A Quick History of Digital Communication Before the Internet - Eager Blog
A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.
A potted history of communication networks from the pony express and the telegraph to ethernet and wi-fi.
This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was received by this office on 5 February 2016 for “A digital/electronic copy of the NSA old security posters from the 1950s and 1960s.”
The graphic design is …um, mixed.
Ainissa Ramirez recounts the story of the transatlantic telegraph cable, the Apollo project of its day.
Enumerating the anti-patterns that cause serious user experience issues that don’t get nearly enough attention:
While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.
I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up post.
(I was going to say I was anxiously awaiting the follow-up post but …never mind.)
A transatlantic cable, hurrah!
For people of a certain age, this will bring back memories of a classic screensaver.
If you had told me back then that the screensaver could one day be recreated in CSS, I’m not sure I would’ve believed it.
A great analysis of how centralised hubs are the easiest attack vector for bad actors like the NSA and GCHQ:
How did we get such industry concentration? Why is a network famously based on distributed processing, routing, and peer connections characterized now by a few choke points that the NSA can skim at its leisure?
A superb piece of hypertext from The Guardian.
Don’t ever worry about not sharing again.
We shouldn’t be protecting ourselves. We should be protecting each other.
Metajournalism.
A good ol’ fashioned rant.
A really terrific piece by George Dyson taking a suitably long-zoom look at information warfare and the Entscheidungsproblem, tracing the lineage of PRISM from the Corona project of the Cold War.
What we have now is the crude equivalent of snatching snippets of film from the sky, in 1960, compared to the panopticon that was to come. The United States has established a coordinated system that links suspect individuals (only foreigners, of course, but that definition becomes fuzzy at times) to dangerous ideas, and, if the links and suspicions are strong enough, our drone fleet, deployed ever more widely, is authorized to execute a strike. This is only a primitive first step toward something else. Why kill possibly dangerous individuals (and the inevitable innocent bystanders) when it will soon become technically irresistible to exterminate the dangerous ideas themselves?
The proposed solution? That we abandon secrecy and conduct our information warfare in the open.
Ben is rightly worried by the blasé attitude in the tech world to the PRISM revelations. Perhaps that attitude stems from a culture of “log everything by default”?
I think there’s a deep rooted trait within this industry that sedates the outrage. That is the normality, complicity, and dependency on ‘surveillance’ in the software we make.
A team competing in NASA's beamed power climber competition—a race to provide one of the technologies needed for building a space elevator. I doff my hat to these guys.
"No Ideas But In Things is a library of controls, animations, layouts, and displays that might be a source of inspiration for interaction designers. Dan Saffer is the curator. The title comes from a William Carlos Williams poem."
Stan talks about the upcoming Event Apart in Philadelphia.