60 Internet Quotes

You don't get to cut that chain of evidence and start over. You're always going to be pursued by your data shadow, which is forming from thousands and thousands of little leaks and tributaries of information.

The Internet is a medium only at the bit level. At the human level, it is a conversation that, because of the persistence and linkedness of pages, has elements of a world. It could only be a medium if we absolutely didn't care about it.

The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.

In general, an implementation must be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior.

Computer is not a device anymore. It is an extension of your mind and your gateway to other people.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

What, exactly, is the Internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a 'modem' can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo.

The Internet:has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction.

I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. But at the end, that article wasn't very complimentary, because the author suggested that I wasn't doing a very good job, and that I ought to be replaced by a 'professional.' Of course, there isn't any 'God of the Internet.' The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together.

The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. That's all it is. All those media companies say, 'We're going to make a killing here.' You won't because it's still only as good as the content.

'Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going on while IP was being designed.' (2000)

'The internet has no government, no constitution, no laws, no rights, no police, no courts. Don't talk about fairness or innocence, and don't talk about what should be done. Instead, talk about what is being done and what will be done by the amorphous unreachable undefinable blob called the internet user base.' (2004)

'personally i prefer the MX RR and a stylized name, but i was trying to solve the problem rather than create an industry.' (2004)

It's funny how the music industry is enraged about the Internet and the way things are copied without being paid for. But you know why people steal the music? Because they can't afford the music. I'm not condoning downloading music for free. I don't think that's really fair, but I understand it. If you brought CD prices back down to $8.98, you would solve a lot of the industry's problems.

This isn't just some phenomenon of the Internet - to liken Barack Obama to the flash-in-the-pan Dean campaign does him a disservice. There is something happening with this guy, and I don't think he should be given short shrift.

A lack of a workable means of cultural consumption has killed off the Internet boom and lost AOL Time Warner $54 billion dollars in just one quarter. It's a big, ugly, stinking deal, with extremely high stakes, in which there are no heroes.

Googling is international. It's not just restricted to cranky Republicans who couldn't erase e-mail in their PROFS (Professional Office System). That's going to have more of an effect. It's difficult to escape a tragedy in your life that's not your own fault.

Years ago, if your husband died in a house fire, you could get a covered wagon and go to Oregon. Now, as soon as you arrive in Oregon, someone could google you. 'Oh, well, widow Simpson. Really sorry to hear about the house fire.'

{On his work appearing on the Internet} It's a conflicted feeling. I'm really a populist, down in the very center of me. I like the power people can accrue for themselves, and I like the idea of user-generated content and taking power from the corporations. The other half of the conflict, though, is that, traditionally speaking, artists are protected from copyright infringement. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about solving this issue. It's someone else's job.

I did spearhead the introduction of the Internet in countries like Russia, the former Soviet Union, because it is a very open system of communication. I think it has great potential for self-organization and self-organization is very much at the heart of an open society. The Internet is sort of a medium of open society. However, it can also be a medium of control and so we have to be careful it doesn't destroy you.

On-line service providers and others have a key role to play in freeing cyberspace of the taint of copyright lawlessness. Accountability for copyright violations committed by users is as essential for advancing this indispensable goal. Who is responsible if a valuable copyrighted work is downloaded from a provider, and then copied on a digital video machine from which thousands of copies can be made, the last copy as pure and pristine as the first? And if no one can be held responsible, then who and what is to prevent the flood that will surely follow? This is a loophole larger than a parade of eight-wheelers through which a dam-busting avalanche of violations can rupture the purpose of your bill every day.

Technology moves with terrifying speed. If the traffic rules are explicit and understandable, and accompanied by common-sense protective designs, this technology will be an incalculable boon to America, a shot in the arm to our international competitiveness, and a stimulus to our creative industries. If not, then the information superhighway, cyberspace, the Internet, call it what you will, technology will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property. The country will be the loser. Big time.

That's what the problem is with the Internet, this great escape that we have, everything automatically becomes fact!

God, at least in the West, is often represented as a man with a flowing beard and sandals... if the Net does have a god, he is probably Jon Postel, a man who matches that description to a T. Mr. Postel's claim to cyber-divinity, besides his appearance, is that he is the chairman and, in effect, the sole member of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, the organization that coordinates almost all Internet addresses.

It's pretty obvious to everyone that the revolution has happened. The People can now easily cut out a hoard of middlemen (record companies, radio stations, music press and retail shops). With a series of computer strokes they can find the music they want to hear, become informed about the musicians who make it, find other people who share their interest and ultimately either buy, trade or steal that coveted sound.

I don't listen to anything on the radio but NPR and occasional oldies programs. I can't comment on the content or format of most commercial radio but I have read the statistics about the step-by-step deregulation of FCC rules that has allowed monopolies like Clear Channel to buy up massive shares of the airwaves. This has damaged our business (music) and our culture (American). The internet is offering bold alternatives but a transistor radio is only $25.00 and not everyone is hooked up through a computer and high speed connection.

Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.

I don't really pay much attention to it anymore. It's pretty ridiculous. I view it as a giant graffiti board for people with axes to grind - or for guys named Jimbo Wales who want to dump their girlfriends.

Dopoki nie skorzystalem z Internetu, nie wiedzialem, ze na swiecie jest tylu idiotow. I didn't know that there are so many idiots, until I began using Internet.

*Get your own entry in an encyclopedia... In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the supression of the Internet is really aimed at supressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available.

Floating around the Internet these days, posted and e-mailed back and forth, are a number of writings attributed to me, and I want people to know they're not mine. Don't blame me. Some are essay-length, some are just short lists of one and two-line jokes, but if they're flyin' around the Internet, they're probably not mine. Occasionally, a couple of jokes on a long list might have come from me, but not often. And because most of this stuff is really lame, it's embarrassing to see my name on it. And that's the problem. I want people to know that I take care with my writing, and try to keep my standards high. But most of this 'humor' on the Internet is just plain stupid. I guess hard-core fans who follow my stuff closely would be able to spot the fake stuff, because the tone of voice is so different. But a casual fan has no way of knowing, and it bothers me that some people might believe I'd actually be capable of writing some of this stuff.

They are on our website, www.thingsscaremeundermybed.com, just go there now...

I'm in Canada, obviously, because my life's been threatened directly by Al Gore. He's always hated me because I invented the Internet.

Any sufficiently advanced chaos is indistinguishable from Usenet.

Spam will be a thing of the past in two years' time.

On the banners atop some Wikipedia pages: 'Some of this is shit.'

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations. This revolution has produced the most powerful and diverse spur to innovation of any in modern times. Yet a set of ideas about a central aspect of this prosperity - 'property' - confuses us. This confusion is leading us to change the environment in ways that will change the prosperity. Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.

The problems with software are just examples of the problems found generally with creativity. Our trend in copyright law has been to enclose as much as we can; the consequence of this enclosure is a stifling of creativity and innovation. If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables. In addition to these important harms, there is one more that was important to our forebears, but seems forgotten today. Overregulation corrupts citizens and weakens the rule of law. The war that is being waged today is a war of prohibition. As with every war of prohibition, it is targeted against the behavior of a very large number of citizens. According to The New York Times, 43 million Americans downloaded music in May 2002. According to the RIAA, the behavior of those 43 million Americans is a felony. We thus have a set of rules that transform 20 percent of America into criminals.

Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 - a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 - meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.

The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time - you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing.

I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don't think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it's capable of living and reproducing itself.

Unlike television - at least as it currently exists - the Internet is a medium of choice.

My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.

That's the beauty of the Web: You can roll around in a stranger's obsession without having to smell his or her house. You can amscray whenever you want without being rude. The site gets its 'hit' and you know more about our species' diversity.

The person of the year: Ron Paul, a physician-politician. He injected the presidential campaign with a dose of truth serum. Paul's straight talk on Iraq, and his straight talk on the Constitution, as Buchanan pointed out, and the limits of government have made him an Internet phenomena. In fact, Paul has become an independent force in the nation's life.

I'm now a committed silver surfer.

Here's a simple copyright lesson: Law regulates copies. What's that mean? Well, before the Internet, think of this as a world of all possible uses of a copyrighted work. Most of them are unregulated. Talking about fair use, this is not fair use; this is unregulated use. To read is not a fair use; it's an unregulated use. To give it to someone is not a fair use; it's unregulated. To sell it, to sleep on top of it, to do any of these things with this text is unregulated. Now, in the center of this unregulated use, there is a small bit of stuff regulated by the copyright law; for example, publishing the book - that's regulated. And then within this small range of things regulated by copyright law, there's this tiny band before the Internet of stuff we call fair use: Uses that otherwise would be regulated but that the law says you can engage in without the permission of anybody else. For example, quoting a text in another text - that's a copy, but it's a still fair use. That means the world was divided into three camps, not two: Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories. Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, 'What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?' I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control?

Official Skye Sweetnam Site

Cyberlaw is global law.