internet
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The Giant Zero
The world of distance Fort Lee is the New Jersey town where my father grew up. It’s at the west end of the George Washington Bridge, which he also helped build. At the other end is Manhattan. Even though Fort Lee and Manhattan are only a mile apart, it has always been a toll call… Continue reading
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Speeding on the Subway
At the uptown end of the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway platform there hangs from the ceiling a box with three disks on fat stalks, connected by thick black cables that run to something unseen in the downtown direction. Knowing a few things about radio and how it works, I saw that and thought, Hmm… That… Continue reading
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Thoughts on Privacy
In Here Is New York, E.B. White opens with this sentence: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” Sixty-four years have passed since White wrote that, and it still makes perfect sense to me, hunched behind a desk in the back room… Continue reading
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FiOS is in my street. Can I have some?
[4 December: I got a call from Verizon and an answer. For that, skip down to *here.] We have a new apartment in Manhattan. Washington Heights. Verizon FiOS is here. FiOS trucks roam the streets. They set up little tables in front of apartments where FiOS is now available, to sign customers up. My wife… Continue reading
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Hey Verizon, show us some upstream FiOS love
If you want to get the most out of your Verizon FiOS (fiber to the home) Internet connection, here are your top two tiers: I have the one on the left, and that’s what I’m paying for it. The service is rock-solid and reliable. So is support, as rarely as I’ve needed it. But when… Continue reading
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Purple Reign Ends
Prince, to the Mirror: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. “The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became… Continue reading
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Reliable old blogging
So here I am on a street in Saverne, France, getting on the Net over a rare open wi-fi hot spot. I was going to tweet something about it, but Twitter is down. So here we are. There’s one Net, one Web and one Twitter. Many paths through the formers and but one through the… Continue reading
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How the Internet becomes the Content-o-net
The Cinternet is Donnie Hao Dong’s name for the Chinese Internet. Donnie studies and teaches law in China and is also a fellow here at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As Donnie sees (and draws) it, the Cinternet is an increasingly restricted subset of the real thing: He calls this drawing a “map of encirclement.” That last… Continue reading
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The Infrastructure Dynamic
I just posted Rupert Murdoch vs. The Web, over at Linux Journal. In it I suggest that the Murdoch story (played mostly as Bing vs Google) is a red herring, and that the real challenge is to free the Web and ourselves from dependencies from giant companies I liken to volcanoes: We’re Pompeians, Krakatoans, Montserratans,… Continue reading
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Thinking outside the Internet box
A couple days ago I responded to a posting on an email list. What I wrote struck a few chords, so I thought I’d repeat it here, with just a few edits, and then add a few additional thoughts as well. Here goes. Reading _____’s references to ancient electrical power science brings to mind my… Continue reading
ABC, AM, Brett Glass, Broadband Politics, CBS, cloud, Erik Cecil, FM, fox, Hammarlund, Hammarlund HQ-129x, information service, internet, NBC, New Jersey, new york, Nicholas Carr, ota, PBS, projectvrm, regulatory capture, Richard Bennett, Sporadic E, telecommunication service, television, towers, uhf, utility, vhf, VRM, Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler -
Thinking past the I-I boundary
For the form of life we call business, we are at a boundary between eras. For biological forms of life, the most recent of these is the K-T boundary between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic Eras. The Mezozoic Era ended when Earth was struck by an object that left a crater 110 miles wide and… Continue reading
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Beyond celebrity obsession
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. — Eleanor Roosevelt Somebody I wish to discuss an idea here. It’s an idea about celebrity, and it follows an event that has become a black hole in nearly all media: the death of Michael Jackson. According to Don Norman, a black hole… Continue reading
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Apple control freakiness
Apple has the best taste in the world. It also has the tightest sphincter. This isn’t much of a problem as long as they keep it in their pants, for example by scaring employees away from saying anything about anything that has even the slightest chance of bringing down the Wrath of Steve or his… Continue reading
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Origins
Good of Vanity Fair to interview some of the Net’s and the Web’s fathers and sons (alas, no mothers or daughters), in a piece titled How the Web was Won. On vision: Leonard Kleinrock: Licklider was a strong, driving visionary, and he set the stage. He foresaw two aspects of what we now have. His… Continue reading
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Infinite play
Video Is Dominating Internet Traffic, Pushing Prices Up says the headline of a piece by Saul Hansell in the New York Times. Its first three subheads say, File sharing has been usurped by legitimate video services, The very heaviest users drive up network costs and Unlimited data plans may have a limited life. This is… Continue reading
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Nettapping for everyone
ISPs are pressed to become child porn cops is a new MSNBC piece by Bill Dedman and Bob Sullivan. It begins, New technologies and changes in U.S. law are adding to pressures to turn Internet service providers into cops examining all Internet traffic for child pornography. One new tool, being marketed in the U.S. by… Continue reading