[net] Digital hygiene … A post from Andrej Karpathy offering tips on cleaning up and securing your digital life. ‘The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.’
[internet] Remembering Cyberia, the World’s First Ever Cyber Cafe … The story of the first cyber-cafe which opened in London. ‘Linking up with like-minded pioneers David Rowe and husband and wife Keith and Gené Teare, Eva found a spot on the corner of Whitfield Street and launched Cyberia there in 1994. With Hackers-style aesthetics and futuristic furniture, it was based around a U-shaped layout that meant visitors could see each other’s screens. “I wanted women to feel safe, because a lot of the stuff on the net was dodgy,” she explains. Many of Eva’s mates chipped in to help out––architects, interior designers, graphic artists, publishers, and ravers among them.’
[web] Essential tools to make the modern web more bearable … A great list of useful tools to make browsing the web less anoying. ‘The most user-friendly way to block ads on desktop is to use an ad-blocking extension in your browser. The main thing to be aware of is that some ad-blockers use monetization strategies that “soften” their ambitions (search “acceptable ads”). I would recommend uBlock Origin Lite (I assume you are using Chrome). Two additional things about ad-blocking to note: Blocking ads is generally easier on desktop than on mobile, and (at the time of writing) ad-blocking extensions are more effective on Firefox desktop than on Chrome desktop.’
[internet] What the Internet Was Like in 2004 … ‘Blogging was still niche in 2004, but it was increasingly where daily conversations online were happening. I started out in 2002 using a desktop app called Radio Userland, but in early May 2004, I switched to a browser-based blog platform called Movable Type. The “blogosphere” was kind of a prototype for social media, because it was where people learned to be opinionated and express ‘takes’ on the internet. The beauty of the blogosphere was that it was truly decentralised.’
[internet] Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet … A look back at very early social networking. ‘It’s easy to be nostalgic for the way things were when you were a teen-ager. I grew up online, but time inevitably moved on, and younger generations have become the prime demographic for a new wave of technology. As the writer Max Read recently posited in the Times, perhaps millennials have simply aged out of the Internet. Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us all.’
[tags: Internet, Social Media][permalink][Comments Off on Looking Back at the Early Beginnings Of Social Networking]
[tags: History, Internet][permalink][Comments Off on Internet Artifacts – A Collection of Internet History]
12 September 2023
[google] The end of the Googleverse … A look at Google’s impact on the internet and some ideas on why it’s influence is waning. ‘Discoverability of the open web has suffered. Pinterest has been accused of eating Google Image Search results. And the recent protests over third-party API access at Reddit revealed how popular Google has become as a search engine not for Google’s results but for Reddit content. Google’s place in the hierarchy of Big Tech is slipping enough that some are even admitting that Apple Maps is worth giving another chance, something unthinkable even a few years ago.’
[web] Anna’s Archive … A search engine for huge semi-hidden collections of books and written material on the internet. ‘📚 The world’s largest open-source open-data library. âï¸ Mirrors Sci-Hub, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and more. 📈 21,278,536 books, 86,614,441 papers, 2,451,043 comics, 508,999 magazines – preserved forever.’
[internet] Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution… A profile of Douglas Rushkoff in 2023. ‘I first encountered Rushkoff’s writing around this time, in 2010, while I was working for a site called Shareable.net. The site’s premise was that connecting everything and everyone to the web would allow people to freely lend the stuff they already owned, creating further abundance for all. Room-sharing platforms would reduce housing costs, and ride-sharing platforms would reduce the number of cars on the road. Rushkoff was a proponent of reorganizing the internet according to peer-to-peer principles, and he became one of the site’s most popular contributors. As platforms like Airbnb and Uber took over, leading the world into a new age of inequality and increased resource consumption, his dream of participatory decentralization died hard. But even amid mounting cognitive dissonance, certain parts of Rushkoff’s faith held out. On reflection, he says, “I blamed capitalism and held the technology itself innocent.”’
[modem] The Sound of the Dialup, Pictured … An infographic showing what the noises mean when a modem connects to the internet. ‘As many already know, what you’re hearing is often called a handshake, the start of a telephone conversation between two modems. The modems are trying to find a common language and determine the weaknesses of the telephone channel originally meant for human speech.’
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[time] The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time … The story behind the internet’s N.T.P. Protocol. ‘A loose community of people across the world set up their own servers to provide time through the protocol. In 2000, N.T.P. servers fielded eighteen billion time-synchronization requests from several million computers-and in the following few years, as broadband proliferated, requests to the busiest N.T.P. servers increased tenfold. The time servers had once been “well lit in the US and Europe but dark elsewhere in South America, Africa and the Pacific Rim,” Mills wrote, in a 2003 paper. “Today, the Sun never sets or even gets close to the horizon on NTP.” Programmers began to treat the protocol like an assumption-it seemed natural to them that synchronized time was dependably and easily available. Mills’s little fief was everywhere.’
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24 March 2022
[lol] Why We Use “lol” So Much … A deep-dive into LOL. ‘We use lol as a way of downplaying a statement; adding irony, levity, humility, empathy, or commiseration; expressing amusement; or just neutral acknowledgment. No longer simply an internet acronym that’s entered the mainstream, lol is an example of how language evolves over time, adheres to new grammatical rules, and creates community around the people that use it.’
[tv] What Was the First TV Show to Reference the Internet? … ‘The X-Files had to have been among the first shows to use the web in a storyline, in “2Shy,” which originally aired in November 1995. The episode features a mutant serial killer who sweet-talks self-conscious women online, convinces them to meet in-person, then pulverizes their flesh for sustenance. (Moral of the story: Chat with strangers online and an alien will turn your body into goo.)’
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20 October 2021
[internet] The ‘Dead-Internet Theory’ Is Wrong but Feels True … An odd conspiracy theory that claims that most of the content on the internet is posted by Bots. ‘Anyway … dead-internet theory is pretty far out-there. But unlike the internet’s many other conspiracy theorists, who are boring or really gullible or motivated by odd politics, the dead-internet people kind of have a point. In the New York story that IlluminatiPirate invokes, the writer Max Read plays with paranoia. “Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake,” he writes. But he makes a solid argument: He notes that a majority of web traffic probably comes from bots, and that YouTube, for a time, had such high bot traffic that some employees feared “the Inversion” – the point when its systems would start to see bots as authentic and humans as inauthentic.’
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on The Dead-Internet Theory]
2 March 2021
[meme] An anniversary for great justice: Remembering “All Your Base” 20 years later … ‘This video’s 20th anniversary will likely make you feel old as dirt, but that doesn’t mean the video itself aged badly. There’s still something timeless about both the wackiness and innocence of so many early-Internet pioneers sending up a badly translated game.’
[memes] 100 Best Memes Of The Decade … Another roundup of the decade list. ‘ “This Is Fine” Dog: The meme has been used a lot to describe various political situations: The official @GOP Twitter used it once, and a senator even described the comic during a Senate Intelligence Committee while describing how Russian election interference was not fine. But the staying power of the dog is about how we all grin and bear it through everything that’s happened over this decade that feels like the house is on fire – the climate crisis, elections, the disappointing last season of Game of Thrones. There is nothing that captures the 2010s more than “this is fine” dog.’
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on 100 Best Memes Of The Decade]
4 December 2019
[time] The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time … How mobiles phones and social media changed our perception of time. ‘Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now – or knowing too well why it is so.’
[trolls] That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It … How Russian disinformation/trolling campaigns look in 2019. ‘We have experienced a range of emotions studying what the IRA has produced, from disgust at their overt racism to amusement at their sometimes self-reflective humor. Mostly, however, we’ve been impressed. Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.’
[funny] Ballad of a WiFi Hero… Animated adaption of the Mike Lacher’s McSweeney’s article. ‘And at last the warrior arrived at the Router. It was a dusty black box with an array of shimmering green lights, blinking on and off, as if to taunt him to come any further. The warrior swiftly maneuvered to the rear of the router and verified what he had feared, what he had heard whispered in his ear from spirits beyond: all the cords were securely in place. The warrior closed his eyes, summoning the power of his ancestors, long departed but watchful still. And then with the echoing beep of his digital watch, he moved with deadly speed, wrapping his battle-hardened hands around the power cord at the back of the Router.’
[internet] Go Look: Usage Share of Internet Browsers 1996 – 2019 … A fascinating infoviz – mainly because it neatly illustrates Internet Explorer’s total domination of browser share for much of the early 2000s and later the rise of Chrome.
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27 June 2019
[comics] How ‘This is Fine’ Dog Creator KC Green Made Money From Meme … How a comic creator made lemonade when one of his creations became a popular meme. ‘But most of all, Green has stolen from the people who stole from him. “I can write to Redbubble, or Etsy, or any other place, to ask them to take something down, but I think the best way to try and take it back yourself is to steal other people’s ideas,” he says with a laugh. “Like, Oh, they wanted a tote bag with this on it? Then I’ll make a tote bag with that on it. I’ll stop them. Like, they want a shirt print with just the two panels on it, so they go to Etsy to make a dumb version of the print. Then here” – that is, on his site and on his store at creator-friendly merch site TopatoCo – “we offer a print with just the two panels, or we offer a shirt with just the two panels, because that’s all people fucking want.” Turnabout’s fair play, after all.’
[tags: Comics, Internet][permalink][Comments Off on How The ‘This is Fine’ Dog Creator Kept Control Over His Creation]
11 June 2019
[crime] The bizarre world of the true crime YouTube influencers … ‘It’s hard to explain the current trend towards lifestyle/true crime crossovers without acknowledging a disconcerting fact; that what seems at surface level to be a wild mismatch, has a perfectly sound internal logic lurking under the surface. Both rely on the marketing of a product in a wildly oversaturated marketplace. The required skills are readily interchangeable: a ‘relatable’ manner, the ability to spin a compelling yarn and an on-the-nose sincerity. And, most importantly, the savviness to seize an opportunity. And while the traditional avenues of online lifestyle revenue begin to shift and change, crime remains conventionally big traffic business. ‘
[tags: Internet, Social Media, True Crime][permalink][Comments Off on True Crime YouTube Influencers: “There’s so much more to my personality than morbidity.”]
1 April 2019
[privacy] A Few Simple Steps to Vastly Increase Your Privacy Online … straight-forward list of ways to inprove your privacy on the internet in 2019. ‘Switch to Firefox as your browser on all devices. I’m not a Chrome or Edge hater, I’m just lazy. I don’t want to parse whether each new update contains a privacy regression or new settings I need to worry about. I just want a browser that has more of my best interests in mind. Firefox is developed by a non-profit company, Mozilla, explicitly dedicated to users’ needs…’
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25 March 2019
[web] Killed by Google – The Google Graveyard & Cemetery … A list of products shutdown by Google. ‘Google Reader – 2005 – 2013. Killed over 5 years ago, Google Reader was a RSS/Atom feed aggregator. It was over 7 years old.’
[blogging] “The Linux of social media” – How LiveJournal pioneered (then lost) blogging … A brief history of LiveJournal. ‘When friends started complaining about the unsheared “walls of text” that some of their peers would post, Fitzpatrick added a “post” button so they could space out their paragraphs. There was no way to respond to other people’s output initially, no matter how insipid-until, of course, Fitzpatrick decided that he wanted to make fun of one of his friend’s posts. He next added in the comment functionality just to post “a snarky-ass comment.” “Everything was like that,” Fitzpatrick says. “Current mood, current music, profile pics-it was all screwing around and trying to add whatever new things we could do or what the Web supported at the time.” At a certain point in his college career, around the year 2000, Fitzpatrick realized that LiveJournal had turned from a fun way to mess around with CGI scripts into something approaching an actual business…’
[internet] The secret rules of the internet … Fascinating look at the moderation of content on social networks. ‘Joi Podgorny is former vice president at ModSquad, which provides content moderation to a range of marquee clients, from the State Department to the NFL. Now a digital media consultant, she says founders and developers not only resist seeing the toxic content, they resist even understanding the practice of moderation. Typically cast off as “customer-service,” moderation and related work remains a relatively low-wage, low-status sector, often managed and staffed by women, which stands apart from the higher-status, higher-paid, more powerful sectors of engineering and finance, which are overwhelmingly male. “I need you to look at what my people are looking at on a regular basis,” she said. “I want you to go through my training and see this stuff [and] you’re not going to think it’s free speech. You’re going to think it’s damaging to culture, not only for our brand, but in general.” Brian Pontarelli, CEO of the moderation software company Inversoft, echoes the observation. Many companies, he told us, will not engage in robust moderation until it will cost them not to.’
Early in the operation, the IT staffers rebuilding Maersk’s network came to a sickening realization. They had located backups of almost all of Maersk’s individual servers, dating from between three and seven days prior to NotPetya’s onset. But no one could find a backup for one crucial layer of the company’s network: its domain controllers, the servers that function as a detailed map of Maersk’s network and set the basic rules that determine which users are allowed access to which systems.
Maersk’s 150 or so domain controllers were programmed to sync their data with one another, so that, in theory, any of them could function as a backup for all the others. But that decentralized backup strategy hadn’t accounted for one scenario: where every domain controller is wiped simultaneously. “If we can’t recover our domain controllers,” a Maersk IT staffer remembers thinking, “we can’t recover anything.”
[tags: Crime, Internet][permalink][Comments Off on Sobering Account of the NotPetya Cyberattack]
16 April 2018
[timemachinego] The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers … fascinating overview of the epidemic of Time Travellers online. ‘With time travel, you can step outside the eternal stream of time. You can conquer physics. You can deal with loss and overcome death. In this way, these clickbait time-travel stories are a very American form of existentialism: We like to believe we can shape the future, and we need to know that everything will be okay.’
[tags: Internet, Life, Weird][permalink][Comments Off on Examining the Recent Epidemic of Time Travelers]
4 April 2017
[tv] A dying habit: why the average BBC1 viewer is 61 … the slow death of Broadcast TV … ‘According to recent research by Enders Analysis, ITV’s average viewer is now 60; Channel 5’s is 58 and Channel 4’s is 55. Even at E4, birthplace of such yoof-targeting shows as Made in Chelsea and Hollyoaks, the average age is 42. The reason, of course, is simple: the internet…’
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16 December 2016
[horror] ‘Creepypasta’ is how the internet learns our fears … fascinating look at how the internet crowd sources horror stories and memes … ‘Effective horror, after all, has little or nothing to do with gore or body-counts. ‘Atmosphere is the all-important thing,’ wrote Lovecraft, ‘for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation.’ This is the only test of weird fiction that matters: can the work excite, at its least mundane point, a particular emotional response, ‘a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers’? Creepypasta represents a kind of industrialised refinement of this art. It is a networked effort to deliver dread in as efficient a way as possible, with the minimum of extraneous matter. Like pornography, it is single-minded in its pursuit of a particular response.’
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on CreepyPasta – “Like pornography, it is single-minded in its pursuit of a particular response.”]
30 August 2016
[wikipedia] Wikipedia Is Not Therapy! … behind-the-scenes look at how Wikipedia deals with mental health issues within it’s online community of volunteers … ‘A ‘recent changes’ feed tracks every edit made across Wikimedia projects; this is constantly monitored by volunteer community members. Experienced editors know that when an alarming change hits the feed, they should reach out to emergency@wikimedia.org. This address is connected to a 24-hour pager system that notifies Earley’s geographically dispersed team. Human eyes will usually read this message within a couple minutes. If at least two team members agree that the situation seems serious enough, they will report it to a law enforcement agency. Earley says that the Foundation has established police contacts across the English-speaking world who are familiar with this type of online threat of harm; it’s never a matter of hurriedly trying to explain Wikipedia to a confused or suspicious local cop.’
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[tech] The Room Where the Internet Was Born … A visit to the place where the first messages over the internet were sent from … ‘In a strikingly accurate replica of the original IMP log (crafted by UCLA’s Fowler Museum of Cultural History) on one of the room’s period desks is a note taken at 10:30 p.m., 29 October, 1969”-talked to SRI, host to host.” In the note, there is no sense of wonder at this event-which marks the first message sent across the ARPANET, and the primary reason the room is now deemed hallowed ground.’
[funny] 5 People on Etsy Who Are Clearly Serial Killers Part 1 | Part 2 …
‘Hey, remember that nightmare you had once where you wandered into that rural cult compound and everyone celebrated the arrival of an outsider by tying you to a banquet table, putting on their ceremonial animal masks, and drinking your blood from a chalice? Well, even if you don’t, this nice woman sure does, and she was really hoping you’d like to be reminded for only $30. She’s a Canadian photographer and expert in subtle terror. Objectively, there’s nothing scary about a kid wearing a plastic animal mask, and yet her pictures are so ominous, they look like something you’d find in the attic of a house no one will buy.’
[tags: Funny, Internet][permalink][Comments Off on 5 People on Etsy Who Are Clearly Serial Killers]
“Every time a light blinks, someone is uploading or downloading,” Kahle explains. Six hundred thousand people use the Wayback Machine every day, conducting two thousand searches a second. “You can see it.” He smiles as he watches. “They’re glowing books!” He waves his arms. “They glow when they’re being read!”
One day last summer, a missile was launched into the sky and a plane crashed in a field. “We just downed a plane,” a soldier told the world. People fell to the earth, their last passage. Somewhere, someone hit “Save Page Now.”
Where is the Internet’s memory, the history of our time?
“It’s right here!” Kahle cries.
The machine hums and is muffled. It is sacred and profane. It is eradicable and unbearable.
[tags: Internet, Web][permalink][Comments Off on Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive]
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on 86 Fake Viral Images From 2014]
8 November 2014
[net] What happens when you accidentally become internet famous? … ‘Fist clenched, a look of pure determination on his face, Success Kid is the boy who can do it all. You may have seen his face posted when someone’s particularly proud of an achievement. Success Kid’s real name is Sam Griner and the photo is one of many his mother Laney, a photographer, took of her son and posted on her Flickr page. She still remembers the day and the moment she snapped this picture…’
[tags: Internet, Life, People][permalink][Comments Off on What’s It Like To Become Accidentally Internet Famous?]
23 October 2014
[internet] Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down … Quinn Norton On The Internet … ‘The net never forgets. Forgetting is a gentle process of thought and learning which the net can’t do. Losing things, which the net does plenty, is different.’
[tech] Browsing speeds may slow as net hardware bug bites… BBC News on the 512K routing bug … ‘This may come as a surprise to non-specialists who view the internet as a high-tech affair comparable to the bridge of the USS Enterprise of Star Trek fame, in actuality, the internet is more akin to an 18th century Royal Navy frigate, with a lot of running about, climbing, shouting, and tugging on ropes required to maintain the desired course and speed.’
[tags: Internet][permalink][Comments Off on How to use the Internet in 2014]
13 March 2014
[www] 25 Things You Might Not Know About The Web On Its 25th Birthday … ‘5 Tim Berners-Lee is Gutenberg’s true heir – In 1455, with his revolution in printing, Johannes Gutenberg single-handedly launched a transformation in mankind’s communications environment – a transformation that has shaped human society ever since. Berners-Lee is the first individual since then to have done anything comparable.’
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22 February 2014
[tv] What happens at Netflix when House of Cards goes live … ‘Edberg said the last time House of Cards launched, the engineers figured out that the entire season was about 13 hours. “And we looked to [see] if anybody was finishing in that amount of time,” Edberg said. “And there was one person who finished with just three minutes longer than there is content. So basically, three total minutes of break in roughly 13 hours.”‘
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19 January 2014
[web] Have I Been Pwned? … a service that allows you to check if any of your usernames or passwords been compromised in recent website security breaches.
