Day
If privacy is your issue, join us there. MyTerms is the only thing that will get us personal privacy in the digital world (seriously). We'll be working on ways to ubiquitze it at three consecutive events at the end of April: • VRM Day• IIW #42 • AIW #2 All at the Computer History Museum in Silicon… Continue reading
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Watts Up
Book them now Early bird tickets are on sale for the 42nd IIW, which began on a Gillmor Gang podcast the last day of 2004. In my biased but correct opinion, IIW is the most leveraged tech conference on Earth. This one will happen on April 28th to 30th, Tuesday to Thursday. But for the… Continue reading
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BDT
Busy Day Today I'm giving this talk at 4pm Eastern today. The longer I work on it, the more audacious it seems. In November no less There's a thunderstorm going on. Bright flashes, deep booms. And it's just 44° out there. Perhaps because mortality is interesting This is the most-read post on this blog over… Continue reading
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Friday, 11 July 2025
And the republic is still lost. Sad to learn that David Gergen has passed. I met him briefly when he came to Harvard Law School for a conversation in Austin Hall's Ames Courtroom with Larry Lessig on the topic of Larry's new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It. Gergen was… Continue reading
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Pictures
Still miss him. Just found a photo of Aaron Swartz from the time I recruited him for a panel at Comdex in 2002. He was a kid, but rocked it. I suppose it's one of these. The photo at the top of this story is of the Linden Cogeneration Plant in New Jersey, which I… Continue reading
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Heavy Whether
We'll know soon. Whether or not you're watching St. John's playing Arkansas, right now, in the NCAA's March Madness tournament, take out a minute and a half to take in Jimmy Fallon and the boys singing the Red Storm Shanty. Lou Carnaseca must be glowing in his grave. (Later: they lost.) Continue reading
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Come from Everywhere
IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, is the UN of identity. While located in the U.S., it has always represented and welcomed the whole world to work on global problems best addressed in person. As it happens, IIW was born exactly twenty years ago tomorrow—20 March 2005—at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum in Scottsdale, Arizona. A group… Continue reading
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Talking Right
Great speech by David Brooks at a recent ARC conference in London. I read here that he was booed and heckled, but in the video one only sees smiles, warmth, and occasional laughs (e.g. to “At Chicago I had a double major in history and celibacy”). It’s a short, deep, and caring talk that comes from… Continue reading
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Bookings
Even in a small city such as Bloomington, one can make fun discoveries all the time. Yesterday, for example, I discovered Redbud Books, which had a table set up to sell books from Cory Doctorow's increasingly vast oeuvre while the man himself spoke to a packed classroom in the Media School here at Indiana University. He'll… Continue reading
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Lifting the Lid on Government Meetings
Twenty-sixth in the News Commons series. On the left is Tom Evslin, former CTO for Vermont. On the right is the golden dome atop Vermont’s capitol building. Underneath that dome, and in countless spaces in government bodies everywhere are meetings recorded in video. Reviewing or reporting on those meetings is a chore. Unless that is,… Continue reading
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How communities without one can build a local library
That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talked about in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. The salon was held at the latter for locals and on Zoom for the world, at Noon Eastern time on Wednesday, December 4th. (Upcoming salons are… Continue reading
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Because We Still Have Net 1.0
That’s the flyer for the first salon in our Beyond the Web Series at the Ostrom Workshop, here at Indiana University. You can attend in person or on Zoom. Register here for that. It’s at 2 PM Eastern on Monday, September 19. And yes, all those links are on the Web. What’s not on the Web—yet—are all… Continue reading
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The Age of Optionality—and its costs
Throughout the entire history of what we call media, we have consumed its contents on producers’ schedules. When we wanted to know what was in newspapers and magazines, we waited until the latest issues showed up on newsstands, at our doors, and in our mailboxes. When we wanted to hear what was on the radio… Continue reading