Quotes About Technology

It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses.

Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime? That's like euthanizing your grandmother.

I miss the days when forensic accountancy and security engineering were distinct fields.

On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Any data you collect will probably leak, any data you retain will definitely leak, and we're putting data-collection capability into fucking lightbulbs now.

The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house locks after losing your keys but leaving all the windows unlocked.

I waited outside her door while she went into her room and moved around. She opened her door, holding her laptop in one hand and its battery in the other.

there aren't any 'jobs' left. Just financial engineering and politics. I'm not qualified for either. For one thing, I can't say 'meritocracy' with a straight face.

Freedom isn't something technology gives you, technology is something you use to get freedom.

But the people who had to use the software were never actually consulted in the purchase cycle, so why bother to make the software any good for those people?

Not even PEBKAC this time," Van said. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.

Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.

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.

You're going to hate to hear this, but you're too young to get it. 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. You don't remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don't understand how different things are, so you think things don't change that much.

You never have to sit back and look at the people, the systems, the politics—just the technology that can be used to distort them to suit your needs.

It's way too late to decarbonize the surveillance economy.

Computers can control you or they can lighten your work—if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.

teach a woman to phish…")

No one at the Interior Ministry used PGP for email, because no normal human does

I play video games and watch TV, but there's more to life than that. Faxing and the Internet have created a global community. The kid next door has become the kid in Latin America or Asia.

In the United States of 1850, the Industrial Revolution had amped up labor to an astonishing all-time high of 3,650 hours, based on seventy-hour weeks and fifty-two weeks per year.

Don't say that he's hypocritical Say rather that he's apolitical. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? "That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.

See you on the other side of the screen, if you make it, earnest cyberspace cadet.