Today’s Popular Posts
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Popular Posts
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Tag Archives: Internet
Welcome to a new world created by Wikileaks?
Writers and journalists love to develop (and throw) the ideational bomb – that is, an idea so incendiary and potent that people everywhere talk about it. The idea goes viral. Perhaps a few heads explode. It changes perceptions. It causes many arguments. Of course, many of these bombs turn out to be duds. It’s not [...]
Posted in Impact: Online Information Also tagged bureaucracy, online information, secrets, Wikileaks 1 Comment
Dissolving the Internet into fragments
Before it disappears into the archives, I’d like to call attention to a significant article (and cover story: The web’s new walls) in the September 2, 2010 issue of The Economist: The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution. Some points will be familiar to anyone following the ‘net-neutrality’ issue in the U.S. or elsewhere. [...]
Posted in Impact: Online Information Also tagged balkanization, Facebook, iPad, net neutrality, online information, The Economist, Web Leave a comment
Internet over copper telephone lines: Squeezing out more speed
Eventually the world of communications will be glass – fiber optic cables. However, that will be a long and costly transition. Meanwhile, much of the world’s communications still runs on copper, the copper of POTS (the Plain Old Telephone System). Given that reality, one of the obvious things to do is squeeze as much transmission [...]
Posted in News: Communications Also tagged bonding, communications, copper line, DSL, DSL phantom mode, fiber-optic, POTS, transmission speed, vectoring Leave a comment
Government Internet censorship on the rise
It’s sort of been an article of faith that censorship on the Internet doesn’t work. The unspoken question has been: Is this true? On the face of it, of course it’s not true. Parents do Internet censorship all the time, and parental control software is a fairly big item for the software industry. Then there’s [...]
Posted in Impact: Online Information Also tagged censorship, dissent, national intranets, Reporters Without Boundaries, RSF, social networks, surveillance 1 Comment
What chatroulette and pleaserobme have in common
If you haven’t heard of the web sites chatroulette or pleaserobme, they’ve not been around long. The worldwide media has sort of picked them up, but haphazardly. They’re both very provocative sites, but in different ways. Pleaserobme.com is deliberately provocative, a message site not especially intended to last long. Chatroulette is by its nature thought [...]
Impact Watch: China out of the Internet?
If China removes itself from the Internet, what impact would that have? I don’t mean that China won’t have the Internet, or even that it will cut itself off entirely from international connections, but what if, for all practical purposes China operates on a different, separate Internet? What would removing the world’s largest Internet using [...]
Posted in Impact: Online Information Also tagged censorship, China, cyberspace, Google Leave a comment
They call it a ‘tele-immersive environment’
It might be called pushing the envelope of virtual reality. What they’ve done at the University of Illinois (USA) is develop a camera cluster and software that can capture activity in real-time and transmit it (more or less) simultaneously over the Internet to other locations. This isn’t like the virtual reality of gaming, where the [...]
The borderland of net neutrality
Thank goodness the Internet is no longer an American plaything. I know, however, that what happens to the Internet in the United States is still important to what happens to the Internet elsewhere. I’m thinking particularly about the issue of Net Neutrality, which surfaces with some regularity in the U.S. and more often now in [...]
Posted in Essay Also tagged communications, consumer benefit, government policy, net neutrality, routers Leave a comment
The Internet at forty
Forty years old doesn’t mean much, not even for people. For the Internet, it really means next to nothing, other than a being kind of a marker. I suppose you could say, at least, that at forty the Internet is not new anymore. For most people the novelty of the Internet wore off years ago. [...]
Posted in Impact: Communications Also tagged communications, DARPA, information, network Leave a comment
The Internet at Forty: URLs of character
There’s been some hoopla about the 40th anniversary of the Internet (precisely defined from the first Arpanet transmission October 29, 1969). Forty is not exactly a ripe old age. We need to appreciate that the Internet is neither old nor ripe. It continues to grow and evolve. For example, on October 30th ICANN, the custodian [...]
Posted in Impact: Communications Also tagged communications, domain name, ICANN, language, network, URL Leave a comment
The China model of government Internet censorship