Quotes About Technology

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don't want to pay, people who are pirates, don't get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It's only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining, he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.

The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.

s security expert Bruce Schneier has said, Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet.

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book. It's easy and incredibly fun. There's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free.

These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

the problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.

Any complex system is sport for a hacker;

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you're out, mate.

Any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it.

But you technical people have a disease: it's called 'solutionism.' You see every challenge as a problem and every problem as having a solution and every solution as being a piece of technology. You hare off after those solutions without ever stopping to see whether there's another, worse problem that'll burst into life the moment the current one is 'solved.

Technology won't save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It's like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.

the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale.

That would be like telling people not to send nudes. It doesn't work.

One thing I learned in all my years as a tech person: tech is more about sales than it is about code.

you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid.