came in 15 mins later after dropping by barcamp.
pakistan blocking youtube.
NANOG (no longer for north americans only!) (north american network operators group)
“the staging area becomes the live thing” stir-fried wikipedia with pimentos? you would think it shouldn’t be working. wikipedia civil defense: administrators noticeboard. “a long story” people throw their problems into a heap. people solve them, and why? economists are studying this now! price of freedom is eternal vigilance and all that. at all times 45 minutes away from total destruction. (all this reminds me of mefi.)
cats that look like hitler. (with the right angle, I think boingo could be on that site.) it starts out goofy and then gets serious. global voices. blog spam! (even the ENA site gets that crap fairly regularly.) civic defence again: captcha. for a while that keeps the barbarians away…we’ll come back to that later.
21 yr old Jobs introing apple (IIe?). 10 print hi 20 go to 10. ah yes, I remember 7th grade computer class & the trash-80s. “businesses around the world were like holy fucking shit.” (re: visicalc) the 66 light, and TURBO mode! hamster-powered paper shredder. I so f-ing need one of those.
you give it the executable code, and it runs it. vulnerable to the same problem: what if someone wanted to do bad code. and for 20 years, that actually was a damn good question, and nobody, really. smart word processor, grandpa had one of those when I was in high school. loved it. wrote a huge chunk of fiction over a 2 week vacation there.
bizarre & absurd state of affairs: the screens of what the hell is running on your computer. unpatched windows pc can be p0wned in 4 mins. storm worm that fights back! speech recognition bug in Vista. (srlsly? [update: zdnet blog post. googling seems to indicate that it hasn’t been patched/changed]) existential debate with yr computer?!
huge pile of advice of how to avoid being taken advantage of.
the cap’n crunch bosun whistle. I’ve never actually seen a picture of one! free long distance back in the day. General Mills as the “3rd party app”. and AT&T could just change the whole damn network.
but now…who gets to control those instructions get to control the future of the internet.
what will we do?
1) locking down, at the cybercafe, library, etc. can’t just install the flying screensaver.
2) revenge of the brother word processor: blackberries, tivo, kindle, ipod/iphone “perfect poster child for this phenomenon” “we define everything that is the phone. you don’t want your phone to be like a pc (etc)” but the demand so strong (jailbreaking), SDK released, if you write the next visicalc you can’t release it yourself, but have to be approved to sell at the store. (what if I WANT porn on my iphone?) takes a long time to get approval. the i am rich app, and 8 people bought it. box office app pulled for no apparent reason. what if netscape just didn’t work on windows one day? windows still (oddly enuf) a civic tech. freedom time app rejection. “what’s the point?” huge seachange in the kind of innovation that we can do. not just about phones. because it addresses the security problem.
3) facebook. all the stuff that people in other rooms are so excited about. if you right a new app, facebook reserves right to yoink or take a cut or charge for access. “if you don’t like it go somewhere else” but almost anywhere you turn is there’s a custodian. toaster: web 2.0 toaster. “we apologize for any toast crushed in the interim” “you entered into a breakfast oriented relationship with a service provider” and then the gov’t! kindle reading the text. and the publishers wigged out, felt betrayed. (not yet feeling the gov’t aspect) onstar system. (got freaked out in the work impala once when the facilities guy called!) ah here we go. fbi glommed onto this feature, turn on the mic in *that* car at all times, and they just do it. The Company vs United States of America. srsly. the company wins on appeal, thinly, because if bad guys need help, wouldn’t get it because all audio went to fbi. orwellian? akshully, even more so, that was just a screen in the living room! counting people at stadiums via cellphone signals “we take privacy very seriously. we only give this information to the govt” the strange phenom of the posse. sheriff could summon you. fugitive slave law. “i’m sorry, I’m shampooing my cat that day” because citizens didn’t want to help enforce that law. non-civic technologies, enforcement without the acceptance or even knowledge of the citizenry.
yearn for a way to buttress the civic technologies. is involved with stopbadware.org & open net initiative. using the herd to evaluate code, use our own risk preferences. herdict project. “possibly the worst name ever for a project” am i blocked or not? so many technologies that start playful and become significant. egyptian twitterer “arrested”. couch surfing “that’s a real bee” evolving civic defences.
innocentive, solve challenges for cash. liveops. mechanical turk. liberating and scary. free porn for solving captchas. aaaaand we’ve come back to that topic. digg leading to subvert & profit.
there was a time when it was totally rational to hitchhike. comes back as craigslist as rideshare. “evil people don’t think ahead?” cameras that detect blood to try to defeat carpool cheaters.
in north korea only 3 channels. in south korea they try sending solar-powered radios over by balloon. worst of both worlds? best of both worlds?
might need to get his book. [“future of the internet – and how to stop it” – avail in full online, also at my library!] fast and interesting.