John Gilmore

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pages: 461 words: 125,845

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers by Andy Greenberg

air gap, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Burning Man, Chelsea Manning, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, disinformation, domain-specific language, driverless car, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, hive mind, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mondo 2000, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, operational security, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Ralph Nader, real-name policy, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, SQL injection, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Teledyne, three-masted sailing ship, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Zimmermann PGP

DAVID CHAUM Inventor and academic whose anonymity systems, including DC-Nets and Mix Networks, would inspire the cypherpunks and lead to tools like anonymous remailers and Tor. ERIC HUGHES Mathematician, cryptographer, and cofounder of the cypherpunks who ran one of the Internet’s first anonymous remailers. JOHN GILMORE Former Sun Microsystems programmer who would cofound the cypherpunks as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. JOHN YOUNG Architect, activist, and cypherpunk who founded Cryptome.org in 1996, a leak-focused site that has published thousands of names of intelligence agents and their sources, along with hundreds of secret encryption – and security-related documents.

., and in Salt Lake City, Hughes shared May’s frontier style of cowboy hats and leather, though instead of a beard he wore a blazing red goatee. He also shared May’s libertarian ideals, and the sense that cryptography would help to keep the government’s tendrils safely hogtied. The pair had met at a party thrown by their libertarian hacker friend John Gilmore, a ponytailed and balding software developer whose sad eyes hid a fiercely independent streak. As the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, Gilmore had struck it rich in software just as May had in hardware, and retired from the world of Silicon Valley to pursue his digital whims and libertarian ideals.

The next morning, May and Hughes went out to buy bagels and brainstorm about the potential of the group that had begun to coalesce around their meeting. Why limit the club to the physical world, for instance, when the real mass of potential cryptography fanatics was online? As May had years earlier realized, cyber-utopias would have to be created on the Internet, not in someone’s living room. They later asked John Gilmore if he would host an e-mail list on the server of his personal site, Toad.com, and he eagerly agreed. But it was Jude Milhon, Hughes’s girlfriend several decades his senior, who provided the group’s name. At the time, science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson had adopted the “cyberpunk” genre, stories of bohemian hackers fighting steely megacorporations in virtual worlds.


pages: 205 words: 18,208

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? by David Brin

affirmative action, airport security, Ayatollah Khomeini, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, data acquisition, death of newspapers, Extropian, Garrett Hardin, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, Iridium satellite, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, packet switching, pattern recognition, pirate software, placebo effect, plutocrats, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, telepresence, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, workplace surveillance , Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Recent years have witnessed widespread calls to “empower” citizens and corporations with tools of encryption— the creation of ciphers and secret codes—so that the Internet and telephone lines may soon fill with a blinding fog of static and concealed messages, a haze of habitual masks and routine anonymity. Some of societyʼs best and brightest minds have begun extolling a coming “golden age of privacy,” when no one need ever again fear snooping by bureaucrats, federal agents, or in-laws. The prominent iconoclast John Gilmore, who favors “law ʻnʼ chaos over law ʻnʼ order,” recently proclaimed that computers are literally extensions of our minds, and that their contents should therefore remain as private as our inner thoughts. Another activist, John Perry Barlow, published a widely discussed “Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace” proclaiming that the mundane jurisdictions of nations and their archaic laws are essentially powerless and irrelevant to the Internet and its denizens (or “netizens”).

At one extreme of this trend are those who demand legal recognition that individuals have a basic right of ownership over any and all data about themselves: no one should be able to use any fact or datum concerning you—not even your name—without your explicit permission. Supporting a quite different approach are some of the most vivid and original thinkers of the information age. John Gilmore, Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow, and others on the (roughly) libertarian wing were in the vanguard fighting against both the Clipper proposal and the Communications Decency Act. Seeing little need or value in new laws, they hold that technology will be a key factor in defending liberty during the coming era.

In a great paradox of our time, the deep rifts dividing humanity during the Cold War ultimately led to a supremely open and connecting system. The same traits responsible for the Internetʼs hardiness in the face of physical destruction seem also to protect its happy chaos against attempts to impose rigorous discipline, a point illustrated in a popular aphorism by John Gilmore: “The Net perceives censorship as damage, and routes around it.” I plan to reconnect with this thought in later chapters, for it bears directly on the issue of a transparent society. Censorship can be seen as just one particular variant of secrecy. In the long run, the Internet and other new media may resist and defeat any attempt to restrict the free flow of information.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

He covered and shaped the early tech counterculture and cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In a military library in Virginia, EFF cofounder John Gilmore discovered a coveted classified document that the NSA had refused to release to him, and he confronted the government. Here he celebrates his victory in late 1992. Timothy C. May, an early Intel employee, was the most eloquent cypherpunk and one of the most radical. He wrote the “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto,” came up with BlackNet in August 1993, and coined phrases like “crypto = guns.” Tim May (left), John Gilmore (right), and Eric Hughes, who appeared wearing these masks on the cover of Wired magazine’s second issue, in May 1993, their PGP fingerprints written on their foreheads.

People were just beginning to use e-mail accounts, so an e-mail list seemed the best and most open way to network the group. Unlike on the WELL up in Sausalito, no membership fees were required and, more important, everyone could sign up anonymously. The list was open; no finger files wanted. Everybody could subscribe by simply e-mailing cypherpunks-request@toad.com. The list was hosted on a machine owned by John Gilmore, an early San Francisco–based crypto activist with a long mane, a flimsy beard, and a keen interest in recreational drugs. Gilmore was one of five original employees at Sun Microsystems, and like May, he was independently wealthy at a relatively young age. Cypherpunk hailed from science fiction.

Like any reputable subculture phenomenon, the cypherpunks had their own jargon: pseudonyms and anonymous handles simply became “nyms,” for instance, and they called themselves simply “c-punks.” Steven Levy and Kevin Kelly attended some of the first Palo Alto c-punk meetings. Levy portrayed the new movement in a famous cover story for Wired, in the magazine’s second issue, which came out in May 1993. On the cover were Eric Hughes, Tim May, John Gilmore, holding up an American flag, their faces hidden behind white plastic masks, Gilmore even sporting an EFF T-shirt complete with the internet address of the then newly founded Electronic Frontier Foundation. The geeky rebels had their PGP fingerprints written on the foreheads of the masks.32 The same year, in the summer of 1993, Kelly published a long story about the crypto anarchists in the anniversary issue of the Whole Earth Review, guest-edited by its founder, Stewart Brand.


Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

"I think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says. The GNU Emacs License made its debut when Stallman finally released GNU Emacs in 1985. Following the release, Stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. One hacker to take up the offer was future software activist John Gilmore, then working as a consultant to Sun Microsystems. As part of his consulting work, Gilmore had ported Emacs over to SunOS, the company's in-house version of Unix. In the process of doing so, Gilmore had published the changes as per the demands of the GNU Emacs License. Instead of viewing the license as a liability, Gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos.

Prompted by a conversation on Usenet, Gilmore sent an email to Stallman in November, 1986, suggesting modification: You should probably remove "EMACS" from the license and replace it with "SOFTWARE" or something. Soon, we hope, Emacs will not be the biggest part of the GNU system, and the license applies to all of it.See John Gilmore, quoted from email to author. Gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. By the end of 1986, Stallman himself was at work with GNU Project's next major milestone, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to revamp the Emacs license so that it might apply to both programs.

In a 1999 essay, Tiemann recalls the impact of Stallman's Manifesto. "It read like a socialist polemic, but I saw something different. I saw a business plan in disguise."7. See Michael Tiemann, "Future of Cygnus Solutions: An Entrepreneur's Account," Open Sources (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1999): 139. Teaming up with John Gilmore, another GNU Project fan, Tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing GNU programs. Dubbed Cygnus Support, the company signed its first development contract in February, 1990. By the end of the year, the company had $725,000 worth of support and development contracts.


pages: 468 words: 137,055

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, disinformation, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, information security, invention of the telegraph, Jim Simons, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knapsack problem, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mondo 2000, Network effects, new economy, NP-complete, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

John Kasdan kindly allowed me to audit his cyberlaw course and Matt Blaze and Joan Feigenbaum welcomed me to their computer science course on cryptography. Mark Rotenberg, David Banisar, and David Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center gave me access to the astounding documents coughed up by the government under their skillful use of the Freedom of Information Act. John Gilmore and his lawyer Lee Tien also provided me with armloads of declassified materials. Roger Schlafly sent me a huge pack of documents related to RSA and Cylink. Simpson Garfinkel e-mailed me notes of interviews he did for his book, PGP. (Other suppliers will remain nameless, but thanks to them, too.)

Xerox, as a huge government contractor, quietly agreed to the agency’s request. Normally, that might have been the end of it. But in this case, apparently one of the outside reviewers of Merkle’s paper was upset that the agency had spiked it—so upset that he or she slipped it to an independent watchdog, a computer-hacker millionaire named John Gilmore. Gilmore had a weapon that wasn’t available a decade earlier, when the prepublication process was initiated: the Internet. One of the most popular Usenet discussion groups on this global web of computers was called sci.crypt. It was sort of an all-night-diner equivalent of the yearly Crypto feasts in Santa Barbara, featuring a steady stream of new ideas, criticism of old schemes, and news briefs from the code world.

Not to sit around and bullshit, but to actually produce, à la Zimmermann, the tools that would arm the general public against cyberthieves, credit bureaus, and especially the government. In the next few weeks, they enlisted the aid of some influential figures in the antigovernment crypto community. One forceful ally was thirty-seven-year-old John Gilmore, a gentle computer hacker with long thinning hair and a wispy beard (when he stood beside Eric Hughes, the two of them looked like a geeky version of the cough-drop-icon Smith Brothers). Gilmore had made a small fortune from being one of the original programmers at Sun Microsystems—he had been employee number five—but left in 1986.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Even so, Barlow continued to say he was more worried about the government restricting or monitoring computers than he was about the punks. He met the two hackers for Chinese food, reaffirming his belief that they were not the main enemy. Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.) The trio’s long-term goal was to extend the freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and as many other rights as possible to the digital realm.

Misha had moved to San Francisco in 1992 and had bragged about it to Luke and the others back east at every opportunity. One of Misha’s first contacts was the editor of a magazine called Mondo 2000, who reprinted his Information America piece and introduced him to her boyfriend, Eric Hughes, who was about to start the Cypherpunks mailing list, hosted by John Gilmore. Misha spread the word among hackers. The dot-com boom that began with Netscape’s initial public offering in 1995 lured more waves of cDc members and friends to California. Dylan Shea took a job at the Mountain View headquarters of Netscape itself in 1996, and when the company offered to pay for his move, he brought out Luke’s gear as well.

After he had dropped out of graduate school in 1991 and traveled to El Salvador, Ball had moved to one troubled country after another, methodically drafting programs, installing protective cryptography, and compiling databases of some of the worst human rights horrors in the world. He presented at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference in 1998 in Austin and debated crypto policy with an official at the Department of Justice who wanted back doors and weak encryption. It was there he met Cypherpunks mailing list sponsor and EFF cofounder John Gilmore and Phil Zimmerman, the inventor of Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email encryption, who had also battled the federal government. “I ended up being friends with these people forever,” Ball said. In Las Vegas, Ball and the others were speaking in a hot tent pitched on a hotel roof, because no ballroom was big enough.


pages: 267 words: 82,580

The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

3D printing, 4chan, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, carbon footprint, Cody Wilson, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, degrowth, deindustrialization, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, eternal september, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, global village, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invention of writing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Lewis Mumford, life extension, litecoin, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mondo 2000, moral hazard, moral panic, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, pre–internet, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

In 1987, Usenet administrators forced what became known as the ‘Great Renaming’, categorising all the haphazard groups into seven ‘hierarchies’. These were: comp.* (computing), misc.* (miscellaneous), news.*, rec.* (recreation), sci.* (science), soc.* (social) and talk.* – under which users could start their own relevant subgroups. To name the group, you took the main hierarchy name, and then added further categories.fn2* John Gilmore, who would go on to co-found the cypherpunk movement with Tim May and Eric Hughes in 1992, wanted to start a group about drugs, called rec.drugs. His request was turned down by the administrators. So Gilmore and two experienced Usenetters created their own hierarchy, which would be free of censorship.

Amir believes you should be free to be whoever, say whatever and do whatever you want online without censorship or surveillance – and that such freedoms will lead to political revolutions. He is a cypherpunk. The Mailing List One day in late 1992, retired businessman Tim May, mathematician Eric Hughes and computer scientist John Gilmore – the creator of alt.* – invited twenty of their favourite programmers and cryptographers to Hughes’ house in Oakland, California. After taking a degree in physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, May went to work for Intel in 1974, where he made a brilliant breakthrough in redesigning Intel’s computer memory chips.

He told Young of his plan to create a new organisation, which he called WikiLeaks, which he believed would change the world: ‘New technology and cryptographic ideas permit us to not only encourage document leaking, but to facilitate it directly on a mass scale. We intend to place a new star in the political firmament of man.’ For almost a decade, the cypherpunk mailing list was the centre of the crypto world. Hundreds of people used it to propose and learn ciphers, evade detection, discuss radical politics. It was finally discontinued in 2001 when John Gilmore booted it from his host, toad.com, for reasons not entirely clear – Gilmore claimed it had ‘degenerated’. But it had a remarkable track record: anonymous remailers were everywhere, an anonymous browser that allowed users to browse the web without anyone being able to track them was in development, the whistleblowing site Cryptome was becoming a thorn in the side of intelligence agencies.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

In time the subsections in newsgroups covered every subject known to woman and man, and in an age before search engines, they were one of the best ways to find information online – or anywhere, since they were populated by the most extraordinarily helpful, altruistic and technologically adept users in the world. Computer scientist Brian Reid, and John Gilmore (an early internet pioneer, civil libertarian, entrepreneur and techno-renaissance man whose work around cryptography, censorship and drug law reform make him an unsung early hero of the digital age – and who is also, judging by his love of tie-dye and several anecdotes, no stranger to a dose or three of psychedelics) felt the reorganization would limit freedom of speech.

In the early 1990s, Stuart Brand set up The Well, a legendary bulletin board that was an early gathering point for intellectuals and cyberutopians. The Well, or Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, was a virtual community that hosted conversations between some of the web’s earliest champions including John Gilmore. It was also an important meeting point for fans of the Grateful Dead, confirming for ever the association between high-tech geekery and psychedelics that would result in the virtualization of the illegal drugs market in the twenty-first century. Newsgroups disseminated the solid information on drugs that had been so lacking earlier.

They asked the Tor volunteers to form a company, in order to make the service and the network more widely available, which they did. ‘At the time we were still independent contractors with the EFF [the online freedom of speech group, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, set up by .alt newsgroup creator John Gilmore] and the American Department of Defence at the same time, which made for some strange meetings!’ says Lewman. Tor is not just used by those engaged in illicit activity. The vast majority of Tor users are simply people who want privacy when they go online, as the information gathered on us by search engines and social media grows daily.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Bureaucracies, Barlow argues in Crime and Puzzlement, will naturally over-react to poorly-understood “cyber-threats”, and in trying to do the job of parents regulating the behaviour of childish online trespassers, will crush the new-found freedom of the online sphere for the grown-ups, too. It was these experiences which contributed to Barlow’s decision to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the world’s first digital civil liberties organisation, along with EFF co-founders Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore. The EFF initially took on legal cases of hackers targeted by the FBI’s two-year crackdown on computer-related activities, Operation Sundevil, as well as academic researchers and entrepreneurs whose work attracted the attention of the authorities. But although so-called “impact litigation” remains a central part of the its operations to this day, as legislators began to ponder how to regulate the ’net, the EFF’s work quickly stretched beyond the courtroom and into the corridors of Washington DC.

Now they argued that “internet censorship is becoming a global norm”, with “many of the legal mechanisms that legitimate control over cyberspace… led by the advanced democratic countries of Europe and North America”, and where “the industrialized North is establishing norms that are only too readily propagated and adopted by repressive and authoritarian regimes elsewhere”. EFF co-founder John Gilmore told Time magazine in 1993 that “The ’net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” In the space between their two reports, the ONI had observed a shift in governments’ approaches to controlling the information that circulates online. In 2008, when states were still using a broadcast model to understand the internet, with each website a channel that could be turned on and off, and each web user a viewer, Gilmore’s observation held and state efforts to control the information environment didn’t work.


pages: 483 words: 145,225

Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution by Glyn Moody

barriers to entry, business logic, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, ghettoisation, Guido van Rossum, history of Unix, hypertext link, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Gilmore, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, thinkpad, VA Linux

As a result, Tiemann explains, “I sort of felt if I was just another voice in the wilderness I wouldn’t be able to get any more critical mass than he got. “So I explicitly wanted to recruit some cofounders,” he says, “to try to create a level of critical mass that would catalyze the business. And I talked with many people about this idea, and the only ones that took me seriously were the other two cofounders,” John Gilmore and David Henkel-Wallace. “John Gilmore’s e-mail handle is ‘gnu,’” Tiemann explains, “and some claim that he had nicknamed the GNU project.” Moreover, “John was employee number 5 at Sun, renowned programmer and civil libertarian, and also independently wealthy because of his Sun stock.” The other partner, David Henkel-Wallace, was somebody Tiemann had met while doing his research on compilers, and who “also seemed reasonably bright,” he says.

The challenge was we knew that we wanted to be support services for the software, [but] we didn’t have [our own] product at the time.” In fact, “it took about three years before we really had a credible support offering,” he says, and adds, “we probably lost money on every support deal we did before 1992.” While they were casting around for a product, one of them came up with what, in retrospect, was an interesting idea. “John Gilmore proposed that we write a free kernel for the 386,” Tiemann recalls. This was in 1990, fully one year before Linus would sit down and do exactly that. “I always considered myself to be an unprejudiced individual,” Tiemann explains, “but the thought of taking something like Unix and running it on an Intel 386 just boggled my mind.

“In 1995, Larry McVoy”—author of the Sourceware document—“came to me,” Tiemann explains, “and said, ‘There’s this company in North Carolina that’s doing Linux, and they’re really making a lot of money for the number of people they’ve got. You ought to check it out.’ And I tried to convince my partners at that time that we attempt to acquire Red Hat, and they would have none of it. In 1990-91, I said no to John Gilmore, and in 1995 he said no to me. So there was a long window of opportunity that we simply ignored.” The problem was hardly lack of vision. After all, in 1992, Tiemann had made a speech to the Sun Users Group conference in which he not only assessed correctly the strengths of the free software movement, but predicted it would become the dominant force in the following years.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

(Originally published as "How Big Media's Copyright Campaigns Threaten Internet Free Expression," InformationWeek, November 5, 2007) Giving it Away (Originally published on Forbes.com, December 2006) Science Fiction is the Only Literature People Care Enough About to Steal on the Internet (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2006) How Copyright Broke (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September, 2006) In Praise of Fanfic (Originally published in Locus Magazine, May 2007) Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia (Self-published, 26 August 2001) Amish for QWERTY (Originally published on the O'Reilly Network, 07/09/2003, http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/07/09/amish qwerty.html) Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books (Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, San Diego, February 12, 2004) Free(konomic) E-books (Originally published in Locus Magazine, September 2007) The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights (Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007) When the Singularity is More Than a Literary Device: An Interview with Futurist-Inventor Ray Kurzweil (Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, June 2005) Wikipedia: a genuine Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy — minus the editors (Originally published in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, April 2005) Warhol is Turning in His Grave (Originally published in The Guardian, November 13, 2007) The Future of Ignoring Things (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, October 3, 2007) Facebook's Faceplant (Originally published as "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook," in InformationWeek, November 26, 2007) The Future of Internet Immune Systems (Originally published on InformationWeek's Internet Evolution, November 19, 2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) READ CAREFULLY (Originally published as "Shrinkwrap Licenses: An Epidemic Of Lawsuits Waiting To Happen" in InformationWeek, February 3, 2007) World of Democracycraft (Originally published as "Why Online Games Are Dictatorships," InformationWeek, April 16, 2007) Snitchtown (Originally published in Forbes.com, June 2007) Dedication For the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore For the staff — past and present — of the Electronic Frontier Foundation For the supporters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation Introduction by John Perry Barlow San Francisco - Seattle - Vancouver - San Francisco Tuesday, April 1, 2008 "Content," huh? Ha! Where's the container?

There would be increasingly little free speech or any consequence, since free speech is not something anyone can own. Fortunately there were countervailing forces of all sorts, beginning with the wise folks who designed the Internet in the first place. Then there was something called the Electronic Frontier Foundation which I co-founded, along with Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, back in 1990. Dedicated to the free exchange of useful information in cyberspace, it seemed at times that I had been right in suggesting then that practically every institution of the Industrial Period would try to crush, or at least own, the Internet. That's a lot of lawyers to have stacked against your cause.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

How We Settled into a Seed for the Future Virtual Rights, but Not Virtual Economic Rights In 1990, I was invited to a lunch at a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District to consider cofounding a new organization to fight for cyber rights. Chuck, VPL’s prime hacker, and I went up and met Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, and Barlow. The three of them eventually moved forward, founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But I held back. (Chuck was too busy coding to pay any of us much mind.) I didn’t say why at the time; wasn’t ready to state my doubts to these sweet friends. I support most of the cases the EFF takes on, but not the underlying philosophy.

He caught a lot of grief from hackers who wanted an even more extreme vision of hacker supremacy. Before the World Wide Web existed, there was a ubiquitous bulletin-board-like service called Usenet. It had been around since 1980, way before the Internet,5 so it was already a somewhat stale institution by around ’87. That was when it was reorganized by a few people, including John Gilmore, who would become a cofounder of the EFF, to support a chaotic explosion of user-created topics. The anarchic new universe was called the alt. hierarchy.6 Surprise, there was a lot of porn. But this other thing started to happen. Conversation threads in the alt. universe started to get extreme.

(The story of how our scale model of a degraded society exploded into mainstream politics and society is told in appendix 3.) I often replay those years in my head. There was one argument, the one about censorship, that drowned out every other notion about how to improve the online world. It was framed in stark all-or-nothing terms. John Gilmore famously said that the ’Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. But surely there were other ideas worth considering that wouldn’t have demanded a surrender to censorship. If you had to spend a fraction of a penny each time to post, for instance, even that small commitment would have lent the early ’Net a touch of gravity.


Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michelle Slatalla, Joshua Quittner

dumpster diving, East Village, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, job automation, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mitch Kapor, packet switching, ROLM, Stewart Brand, UUNET, Whole Earth Review

She was surprised that Kaiser was calling and that there was a problem with what seemed like such a routine request. Kaiser winced as she explained that the caller said he was a repair technician named John Gilmore who needed a phone number transferred from New York to New Jersey. Of course she'd put through the work order. The request was perfectly ordinary. Kaiser recognized the name John Gilmore: Gilmore was a former hacker who went on to become a millionaire writing code at Sun Microsystems. Kaiser quickly countermanded the work order. Every day was an exercise in frustration. It seemed like the case would drag on forever, and all Kaiser and Staples could do was run around putting out fires.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

I am a law professor, but my argument spans computer design to economics. It is no doubt foolish for anyone to try to pull together such a range of material, but I could never have dared to be so foolish without the patient tutoring of many different people. Among these, I am most grateful to my colleagues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow; and the Center for Public Domain, especially Laurie Racine and Bob Young. Jeff Chester of the Center for Media Education and Mark Cooper of the Consumers Union taught me a great deal about media policy and the passion of this struggle. There is a long list of technical experts who have struggled to show me how the network works.

Rather than “wait and see,” the law has become the willing tool of those who would protect what they have against the innovation the Net could promise. The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don't even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”5 LATE IN THE afternoon of one of California's inevitably beautiful days, Marc Andreessen was driving along one of California's inevitably overcrowded highways.

., 2001). 3 Testimony of Professor Peter Jaszi, The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1995: Hearings on S.483 Before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 104th Cong. (1995), available at 1995 WL 10524355, *6. 4 Oral arguments, United States v. Microsoft, February 26, 2001, available at http:// www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/transcripts/feb01/02-26.asp. 5 E-mail from John Gilmore, January 19, 2001, to EFF list, on file with author, 6. 6 Telephone interview with Marc Andreessen, December 15, 2000. 7 As Timothy Wu commented to me, “[T]he real successes on the Internet have not been killer apps, but killer platforms. “ E-mail from Tim Wu, June 28, 2001. Not, in other words, amazing but proprietary applications that do extraordinary things, but amazing and open platforms upon which others have been free to build.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The most important technical attribute of networked BBSs is that it is an extremely hard network to kill--just as the RAND planners had hoped. Information can take so many alternative routes when one of the nodes of the network is removed that the Net is almost immortally flexible. It is this flexibility that CMC telecom pioneer John Gilmore referred to when he said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." This way of passing information and communication around a network as a distributed resource with no central control manifested in the rapid growth of the anarchic 26-04-2012 21:41 howard rheingold's | the virtual community 9 de 18 http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html global conversation known as Usenet.

Kapor, concerned about the nature of the Sun Devil arrests and what they signaled for civil liberties in cyberspace, offered to support the costs of legal defense. Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik, and their buddy Scorpion were represented by Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky, and Lieberman. Within days of the Pinedale meeting, Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer, and John Gilmore, Unix telecommunications wizard and one of the first employees of the enormously successful Sun Microsystems, offered to match Kapor's initial contributions. A board of directors was recruited that included, among others, WELL founder Stewart Brand. The EFF endowment was intended from the beginning to be a great deal more than a defense fund.

The National Security Agency sees this as a security nightmare, when it can no longer do its job of picking strategic signals out of the ether and inspecting them for content that threatens the security of the United States. Certain discoveries in the mathematical foundations of cryptography are automatically classified as soon as a mathematician happens upon them. John Gilmore, one of the founders of the EFF, recently filed suit against the National Security Agency for its classification and suppression in the United States of fundamental cryptography texts that are undoubtedly known to America's enemies. A few days after Gilmore filed suit and informed the press, the agency astonished everybody by declassifying the documents.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

Our camp featured lectures on psychedelics and a “ride” called “Dance, Dance, Immolation.” Players would don a flame-retardant suit and try to dance to the flashing lights. Make a mistake, and you would be engulfed in flames. The first entry on the FAQ sign read, “Is this safe? A: Probably not.” John Gilmore was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems and registered the domain name Toad.com in 1987. A Burner and well-known psychonaut, he’s certainly one of the mind-blown rich. Today a civil-liberties activist, he’s perhaps best known for Gilmore ’s Law, his observation that “[t]he Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

See also individual names of countries Forrester Research Fourth Amendment Foxy (5-methoxy-diisopropyltryptamine) French Connection Friedman, Milton Furnham, Adrian Further Festival gaming, online Garcia, Elizan Garcia, Jerry Garcia Abrego, Juan Gasser, Peter Gates, Bill Gates, Brad Gates, Daryl Gatien, Peter Gavin, Mary gender issues amphetamines and LSD and opium and Germany Gibbons, Stephen B. Gilmore, John Gilmore’s Law Gingrich, Newt Ginsberg, Allen Goddard, James Goldstein, Paul Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente União do Vegetal Gonzales v. Raich Gonzalez, Henry Gore, Al Gore, Tipper Gorman, Tom Government Executive GQ Graham, Katharine Grateful Dead Green Earth Pharmacy Greenfield, Robert Greenland, Colin Griffee, Vanessa Marie Grinspoon, Lester Grob, Charles grunge bands Guevara, Che Guillermoprieto, Alma Guzmán, Joaquín Hague Opium Convention Haight-Ashbury Haislip, Gene hallucinogens.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

Assata Shakur’s ‘To My People’ is online at http://www.thetalkingdrum.com/tmp.html. 27 Anna Feigenbaum, ‘Death of a Dichotomy: Tactical Diversity and the Politics of Post-Violence’, Upping the Anti, 5, online at http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/05-death-of-a-dichotomy/ [17 June 2017]. 28 Francis Dupuis-Déri and Thomas Déri, Anarchy Explained to My Father, trans. John Gilmore (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2017), p. 79. 29 Uri Gordon, Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto, 2008), ch. 1. 30 Quoted in Michael Loadenthal, The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 145. 31 CrimethInc., podcast #9, No Time to Wait, online at https://crimethinc.com/podcast/9 [last access 8 October 2018]. 32 Loadenthal, The Politics of Attack, p. 141. 33 Alfredo Bonanno, Errico Malatesta and Revolutionary Violence (London: Elephant Editions, 2011 [2007]), p. 10. 34 Loadenthal, The Politics of Attack, p. 52. 35 Wolfi Landstreicher, ‘A Violent Proposition: Against the Weighted Chain of Morality’, in Willful Disobedience (Ardent Press, 2009), p. 32. 36 Wolfi Landstreicher, ‘The Question of Organization’, in Willful Disobedience, p. 33. 37 Chicago Anarcho-Feminists, ‘An Anarcho-Feminist Manifesto’ [1971], Anarcho-Feminism: Two Statements (London: Black Bear, 1974), n.p. 38 Anarkismo.net established May Day 2005, online at https://anarkismo.net/about_us. 39 IAF Principles, online at http://i-f-a.org/index.php/principles [last access 5 July 2017]. 40 Zabalaza, online at https://zabalaza.net/home/ [last access 8 October 2018]. 41 About the IWW, online at https://iww.org/content/about-iww [last access 5 July 2017]. 42 The Statutes of Revolutionary Unionism (IWA), IV Goals and Objectives of the IWA, online at http://www.iwa-ait.org/content/statutes [last access 5 July 2017]. 43 For a discussion see Peter Gelderloos, ‘Insurrection v.

.), Les Différents Visages de l’anarchisme (Paris: Édition de l’En-dehors, 1927), pp. 56–65. 17 Errico Malatesta, Fra Contadini: A Dialogue on Anarchy, trans. Jean Weir (Catania: Bratach Dubh Editions, 1981 [1884]), p. 3. 18 Francis Dupuis-Déri and Thomas Déri, Anarchy Explained to My Father, trans. John Gilmore (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2017), pp. 199–200. 19 bell hooks, ‘How Do You Practice Intersectionalism?’, an interview with bell hooks, Randy Lowens, June 2009, Common Struggle/Lucha Común, online at http://nefac.net/bellhooks [last access 4 June 2018]. 20 Andrew Stevens, ‘Looking Back at Anger’, an interview with Stuart Christie, 3am Magazine, 2004, online at http://www.3ammagazine.com/politica/2004/apr/interview_stuart_christie.html [last access 15 June 2018]. 21 Steven Pinker, ‘The Moral Instinct’, The New York Times Magazine, 13 January 2008, online at https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html [last access 4 June 2018]. 22 Peter Kropotkin, ‘Letter to French and British Trade Union Delegates’ [1901], in I.


pages: 345 words: 105,722

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review. The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation. John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens.

This world of decentralized, small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today. Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak. The Board of the EFF: John Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer entrepreneurism—share his gift, his vision, and his formidable networking talents. They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

See Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, “Political Polarization and the Rational Public,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 18–21, 2006, available at link #95. 44.The optimistic: Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). The dark: Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). 45.The quote is from John Gilmore, one of the founders of EFF. See “John Gilmore,” Wikipedia, available at link #96. 46.Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 47.Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 31, 270. 48.David W.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

Several years earlier, Kapor and John Perry Barlow (who, in addition to being a Grateful Dead lyricist and a WELL member, was a cattle rancher living in Pinedale, Wyoming) had bonded over the plight of a group of teenagers who had run afoul of the Secret Service for breaking into computers. Several months later, the men met for dinner with Jaron Lanier; Saffo; John Gilmore, a technologist and privacy activist; and Brand. From the dinner came the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to civil liberties in cyberspace, and Brand was asked to join the board, along with Gilmore, Dyson, and Steve Wozniak. He served on the board for several years, but in the fall of 1994, Brand sent Kapor an email equating the Clock Library to a fragile startup venture that required all of his energies and politely stepped off it.

Denis Hayes, the founder of Earth Day, noted Brand’s “trademark” technological optimism in placing his faith in next-generation nuclear power plants: “With a serious commitment, Generation IV reactors might be commercially available by the 2030s, by which time global warming will have cooked our goose if we haven’t already built an economy relying heavily on solar energy, affordable storage, and smart power grids.”[19] * * * W hole Earth Discipline created a reasonable amount of buzz in the new world of social media when it appeared in print. Brand also heard from many of his friends and GBN associates who were uniformly enthusiastic. Traditional environmentalists were not the only ones upset, however. John Gilmore, the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a libertarian and a committed privacy activist, sent a note saying he believed that Brand had fallen into a “doomsday” trap, and he accused him of forsaking his libertarian principles, writing that “it [the threat of global warming] has inspired in you exactly the same response—to throw away your reason and your principles. . . .”


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

This manifesto of techno-freedom was written by a young Californian called Timothy C. May in the late 1980s. May had made some brilliant breakthroughs in computer memory chip design at Intel, but his real interest was in how this weird new internet would change politics. He worked with mathematician Eric Hughes and computer scientist John Gilmore (internet history buffs will know Gilmore as the creator of the notorious alt Usenet group) to pursue this theme. All three were radical libertarians from California and early adopters of computer technology. While many West Coast liberals were giving well-received talks about the coming age of digital liberation, this more technically informed trio realised that digital technology would more likely create a dystopia of ubiquitous state espionage and control.


pages: 175 words: 54,497

The Naked Eye: How the Revolution of Laser Surgery Has Unshackled the Human Eye by Gerard Sutton, Michael Lawless

Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, microplastics / micro fibres, Nelson Mandela

Thank you to Dr Geoff Cohn, my mentor in developing-world ophthalmology, who, together with Sister Barbara Roberts, has shared with me and guided me through what, at times, seemed like the insurmountable challenges of practising ophthalmic surgery in Cambodia and Burma. Also, I would like to thank my co-author, Michael, for being there when it mattered. He will always be my benchmark in surgical expertise. I would also like to thank my friends and fly fishing mentors Henare Dewes, Will Spry, John Gilmore and Rick Arnheim who have introduced me to the mystical rivers of the South Island of New Zealand and shared their vast knowledge with me. Special mention must be made of my parents Gerard and Sylvia for their guidance and example that service and vocation enrich lives. I consider myself most fortunate to have grown up in the wonderful family environment they created.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

The earliest example I can find of Szabo’s proposal dates to 2005, long before Bitcoin, and he begins his blogpost with the line, ‘A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold,’ and there are references to it from many contemporaries, so I can see no reason to doubt the assertion that the idea was hatched in the late 1990s. 32 Morgan E. Peck, ‘The Cryptoanarchists Answer to Cash,’ IEEE Spectrum, May 30, 2012, accessed May,10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tHFaWR. 33 ‘Bit gold.’ 34 Ian Grigg, Ian Goldberg, David Chaum, Stefan Brands, Steve Schear, John Gilmore, Ryan Lackey, Ben Laurie, Jim McCoy, Bram Cohen, Paul Kocher, Zooko, Adam Shostack, Len Sassaman, Ulf Moeller and the army of cryptographers, from Gavin Andresen to Jeff Garzik and beyond, who helped develop Bitcoin in the open-source community. 35 Satoshi Nakamoto, ‘Bitcoin v0.1 released’, Cryptography Mailing List, January 9, 2009, accessed March 2, 2014, http://bit.ly/1tru7wY. 36 Hal Finney, ‘Bitcoin v0.1 released’, Cryptography Mailing List.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Bitcoin must also be understood by what came before and, in particular, a group of technologists known as cypherpunks. (The word is a portmanteau of cipher—meaning coded messages—and cyberpunk, the sci-fi genre that combines, as one observer put it, “high tech and low life.” Cyberpunk has long been associated with hacker culture.) In 1992, a group of Silicon Valley cypherpunks regularly met at the office of John Gilmore, a software activist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation—the web’s version of the American Civil Liberties Union—to talk about how to make the internet more secure. Their discussions continued onto online discussion boards, where cypherpunks chatted about how to extend the internet ideals of security and anonymity to money.


pages: 225 words: 70,241

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

But you go to Brazil, and an Indian in a jungle is having similar visions. Drinking ayahuasca is like plugging into the umbilical cord of the planet. Realms that we don’t know how to navigate until people experiment, try. John Perry Barlow. He was such a cowboy—so cool and fun—you couldn’t resist that. He founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, because he didn’t want the government to run away with this new technology. He thought technology should be free. He was never afraid of speaking the truth or confronting “givens.” We would throw parties and bring these incredible people together: filmmakers, computer graphics people, politicians, musicians, hackers.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Not much goes to waste here. Cohn’s connection to EFF dates right back to 1990; she had studied human rights law through law school, and been interested in that field. By virtue of living in the Bay Area, she fell in with a crowd of people involved in the early internet, before the World Wide Web. These included John Gilmore, an early Sun Microsystems employee, and John Perry Barlow, perhaps best known as the lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Barlow, who died aged seventy in 2018,8 became known through the 1990s as something of an internet visionary, seeing its potential – but also its risks. ‘I honestly believe, without hyperbole, that the people in this room are doing things which will change the world more than anything since the capture of fire,’ he told a room of technologists in 1994.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Rightly or wrongly, those planes smashing into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania were viewed as a failure of cyber intelligence, of authorities not monitoring Internet communications and activities closely enough. At the same time, the prevailing view for most of those connected was that the Internet could not be controlled by governments: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” as John Gilmore, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, once famously quipped. I was not so sanguine. That article has been haunting me for years; it only touched the surface, and has struck me ever since as unfinished business. It was called “Black Code.” National security apparatuses have deeply entrenched, subterranean roots whose spread is difficult to curtail, let alone reverse.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

White House Millennium Council 2000. http://clinton4.nara.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/shawking.html. Hawks, John, Eric T. Wang, Gregory M. Cochran, Henry C. Harpending, and Robert K. Moyzls. 2007. “Recent Acceleration of Human Adaptive Evolution.” PNAS 104 (52): 20753—58. Hazlett, Heather Cody, Michele Poe, Guido Gerig, Rachel Gimpel Smith, James Provenzale, Allison Ross, John Gilmore, and Joseph Piven. 2005. “Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Head Circumference Study of Brain Size in Autism: Birth Through Age 2 Years.” Archives of General Psychiatry 62 (December): 1366—76. Heckman, James J., Jora Stixrud, and Sergio Urzua. 2006. “The Effects of Cognitive and Noncognitive Abilities on Labor Market Outcomes and Social Behavior.”


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

But he tapped into a powerful strain of Silicon Valley libertarianism that rejects any form of Internet regulation—except, in most cases, when it happens to help the technology business itself. Whatever its logical flaws, Barlow’s thinking became influential in shaping the idea of “online rights” as somehow distinct from those in the physical world, a concept that lacks much real legal support. In 1990, Barlow had started the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the activist John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, who had designed the early PC program Lotus 1-2-3 and founded the Lotus Development Corporation. The organization was founded to defend civil liberties online, it works to protect privacy and free speech, and it maintains more independence from big technology companies than most other online advocacy groups.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

Without their work, we would not know where our data was going, nor would we have any tools to protect it. Among the many who have guided my work and thinking are Ashkan Soltani, Dave Campbell, Jacob Appelbaum, Brian Kennish, Jon Callas, Michael J. J. Tiffany, Mike Perry, Christopher Soghoian, Dan Kaminsky, and Jonathan Mayer. Special thanks to John Gilmore, who offered my first window into this world so many years ago and whose story I still hope to tell in the fullness that it deserves. I also was lucky that my publishing village was run by excellent leaders. My agent, Todd Shuster, was my savior on many fronts—but most importantly by urging me to make the book more personal.


pages: 453 words: 114,250

The Great Firewall of China by James Griffiths;

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, bike sharing, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mobile money, Occupy movement, pets.com, profit motive, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, undersea cable, WikiLeaks, zero day

“Digital technology is … erasing the legal jurisdictions of the physical world and replacing them with the unbounded and perhaps permanently lawless waves of cyberspace,” he wrote in Wired, going on to endorse a concept he credited to Brand that would become the battle cry for their fellow techno-libertarians: “information wants to be free”.22 Just as he evangelised the freedom enabled by the internet, Barlow attacked the forces that sought to rein it in, like the US National Security Agency, which, he presciently argued, “meticulously observes almost every activity undertaken and continuously prevents most who inhabit its domain from drawing any blinds against such observation”.23 In 1990, Barlow recruited Mitch Kapor and John Gilmore, two tech moguls who got rich in the first Silicon Valley boom, and founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF),24 an organisation dedicated to “defending civil liberties in the digital world”.25 The three were soon joined by a host of Valley luminaries, and major corporate players, including Microsoft and HP, became donors.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

. &&& Acknowledgments This book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes who made it possible. For the hackers and cypherpunks: Bunnie Huang, Seth Schoen, Ed Felten, Alex Halderman, Gweeds, Natalie Jeremijenko, Emmanuel Goldstein, Aaron Swartz For the heroes: Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, Shari Steele, Cindy Cohn, Fred von Lohmann, Jamie Boyle, George Orwell, Abbie Hoffman, Joe Trippi, Bruce Schneier, Ross Dowson, Harry Kopyto, Tim O'Reilly For the writers: Bruce Sterling, Kathe Koja, Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Pat York, Annalee Newitz, Dan Gillmor, Daniel Pinkwater, Kevin Pouslen, Wendy Grossman, Jay Lake, Ben Rosenbaum For the friends: Fiona Romeo, Quinn Norton, Danny O'Brien, Jon Gilbert, danah boyd, Zak Hanna, Emily Hurson, Grad Conn, John Henson, Amanda Foubister, Xeni Jardin, Mark Frauenfelder, David Pescovitz, John Battelle, Karl Levesque, Kate Miles, Neil and Tara-Lee Doctorow, Rael Dornfest, Ken Snider For the mentors: Judy Merril, Roz and Gord Doctorow, Harriet Wolff, Jim Kelly, Damon Knight, Scott Edelman Thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. &&&$ Creative Commons Creative Commons Legal Code Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Jason Healey (1 Nov 2016), “The U.S. government and zero-day vulnerabilities: From pre-Heartbleed to the Shadow Brokers,” Columbia Journal of International Affairs, https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/healey_vulnerability_equities_process. 166Instead, it’s making us much less secure: Oren J. Falkowitz (10 Jan 2017), “U.S. cyber policy makes Americans vulnerable to our own government,” Time, http://time.com/4625798/donald-trump-cyber-policy. 167The NSA participated in the process: John Gilmore (6 Sep 2013), “Re: [Cryptography] opening discussion: Speculation on ‘BULLRUN,’” Mail Archive, https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html. 167“devastating effect” on security: Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier (Dec 2003), “A cryptographic evaluation of IPsec,” Counterpane Internet Security, https://www.schneier.com/academic/paperfiles/paper-ipsec.pdf. 167A second example: in the secret: Elad Barkan, Eli Biham, and Nathan Keller (17 Sep 2003), “Instant ciphertext-only cryptanalysis of GSM encrypted communication,” http://cryptome.org/gsm-crack-bbk.pdf. 167Both of these were probably part: Nicole Perlroth, Jeff Larson, and Scott Shane (5 Sep 2013), “Secret documents reveal N.S.A. campaign against encryption,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/09/05/us/documents-reveal-nsa-campaign-against-encryption.html.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Mute Magazine, September 1995, http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology. 102. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded by Lotus Notes creator Mitch Kapor, cattle rancher and Grateful Dead songwriter John Perry Barlow, and early Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore. It started out with a vague mission: to defend people’s civil liberties on the Internet and to “find a way of preserving the ideology of the 1960s” in the digital era. From its first days, EFF had deep pockets and featured an impressive roster: Stewart Brand and Apple’s Steve Wozniak were board members, while press outreach was conducted by Cathy Cook, who had done public relations for Steve Jobs.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

group, May 5, 2005, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EOHarm/message/1496. 211 “once causation is established”: Jim Moody, “An Introduction and a Question,” EOHarm Yahoo! group, April 26, 2005, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EOHarm/message/344. 212 “Please feel free to share”: David Kirby, “EVIDENCE OF HARM: NYT Science Times ad,” EOHarm Yahoo! group, April 28, 2005, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EOHarm/message/628. 212 “Two years ago this was the province”: John Gilmore, “Sound the Trumpet—Update,” EOHarm Yahoo! group, April 28, 2005, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EOHarm/message/719. 212 “Somehow,” Kirby says, Deirdre Imus: David Kirby, interview with author, April 14, 2009. 212 reached more than three million Americans: “Imus Audience Slips in New York but He Still Packs a Punch,” Business Week, April 26, 2005, http://nybw.businessweek.com/the_thread/ brandnewday/archives/2005/04/imus_audience _slips_in_new_york_but_he_ still_packs_a_punch.html. 212 Imus gave Kirby immediate credibility: Don Imus, “David Kirby Interviewed by Don Imus,” Imus in the Morning, MSNBC, March 10, 2005, unofficial transcript. 212 the only health-related story: David Kirby, “Sex and Medicine—Party Favors: Pill Popping as Insurance,” The New York Times, June 21, 2004, F1. 213 He asked about the book’s name: Imus, “David Kirby Interviewed by Don Imus.” 214 “happened to check Amazon”: David Kirby, interview with author, April 14, 2009. 215 “rang[ing] from severely flawed”: Tim Russert, Meet the Press, NBC, August 7, 2005, transcript, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8714275/. 216 In June 2010, the FDA accused Haley: U.S.


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Barlow and I felt something had to be done.” In 1990 they cofounded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). They put out the word to a few high-profile computer-industry figures who they thought would understand what they were up to. Steve Wozniak kicked in a six-figure contribution immediately, as did Internet pioneer John Gilmore. Merely fighting the defensive battles in the courts was a passive strategy. EFF, they decided, should play an active role. It should take on proposed and existing legislation, guard civil liberties in cyberspace, help open this new online realm to more people, and try to narrow the gulf between the “info haves” and the “info have-nots.”


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

However, digital technologies have also added new dimensions to what the powerful can attempt to repress or demobilize movements. Governments, too, have developed increasingly sophisticated strategies against threats that networked movements in the new public sphere poses to their hold on power, even though they can no longer effectively censor in the old ways; as an oft-quoted aphorism by internet pioneer John Gilmore goes, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”34 There is even a name for the phenomenon of attracting more attention by attempting to hide something, just as Barbra Streisand inadvertently publicized the location of her home by battling to remove images of her mansion from the California Coastal Records Project.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

A 40-bit encryption method is not very secure. In September 1997, Ian Goldberg, a University of California at Berkeley graduate student, was able to crack a 40-bit code in three and a half hours using a network of 250 small computers. 15 A 56-bit code is a bit better (16 bits better, actually). Ten months later, John Gilmore, a computer privacy activist, and Paul Kocher, an encryption expert, were able to break the 56-bit code in 56 hours using a specially designed computer that cost them $250,000 to build. But a quantum computer can easily factor any sized number (within its capacity). Quantum computing technology would essentially destroy digital encryption.


pages: 470 words: 144,455

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

It’s just as easy to log on to a computer in Tulsa from a computer in Tunisia as it is from one in Tallahassee. Don’t like the censorship laws or computer crime statutes in your country? Find a country more to your liking. Countries like Singapore have tried to limit their citizens’ abilities to search the Web, but the way the Internet is built makes blocking off parts of it unfeasible. As John Gilmore opined, “The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” This means that Internet attackers don’t have to be anywhere near their prey. An attacker could sit behind a computer in St. Petersburg and attack Citibank’s computers in New York. This has enormous security implications.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

The foundation would, in addition, work “to convey to both the public and the policy-makers metaphors which will illuminate the more general stake in liberating Cyberspace.”84 The first and most influential of the metaphors Barlow referred to was the “electronic frontier.”85 Being master networkers, Kapor and Barlow quickly gained press coverage of their new organization as well as offers of funding from Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems. They started a conference on the WELL, and they recruited Stewart Brand, among others, to serve on their new organization’s board of directors. One evening in the early fall, Barlow convened a dinner in San Francisco attended by Brand, Jaron Lanier, Chuck Blanchard (who worked at VPL with Lanier), and Paul Saffo (head of the Institute for the Future, a Silicon Valley think tank).


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

This process allows me to get detailed feedback on the book throughout the process. Many people read all or parts of the manuscript: Ross Anderson, Steve Bass, Caspar Bowden, Cody Charette, David Campbell, Karen Cooper, Dorothy Denning, Cory Doctorow, Ryan Ellis, Addison Fischer, Camille François, Naomi Gilens, John Gilmore, Jack Goldsmith, Bob Gourley, Bill Herdle, Deborah Hurley, Chrisma Jackson, Reynol Junco, John Kelsey, Alexander Klimburg, David Levari, Stephen Leigh, Harry Lewis, Jun Li, Ken Liu, Alex Loomis, Sascha Meinrath, Aleecia M. McDonald, Pablo Molina, Ramez Naam, Peter Neumann, Joseph Nye, Cirsten Paine, David M.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

This freedom wouldn’t just sound the death knell of censorship; it would also mark the end of authoritarian regimes that relied on it. After all, what government could triumph against a self-multiplying network of information creators and consumers, where any idea might mobilize millions in a heartbeat? John Gilmore, an early cyber-activist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, put it simply in a 1993 interview: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” For many years, this seemed to be the case. In a dispatch for the newly launched Wired magazine, reporter Bruce Sterling described the key role of an early freedom fighter.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

The same year, 1996, that I worked at Freedom House, John Perry Barlow—a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead who been an early participant in the web—authored and posted online a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” writing, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.” Barlow—who with two like-minded digital pioneers, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor, founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation—believed that the virtual worlds of cyberspace existed beyond the reach of any pedestrian earthly government. “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” he wrote. “I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.


The Rough Guide to Jamaica by Thomas, Polly,Henzell, Laura.,Coates, Rob.,Vaitilingam, Adam.

buttonwood tree, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, centre right, colonial rule, computer age, ghettoisation, jitney, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sustainable-tourism, trade route

Based around the diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, who kept a regular journal during his forty years as a plantation owner in Jamaica, this compelling and accessible book provides a chilling insight into life in the colonial era, from Thistlewood’s obsessive detailing of his sexual exploits to the appalling punishments and routine humiliations he meted out to his slaves. James Ferguson A Traveller’s History of the Caribbean. Concise and well-written overview that John Gilmore Faces of the Caribbean. Excellent and essential sociohistory of the Caribbean, covering everything from slavery to reggae, cricket and the environment. Michelle Harrison King Sugar – Jamaica, the Caribbean and the World Sugar Economy. Solid history of the Jamaican sugar industry – and the fortunes it made for British planters


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Soon after, as Marty Tenenbaum had hoped, the NSF started to pull down the walls of its online garden, changing the terms of its “acceptable use policy” to permit business transactions online.16 Mitch Kapor ran with a crowd that made no bones about its antipathy for government. Along with Barlow, one of his EFF co-founders was John Gilmore. An early Sun Microsystems employee with a net worth in the many millions, Gilmore was a key figure behind the Cypherpunks, a libertarian hacker collective devoted to the pursuit of building cryptography-based monetary and communications systems. The future pursued by the Cypherpunks was an exalted state of “crypto-anarchy,” unbounded by government control.17 Perhaps because he’d always been bouncing back and forth between East and West Coasts, Kapor understood that making change wasn’t always about storming the barricades.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Going beyond the basic security-assessment methodologies are meta-methodologies like the Common Criteria, which employ a notation recovered from a UFO crash site and only understandable by seven people on earth, several of whom mutter to themselves a lot and aren’t allowed near sharp objects because of what they might do with them. The jargon used is so impenetrable that Unix guru John Gilmore, on encountering it for the first time, thought that it had been deliberately and maliciously designed to obfuscate the real meaning of a document “so that nobody reading it can tell what it’s for any more” [4]. The result is something that “requires expert users to work with, and once they’re finished it requires another set of expert users to verify and evaluate the results” [5], something that’s of little value to either the product developers or the product’s users54.

References [1] “SSL and TLS: Designing and Building Secure Systems”, Eric Rescorla, Addison-Wesley, 2001. 286 Threats [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] “The Uneasy Relationship Between Mathematics and Cryptography”, Neal Koblitz, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol.54, No.8 (September 2007), p.972. “WYTM?”, Ian Grigg, posting to the cryptography@metzdowd.com mailing list, message-ID 3F886682.1F7817DB@systemics.com, 13 October 2003. “Re: Difference between TCPA-Hardware and other forms of trust”, John Gilmore, posting to the cryptography@metzdowd.com mailing list, messageID 200312162153.hBGLrOds029690@new.toad.com, 16 December 2003. “Cryptographic Security Architecture Design and Verification”, Peter Gutmann, Springer-Verlag, 2004. “Fortress: A History of Military Defence”, Ian Hogg, Macdonald and Jane’s, 1975.