Category: Decentralize

  • Open-sourcing my (literal) Pain In The Butt

    Update 2015-11-06. Imagine you have a painful medical condition, and the doctors aren’t able to help you. What do you do? This is the situation I find myself in. Since March, I have been in almost-constant pain, deep inside my butt, and down my leg. I have seen close to a dozen doctors, physical therapists,…

  • Ten years later, Paypal is already using personal URLs for money transfer

    LID turned 10 years a little while ago. Back in the days, the revolutionary idea was: everyone could have one (or several) user-specific URLs they could print that URL on their business card and all sorts of interesting services could be attached to that URL, such as: single-sign-on into any website standardized transfer of personal…

  • Reading the Holacracy Book

    Just about everybody is unhappy with how large organizations function, or rather, dys-function. One of my first big-company experiences were the seemingly endless, back-to-back meetings at BMW. I remember coming home one one day to the townhouse I shared with several other people, complaining that I had just gotten a degree called “Diplom Ingenieur” (Master…

  • Let’s create the Internet of Our Own Things #IndieIoT

    Bruce Sterling penned a marvelous, impassioned essay titled “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” a few months ago. ($3.99 at Amazon). He pulls no punches, right from the beginning: The first thing to understand about the “Internet of Things” is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that…

  • The Perfect Surveillance Architecture

    If you set out to design the perfect surveillance architecture, what would you come up with? Assume there are no “legacy” issues, and you get to design the entire system for the benefit of the entity that gets to do the surveillance (government, or private sector, doesn’t really matter which). It’s an interesting thought experiment,…