On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the ACLU’s challenge to warrantless wiretapping. That leaves the EFF’s lawsuit as the last one still standing. The argument made by the majority of justices for dismissing the ACLU challenge was that the defendant had no standing because there was no provable harm. There are many things that are disconcerting about this argument. For starters, it is entirely unclear how someone would know that specific harm has occurred to them and is the result of wa...

On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court rejected the ACLU’s challenge to warrantless wiretapping. That leaves the EFF’s lawsuit as the last one still standing. The argument made by the majority of justices for dismissing the ACLU challenge was that the defendant had no standing because there was no provable harm. There are many things that are disconcerting about this argument. For starters, it is entirely unclear how someone would know that specific harm has occurred to them and is the result of wa...

A court in Germany just ruled that Google must remove autocomplete suggestions is they are defamatory. Now at first blush this seems quite silly and Google has taken the position that they are simply reflecting what people are searching for. I don’t think it is quite that simple though. This is clearly an example of where information cascades are possible and problematic. I have written about the issue of information cascades before, but this makes another great example. Imagine someone start...

A court in Germany just ruled that Google must remove autocomplete suggestions is they are defamatory. Now at first blush this seems quite silly and Google has taken the position that they are simply reflecting what people are searching for. I don’t think it is quite that simple though. This is clearly an example of where information cascades are possible and problematic. I have written about the issue of information cascades before, but this makes another great example. Imagine someone start...

This is the week for “revisited” blog posts. Today: bitcoin. In my first post about bitcoin I expressed my concern that we may be experiencing a speculative bubble that might ultimately destroy the currency’s usefulness. Since that post, which was just last week, the $/bitcoin rate has gone from $8 to $26! That’s already above the target estimate for the currency that I heard from one entrepreneur working on a bitcoin related business. I ran across another link recently suggesting that were b...

This is the week for “revisited” blog posts. Today: bitcoin. In my first post about bitcoin I expressed my concern that we may be experiencing a speculative bubble that might ultimately destroy the currency’s usefulness. Since that post, which was just last week, the $/bitcoin rate has gone from $8 to $26! That’s already above the target estimate for the currency that I heard from one entrepreneur working on a bitcoin related business. I ran across another link recently suggesting that were b...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking hasn’t changed enough since to warrant a new post. The key quote is this:I believe what we are seeing is the transition fr...

On Twitter this morning I received a link to a Guardian piece titled “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse” by Suzanne Moore. What caught my attention was not so much the piece itself, which has many arguments that I have been making on Continuations for some time about technology being the driving force behind income inequality and the disappearance of work. Instead I was intrigued by the “I refuse” part. There is, unfortunately, not much elaboration on t...

On Twitter this morning I received a link to a Guardian piece titled “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse” by Suzanne Moore. What caught my attention was not so much the piece itself, which has many arguments that I have been making on Continuations for some time about technology being the driving force behind income inequality and the disappearance of work. Instead I was intrigued by the “I refuse” part. There is, unfortunately, not much elaboration on t...

The debt showdown in Washington is supremely frustrating as it illustrates the complete inability of our current political system to deal with the structural changes that we are facing. At present course and speed things will get a lot worse before we can hope for them to get better. Trying to fix the budget without fixing the underlying problems in the economy and society is the proverbial attempt to prevent the sinking of the Titanic by rearranging the deck chairs. Here are several areas in...

The debt showdown in Washington is supremely frustrating as it illustrates the complete inability of our current political system to deal with the structural changes that we are facing. At present course and speed things will get a lot worse before we can hope for them to get better. Trying to fix the budget without fixing the underlying problems in the economy and society is the proverbial attempt to prevent the sinking of the Titanic by rearranging the deck chairs. Here are several areas in...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...

In the future we can’t have privacy for the same reason that the record labels and Hollywood can’t have DRM and that’s ultimately a good thing. DRM has proven a fool’s errand because it is not compatible with general purpose computing. At some point a song or movie has to be decrypted in order to be played back and short of tamper proof and “trusted” hardware at that moment it can be digitally copied (and even if we had all of that it could be re-recorded or re-filmed during playback). That i...

I am very excited to be preparing for a talk at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh (last week of August). The subject, not surprisingly, will be “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet - how the Internet will transform business, government and society." I love that Vint Cerf used "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” as his 5 word acceptance speech for the Webby Awards. To me it perfectly captures where we are with the Internet today and could be the unofficial motto for Union Square Ventures. Part of what I am doi...

I am very excited to be preparing for a talk at the Turing Festival in Edinburgh (last week of August). The subject, not surprisingly, will be “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet - how the Internet will transform business, government and society." I love that Vint Cerf used "You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” as his 5 word acceptance speech for the Webby Awards. To me it perfectly captures where we are with the Internet today and could be the unofficial motto for Union Square Ventures. Part of what I am doi...

We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other. Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the world: Utopia. Transparent information sharing. Global collaboration. Renaissance of arts. Reputation more import...

We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other. Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the world: Utopia. Transparent information sharing. Global collaboration. Renaissance of arts. Reputation more import...