It’s been a long while since I’ve posted new content. Frankly, I find myself focusing on “conversations” in Facebook and email, though both of those are poor substitutes for thinking and writing about complex ideas. So I’m back to posting here to see if this medium can remain alive. I
Continue readingAuthor: dpr
Greta Thunberg’s Climate Emergency Challenge
For the past few months I’ve been struggling to sort out why very little has been being done to address the biggest issue that faces humanity today. That is, the Climate Emergency. I’ve been digging more deeply into the scientific understandings we have gained, and into the range of solutions
Continue readingGoGo does not need to run “Man in the Middle Attacks” on YouTube
Ars Technica mentioned in a post that GoGo, the primary “airplane Internet Access provider” is breaking HTTPS security with a fake certificate in order to prevent access to YouTube over HTTPS when using GoGo to access the Internet. Many are already pointing out that this damages all of Internet security
Continue readingDoes the Internet need “governance”?
It’s remarkable to me that there are now two powerful agencies fighting to “govern” the Internet – the ITU and the FCC. On any given day, it’s hard to tell whether they are on the same side or different sides. The ITU process apparently began in earnest with the World
Continue readingThe (word) Internet is dead. Long live Fiber!
To me, this NYT article suggests that Susan Crawford “doesn’t get it” about the Internet, in a an amazingly extreme way (an “epic fail”). She focuses on a specific hardware technology (fiber), when in fact the whole point of the Internet was to focus on interoperability among ALL transport technologies
Continue readingWhat The Internet Is, and Should Continue To Be
Occasionally, people ask my perspective on the Internet, since I often object to confusing it with things like the telephone or Cable TV. Recently I composed a response that captures my perspective, as one of the participants in its genesis, and as an advocate for sustaining its fundamental initial design
Continue readingRegarding OAM based multiplexing of radio and light
Bob Frankston suggested I post some of my recent remarks and references to Orbital Angular Momentum and its potential value in increasing the capacity of “spectrum” (the word I think misleads everyone, but that’s a subject I’ve talked about a lot). So I did put up a brief page here,
Continue readingWhat we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!
What do we teach when we teach science in school? And really, why do we teach science that way? I’ve personally never been quite sure whether I’m more of a scientist, engineer, or mathematician. The public lumps these all together for some reason, perhaps because they all appear to deal
Continue readingA response to Barbara van Schewick: code needs (only a little) help from the law
Barbara van Schewick posted a really thoughtful analysis about how about application-specific vs. application-agnostic discrimination directly affects innovation, and looks at an actual example of a Silicon Valley startup. I think her points are right on, and I strongly support the rationale for resisting “application-specific” discrimination. In fact, Barbara’s point
Continue readingBroadband vs. Open Internet, Open Internet scores a point
FCC Chair Genachowski released a statement today to announce that he will put forward a proposal to his fellow commissioners “Preserving a Free and Open Internet”, and it has already been reported on the NYTimes online. It is possible to read Genachowski’s statement very, very carefully, and see a distinction
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