Tag: If-Then

else 10.7: A Dread Pirate Gives Up His Bitcoins

Anonymity on the web becomes increasingly fractious as Tor and Bitcoin come into question with recent headline-grabbing stories. A quick scan of this weekend’s NYTimes reveals three big articles on the novel ways our digital histories stay with us. Clearly, our story has come to the fore.

This week, we’re also looking forward this coming week’s OpenCo and the Quantified Self global conference, both in San Francisco. As always, if you want to keep up with what we’re reading/thinking about on a weekly basis the best way is to subscribe to the “else” feed either as an email newsletter or through RSS.

The Dread Pirate Roberts, AKA Ross William Ulbricht, may suffer from the seedy reputation of the Silk Road, but as goes Silk Road, so go more legitimate uses of online anonymity.

FBI’s Case Against Silk Road Boss Is A Fascinating Read – Techdirt
The capture and revelation of dramatic details of the Ulbricht’s Silk Road drug trafficking website has called into question both legitimate and seedy uses of anonymous technologies like Tor and Bitcoin. NSA and GCHQ target Tor network that protects anonymity of web users – The Guardian
Tor, a routing system that masks traffic through a network of relaying nodes, isn’t safe from government spying. The latest Guardian NSA piece describes measures designed to peel ‘back the layers of Tor with EgotisticalGiraffe.’

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If-Then and Antiquities of the Future

Over the past few months I’ve been developing a framework for the book I’ve been working on, and while I’ve been pretty quiet about the work, it’s time to lay it out and get some responses from you, the folks I most trust with keeping me on track.

I’ll admit the idea of putting all this out here makes me nervous – I’ve only discussed this with a few dozen folks, and now I’m going public with what I’ll admit is an unbaked cake. Anyone can criticize it now, (or, I suppose, steal it), but then again, I did the very same thing with the core idea in my last book (The Database of Intentions, back in 2003), and that worked out just fine.

So here we go. The original promise of my next book is pretty simple: I’m trying to paint a picture of the kind of digital world we’ll likely live in one generation from now, based on a survey of where we are presently as a digital society. In a way, it’s a continuation and expansion of The Search – the database of intentions has expanded from search to nearly every corner of our world – we now live our lives leveraged over digital platforms and data. So what might that look like thirty years hence?

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