The Internet is a collective hallucination: one of the best humanity has ever generated.
We face paired dangers. The first is that our networks are successfully attacked. The second is that our fear of attack will cause us to destroy what makes the Internet special.
The openness on which Apple had built its original empire had been completely reversed - but the spirit was still there among users. Hackers vied to 'jailbreak' the iPhone, running new apps on it despite Apple's desire to keep it closed.
Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don't like.
I'm interested in harnessing the good will and distributed power of people, including novices.
Attacks on Internet sites and infrastructure, and the compromise of secure information, pose a particularly tricky problem because it is usually impossible to trace an attack back to its instigator.
Technologically, the Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new ISPs or new forms of expanding access.
We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves.
I'm interested in helping secure the PC - we need innovation here. It's not just hug your PC, hate the iPhone. In fact I don't even hate the iPhone; I think it's really cool. I just don't want it to be the center of the ecosystem along with the Web 2.0 apps.
How an individual's reputation is protected online is too important and subtle a policy matter to be legislated by a high court, which is institutionally mismatched to the evolving intricacies of the online world.
When I worry about privacy, I worry about peer-to-peer invasion of privacy. About the fact that anytime anything of any note happens, there are three arms holding cell phones with cameras in them or video records capturing the event ready to go on the nightly news, if necessary.
All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant.
Instead of using new technologies to preserve for ready discovery material that might in the past never have been stored, or deleting everything as soon as possible, we can develop systems that place sensitive information beyond reach until a specified amount of time has passed or other conditions are met.
When I think about privacy on social media sites, there's kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn't make them any less important or severe; it's just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we're going to solve them.
I don't know how much thought is behind it, but it seems to me highly effective the way that Facebook will let somebody tag a photo with a friend's name, then others who are a friend of that friend can perhaps immediately see the photo, and the friend, in the meantime, has a chance to wander back and un-tag it.
I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online.
The problem is, we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve.