Sapere Aude
Tag: internet
Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.
so awesome.
The EU takes money from the Microsoft ATM with one hand, and then invests it in a sure-to-fail “Google Killer” with the other. Of course, I’m stretching the facts here to make a point. The EU is simply allowing the French and German governments to make these investments with their own taxpayer’s money. There is no direct link between Microsoft fines and these subsidies. But the point is the same – the EU is not willing to let free markets determine winners and losers. The winners must be home grown, at any cost. And US companies that have too much success in Europe seem to face a bleak choice – massive fines or government-backed competitors. It’s absurd. And it’s no wonder that many of the best European entrepreneurs keep coming to the US to start companies.
i hate european industrial policy. so misguided.
2015-03-04: europe continues to be run by morons.
Just 1 week after the American government voted to enforce net neutrality, the European Union is considering plans allowing the opposite, permitting internet providers to create a tiered internet service with paid fast lanes.
2015-12-17: europe is working very hard to retain its top spot for the dumbest tech policies.
New European data protection rules would see companies require parental consent to handle data of those under 16, effectively blocking them from social media
2016-05-26:
But the much more concerning stuff involves the regulation of the internet. Now, yes, the EU Commission basically tries to bend over backwards to say that this isn’t about creating new regulations for the internet. And also to claim that they’re not changing the “intermediary liability” regime as laid out in the E-Commerce Directive that is a decent, if unfortunately weaker, version of US intermediary liability protections, saying that platforms aren’t responsible for actions of their users. But… there’s a big “but” after those claims, and it basically undermines those claims. You can read the following and see them swearing no new regulations and no changes, but the 4 bullet points and the details buried in them suggest something entirely different
one wishes that brexit happens so that the EU doesn’t have time for nonsense like this.
2018-09-18: how the latest internet nonsense coming out of the EU will only end up harming the EU.
If regulators, EU or otherwise, truly want to constrain Facebook and Google — or, for that matter, all of the other ad networks and companies that in reality are far more of a threat to user privacy — then the ultimate force is user demand, and the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are doing. To that end, were I a regulator concerned about user privacy, my starting point would not be an enforcement mechanism but a transparency mechanism. I would establish clear metrics to measure user privacy — types of data retained, types of data inferred, mechanisms to delete user-generated data, mechanisms to delete inferred data, what data is shared, and with whom — and then measure the companies under my purview — with subpoena power if necessary — and publish the results for the users to see.
the legacy media is not nearly dying fast enough
The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating … [ed., that’s down roughly 30% over the last decade] On the other side of the ledger the audience for public radio has been growing: there are more than 30m listeners now, compared to just 2m in 1980. “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” NPR’s morning and evening news programs, are the 2nd and 4th most listened to shows in the country. PBS programming costs more than NPR programming, so NPR has been able to innovate easier and most cost-effectively than PBS within the same tight budget.
makes sense that quality programming would die first. it attracts the kind of people intelligent enough to recognize they are wasting away their life in front of the tv.
Broadly, 2 sets of obstacles stand in the way of technological progress in emerging economies. The first is their technological inheritance. Most advances are based on the labours of previous generations: you need electricity to run computers and reliable communications for modern health care, for instance. So countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones. Mobile phones, which require no wires, are a prominent exception. Yet it would be wrong to be gloomy about the technological outlook of emerging economies. The channels of technology transfer have widened enormously over the past 10 years. Technological literacy has risen, especially among the young. But all this has helped emerging economies mainly in the first stage: absorption. The second stage—diffusion—has so far proved much more testing.
diffusion patterns
Project Chanology is the large scale plan to bring down the Church of Scientology.
the loss of 3 major internet underseas cables in 3 days does indeed raise eyebrows. plus, this moronic comment: “a similar Internet problem could not happen in the US. We have all the content here.”
Vishing operates like phishing by persuading consumers to divulge their Personally Identifiable Information (PII), claiming their account was suspended, deactivated, or terminated. Recipients are directed to contact their bank via telephone number provided in the e-mail or by an automated recording.
vishing? you gotta be kidding me. also, you gotta be kidding me if you do business with your bank over the phone. you have it coming.
From my view, 2 of the most talked about “products” in the conference sessions at CES were openness and sharing. These concepts were mentioned over and over in sessions dealing with topics as diverse as multiplatform content delivery, personalized TV and next generation wireless. Speakers from well known (and not so open) companies like Microsoft, Comcast and Verizon were in a modest frenzy to demonstrate or at least pre-announce their openness and sharing plans. Microsoft proudly touted the number of developers using their IPTV platform to build consumer offerings, while reminding would-be developers that they still had to sell their inventions to the service providers before they would see the light of day.
we’ll see if that lasts, but it is encouraging
haha. the WP talks about goatse, calling it “extreme mooning”.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 