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The wonderful, but so far uncharted world of personal data
The term “Personal Data” is everywhere, but almost nobody knows anything about it. How can that be? Let’s start with what we do know about: We know about “government data”. Well, at least the government does. It is where information technology originated, for the census, for taxing and so forth. The government collects data about […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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Independent web principles
Posting my list here, because putting them on Twitter only would just be too ironic: 1. Keep the master copy of all data you create in a way that nobody can prevent you from keep using that data For example, if I write a beautiful poem on Gmail (it is Valentine’s day after all), Google […]
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We Want Root
When you buy an iPhone, do you actually get to own it? Apple is doing its darnedest to make changes impossibe that you might want to do but that they don’t approve of, even after you paid a lot of money for the device. Does not sound like ownership to me. It wasn’t always that […]