There have been a number of tweets in my timeline roughly saying: “Ferguson, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine — what is going on with the world?” I don’t know that these can all be reduced to a single underlying reason although the current rate of global change likely has something to do with it. There is, however, one thing they all have in common: an abject failure to recognize each other’s humanity. This failure is all the more frustrating at a time when we should all know that we are inhabiting a roc...

The Internet is a most amazing thing that we are unfortunately taking for granted. At its core it is about connecting all of humanity with each other. With it we, the people, have the power to dramatically reduce the cost and expand the reach of education. To conduct research outside of the confines of academia or corporations. To collaborate on art projects and so much more. Yet precisely because it is so disruptive for existing power structures including large corporations and governments, ...

For the New Year, I tweeted that we should “ll work together in 2014 to keep the Internet open for the benefit of humankind everywhere." That couldn’t be any more pressing as there is a full scale assault under way and we don’t seem to be doing much about it. First, thanks to Edward Snowden we have a much better view into the extent of domestic and international surveillance activities. The non-democratic ultra-secret and blackhat based approach taken by the NSA has done much to undermine the...

The scale of the protests against government in Turkey is significant with over 200 demonstrations in 67 cities. Social media has played an important role in making the rest of the world aware of the scale of the protests and more importantly of the aggressive government response which has involved mass arrests and excessive use of tear gas and water cannons. It is not surprising that the Turkish Prime Minister, who initially replied saying that the opinions of the protestors will simply be i...

The IPv6 standard was first published in 1998 which is now 15 years ago. For a while it looked like adoption would drag on forever resulting in some anguished discussions. But by about 2011 IPv6 started to develop real momentum on private networks with Google achieving 95% IPv6 on their internal network at the end of 2011. Another major milestone was World IPv6 Launch Day, which took place last June. A study that was just presented a couple of weeks ago at the NANOG conference shows (PDF) tha...

The Internet changes everything. Aaron Swartz knew and embraced that at an age when most of us think that the biggest problem we are facing is this week’s home work assignment. For the first time in human history we can connect to each other independent of where or who we are. We have at our disposal the ability to collaborate on ideas globally and advance knowledge and society. Aaron lived a life committed to furthering and protecting that newfound capability. In the process he sometimes pus...

There are two major battles brewing at the moment, one domestic and one international that both deserve close attention and require citizen action. TLDR version: go to (1) WhatIsTheITU and (2) VanishingRights, take action there and help spread the word. On the international side the attempt by the ITU to take over regulation of the Internet is in full swing. I had briefly mentioned this before and at the time many folks dismissed it as something that wouldn’t gain any traction. But with major...

Much has been written about how idiotic it is for the NBC to tape delay Olympic broadcasts when everybody already knows via Twitter what the outcome of an event has been. At the current Olympics we are witnessing like never before that the Internet is global and realtime whereas TV historically has been neither. Now you can in fact get live streaming of the Olympics but only if you are based in the UK. Enter proxies. A proxy is an intermediate server that lets you appear as if you are located...

Some fine folks have been hard at work to draft a Declaration of Internet Freedom. I couldn’t agree more with the preamble:We believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world. To keep the Internet free and open, we call on communities, industries and countries to recognize these principles. We believe that they will help to bring about more creativity, more innovation and more open societies.So please go and read the Declaration. If you agree with it, you can sign it by fo...

I have long been a fan of the UK’s Guardian. They have embraced the internet like no other newspaper publisher. One of my favorite examples of the many great things they have done was the crowdsourced investigation of the expenses of Members of Parliament. Now they are kicking off a seven day series titled “Battle for the internet” that will cover many of the same topics that make a regular appearance here on Continuations. The series kicked off with a summary of an interview with Sergey Brin...