Posts by Steve Barnes
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In one of my earlier posts I touched on how “those evil hackers” actually had a great deal to do with the development of the web and computers in general and how that has changed with time.
Tim Berners Lee has this to say.Speaking with The Guardian earlier today, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described his belief that increasing government and corporate influence have strained the open architecture of the Web, jeopardizing the independence, neutrality, and freedom upon which the system was originally built.
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls for digital “Magna Carta”
We need a global constitution—a Bill of Rights. Unless we have an open, neutral Internet we can rely on without worrying about what’s happening at the back door, we can’t have open government, good democracy, good healthcare, connected communities, and diversity of culture. It’s not naive to think we can have that, but it is naive to think we can just sit back and get it.
“The price of peace is eternal vigilance”.
Many have been credited with this statement but it matters not who said it but what it means. If we lose the freedom of the web to share information freely then we may as well lose our freedom all together. -
Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
what’s more they act like light, and smoke, too
mutable particle waveform hybrids
if you know where they are,
you don’t know their speed
but if you know their speed,
ya don’t know where they are at
most of the time they are
neither here nor there…As usual Ian, brilliant. Love the Heisenberg reference. ;-)
As to Labour and Greens…. the way I see it (which seems to mean, on these boards anyway, wrongly)
Labour. Looks after the people that do the actual work of getting things done.
Greens. Makes sure the people that get things done clean up after themselves and don’t make a mess.Bit like…
Dad. Gets Boy to help him fix the car.
Mum. Berates Dad and Boy for getting grease on the carpet.
I don’t think that is grounds for divorce.
Simplistic but that’s just me.Most importantly
If ya know where you are
everything else
is relative…Relatives... eh?
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A bit of reminiscing from Russ at the Australia New Zealand Internet Awards on the evening of Tuesday, September 17 in Wellington
From... nz.general: a speech....websites created by individuals like Bruce Simpson, Rob Cawte and Mark Profitt. The latter two published the text of my weekly radio rant, Hard News, from 1993. Someone knocked me up a listserv for it, and I put it on Usenet.
The power to publish had arrived.
That same year, I accepted a proposition that I should stop writing about rock music for The Listener and start writing a new column called Computers. The column might as well have been called “Internet”, because that’s mostly what I wrote about. At one point, the editor asked me in for a chat and said there had been some complaints: so much of this internet thing – could I not write more about CD-ROMs?
CD-ROMs... Fnahhh.
;-) -
I am really quite surprised, if not astounded, that this thread has received so little response. In light of the fact that Russell cut his MSM teeth on this very subject, Computers and Internet, in the Listener magazine, in fact he won an award for the column in 2001 at The Net Awards (not to be confused with the Onyas, who’s inaugural event took place some ten years later)
I like these threads, a mix of history, techno-babble and nostalgia. They seem far too rare considering so many readers and corespondents on these boards are involved in IT and Communications tech, admittedly not so many now that Hard News seems to have morphed into Knitting Yarns and one of the most vicious knitting circles I have ever encountered.
It would be good to see a section devoted to tech stuff, audio, A/V and general computer hardware and programming rather than some of the hand wringing opinionated offerings we have these days.
Onya Russ, why not give it a go?. -
The Wold Wide Web - The dark dark side
Communications security has held my curiosity since the days of Captain Crunch and other members of the Phone Preaking community, among whom was a chap who went by the handle of Oaf Tobark aka Steve Jobs, who went on to become one of the gurus of followers of the new technology, the computer generation if you will.
That was, of course well before any of us heard the scream of a modem connecting to our ISP or some distant server but the security of our information has its roots back with those guys driven by the curiosity of a new technology.
Here's a very interesting article from The Well back in 1995 featuring one Kevin Mitnik.
Security on the Net A Cautionary Tale by Bruce R. Koball 15 March 1995Some of the mysterious files contained email, so I scanned them in an to identify their owner. All of it was addressed to a single individual. I didn't recognize the address until later that evening when the 28 Jan issue of the New York Times landed on my door step.
Shades of Eric Snowden?
Without the world wide web those "Secrets" would still be sitting, hidden from those affected by them, in the hands of the power hungry elite'
where will we go from here? -
Ok, back to
Back in the Day from TVNZ.
Back in the Day: Introducing the Internet
Interesting that the XTRA sponsored program was using Netscape rather than Internet Explorer, guess that was to placate those pesky Macintosh users. ;-) -
Hard News: The Web, in reply to kiwicmc,
Had to go look, erm,, forgot my password ;-)
Seems it is still connected to a server somewhere.
I still regard myself as being somewhat “web savvy” but can’t for the life of me understand Facebook or how the hell it can be worth billions. Guess there is “One born every minute” whether they be advertisers or customers.
At least with TV these days I can understand that the viewer is the product but still can’t understand why people think the web itself can be a way to make money unless you use it as a storefront and actually have something to sell. Zukerburg just sounds like a town full of suckers to me. -
I had a little side bet about the song Springsteen would do, in light of songs he had done for other countries. I went for Dobbyn's Loyal. Close but no cigar.
Anyone else had a guess?. -
Now where were we? ah yes, the World Wide Web.
I wondered at the time if there was a way of making money out of this new fangled device, I scoured my planet sized brain for a cunning plan, I came up blank. If you were to set up a money making service on the web, I thought, you would then have to advertise it, thus negating the whole endeavour.
I have since noticed that many people, obviously, didn’t think things through to the depth I did, fools.
What I did think was worth doing was buying Cisco shares, $0.08 at the time, $82.00 a mere ten years later. Didn’t do it though, waddaya think I am? a capitalist?. -
Ooops. That link to TVNZ Back in the Day was a bit wrong, took you to page 7 of a search.
Here's a better one.
TVNZ Back in the Day
Still think TVNZ should make this easier to find.