Advices from the Wikipedia community on how to handle having made a mistake with public consequences.

Twenty years ago (Jan 5th, 2020) Steve Jobs demoed Internet Explorer 5 for Mac. The app was chosen by Jobs for its bold UI, which was developed in complete secrecy within Microsoft but had an uncanny resemblance of the yet-to-be-unveiled Acqua interface of Mac OS X. Maf Vosburgh, one of the developers who worked on […]

The debate around 5G is being framed as if picking Huawei instead of an European vendor would upset the control telecommunication providers have over their networks. The reality is more grim: we’ve long crossed that bridge, and most providers already do not have a full understanding of their own infrastructure: In a modern telecommunications service […]

L.M. Sacasas: “When I was a child,” the Apostle wrote, “I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.” And, we may add, I looked like a child. Thus the appropriateness of my childishness was evident in my appearance. Yes, that was me as I was, but that is […]

Oona Räisänen: If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean? […] The first thing we hear in this example is a dial tone, the same tone […]

The New York Times, in an article full of impressive photos: A conveyor that staff members call “the Cable Highway” moves the cable directly into Durable, docked in the Piscataqua River. The ship will carry over 4,000 miles of cable weighing about 3,500 metric tons when fully loaded. Inside the ship, workers spool the cable […]

Internet writing uses subtle punctuation choices to convey sarcasm and other tone of voice nuances. It’s not lazy. That’s Gretchen McCulloch, who wrote a book on how we write on the internet (it’s not out yet, but it’s available for preorders). You know, the fact that for example the fullstop in the context of a […]

The Guardian: In Cuba, internet access is limited. But if you can’t get to the internet, there are ways of bringing it physically to you. It’s known as “el paquete semanal” or “the weekly packet”, an external drive loaded with thousands of hours of media content that is delivered to customers by enterprising ‘suppliers’ like […]

Technology Review ricorda che non tutti hanno connessioni iper veloci e dati illimitati: Ma’Niyah has a special-education plan for math; to help her, she’s been assigned problems to do online through Khan Academy. But her mother says she cannot afford broadband from Time Warner Cable, which would begin at around $50 a month, even for an […]

Quelle volte in cui riesco a ignorare per giorni i social network, lo stream di notizie, twitter, blog, e a sparire brevemente da altri luoghi sociali della rete noto, come Kottke, che dell’assenza non frega nulla a nessuno: Not a single person noticed that I had stopped using social media. (Not enough to tell me anyway.) Perhaps if it had […]

Google uProxy è un’estensione per Chrome e Firefox per aggirare i blocchi e la censura locale di internet, creando una rete parallela e sicura sfruttando le connessioni dei propri amici: When you are getting access from a friend, all the web traffic from your browser first travels encrypted to your friend’s computer and from there, to the Internet. This means […]

Quando si devono caricare enormi quantità di dati sulla cloud resta tuttora più veloce spedirli – fisicamente, mettendoli dentro un camion o su un aereo – piuttosto che fare un upload. Il nuovo servizio di Amazon per AWS va incontro a quest’esigenza: è un camion, capace di trasportare circa 100 petabyte di dati. Per riempirlo […]

Bruce Schneier: Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. […] Who […]

Internet non è particolarmente diffuso a Cuba. Il costo d’accesso è di circa 2$ all’ora tramite uno dei 175 hotspot WiFi pubblici, o di 1$ per MB tramite la connessione del cellulare. Questa situazione ha portato alla nascita di El Paquete Semanal, praticamente un dump di musica, film e riviste che si trovano online. Invece di […]

Real Life è un nuovo magazine (sponsorizzato da Snapchat) curato da Nathan Jurgenson, uno di quelli che da tempo spiega in maniera più efficiente e intelligente come la rete stia influenzano il nostro modo di comunicare e stare assieme, contestando l’idea molto diffusa che i rapporti che intessiamo online — le nostre interazioni “virtuali” — abbiano meno valore di […]

Ho per lungo tempo cercato un plugin che mi aiutasse a preservare le pagine a cui linko su queste pagine, e mi evitasse lo scenario corrente: linkrot pervasivo negli archivi del blog. I permalink, in realtà, sono molto poco permanenti. Provate a leggere un post di alcuni anni fa, dagli archivi, e molto probabilmente conterrà un […]