Technology Commentary

Bruce Sterling is a cyberpunk fiction and nonfiction pioneer who wrote such classics as Schismatrix, The Difference Engine, The Hacker Crackdown, and was a frequent contributor to Wired, Mondo 2000…

You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future

Email is an open system, right? Anyone can send a message to anyone... unless they are on Gmail! School Interviews uses two email servers t...

Okay, campers, rise and shine...

Protecting the interest of our customers and ensuring the stability of the service have been key principles for IVPN since starting our operations more than ten years ago. To keep delivering on these promises, we have made the decision to gradually phase out the port forwarding feature from the IVPN Pro plan.

Google Reader was supposed to be much more than a tool for nerds. But it never got the chance.

Once upon a time, telco was a showstopper. Today, its a commodity.

After a successful twenty-year run, we are decommissioning the blogs.harvard.edu platform effective June 30, 2023 in order to pivot to new challenges at the Berkman Klein Center in a time when blog…

The term “censorship resistant” is used a lot in the decentralized computing/web3/crypto space to talk about a core feature of these systems. I don’t love the term censorship resistant because it is a wonky term. Software that is encoded in smart contracts (and other ways) on fully decentralized blockchains can’t be shut down or turned […]

A look at the basics of how to get going, and then a dive into some advanced use cases to show what you can do from there.

Innocent early design decision that led to a disaster years later

The FTC’s Amazon complaint raises some fair points in isolation, but misses the bigger picture, both in terms of Amazon specifically and the Internet generally.

Some people on Mastodon are really upset that Instagram seems primed to join “the fediverse” by integrating to some extent into ActivityPub. I’ve stated my opinion on this matter already, but I wanted to add to this to say I’m more invested in ActivityPub than I am in

Time is not a synchronization primitive - Xe's Blog

What can go wrong when a company tries to police itself? A podcast discusses the case of Dr. Timnit Gebru, a well-known AI researcher whom Google fired after she revealed biases in the company's own AI research.

Discussing the legacy of splash screens, those annoying windows that appear when you’re trying to load up a giant program on your desktop machine.

I'll say up front that I don’t judge anyone who force-closes their apps. This experiment was fulfilling a personal curiosity and I'm generally not in the business of telling people who are using their computers in ways that make them happy that they're wrong. Context I've never, ever force

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) écrit par Ploum, Lionel Dricot, ingénieur, écrivain de science-fiction, développeur de logiciels libres.

Posts about enshittification written by Mike Masnick

It seems that we’ve had a rash of formerly loved internet services going down the enshittification curve. As coined (brilliantly) by Cory Doctorow, enshittification is the process by which a compan…