What is a browser?

I view this as job security…

Using a 1964 modem to dial up to the Internet

In the late 80s I used a 300-baud acoustic modem connected to my Atari 800 to connect to BBSes. Ah, the memories. (Though I think it would have been cooler if he had actually used a rotary dial phone to make it true “dial up”.)

Via Boing Boing

The 3 Rules of the Internet

Contains mild adult language. Via BoingBoing.

History of the Internet

History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Keen meets Godwin

Andrew Keene is the author of The Cult of the Amateur and someone who is convinced that Web 2.0 is leading to the end of civilization as we know it.

(Mike) Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Keene's recent article in The Daily Beast:

Imagine if today’s radically unregulated Internet, with its absence of fact checkers and editorial gatekeepers, had existed back then. Imagine that universal broadband had been available to enable the unemployed to read the latest conspiracy theories about the Great Crash on the blogosphere. Imagine the FDR-baiting, Hitler-loving Father Charles Coughlin, equipped with his “personalized” YouTube channel, able, at a click of a button, to distribute his racist message to the suffering masses. Or imagine a marketing genius like the Nazi chief propagandist Josef Goebbels managing a viral social network of anti-Semites which could coordinate local meet-ups to assault Jews and Communists.

Mr. Keen, please, please go away your arguments have officially lost any merit due to Reductio ad Hitlerum.

Guess who

Q: But do you go on line for yourself?

A: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don't expect to be a great communicator, I don't expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need - including going to my daughter's blog first, before anything else.

Read The Huffington Post for the answer.

Shutdown Day is tomorrow

There's just a little less than 13 hours left until Shutdown Day. Have you made the committment? Can you follow through?

I feel ethical again

Yes folks, the 6MB/sec DSL line is up and running and the (WPA secured) WiFi works throughout the house. (I'm blogging from my living room sofa right now.) I no longer have to mooch off the weak yet open signal from the neighbors.