Category Archives: Internet

I found a useful bibliography of recent cryptographic articles on anonymity. Note that this is almost entirely about the tech stuff, not the legal/social side.

Careful about whether you click on the official BBC Office Time Waster. There's a certain type of person who could spend hours on this.

I just stumbled on what looks like a seriously cool blog: John Battelle's Searchblog (“Thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more. Beta”).

Lots of very interesting stuff on searching and search engines. In what may be ironic, or just sensible, he's writing a book about it all, too.

Google has an interesting-looking Voice Search Demo online. The way it says it works is that you call the number, say your query then go to a link that will have your search results.

As far as I can tell, the current demo doesn't address the issue of how a system that supported multiple simultaneous users would match users with output (caller ID? cookies? dedicated dialup?) but it seems like Google is thinking ahead to the needs of cell phone surfers….

[dive into mark] explains the difference:

Specs are things with important-sounding words like “W3C Recommendation”, “RFC 2616”, or “ISO 8879” at the top. Weblogs are things with cat pictures at the top.

Cory Doctorow has just made his new book, Eastern Standard Tribe available for download in a variety of formats.

This is the second novel I've made available as a free download (the first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and sold like hell). I'm delighted to do it a second time.

Here's the deal: I don't believe that there's any market-demand for teasers or for “Digital Rights Management” technology: none of you woke up this morning and said, “Damn, I wish there was a way I could get less of the books I enjoy and a way I could do less with them once I have them.” My goal here is to figure out what people actually want out of electronically delivered text, and so I'm giving this novel to you …

A note for downloaders: download this book. Enjoy it. If you feel so motivated, drop me a note and tell me how you used it and what you thought (and forgive me if I don't get back to you!). If you want to, go ahead and buy a copy and I'll get my royalty. But there's no obligation on you to buy it if you've read — you're not ripping me off — and forgive me, but I'm not interested in “tipjar” payments — I'm not in competition with my publisher here. Thanks for understanding, and I hope you enjoy the book.