The blockchain holds great promise for developing decentralized protocols and applications such as marketplaces (e.g., openbazaar), registries for digital and physical assets (e.g. mediachain) and social networks that have no value extraction by a controlling company. Everyone who wants to develop such applications though faces the same foundational problem: how to refer to resources and people without resorting to existing centralized systems. On the existing web we use URLs to point to reso...

Since my post last Friday about alternatives to SOPA/PIPA, I have started to talk to a bunch of people about the idea of a decentralized content registry. Here are some thoughts and questions that I have been kicking around since then. A decentralized system could offer a new revenue stream for existing registrars and certificate authorities who are already at least partially equipped to deal with issues of verification. By having a competitive situation from the start the price for content r...

Today we are continuing with the web cycle that I outlined two weeks ago. After a URL has been parsed in Step 1, the browser needs to determine the IP address for the domain as Step 2. Reprising the previous example, let’s consider the domain name dailylit.com. How does the browser determine that in order to retrieve information from this domain it should access a server at IP address 72.32.133.224? This is accomplished via a system called DNS, which stands for Domain Name System, and provide...

Over the holiday several events happened that illustrate that we are facing a clear and present danger to the freedom of the Internet. It started with the US government seizing a bunch of domains that were accused of participating in copyright infringement. The action and its aftermath illustrate two important points. First, despite seeking more powers under the awful COICA, the government is already asserting the legality of controlling DNS and seizing domain names. Second, several of the af...

That would have to be the updated chorus line for Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World for many of today’s kids. Sure, they use the Internet “like all the time,” (sorry) but it is surprising to me how little many of them seem to know about its operation. I am basing this on giving an evening class recently to a bunch young folks from the publishing industry and then yesterday spending some time with the teenage son of friends of ours (he is doing an internship with Susan at DailyLit). All of them use ...