News

net.wars continues...

net.wars continues publishing every Friday at www.pelicancrossing.net/netwars.[more...]

net.wars: Replay

"Annus horribilis" might be going a bit far for the Internet in 2013. Long-term one hopes it instead proves to be a watershed: the end of complacence.[more...]


net.wars: Here there be midget porn

It's hard not to listen to outlines of the smart connected future we're facing and go "EEK! Dragons!" This is particularly true in the context in which these predictions are being made: caught between the Snowden revelations of endemic electronic spying and the UK government's censorship plans.[more...]

net.wars: Copyright plays

Evil - or benign - file-sharers checking in on The Pirate Bay this week discovered the site had vanished. Hours later, it was back via a domain registration in the Ascension Islands; today it's woken up in Peru, apparently at rest for now. TorrentFreak reports, however, that the next phase will be different: The Pirate Bay will circumvent the domain name system entirely. The plan is for a standalone browser and plugins for Chrome and Firefox that will turn the entire system into P2P, taking the process of decentralization that began with the takedown of Napster to the next level.[more...]


net.wars: Running with scissors

What with one thing and another, net.wars failed to mark November 2, 2013 as the 25th anniversary of the Internet worm. Probably its author, Robert Tappan Morris, Jr, would have liked for the whole world to fail similarly. Instead, he got to be one of the first to discover what life is like in the Age of the Internet, when it's increasingly hard to lose your past mistakes in the mists of time. Especially when those mistakes represent a watershed moment in the development of a globally adopted technology.[more...]

net.wars: The learning channel

On the eve of London's CryptoFestival, as everyone gears up to reconnect with their inner cypherpunk, it seems like a good moment to assess what we've learned over the last five months of revelations from the Snowden documents. Not what we've learned from the documents themselves; you can read all that over at the Guardian. I mean the lessons of it all.[more...]