Topic
internet
- Shrinking Arctic Ice Redraws The Map For Internet
Politico:
- Early ARPANET Protocols
This was an interesting post with background on the design of the original ARPANET protocols, and the layering architecture developed by its creators. The IMPs (Interface Message Processors) were the key to interconne…
- Exapting Technologies
New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty. Gordon Brander refers to it in this p…
- Taking Back Our User Accounts
Identity management on the internet has been broken for years. We all have 800 distinct logins to different services, registered to different emails with different passwords. Plus your personal data exists in a morass…
- The Shopify Effect
The internet broadly lowers friction and barriers to entry. It's a mantra so well-known in internet businesses that we think whoever hasn't embodied it isn't going to make it. Alex Danco contrasts this perspective wit…
- Bull Cases for Starlink
Byrne Hobart makes the case for Starlink's business model: The line between a vision and a sales pitch is always blurry, and Elon Musk is unusually good at using this to his advantage. There's a reasonable case that S…
- satellitemap.space
SpaceX's Starlink constellation is getting pretty dense. So far they've put over 1,000 in orbit, with a goal of eventually reaching tens of thousands. Someone put together this map visualization showing the orbit posi…
- The 1980s Dream of a Free and Borderless Virtual World
Reason Magazine has put together a 4-part documentary series on the cypherpunk movement, the early-90s collective of hobbyist computer enthusiasts that believed in an open and free internet. Their philosophies influen…
- Intellectual Value
Investor Esther Dyson published this piece in her Release 1.0 newsletter in 1994. It's a look forward at what the market for content and digital goods with the rise of the internet. These were the days of CompuServe a…
- Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car
🔗 A Clean Start for the Web Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology: I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in…
- Owning Your Internet Property
Ben Thompson posted this a few days ago, something I’m glad to see getting so many likes and retweets: Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not ju…
- Annotating the Web with Memex
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for "power users of the web." Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle. I'm a c…
- Privacy with Utility
The winds of internet privacy shift all over the place. Certain technologies like encryption have given us important moves forward in security, but then big platforms like Facebook or a million small ad tech outfits h…
- Blogroll
Over the years with my RSS subscriptions I've gradually unsubscribed from a lot of "institutional" or corporate blogs and feeds in favor of individuals I've found with interesting websites and things to say. In the ea…
- Dithering and Podcast Subscriptions
A couple weeks ago Ben Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a new podcast they’re doing together with a unique model: 15 minutes per episode, 3 times a week, only for paid subscribers. They launched with a doz…
- Memex
Not that we needed another bookmarking utility, but Memex looks like an interesting take. It’s a browser extension focused on history, bookmarking, and annotation, but all stored in a local database. It has an end-to-…
- Why Alto?
In 1972 at Xerox PARC "Xerox PARC"), Butler Lampson wrote this memo to the Xerox leadership making the case to produce the Alto computer from Chuck Thacker's original design. Amazing to think how significant this piec…
- Enter Ethernet
The specification for Ethernet was proposed in 1973 by Bob Metcalfe as a medium to connect the expanding network of computers at Xerox PARC. This was a schematic he drew as part of the memo proposing the technology to…
- RFC Reader
This tool lets you plunge back into computing history and read the RFCs published over the years since the early days of the ARPANET. I've been reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late, which tells the interesting story beh…
- Weekend Reading: Internet of Beefs, Company Culture, and Secular Cycles
🥩 The Internet of Beefs Venkatesh Rao has assembled a most compelling explanation for how the internet polarization machine works: The semantic structure of the Internet of Beefs is shaped by high-profile beefs betwe…
- Protocols, Not Platforms
With the recent Twitter team announcement of bluesky, a research effort looking at creating a protocol standard out of Twitter, this piece is a timely look at a topic on a lot of minds in tech on the risks of the mega…
- Venkatesh Rao on Waldenponding
“Waldenponding” is a phrase coined by Rao to describe the growing backlash movement against hyperconnectedness, driving people to disconnect completely and long for a life of lower information overload and deeper mean…
- The End of Friction
One of my favorite topics on Ben Thompson's Stratechery, and one that underpins much of his Aggregation Theory, is the role friction plays in economies and cultural forces. Most of the pros (and cons) of internet comp…