Internet
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The Great Trivializer
Last night I watched The Great Hack a second time. It’s a fine documentary, maybe even a classic. (A classic in literature, I learned on this Radio Open Source podcast, is a work that “can only be re-read.” If that’s so, then perhaps a classic movie is one that can only be re-watched.*) The movie’s… Continue reading
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Here’s a cool project: completely revolutionize shopping online
In 1995, shortly after she first encountered e-commerce, my wife assigned a cool project to the world by asking a simple question: Why can’t I take my shopping cart from site to site? The operative word in that question is the first person possessive pronoun: my. Look up personal online shopping cart and you’ll get… Continue reading
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Getting past broken cookie notices
Go to the Alan Turing Institute. If it’s a first time for you, a popover will appear: Among the many important things the Turing Institute is doing for us right now is highlighting with that notice exactly what’s wrong with the cookie system for remembering choices, and lack of them, for each of us using the… Continue reading
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Is ad blocking past 2 billion worldwide?
The answer is, we don’t know. Also, we may never know, because— It’s too hard to measure (especially if you’re talking about the entire Net). Too so much of the usage is in mobile devices of too many different kinds. The browser makers are approaching ad blocking and tracking protection in different and new ways… Continue reading
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The Spinner’s hack on journalism
The Spinner* (with the asterisk) is “a service that enables you to subconsciously influence a specific person, by controlling the content on the websites he or she usually visits.” Meaning you can hire The Spinner* to hack another person. It works like this: You pay The Spinner* $29. For example, to urge a friend to… Continue reading
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On Amazon, New York, New Jersey and urban planning
In a press release, Amazon explained why it backed out of its plan to open a new headquarters in New York City: For Amazon, the commitment to build a new headquarters requires positive, collaborative relationships with state and local elected officials who will be supportive over the long-term. While polls show that 70% of New… Continue reading
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#RectangleBingo
This is a game for our time. I play it on New York and Boston subways, but you can play it anywhere everybody in a crowd is staring at their personal rectangle. I call it Rectangle Bingo. Here’s how you play. At the moment when everyone is staring down at their personal rectangle, you shoot… Continue reading
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The new together
I want to point to three great posts. First is Larry Lessig‘s Podcasting and the Slow Democracy Movement. A pull quote: The architecture of the podcast is the precise antidote for the flaws of the present. It is deep where now is shallow. It is insulated from ads where now is completely vulnerable. It is a chance… Continue reading
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Credit where overdue
The original pioneer in space-based telephony isn’t @ElonMusk (though he deserves enormous credit for his work in the field, the latest example of which is SpaceX‘s 7,518-satellite Starlink network, and which has been making news lately). It’s the people behind the Iridium satellite constellation, the most driven and notorious of which was Ed Staiano. Much has been written about… Continue reading
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We can do better than selling our data
If personal data is actually a commodity, can you buy some from another person, as if that person were a fruit stand? Would you want to? Not yet. Or maybe not really. Either way, that’s the idea behind the urge by some lately to claim personal data as personal property, and then to make money (in… Continue reading
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Please let’s finally kill logins and passwords
How would you feel if you had been told in the early days of the Web that in the year 2018 you would still need logins and passwords for damned near everything. Your faith in the tech world would be deeply shaken, no? And what if you had been told that in 2018 logins and… Continue reading
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What’s wrong with bots is they’re not ours
In Chatbots were the next big thing: what happened?, Justin Lee (@justinleejw) nicely unpacks how chatbots were overhyped to begin with and continue to fail their Turing tests, especially since humans in nearly all cases would rather talk to humans than to mechanical substitutes. There’s also a bigger and more fundamental reason why bots still aren’t… Continue reading
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For privacy we need tech more than policy
To get real privacy in the online world, we need to get the tech horse in front of the policy cart. So far we haven’t done that. Let me explain… Nature and the Internet both came without privacy. The difference is that we’ve invented privacy tech in the natural world, starting with clothing and shelter,… Continue reading
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony… Continue reading
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The real problem is Decoy News (and decoy content of all kinds)—and the platforms can’t fix it
The term “fake news” was a casual phrase until it became clear to news media that a flood of it had been deployed during last year’s presidential election in the U.S. Starting in November 2016, fake news was the subject of strong and well-researched coverage by NPR (here and here), Buzzfeed, CBS (here and here),… Continue reading
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Data is the New Love
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.” That’s because a massive personal data… Continue reading
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Some new ways to look at infrastructure
Nothing challenges our understanding of infrastructure better than a crisis, and we have a big one now in Houston. We do with every giant storm, of course. New York is still recovering from Sandy and New Orleans from Katrina. Reforms and adaptations always follow, as civilization learns from experience. Look at aviation, for example. Houston is the… Continue reading
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How the personal data extraction industry ends
Who Owns the Internet? — What Big Tech’s Monopoly Powers Mean for our Culture is Elizabeth Kolbert‘s review in The New Yorker of several books, one of which I’ve read: Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. The main takeaway for me, to both Elizabeth’s piece and Jon’s… Continue reading
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