#while also having to write the service and security documentation for like 40 infrastructure products we are currently building

[tinglingfuckingsensation]

working on a bridge day (is it called that??) after a national holiday is so chill actually I can finally work in peace for once...thinking I might even get away with putting on band of brothers in the background while I write my documentation today

[lokiondisneyplus]

After more than 40 years as an actor, Sheri Mann Stewart had finally taken the plunge to launch her own production company. A week after she wrapped shooting her first film for Mann Woman Productions, Atlanta went on pandemic lockdown.

Mann Stewart was suddenly left with a film on hold, an audition on hold, and the careers of her husband and two sons — all performers — on hold. Instead of ushering her first film — prophetically inspired by John Paul Sartre’s “No Exit” — through editing and post-production, she spends several hours each day on the phone trying to iron out issues with unemployment benefits that she has yet to receive.

“Nothing like this has ever happened,” said Mann Stewart an Atlanta native who most recently appeared in Tyler Perry’s Netflix feature film “A Fall from Grace.” “I think, one way or another, our industry will be changed.”

COVID-19 left actress Sheri Mann Stewart with the first film from her production company on hold, an audition on hold, and the careers of her husband and two sons – all performers – also in flux. She has spent time working on other projects including a new YouTube series to support LGBTQIA youth who may not be in supportive environments.

Like many other industries, the film and TV business has been shut down since mid-March, with only a few exceptions such as late-night talk shows and virtual versions of “American Idol” and “The Voice.” With plenty of content currently in the pipeline, streaming services and television networks have managed so far, but if production doesn’t restart soon, viewers will face a major drought of new shows to watch this fall.

Pressure is building to get production started as soon as possible, but the natural intimacy of a typical set with makeup artists, camera operators, producers, actors and production assistants constantly crossing paths, makes creating proper protocols a serious challenge.

“People are anxious to get back to work,” said Mark Wofford, general manager at Atlanta-based Production Consultants & Equipment, which provides motion-picture rental equipment. “But this has to be weighed against the need to make sure everyone is safe. It’s going to be a real balancing act.”

Georgia has become a major player in Hollywood production, courtesy of generous tax credits to film and TV production companies passed in 2008. It’s now the third-largest state for such content after California and New York. As the only state with no cap on its credits, Georgia has drawn big-budget films such as “Black Panther” and “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.”

Despite Hollywood’s liberal leanings — some in the industry called for boycotts after Georgia’s 2016 religious liberty bill and 2019 heartbeat abortion bill — the Republican-led state legislature and three Republican governors have consistently embraced the tax credit system. At the recent Georgia Film Day on March 11, Gov. Brian Kemp spoke before 200 industry supporters in the state Capitol atrium, extolling the $2.9 billion in direct investment and 50,000-plus jobs the business brought into the state last fiscal year. Weeks later, Kemp would issue a statewide shelter-in-place order.

In May, the Georgia Film Office released a set of nonbinding best practices for film and television productions to consider during the pandemic. The guidelines included holding remote auditions and virtual location scouting as well as reducing the number of extras used on set and placing clear barriers between actors to be removed just before the director yells “Action!”

Local studios are preparing to reopen this summer as they await multiple unions to accept unified protocols. Earlier this month, a task force composed of the various unions and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, sent approved health and safety guidelines to governors in California and New York with plans for final protocols to follow soon. “This document is an initial set of principles and guidelines that we all agree form a relevant and realistic first step to protecting cast and crew in the reopening of the entertainment and media industry in its two largest markets,” said a joint statement from unions, including the Teamsters, the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA. Face masks for live audiences, staggered mealtimes with no buffet-style setups, and daily screenings for COVID-19 along with a designated COVID-19 compliance officer, were among the recommended guidelines.

Studios have already begun to make big investments in COVID-19 friendly infrastructure. Since March, two of the largest studios in the metro area — Pinewood Studios in Fayetteville and Blackhall Studios in Atlanta — have each invested more than $1 million to retrofit their studios. One of the biggest costs: improving the HVAC systems on their sound stages and offices so they are comparable to that of hospitals in order to reduce the chances of airborne transmission of viruses. Major film and television productions can easily have hundreds of staff members working in tight indoor quarters, creating the kind of environment that public health officials have noted can increase the spread of COVID-19.

“I’ve had to become an expert in viral containment,” said Ryan Millsap, owner of Blackhall Studios. “Until March, I hadn’t given it a second thought. This is a big moment in our generation where disease has come to the forefront.”

Atlanta-based makeup artist Tracy Ewell has seen a virus or cold spread like fire on almost every production on which she has worked. She started toting a personal air filter to set up in the trailers and tents where she and her team spend hours getting actors camera ready. ”I am paid to be hygienic,” Ewell said. “I take full responsibility for my actor’s condition, but masks don’t work in my world.”

Ewell, who has worked as a department head on productions for Marvel and the Netflix drama “Ozark,” is not afraid of returning to set, but she knows that is a decision everyone will have to make for themselves. The initial industry guidelines for makeup artists included providing more time to allow for safety measures to be followed, but additional protocols need to be established before that kind of work can continue. “I would be comfortable having fewer people on set in my department if I knew they were going to have the time,” Ewell said. But more time means more money, and studios now have to make big investments at a time when they’ve posted big losses.

Just before the pandemic shut down productions nationwide, HBO finished its upcoming J.J. Abrams drama, “Lovecraft Country,” and Paramount wrapped Chris Pratt military science fiction movie “The Tomorrow War” at Blackhall. Millsap was about to sign with two other major studios for new productions when COVID-19 put the kibosh on that.

Since then, Millsap has generated zero revenue, shedding more than $1 million a month while keeping his 12 full-time employees on payroll. He said he has had enough money in the bank to keep his studio afloat but would be challenged if shows didn’t begin shooting by the fourth quarter. If all goes well, two major studios will begin pre-production at Blackhall in July with potential full-blown production by August or September, he said.

Frank Patterson, the head of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, said they have had to study every aspect of their business, from more limited security access to more sequestered work pods, dividing the studio into zones. They also hired a medical testing company, BioIQ, to handle the anticipated flood of COVID-19 tests they plan to use on a daily basis. “Some days, we’ll have 6,000 people on the lot,” he said.

The past couple of months have been “overwhelmingly stressful because I’m working with people I’ve known for decades,” Patterson added. “These are people I grew up within the industry. We have to make certain nobody gets sick. At the same time, these are friends who haven’t worked for months and have families to feed. We need to get this done now.”

Atlanta-based Tyler Perry Studios was the first in the country to announce detailed plans to shoot two of his BET television series in July. Perry has some advantages most other studios do not. He owns 330 acres of a former Army base and has at least 80 residences on the property which will enable him to more easily isolate crew and actors. He writes and directs his own TV series in a way that will enable him to finish shooting an entire season in less than three weeks. He has developed protocols to test everybody multiple times with contingencies in case anybody gets COVID-19. He has scaled back on-site crew and extras and is using his largest sound stage as a cafeteria with proper social distancing.

“It’s an enormous undertaking and an enormous cost to the budget,” Perry told Variety last month.

Mann Stewart had just been called for an audition for a Perry television production before the studio closed. She is unsure if that opportunity still stands but has continued with other auditions, including a recent commercial audition that came through in late May. Still, it is never far from her mind how so many aspects of the industry must change.

While writing a script for a play, she found herself debating if she really needed the characters to have a physical interaction.

“I try not to let it impact me and say I can fix it later but…,” said Mann Stewart, her thought left trailing.

Some studios are already pondering creative solutions to those kinds of concerns. As soon as the pandemic hit, executives at Atlanta-based Crazy Legs Productions created an advisory council of five medical experts to help them draw up 25 pages of safety guidelines. Last month, they began compiling a database of local actors who are in relationships with other actors. “We can cast a husband and wife as a husband and wife,” said Scott Thigpen, chief operating officer. “It’s a way to mitigate risk.” They are also considering using family members as extras.

The company, which launched in 2006 and now has 34 salaried employees, produces docuseries for TLC such as “Family by the Ton” and crime shows for ID, like “Dead Silent. ” They also began shooting films for the first time this year.

Industry insiders are confident productions in Georgia will bounce back quickly and fill sound stages as a backlog of content gets filled.

After months spent keeping their skills sharp and in some cases, auditioning via Zoom, actors across metro Atlanta are ready to get back to work, said Clayton Landey, president of SAG-AFTRA Atlanta local. He hopes summer marks that return but said the proper precautions are needed. Landey, a 48-year industry veteran, recalled a scene years ago when his character was being hit with a bullet. Everyone else on the set was standing behind safety glass. “I feel a little like that now,” Landey said. “I am interested to see what is going to be the new normal in terms of safety on set.”

The pandemic ended a theater run for Landey and stalled a film, which no longer has a date to begin production, but he has spent the past three months staying connected to other actors through virtual chats and meetups. Landey worries about the actors who may be suffering mentally while isolated from the career that allows them to channel their emotions into their work. Though acting is a field that prepares you for career ups and downs, this is unlike anything they have seen before, he said.

“Nothing in our industry touches what we are going through now. Typically when there are times of stress or hard times in the general population, we are working like crazy because entertainment is what gets you through the day,” Landey said. “This time, it is slapping us all.”

[tak4hir0]

This is the second post in a two-part series presenting how to work with Developer Sandboxes and the Salesforce CLI. Over the course of this series, we’ll cover: Part 1: Sandbox Management Manage sandboxes with the Salesforce CLI Clone sandboxes instead of creating new ones Initialize sandboxes with a custom Apex class (Beta) Secure your production Org with sandbox-only users Import sample data Refresh outdated sandboxes Delete unused sandboxes Part 2: Metadata Management Prefer the source format over the metadata format Retrieve metadata with the Org Browser Retrieve metadata that do not support wildcards in package.xml (reports, dashboards…) Remove metadata that’s no longer needed Leverage Custom Metadata to pass configuration from Production to your Developer Sandbox Test metadata deployments In this final part, we’ll focus on metadata management for Developer sandboxes, but these best practices can be expanded to any non-source tracked org such as Developer Edition orgs or production orgs. We’ll cover various tools and techniques that you can use to enhance your development workflows. Prefer the source format over the metadata format At a high level, Salesforce orgs are made of three things: The Platform, metadata and data: The Platform is the base infrastructure, tools and services that are provided by Salesforce. Metadata is everything that lets you customize the Platform for your business needs (layouts, source code, permissions, custom objects, fields and so on). Data are the records that are stored in the org. Metadata is what Salesforce developers work on. There are two project formats that developers can work with: Metadata format or source format. The metadata format is the legacy format that was introduced to represent metadata on a filesystem. This format uses large XML files that are designed to be machine readable. This format is used by the Metadata API. With the introduction of Salesforce DX, we introduced the source format. This format splits the metadata into smaller files and intuitive subdirectories. This makes it easier to read and manage in version control. With source format, you can easily collaborate on a project with multiple developers, merge changes with fewer conflicts and review the history of your project. Here’s an example of the same metadata represented in both formats:   As a general rule, the source format is preferable over the metadata format but there are a few common misconceptions around it so let’s clarify a few things before moving on: Source format works with any orgs, it’s not limited to Scratch orgs. What is specific to source-tracked orgs are certain CLI commands such as force:source:pull or force:source:push. There are equivalent commands for metadata deployment to non source-tracked orgs like sandboxes or production orgs ( force:source:retrieve and force:source:deploy for example).   Projects aren’t locked into a specific format: the metadata and source formats can be converted from one to the other. There are two CLI commands that let you convert between the two, respectively force:source:convert and force:mdapi:convert. All CLI commands starting with force:source work with source format and all force:mdapi commands work in metadata format. Always prefer the source format for your projects as it facilitates collaboration and versioning. Retrieve metadata with the Org Browser If you use VSCode, you can use the Org Browser (cloud shaped icon on the left toolbar) to explore the org’s metadata and download selected artifacts in source format with just a few clicks. This feature is amazingly simple and convenient.   Retrieve metadata that doesn’t support wildcards in package.xml When retrieving artifacts with the CLI, you can use a package.xml file to specify the resources that are retrieved. This is generally pretty easy with the use of wildcards (the * symbol). However, some artifacts like reports, dashboards, documents and email templates can’t be retrieved with wildcards because they’re located in folders. You can either retrieve those artifacts by using the Org Browser (see above) or a combination of CLI commands. Here’s an example of how you can retrieve reports in source format using the CLI: List the metadata folder artifacts (ReportFolder type for Report in this example): sfdx force:mdapi:listmetadata -m ReportFolder [ { createdById: '00558000000yFyDAAU', createdByName: 'Philippe Ozil', createdDate: '2020-02-26T12:39:18.000Z', fileName: 'reports/SomeFolder', fullName: 'SomeFolder', id: '00l4H000000eerVQAQ', lastModifiedById: '00558000000yFyDAAU', lastModifiedByName: 'Philippe Ozil', lastModifiedDate: '2020-02-26T12:40:51.000Z', manageableState: 'unmanaged', type: 'ReportFolder' }, ... ] List artifacts for a given folder (in the output of this example we see that there’s a My_User_Report report in the SomeFolder folder): sfdx force:mdapi:listmetadata -m Report --folder SomeFolder { createdById: '00558000000yFyDAAU', createdByName: 'Philippe Ozil', createdDate: '2020-02-26T12:40:08.000Z', fileName: 'reports/SomeFolder/My_User_Report.report', fullName: 'SomeFolder/My_User_Report', id: '00O4H000004U7glUAC', lastModifiedById: '00558000000yFyDAAU', lastModifiedByName: 'Philippe Ozil', lastModifiedDate: '2020-02-26T12:40:08.000Z', manageableState: 'unmanaged', type: 'Report' } Add the artifacts to your package.xml file. You’ll have to specify the artifact fullName (a combination of folder name and artifact name) that you retrieved in the previous command: Retrieve the artifacts in source format with the CLI: sfdx force:source:retrieve -x package.xml This is a rather manual process when doing an initial import, but note that these operations can be chained and automated with custom CLI plugins or scripts. Remove metadata that’s no longer needed Metadata or source deployment only adds new artifacts by default. It’s your responsibility as a developer to do some cleanup and remove unneeded metadata to avoid cluttering your org. If you use VS Code, you can simply right click on a file in the Explorer and select SFDX: Delete from Project and Org.     You can also delete metadata with CLI commands: # Remove a DeleteMe Apex class and a Hello Aura component sfdx force:source:delete -m ApexClass:DeleteMe,AuraDefinitionBundle:Hello # Remove all metadata (in source format) from the 'deleteMeFolder' directory sfdx force:source:delete -p deleteMeFolder Leverage custom metadata types to pass configuration from production to your Developer sandbox While Developer sandboxes are created with no initial data, you can leverage custom metadata types to pass configuration from your production org. Because custom metadata records are no ordinary records, they aren’t considered “data”. This means that they get copied over from the production org to the sandbox. With that special rule in mind, you can set up the following process: Admin configures custom metadata in production Admin creates a new sandbox Metadata and custom metadata records are copied over to the sandbox Apex sandbox initialization class executes automatically Class reads the custom metadata records Class configures the sandbox Here’s a sample project that illustrates how custom metadata lets the production admin configure new sandbox users. This project contains a sandbox initialization Apex class that relies on a custom metadata type to dynamically create sandbox users with specific names and emails. Test metadata deployments You can setup CI to test metadata deployments without modifying the target org. This type of test saves you precious time and eliminates the risk of errors because you do not need to cleanup your sandbox between jobs. Deployment tests are made possible thanks to the checkOnly flag in the metadata deploy command. This option is available in the Salesforce CLI force:source:deploy command with the -c or --checkonly flag. Here’s an example of how you can test the deployment of your local source (force-app folder) and run tests on your sandbox with the CLI: sfdx force:source:deploy -p force-app -c -l RunLocalTests Closing words This concludes our Salesforce CLI Best Practices for Developer Sandboxes series. In this final post we’ve covered CLI best practices for managing metadata in non-source tracked orgs such as Sandboxes, Developer Edition orgs or production orgs. We covered the benefits of the source format, how to retrieve or remove metadata, how to pass configuration from a production org to a Developer sandbox and how to test metadata deployments. We’ll leave you with a CLI command cheatsheet that summarizes the commands we’ve covered in the series:   Try them on your orgs and keep an eye out for the Sandbox source-tracking Beta in Summer ’20. Resources Sandbox management best practices for administrators Salesforce DX Developer Guide Sandboxes Develop Against Any Org Modern Tooling for the Sandbox Development Workflow About the author Philippe Ozil is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce where he focuses on the Salesforce Platform. He writes technical content and speaks frequently at conferences. He is a full stack developer and enjoys working on robotics and VR projects. Follow him on Twitter @PhilippeOzil or check his GitHub projects @pozil.

[empmoniitor]

HOW TO LEAD YOUR COMPANY THROUGH THIS TIME OF CRISIS?

In this pandemic situation, most of the companies all across the globe have shifted their employees to a remote workforce. As the situation has forced employers to try this intricate remote work experiment. Huge thanks to the latest advanced technology, due to which remote work has become easily possible.

For the high scale industries, the policies and infrastructure needed for remote workers might have been drafted as a part of their curriculum, but for other mid-scale businesses, it’s a highly challenging task.

So, here in this blog we will discuss some of the measures that could help people to overcome some uncertain situations. But before moving to that, lets know the advantages.

BENEFITS OF REMOTE WORK CULTURE

Some of the major benefits of remote work culture include minimized pressure, enhanced productivity, and amplified moral value.

As per the recent stats, the top leading institutes who are working on the top remote-working projects prove that remote work culture is not only suitable for work done but also financially justified.

WHAT ARE THE RESULTS?

REDUCED COSTS

As per the world workplace analysis, companies who are shifting their employees from conventional to remote workplace seems to save more than $10k/year/employee, or getting an average of 21% increase in profit ratio in comparison to below.

Apart from this, remote workers also save a lot of money in multiple ways. For example, an average employee spends up to $4k/per year while working from home, including commuting charges, workplace perks, etc. which all could be saved.

FLEXIBILITY AND PRODUCTIVITY

People of almost all the age groups, life stages belonging to different career fields choose flexible work culture as the priority. If companies felt remote work would reduce efficiency for workers, then obviously flexible work arrangements would not be accommodated.

However, there is various evidence that remote employees are more productive and work more as compared to others. Employees produce results with 40% fewer quality deficiencies with stronger autonomy through location independence. Remote work eliminates one of the main productivity obstacles, which are distractions and daily commutes.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE

Remote work also decreases stress – in fact, 82% of telecommuters reported lower levels of stress. That not only benefits the employees but also benefits the employers. Nearly 80% of staff have reported higher morale at home, while 69% reported lower absenteeism, which increases company’s overall productivity hours.

STEP INTO REMOTE WORK NOW!

Remote job is no longer the future but the present necessity. The Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) forced companies to change today’s way they do business. The number of people working from home has risen significantly, as now it is no matter of concern whether the businesses should start operating remotely to generate high revenue, but rather to make sure whether the company is working or not in this epizootic situation.

REQUIREMENTS TO WORK REMOTELY

Advances in technology and computers, including cloud storage, and other electronic networking platforms, have contributed significantly to the growing needs of remote work.

SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

Facilitate contact, prevent misunderstandings, provide the requisite resources to enhance the execution of tasks and meetings. Here are the key tool types which will make your team’s job easier:

Productivity monitoring software: Helps to keep a check on employee productivity and know their productive and non-productive hours.

Messaging and chatting application: Helps in easy communication with other colleagues and managers.

Resource sharing medium: Sharing the working document to manage the project easily.

These are some of the things which all the companies usually require. There might be a lot more things, customize the requirement lists as per your company standards.

MOBILE DEVICES

The vast majority of team members are possibly already laptop-users for tech companies. Nevertheless, some businesses still rely mainly on desktop equipment. As an employer, encourage your employees to bring home whatever they need to carry on performing their tasks. If more equipment is required, allow them to opt for mobile devices and laptops as per their work demands.

HOW TO MAKE REMOTE WORKING SUCCESSFUL?

Defining consistent remote-working policies and procedures is also preferable. However, this level of planning can not be possible in times of crisis. Here, I have listed some of the ways how businesses can resolve some of the most growing barriers to remote work:

PROMOTE HEALTH WORK MANAGEMENT

Encouraging healthy relationships at the workplace helps in providing several benefits:

Employees enjoy their work when they have good relations with their employees around.

It helps companies to implement new changes in a very creative and innovative way.

Providing healthy workplace relationships builds trust, wellness, diversity, etc.

In short, people who have good friends at the workplace are much more likely to be highly satisfied. But it can be a tough part while working remotely. Therefore employers should facilitate all the required connections to communicate with your colleagues actively and share their views and concerns.

MANAGE PROCESSES WITH REQUIREMENTS

By transitioning from in-office work to remote work, the changes that you make to rearrange your processes are important. There is always space for change, but certain companies can need far more than just a few changes. To all those companies, get your documents ready to ensure that the employees are aware of the procedures so that they can be brought into action smoothly.

Communication is always important, it doesn’t matter whether the team is operating remotely or at the workplace. When you get the complete package of the top-notch custom-developed apps, there are higher chances that you come out of flying colors with high leads.

STRUCTURE

There are also fairly simple and inexpensive things administrators can do to ease the transition as much as remote work can be fraught with challenges. In the upcoming years, the latest generation of talents forms the world of labor as they carry dramatically different ideas about the essence of work. The companies who have already adopted workplace culture since before are now starting to be the architects of the workplace culture.

REMOTE WORK POLICIES

Make a complete set of work from home policies that clearly define the roles of the employees and requirements and expectations of the employers towards them who are working from home. As all the companies should have a defined work policy, to provide cyber-security, protect from data breaches, and have successful communication.

Also, the employees should be clear on all the expectations for performance and security. Be transparent on your performance goals, and what costs you want to pay, that helps in upliftment of the company.

You can also take the help of the best remote employee productivity monitoring software, that not only helps to proceed with the work from home practice in a smooth way, and also helps to enhance the employee productivity.

One such tool is EmpMonitor.

EMPMONITOR – BEST REMOTE WORKPLACE ANALYTICS AND PRODUCTIVITY MONITORING SOFTWARE

Quickly gain employee productivity analytics of your whole remote team in one go!

WHY EMPMONITOR?

EmpMonitor is a workplace analytics and productivity monitoring software, that provides the complete insights of what the employees are doing, how they are working, how much time they are investing in each access. This cloud-based user activity monitoring software provides detailed insights that help employees to be productive, safe, and secure. Our software is affordable, easy to use, and can be up and running in the best way.

EmpMonitor helps to,

ANALYZE WORKPLACE PRODUCTIVITY

Gain complete insights on how the work is getting done.

Check how the employees are managing their time.

Control unwanted and time-consuming practices.

Analyze the productivity levels of each employee ( total productive and non-productive hours)

Take proper measures to help drive more business.

ESTIMATE AND STRENGTH FUNCTIONING EFFICIENCY

Determine the required operational conditions that exactly reflect the business.

Know about the time employees are investing in each task and manage it accordingly

Discover the main causes of productivity loss.

Cost management with increased visibility of product use

Apply data insights to design teams for better business results

Check out the link below to know more about its features,

Features

WRAPPING UP

Remote work will not work in the best possible way for all the companies or all the employees working. But there are some significant benefits for both employees and employers in the increasing number of industries, by which we can say that remote work is a viable way of doing business.

Considering those advantages and implementing remote work at your company is up to you. But if you have any other successful practices which you implemented or want to share or know more about these work from home services, then write your views in the comments section below or DM me on my social media profiles.

Originally Published On: EmpMonitor

[antoine-roquentin]

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses -- from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

On the Heroin Trail

After finishing college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of campuses across America for the rest of the semester.

In the midst of all this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the draft? During my first semester at Yale, on December 1, 1969, to be precise, the Selective Service cut up the calendar for a lottery. The first 100 birthdays picked were certain to be drafted, but any dates above 200 were likely exempt. My birthday, June 8th, was the very last date drawn, not number 365 but 366 (don’t forget leap year) -- the only lottery I have ever won, except for a Sunbeam electric frying pan in a high school raffle. Through a convoluted moral calculus typical of the 1960s, I decided that my draft exemption, although acquired by sheer luck, demanded that I devote myself, above all else, to thinking about, writing about, and working to end the Vietnam War.

During those campus protests over Cambodia in the spring of 1970, our small group of graduate students in Southeast Asian history at Yale realized that the U.S. strategic predicament in Indochina would soon require an invasion of Laos to cut the flow of enemy supplies into South Vietnam. So, while protests over Cambodia swept campuses nationwide, we were huddled inside the library, preparing for the next invasion by editing a book of essays on Laos for the publisher Harper & Row. A few months after that book appeared, one of the company’s junior editors, Elizabeth Jakab, intrigued by an account we had included about that country’s opium crop, telephoned from New York to ask if I could research and write a “quickie” paperback about the history behind the heroin epidemic then infecting the U.S. Army in Vietnam.

I promptly started the research at my student carrel in the Gothic tower that is Yale’s Sterling Library, tracking old colonial reports about the Southeast Asian opium trade that ended suddenly in the 1950s, just as the story got interesting. So, quite tentatively at first, I stepped outside the library to do a few interviews and soon found myself following an investigative trail that circled the globe. First, I traveled across America for meetings with retired CIA operatives. Then I crossed the Pacific to Hong Kong to study drug syndicates, courtesy of that colony’s police drug squad. Next, I went south to Saigon, then the capital of South Vietnam, to investigate the heroin traffic that was targeting the GIs, and on into the mountains of Laos to observe CIA alliances with opium warlords and the hill-tribe militias that grew the opium poppy. Finally, I flew from Singapore to Paris for interviews with retired French intelligence officers about their opium trafficking during the first Indochina War of the 1950s.

The drug traffic that supplied heroin for the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not, I discovered, exclusively the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab and was so oblivious to the implications of the traffic that he opened his opium ledgers for my inspection. Several of Saigon’s top generals were complicit in the drug’s distribution to U.S. soldiers. By 1971, this web of collusion ensured that heroin, according to a later White House survey of a thousand veterans, would be “commonly used” by 34% of American troops in South Vietnam.

None of this had been covered in my college history seminars. I had no models for researching an uncharted netherworld of crime and covert operations. After stepping off the plane in Saigon, body slammed by the tropical heat, I found myself in a sprawling foreign city of four million, lost in a swarm of snarling motorcycles and a maze of nameless streets, without contacts or a clue about how to probe these secrets. Every day on the heroin trail confronted me with new challenges -- where to look, what to look for, and, above all, how to ask hard questions.

Reading all that history had, however, taught me something I didn’t know I knew. Instead of confronting my sources with questions about sensitive current events, I started with the French colonial past when the opium trade was still legal, gradually uncovering the underlying, unchanging logistics of drug production. As I followed this historical trail into the present, when the traffic became illegal and dangerously controversial, I began to use pieces from this past to assemble the present puzzle, until the names of contemporary dealers fell into place. In short, I had crafted a historical method that would prove, over the next 40 years of my career, surprisingly useful in analyzing a diverse array of foreign policy controversies -- CIA alliances with drug lords, the agency’s propagation of psychological torture, and our spreading state surveillance.

The CIA Makes Its Entrance in My Life

Those months on the road, meeting gangsters and warlords in isolated places, offered only one bit of real danger. While hiking in the mountains of Laos, interviewing Hmong farmers about their opium shipments on CIA helicopters, I was descending a steep slope when a burst of bullets ripped the ground at my feet. I had walked into an ambush by agency mercenaries.

While the five Hmong militia escorts whom the local village headman had prudently provided laid down a covering fire, my Australian photographer John Everingham and I flattened ourselves in the elephant grass and crawled through the mud to safety. Without those armed escorts, my research would have been at an end and so would I. After that ambush failed, a CIA paramilitary officer summoned me to a mountaintop meeting where he threatened to murder my Lao interpreter unless I ended my research. After winning assurances from the U.S. embassy that my interpreter would not be harmed, I decided to ignore that warning and keep going.

Six months and 30,000 miles later, I returned to New Haven. My investigation of CIA alliances with drug lords had taught me more than I could have imagined about the covert aspects of U.S. global power. Settling into my attic apartment for an academic year of writing, I was confident that I knew more than enough for a book on this unconventional topic. But my education, it turned out, was just beginning.

Within weeks, a massive, middle-aged guy in a suit interrupted my scholarly isolation.  He appeared at my front door and identified himself as Tom Tripodi, senior agent for the Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). His agency, he confessed during a second visit, was worried about my writing and he had been sent to investigate. He needed something to tell his superiors. Tom was a guy you could trust. So I showed him a few draft pages of my book. He disappeared into the living room for a while and came back saying, “Pretty good stuff. You got your ducks in a row.” But there were some things, he added, that weren’t quite right, some things he could help me fix.

Tom was my first reader. Later, I would hand him whole chapters and he would sit in a rocking chair, shirt sleeves rolled up, revolver in his shoulder holster, sipping coffee, scribbling corrections in the margins, and telling fabulous stories -- like the time Jersey Mafia boss “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli tried to buy a thousand rifles from a local gun store to overthrow Fidel Castro. Or when some CIA covert warrior came home for a vacation and had to be escorted everywhere so he didn’t kill somebody in a supermarket aisle.

Best of all, there was the one about how the Bureau of Narcotics caught French intelligence protecting the Corsican syndicates smuggling heroin into New York City. Some of his stories, usually unacknowledged, would appear in my book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. These conversations with an undercover operative, who had trained Cuban exiles for the CIA in Florida and later investigated Mafia heroin syndicates for the DEA in Sicily, were akin to an advanced seminar, a master class in covert operations.

In the summer of 1972, with the book at press, I went to Washington to testify before Congress. As I was making the rounds of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, my editor rang unexpectedly and summoned me to New York for a meeting with the president and vice president of Harper & Row, my book’s publisher. Ushered into a plush suite of offices overlooking the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I listened to those executives tell me that Cord Meyer, Jr., the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, had called on their company’s president emeritus, Cass Canfield, Sr. The visit was no accident, for Canfield, according to an authoritative history, “enjoyed prolific links to the world of intelligence, both as a former psychological warfare officer and as a close personal friend of Allen Dulles,” the ex-head of the CIA. Meyer denounced my book as a threat to national security. He asked Canfield, also an old friend, to quietly suppress it.

I was in serious trouble. Not only was Meyer a senior CIA official but he also had impeccable social connections and covert assets in every corner of American intellectual life. After graduating from Yale in 1942, he served with the marines in the Pacific, writing eloquent war dispatches published in the Atlantic Monthly. He later worked with the U.S. delegation drafting the U.N. charter. Personally recruited by spymaster Allen Dulles, Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and was soon running its International Organizations Division, which, in the words of that same history, “constituted the greatest single concentration of covert political and propaganda activities of the by now octopus-like CIA,” including “Operation Mockingbird” that planted disinformation in major U.S. newspapers meant to aid agency operations. Informed sources told me that the CIA still had assets inside every major New York publisher and it already had every page of my manuscript.

As the child of a wealthy New York family, Cord Meyer moved in elite social circles, meeting and marrying Mary Pinchot, the niece of Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forestry Service and a former governor of Pennsylvania. Pinchot was a breathtaking beauty who later became President Kennedy’s mistress, making dozens of secret visits to the White House. When she was found shot dead along the banks of a canal in Washington in 1964, the head of CIA counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, another Yale alumnus, broke into her home in an unsuccessful attempt to secure her diary. Mary’s sister Toni and her husband, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, later found the diary and gave it to Angleton for destruction by the agency. To this day, her unsolved murder remains a subject of mystery and controversy.

Cord Meyer was also in the Social Register of New York’s fine families along with my publisher, Cass Canfield, which added a dash of social cachet to the pressure to suppress my book. By the time he walked into Harper & Row’s office in that summer of 1972, two decades of CIA service had changed Meyer (according to that same authoritative history) from a liberal idealist into “a relentless, implacable advocate for his own ideas,” driven by “a paranoiac distrust of everyone who didn’t agree with him” and a manner that was “histrionic and even bellicose.” An unpublished 26-year-old graduate student versus the master of CIA media manipulation. It was hardly a fair fight. I began to fear my book would never appear.

To his credit, Canfield refused Meyer’s request to suppress the book. But he did allow the agency a chance to review the manuscript prior to publication. Instead of waiting quietly for the CIA’s critique, I contacted Seymour Hersh, then an investigative reporter for the New York Times. The same day the CIA courier arrived from Langley to collect my manuscript, Hersh swept through Harper & Row’s offices like a tropical storm, pelting hapless executives with incessant, unsettling questions. The next day, his exposé of the CIA’s attempt at censorship appeared on the paper’s front page. Other national media organizations followed his lead. Faced with a barrage of negative coverage, the CIA gave Harper & Row a critique full of unconvincing denials. The book was published unaltered.

My Life as an Open Book for the Agency

I had learned another important lesson: the Constitution’s protection of press freedom could check even the world’s most powerful espionage agency. Cord Meyer reportedly learned the same lesson. According to his obituary in the Washington Post, “It was assumed that Mr. Meyer would eventually advance” to head CIA covert operations, “but the public disclosure about the book deal... apparently dampened his prospects.” He was instead exiled to London and eased into early retirement.

Meyer and his colleagues were not, however, used to losing. Defeated in the public arena, the CIA retreated to the shadows and retaliated by tugging at every thread in the threadbare life of a graduate student. Over the next few months, federal officials from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare turned up at Yale to investigate my graduate fellowship. The Internal Revenue Service audited my poverty-level income. The FBI tapped my New Haven telephone (something I learned years later from a class-action lawsuit).

In August 1972, at the height of the controversy over the book, FBI agents told the bureau’s director that they had “conducted [an] investigation concerning McCoy,” searching the files they had compiled on me for the past two years and interviewing numerous “sources whose identities are concealed [who] have furnished reliable information in the past” -- thereby producing an 11-page report detailing my birth, education, and campus antiwar activities.

A college classmate I hadn’t seen in four years, who served in military intelligence, magically appeared at my side in the book section of the Yale Co-op, seemingly eager to resume our relationship. The same week that a laudatory review of my book appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, an extraordinary achievement for any historian, Yale’s History Department placed me on academic probation. Unless I could somehow do a year’s worth of overdue work in a single semester, I faced dismissal.

In those days, the ties between the CIA and Yale were wide and deep. The campus residential colleges screened students, including future CIA Director Porter Goss, for possible careers in espionage. Alumni like Cord Meyer and James Angleton held senior slots at the agency. Had I not had a faculty adviser visiting from Germany, the distinguished scholar Bernhard Dahm who was a stranger to this covert nexus, that probation would likely have become expulsion, ending my academic career and destroying my credibility.

During those difficult days, New York Congressman Ogden Reid, a ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, telephoned to say that he was sending staff investigators to Laos to look into the opium situation. Amid this controversy, a CIA helicopter landed near the village where I had escaped that ambush and flew the Hmong headman who had helped my research to an agency airstrip. There, a CIA interrogator made it clear that he had better deny what he had said to me about the opium. Fearing, as he later told my photographer, that “they will send a helicopter to arrest me, or... soldiers to shoot me,” the Hmong headman did just that.

At a personal level, I was discovering just how deep the country’s intelligence agencies could reach, even in a democracy, leaving no part of my life untouched: my publisher, my university, my sources, my taxes, my phone, and even my friends.

Although I had won the first battle of this war with a media blitz, the CIA was winning the longer bureaucratic struggle. By silencing my sources and denying any culpability, its officials convinced Congress that it was innocent of any direct complicity in the Indochina drug trade. During Senate hearings into CIA assassinations by the famed Church Committee three years later, Congress accepted the agency’s assurance that none of its operatives had been directly involved in heroin trafficking (an allegation I had never actually made). The committee’s report did confirm the core of my critique, however, finding that “the CIA is particularly vulnerable to criticism” over indigenous assets in Laos “of considerable importance to the Agency,” including “people who either were known to be, or were suspected of being, involved in narcotics trafficking.” But the senators did not press the CIA for any resolution or reform of what its own inspector general had called the “particular dilemma” posed by those alliances with drug lords -- the key aspect, in my view, of its complicity in the traffic.

During the mid-1970s, as the flow of drugs into the United States slowed and the number of addicts declined, the heroin problem receded into the inner cities and the media moved on to new sensations. Unfortunately, Congress had forfeited an opportunity to check the CIA and correct its way of waging covert wars. In less than 10 years, the problem of the CIA’s tactical alliances with drug traffickers to support its far-flung covert wars was back with a vengeance.

During the 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic swept America’s cities, the agency, as its own Inspector General later reported, allied itself with the largest drug smuggler in the Caribbean, using his port facilities to ship arms to the Contra guerrillas fighting in Nicaragua and protecting him from any prosecution for five years. Simultaneously on the other side of the planet in Afghanistan, mujahedeen guerrillas imposed an opium tax on farmers to fund their fight against the Soviet occupation and, with the CIA’s tacit consent, operated heroin labs along the Pakistani border to supply international markets. By the mid-1980s, Afghanistan’s opium harvest had grown 10-fold and was providing 60% of the heroin for America’s addicts and as much as 90% in New York City.

Almost by accident, I had launched my academic career by doing something a bit different. Embedded within that study of drug trafficking was an analytical approach that would take me, almost unwittingly, on a lifelong exploration of U.S. global hegemony in its many manifestations, including diplomatic alliances, CIA interventions, developing military technology, recourse to torture, and global surveillance. Step by step, topic by topic, decade after decade, I would slowly accumulate sufficient understanding of the parts to try to assemble the whole. In writing my new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, I drew on this research to assess the overall character of U.S. global power and the forces that might contribute to its perpetuation or decline.

In the process, I slowly came to see a striking continuity and coherence in Washington’s century-long rise to global dominion. CIA torture techniques emerged at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s; much of its futuristic robotic aerospace technology had its first trial in the Vietnam War of the 1960s; and, above all, Washington’s reliance on surveillance first appeared in the colonial Philippines around 1900 and soon became an essential though essentially illegal tool for the FBI’s repression of domestic dissent that continued through the 1970s.    

Surveillance Today

In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, I dusted off that historical method, and used it to explore the origins and character of domestic surveillance inside the United States.

After occupying the Philippines in 1898, the U.S. Army, facing a difficult pacification campaign in a restive land, discovered the power of systematic surveillance to crush the resistance of the country’s political elite. Then, during World War I, the Army’s “father of military intelligence,” the dour General Ralph Van Deman, who had learned his trade in the Philippines, drew upon his years pacifying those islands to mobilize a legion of 1,700 soldiers and 350,000 citizen-vigilantes for an intense surveillance program against suspected enemy spies among German-Americans, including my own grandfather. In studying Military Intelligence files at the National Archives, I found “suspicious” letters purloined from my grandfather’s army locker.  In fact, his mother had been writing him in her native German about such subversive subjects as knitting him socks for guard duty.

In the 1950s, Hoover’s FBI agents tapped thousands of phones without warrants and kept suspected subversives under close surveillance, including my mother’s cousin Gerard Piel, an anti-nuclear activist and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. During the Vietnam War, the bureau expanded its activities with an amazing array of spiteful, often illegal, intrigues in a bid to cripple the antiwar movement with pervasive surveillance of the sort seen in my own FBI file.

Memory of the FBI’s illegal surveillance programs was largely washed away after the Vietnam War thanks to Congressional reforms that required judicial warrants for all government wiretaps. The terror attacks of September 2001, however, gave the National Security Agency the leeway to launch renewed surveillance on a previously unimaginable scale. Writing for TomDispatch in 2009, I observed that coercive methods first tested in the Middle East were being repatriated and might lay the groundwork for “a domestic surveillance state.”  Sophisticated biometric and cyber techniques forged in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq had made a “digital surveillance state a reality” and so were fundamentally changing the character of American democracy.

Four years later, Edward Snowden’s leak of secret NSA documents revealed that, after a century-long gestation period, a U.S. digital surveillance state had finally arrived. In the age of the Internet, the NSA could monitor tens of millions of private lives worldwide, including American ones, via a few hundred computerized probes into the global grid of fiber-optic cables.

And then, as if to remind me in the most personal way possible of our new reality, four years ago, I found myself the target yet again of an IRS audit, of TSA body searches at national airports, and -- as I discovered when the line went dead -- a tap on my office telephone at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why? Maybe it was my current writing on sensitive topics like CIA torture and NSA surveillance, or maybe my name popped up from some old database of suspected subversives left over from the 1970s. Whatever the explanation, it was a reasonable reminder that, if my own family’s experience across three generations is in any way representative, state surveillance has been an integral part of American political life far longer than we might imagine.

At the cost of personal privacy, Washington’s worldwide web of surveillance has now become a weapon of exceptional power in a bid to extend U.S. global hegemony deeper into the twenty-first century. Yet it’s worth remembering that sooner or later what we do overseas always seems to come home to haunt us, just as the CIA and crew have haunted me this last half-century.  When we learn to love Big Brother, the world becomes a more, not less, dangerous place.

[networkingdefinition]

Internet Quotes

Official Website: Internet Quotes

• A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they’re not. Well, yeah; that’s true. That’s one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that’s a damn good thing. – Augusten Burroughs • A lot of rumours on the Internet are wrong and horrible. – Carine Roitfeld • Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • According to new statistics, Pope Francis is the most talked about person on the Internet. And not only that, he has the most viewed profile on Christian Mingle. – Conan O’Brien • After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. – Kim Edwards • Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes. – Jeff Bezos • America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what’s this? A Pepsi ad? They’re ruining the integrity of the Internet! – Jay Leno • America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future. – Edward Snowden • An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.- Danny Hillis • Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. – John von Neumann • As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. – Robert Darnton • As long as you have markets, you’ll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you’re not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn’t get a lot smarter. – Howard Warren Buffett • As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. – Stewart Dalzell

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  jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Internet', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. – Howard Zinn • Because the Internets there, I have access to a lot of the legends, like Fela Kuti. I used to watch a lot of Fela Kuti videos, just to see how he performed. He inspired me a lot, actually, because he was a man of many words, many good words. – King Krule • Before there was an Internet, before there was an AOL, the circulation of newspapers was going down. – Donald E. Graham Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are. – Will Ferrell • Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control. – Jamais Cascio • Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.- Aaron Koblin • By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. – Vinton Cerf

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. – Michael Anti • Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services. – Jamais Cascio • Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it. – Jamais Cascio • Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. – Julian Assange • Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. – Stewart Dalzell • Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography.- Sandra Day O’Connor • Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies. – Jon Lester • Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet. – Gabe Newell • Dont you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.- Yasutaka Tsutsui • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. – Al Gore • Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons – it’s the cockroach of the Internet. – Jason Hirschhorn • Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV. – Dave Barry • Eventually, somewhere – be it on the Internet or somewhere else – I will host some version of ‘The Daily Show.’ – Marcus Brigstocke • Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things but yeah I can imagine that you can kind of – I think it depends on one’s psychological state. I think there are some people who are on the internet and can fall in love and seem to be in a certain psychological state and other people who are – who couldn’t quite do that. – Keanu Reeves • Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. – Mitchell Kapor • Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it’s over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment. – Bill Gates • Guys should not be allowed to use the Internet all day long. So sad.- Natasha Leggero • Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. – Jason Silva • I agree completely with my son James when he says ‘Internet is like electricity. The latter lights up everything, while the former lights up knowledge’. – Kerry Packer • I always had faith in the internet. I believed in it and thought it was obviously going to change the way the world worked. I really did not understand why others were selling their stock. As stock prices plunged, I just bought them, one after another, since I had the money. I guess I was rather lucky. – Takafumi Horie • I always try and tell dudes that are younger than me is that because of the Internet everyone can just be by themselves doing something, but the importance of a group is being able to have some sort of competition. – Earl Sweatshirt • I always use the Internet. It’s a great marketing tool. It’s a great starting point, allowing you to show your trailer and have people all over world be able to see it. It was much harder in the old days. – Tom Six • I am possibly thinking about doing an Internet show in the future that will highlight political organizations that I seek out to let people know about them, volunteer opportunities, and donation opportunities. – Kathleen Hanna • I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.- Julian Assange • I do get offered a lot more roles than I choose to do. I’m very busy as a producer and a writer, especially with my Internet stuff, and I tend to only accept the roles that I know will have an impact and has a fanbase. – Felicia Day • I don’t sweat the Internet. You know, it’s still something I enjoy as a movie geek myself to get on and, like, look at all the websites; however, when it comes to marketing a movie, the Internet is still not the thing that gets people to the theatre. – Michael De Luca • I don’t worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. – Augusten Burroughs • I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV. – Jeffrey Gitomer • I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.- Julian Assange • I hate auditioning; it makes me more nervous than anything ever, and I always feel like I wasted my time and I could have been creating my own thing. With the Internet, you have so much freedom that ‘gatekeepers’ make me terrified. – Grace Helbig • I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children. – Rick Yancey • I have always had stuff on the internet, way back in the Myspace days, I had a lot of friends on Myspace. And it is just all about like networking – contacting people and showing people, like, your mind. – Kreayshawn • I have an almost religious zeal… not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. – Dan Millman • I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library… beyond that, I’m completely intimidated by it. – Drew Barrymore • I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially… They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. – Theodore Stevens • I live in a bubble. I don’t read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don’t know what people are saying because, well I guess I’m afraid to. – Ron Perlman • I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet – even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time. – Claire Cameron • I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! – Arthur C. Clarke • I think [the virtual choir] speaks well to a benevolent future for the Internet. – Eric Whitacre • I think it’s a bit silly to brand the Internet as the ‘downfall of youth.’- Ernest Cline • I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think – I think it’s because the Internet. I think they’re exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don’t hear all the time in art communities.- John Waters • I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way. – Jessica Valenti • I think that the Internet is our most profound and beautiful achievement. It is magnificent. We have the Internet as a layer of our thinking that doesn’t control us, we control it, yet we don’t have to be aware of it. It will be like a suit that really fits well. – Augusten Burroughs • I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again. – Brian K. Vaughan • I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there’s a financial incentive. – Jeremy Stoppelman • I use the Internet for what it’s for: to learn. – Danny Brown • I want to preserve the free and open Internet – the experience that most users and entrepreneurs have come to expect and enjoy today and that has unleashed impressive innovation, job creation, and investment. – Julius Genachowski • I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet, people only look at pictures of kittens. – Banksy • I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. – Christopher Bollen • I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web. – Sugata Mitra • I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward. – Heidi Julavits • I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’ – Mike Godwin • I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old. – Vinton Cerf • If I do need to make money suddenly, I prefer to just draw something I want to draw and have someone else sell it for me on the Internet. – Chester Brown • If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka. – Dennis Miller • If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will. – George Pendle • If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation. – Robert Waterman McChesney • If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we’re toast. But if it is, we’re golden. – Larry Ellison • If you and I got on an airplane, you’re going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I’m going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance. – Jesse Jackson • If you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don’t get it at 7, 8 years old. You can’t really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I’ve done Disney and Pixar stuff. – Randy Newman • If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.- Danny Hillis • If you look at the evolution of games from console to Internet to mobile, and look at social networking from Web to mobile, everything is fragmenting. – Chris DeWolfe • If you offer people a decent service, if you give them you know Internet access, if their phones are not cut off on the trains, you know if you have plugs where they can plug in their computers, and if you have a smiling, cheerful staff; and if you can travel really quickly, then you can make a success out of the rail business. – Richard Branson • I’m a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet. – Andy Grove • Im accustomed to Internet forums where rudeness and incivility are the rule, where too many people seem to take pride in their insults. – Bryan Burrough • I’m lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I’m grateful to be a witness to that. It’s horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense? – Kathleen Hanna Impact, Roles, Stuff • In a way, the whole music industry is just catering to the inherent esteem issues all these artists have – it lays it all out on the line and baits the artist, like a light baits a mosquito. And you go right into it. With every comment on the internet, you go up, you go down, and it’s a big shitshow full of uneducated people. – Willis Earl Beal • In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. – Virginie Despentes • In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn’t fair and it’s not polite and we can’t grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn’t always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else. – Augusten Burroughs • In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical. – Joss Whedon • In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not. – Michael Specter • In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone. – Bill Gates Information, Pickles, Turns • Innovation is what America does best. Whether it is the Apollo Project to the moon, developing the most advanced defense technologies available, the rise of the Internet or the latest advancements in biomedical gene therapies, our nation leads the world in transformative innovations. – Martin Heinrich • Internet technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it’s a tool that needs to be used correctly. – Rainn Wilson • Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That’s the sky. If you’re still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. – Stephen Colbert • It all stems from the same thing – which is that when we are face to face – and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook … when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We’re aware that we’re with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being. – Sherry Turkle • It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides – after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. – Clay Shirky • It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. – Denise Caruso • Its flattering that there are lots of Internet fan sites about me. Im a bit of a technophobe and I dont even own a laptop, but its probably a good thing Im not logged on, checking up on what everyone is saying about me. – Jonas Armstrong • It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet. – George W. Bush • It’s like they say in the Internet world — if you’re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you’re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. – Bruce Feiler • It’s very advantageous to be sensitive with your work – and, yet, being sensitive, in reality, when criticized, it can annihilate you. It can destroy you. And with the internet there sometimes is a lot of harm, which I find must be very difficult for youngsters coming on – it can be very harsh; the criticism. And, sometimes, it can be a little cruel – which makes it hard for young performers coming on. – Michael Crawford • I’ve learned a lot about things because of the Internet. I’m happy with it, but it’s a long road for me. I’m still definitely a little anti. – Patrick Stump • John Kerry is finding out that it is no fun to be the front runner, that’s when you get all the heat. He had to deny internet rumors this week that he had Botox treatments. The Republicans say Kerry should have a clear, unfurrowed brow the old fashioned way by not giving a sh–. – Bill Maher • Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection. – Don Tapscott • Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. – Stewart Dalzell • Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC. – Andy Grove • Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news. – Jann Wenner • Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen. – Douglas Rushkoff • Most kids come home from school. They don’t go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We’re not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We’re going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I’m currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I’m on all that stuff. – Jimmy Fallon • My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.- Penn Jillette • My wife and I have purchased two hybrids. We bought a 3 kw photovoltaic unit. We recycle and offset our carbon emissions on the Internet. We turn things off. But we also spend two nice salaries every year, and here’s the dirty little secret – our environmental footprint is HUGE, I’m sure. We’ve all got to do what we can in our individual lives, but we’ve also got to drive the systemic changes that will make the big differences. – James Gustave Speth • Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government. – Ted Cruz • Net neutrality was essential for our economy; it was essential to preserve freedom and openness, both for economic reasons and free speech reasons, and the government had a role in ensuring that Internet freedom was protected.- Julius Genachowski • Newspapers and magazines didn’t want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that’s all the media wants. – Mick Rock • Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention – phones, Internet – and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present. – Nicholas Hoult • Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward. – Al-Waleed bin Talal • On Chinese Internet, freedom is a targeted and precise window. – Michael Anti • On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better. – Reed Hastings • On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.- James Salter • On the Internet, there are an unlimited number of competitors. Anybody with a Flip camera is your competition. What makes it even worse is that YouTube is willing to subsidize the cost of your bandwidth. So anybody can create and distribute for free basically, but the real cost is marketing. And that’s always the big cost – how do you stand out and what’s the cost of standing out? And there’s no limit to that cost. – Mark Cuban • One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. – Jared Sandberg • One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn’t always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources. – Chris Murphy • One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.- John Green • One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990’s citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China’s policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation. – William J. Clinton • One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. – Eric Kandel • People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there’s been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it’s actually kind of fragile.- Danny Hillis • People depend on the Open Internet to connect and communicate with each other freely. Voters need it to inform themselves before casting ballots. Without prompt corrective action by the Commission to reclassify broadband, this awful ruling will serve as a sorry memorial to the corporate abrogation of free speech. – Michael Copps • People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. – Ken Robinson • People wouldn’t go on Facebook unless they wanted to share with groups of people. But there is this perception that you have been on a course to push people’s information where it’s visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff. – Walt Mossberg • Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. – Gary Kovacs • Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; its a privately owned space on the Internet. – John Scalzi • Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. – Vinton Cerf • Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes. – Nicholas A. Christakis • Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. – Kurt Vonnegut • Thanks is part to our education system, we tend to think that we’re smarter than the stupid guys in funny wigs who came before us. But that’s because we are mistaking technology, progress, and access to information for intelligence. We think that because we know how to use iPhones (but not build them), browse the Internet (but not understand how it works), and use Google (but not really know anything), our educational system is working just great. By the same token, we think that those dumb aristocrats who used horses to get around and didn’t have electricity were neanderthals. – Glenn Beck • That is, we’re into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. – William J. Clinton • The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet. – Robert Darnton • The artistic desire reveals itself in dark form – in karaoke bars [or] trolling on the Internet. – Young-Ha Kim • The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. – Noam Chomsky • The big downside to the global village that the Internet has created is that nothing has time to grow out of the public gaze and, even more dangerous, whatever your personal interests might be, there will always be someone somewhere to provide validation and encouragement. – Derek Ridgers • The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. – Andy Grove • The constant buzz and pressure and noise and static of the Internet, and the way it makes young people feel makes it difficult to grow up and develop the way one might want to. – Ethan Hawke • The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder. – Al Gore • The Internet “browser”… is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later. – Dave Barry • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, “It’s the biggest thing since Gutenberg,” and then someone else said “No, it’s the biggest thing since the invention of writing.”- Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. – Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has really democratized ideas. There are no real gatekeepers any more, because if you have a great idea, and you put it online, people will find it and it will get in front of who it needs to get in front of. – Justin Halpern • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other. – Dave Barry • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other…. While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our “CONFIG.SYS.” – Dave Barry • The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity. – Clifford Stoll • The Internet is a very intimate entertainment experience. I’m in my own apartment talking to people, and I want them to feel like they’re with me in my apartment. So if I’m listening to them and taking ideas from them and being honest with how I’m feeling, it resonates even more that we’re having a real, actual conversation. – Grace Helbig • The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined. – Kim Dotcom • The internet is an amazing medium for languages. – David Crystal • The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. – Bill Gates • The Internet is disrupting every media industry…people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling. – Jeff Bezos • The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. – Jon Stewart • The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans. – Will Hobbs • The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. – Esther Dyson • The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that’s all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it’s incredible – there’s nothing that you can’t find out about. It’s not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don’t go into as many because any book I want. – David Bowie • The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available. – John Green • The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt • The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution. – Benazir Bhutto • The Internet is the greatest thing that ever happened to the entertainment industry. – Michael Ovitz • The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting. – Dave Barry • The internet makes everything not enough. – Alec Sulkin • The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it’s just terrifying when you’re actually experiencing it as a person.- Bradford Cox • The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it’s a valid thing. It’s a valid forum and I’m not going say that they aren’t valid feelings. But it’s sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it’s sad that it’s used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity. – Chris Gethard • The Internet shapes my life and work so completely that I couldn’t imagine living without it. – Nicola Formichetti • The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. – Alan Kay • The Internet will help achieve “friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other. – Bill Gates • The Internet, I’m trying to point out, is a kooks’ paradise. Anybody with a keyboard and a modem can spread fear, loathing, and just plain asinine ideas among hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button. Discouraging, but true. – David F. Emery • The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs. – Philip Elmer-DeWitt • The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. – Robert Waterman McChesney • The Internet]is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.- Theodore Stevens • The Internets distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom. – Jonathan Zittrain • The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering. – Charlie Brooker • The key is really just saying my brain isn’t big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet. – Rick Warren • The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation. – Sergey Brin • The most important thing for people to understand is that the basic rule that people have a right to send information over the Internet – even when they are using a wireless device – is part of the framework. – Julius Genachowski • The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. – Peter Drucker • The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google’s crawlers can’t climb. – John Battelle • The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation. – Julian Assange • The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. – Vinton Cerf • The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real. – Ivan Sutherland • The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.- Tim Berners-Lee • The serialization through the Internet or through digital portals, means of ways of communicating, and I think that’s great. – Keanu Reeves • The web site and the Internet are a whole new ball game. – Johnny Ramistella • The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge. – Clay Shirky • The worst and the best that the internet ever did was give everybody a voice. – Simon Pegg • There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet(…); the other was the fact that the century would end. – Douglas Adams • There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. – Monica Lewinsky • There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009. – Ben Parr • There’s no real organised body, … so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement. – Chris Hayes • Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.- Steve Case • Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. – David Filo • To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas. – Bill Gates • To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation. – Zeena Schreck • Today with technological advancement, with the Internet, with planes, with the rate at which we travel – even if you wanted, you cannot hide from the rest of the world. And whether you like it or not, you are part of this global marketplace, and so you might as well understand it, you might as well embrace it, because even if you hide, it will find you. – • Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives. – Hedi Slimane • Trade on the Internet is becoming very widespread. The problem is our laws have not caught up with electronic commerce. – Susan Bysiewicz • Turns out, theres not a lot of information about pickles on the Internet. – Brian Posehn • US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries. – Edward Snowden • US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory. – Edward Snowden • Use the Internet to get off the Internet! – Scott Heiferman • Video for the Internet has become a testing ground for mediums that actually have revenue. – Mark Cuban • We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches. – Larry Page • We believe we’re moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin’ Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. – Scott McNealy • We didn’t know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there. – Burt Rutan • We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. – Tony Abbott • We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country. But among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential. Of the information age. – Al Gore • We’re into tech stuff, gadgets, phones, video games. We’ll treat a video game premiere like a movie premiere. I’m just going to be honest with what I like and what I do. What I enjoy. We’re not going to hide the fact that people are on the Internet all day. I think a lot of shows don’t really mention that. – Jimmy Fallon • What we need is a plan B … independent of the Internet. [It] doesn’t necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department. – Danny Hillis • 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 – Dave Barry • When Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet. – David Leonhardt • When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they’re network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection. – Edward Snowden • When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition. – Neil Strauss • When you find yourself on the Internet when you’re supposed to be writing, you’ve already lost. It’s even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet. – Noah Baumbach • When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it’s a source. They don’t realise it is just one person typing out their opinion. – George Lucas • When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], ‘Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?’ – Clay Shirky • When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war. – Edward Snowden • Who needs evidence when you’ve got the Internet? – Christopher Buckley • Will the highways on the Internet become more few? – George W. Bush • With the development of the Internet…we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. – John Perry Barlow • With YouTube – with the Internet in general – you have information overload. The people who dont necessarily get credit are the curators. – Chad Hurley • You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It’s like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity. – John Legend • You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you’ve had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early ’80s. – Howard Warren Buffett • You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you’re crazy if you don’t get in on this. So it’s very human. – Howard Warren Buffett • You have to be very clear with yourself about how you’re going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don’t spend it surfing the Internet or reading. – Elizabeth Hoyt • You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains? – Shawn Achor • Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say ‘We have access to that, but we’re going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we’re going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.’ – Kathleen Hanna

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[equitiesstocks]

Internet Quotes

Official Website: Internet Quotes

• A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they’re not. Well, yeah; that’s true. That’s one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that’s a damn good thing. – Augusten Burroughs • A lot of rumours on the Internet are wrong and horrible. – Carine Roitfeld • Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • According to new statistics, Pope Francis is the most talked about person on the Internet. And not only that, he has the most viewed profile on Christian Mingle. – Conan O’Brien • After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. – Kim Edwards • Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes. – Jeff Bezos • America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what’s this? A Pepsi ad? They’re ruining the integrity of the Internet! – Jay Leno • America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future. – Edward Snowden • An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.- Danny Hillis • Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. – John von Neumann • As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. – Robert Darnton • As long as you have markets, you’ll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you’re not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn’t get a lot smarter. – Howard Warren Buffett • As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. – Stewart Dalzell

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  jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Internet', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. – Howard Zinn • Because the Internets there, I have access to a lot of the legends, like Fela Kuti. I used to watch a lot of Fela Kuti videos, just to see how he performed. He inspired me a lot, actually, because he was a man of many words, many good words. – King Krule • Before there was an Internet, before there was an AOL, the circulation of newspapers was going down. – Donald E. Graham Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are. – Will Ferrell • Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control. – Jamais Cascio • Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.- Aaron Koblin • By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. – Vinton Cerf

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. – Michael Anti • Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services. – Jamais Cascio • Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it. – Jamais Cascio • Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. – Julian Assange • Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. – Stewart Dalzell • Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography.- Sandra Day O’Connor • Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies. – Jon Lester • Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet. – Gabe Newell • Dont you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.- Yasutaka Tsutsui • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. – Al Gore • Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons – it’s the cockroach of the Internet. – Jason Hirschhorn • Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV. – Dave Barry • Eventually, somewhere – be it on the Internet or somewhere else – I will host some version of ‘The Daily Show.’ – Marcus Brigstocke • Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things but yeah I can imagine that you can kind of – I think it depends on one’s psychological state. I think there are some people who are on the internet and can fall in love and seem to be in a certain psychological state and other people who are – who couldn’t quite do that. – Keanu Reeves • Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. – Mitchell Kapor • Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it’s over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment. – Bill Gates • Guys should not be allowed to use the Internet all day long. So sad.- Natasha Leggero • Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. – Jason Silva • I agree completely with my son James when he says ‘Internet is like electricity. The latter lights up everything, while the former lights up knowledge’. – Kerry Packer • I always had faith in the internet. I believed in it and thought it was obviously going to change the way the world worked. I really did not understand why others were selling their stock. As stock prices plunged, I just bought them, one after another, since I had the money. I guess I was rather lucky. – Takafumi Horie • I always try and tell dudes that are younger than me is that because of the Internet everyone can just be by themselves doing something, but the importance of a group is being able to have some sort of competition. – Earl Sweatshirt • I always use the Internet. It’s a great marketing tool. It’s a great starting point, allowing you to show your trailer and have people all over world be able to see it. It was much harder in the old days. – Tom Six • I am possibly thinking about doing an Internet show in the future that will highlight political organizations that I seek out to let people know about them, volunteer opportunities, and donation opportunities. – Kathleen Hanna • I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.- Julian Assange • I do get offered a lot more roles than I choose to do. I’m very busy as a producer and a writer, especially with my Internet stuff, and I tend to only accept the roles that I know will have an impact and has a fanbase. – Felicia Day • I don’t sweat the Internet. You know, it’s still something I enjoy as a movie geek myself to get on and, like, look at all the websites; however, when it comes to marketing a movie, the Internet is still not the thing that gets people to the theatre. – Michael De Luca • I don’t worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. – Augusten Burroughs • I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV. – Jeffrey Gitomer • I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.- Julian Assange • I hate auditioning; it makes me more nervous than anything ever, and I always feel like I wasted my time and I could have been creating my own thing. With the Internet, you have so much freedom that ‘gatekeepers’ make me terrified. – Grace Helbig • I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children. – Rick Yancey • I have always had stuff on the internet, way back in the Myspace days, I had a lot of friends on Myspace. And it is just all about like networking – contacting people and showing people, like, your mind. – Kreayshawn • I have an almost religious zeal… not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. – Dan Millman • I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library… beyond that, I’m completely intimidated by it. – Drew Barrymore • I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially… They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. – Theodore Stevens • I live in a bubble. I don’t read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don’t know what people are saying because, well I guess I’m afraid to. – Ron Perlman • I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet – even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time. – Claire Cameron • I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! – Arthur C. Clarke • I think [the virtual choir] speaks well to a benevolent future for the Internet. – Eric Whitacre • I think it’s a bit silly to brand the Internet as the ‘downfall of youth.’- Ernest Cline • I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think – I think it’s because the Internet. I think they’re exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don’t hear all the time in art communities.- John Waters • I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way. – Jessica Valenti • I think that the Internet is our most profound and beautiful achievement. It is magnificent. We have the Internet as a layer of our thinking that doesn’t control us, we control it, yet we don’t have to be aware of it. It will be like a suit that really fits well. – Augusten Burroughs • I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again. – Brian K. Vaughan • I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there’s a financial incentive. – Jeremy Stoppelman • I use the Internet for what it’s for: to learn. – Danny Brown • I want to preserve the free and open Internet – the experience that most users and entrepreneurs have come to expect and enjoy today and that has unleashed impressive innovation, job creation, and investment. – Julius Genachowski • I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet, people only look at pictures of kittens. – Banksy • I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. – Christopher Bollen • I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web. – Sugata Mitra • I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward. – Heidi Julavits • I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’ – Mike Godwin • I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old. – Vinton Cerf • If I do need to make money suddenly, I prefer to just draw something I want to draw and have someone else sell it for me on the Internet. – Chester Brown • If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka. – Dennis Miller • If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will. – George Pendle • If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation. – Robert Waterman McChesney • If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we’re toast. But if it is, we’re golden. – Larry Ellison • If you and I got on an airplane, you’re going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I’m going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance. – Jesse Jackson • If you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don’t get it at 7, 8 years old. You can’t really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I’ve done Disney and Pixar stuff. – Randy Newman • If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.- Danny Hillis • If you look at the evolution of games from console to Internet to mobile, and look at social networking from Web to mobile, everything is fragmenting. – Chris DeWolfe • If you offer people a decent service, if you give them you know Internet access, if their phones are not cut off on the trains, you know if you have plugs where they can plug in their computers, and if you have a smiling, cheerful staff; and if you can travel really quickly, then you can make a success out of the rail business. – Richard Branson • I’m a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet. – Andy Grove • Im accustomed to Internet forums where rudeness and incivility are the rule, where too many people seem to take pride in their insults. – Bryan Burrough • I’m lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I’m grateful to be a witness to that. It’s horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense? – Kathleen Hanna Impact, Roles, Stuff • In a way, the whole music industry is just catering to the inherent esteem issues all these artists have – it lays it all out on the line and baits the artist, like a light baits a mosquito. And you go right into it. With every comment on the internet, you go up, you go down, and it’s a big shitshow full of uneducated people. – Willis Earl Beal • In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. – Virginie Despentes • In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn’t fair and it’s not polite and we can’t grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn’t always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else. – Augusten Burroughs • In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical. – Joss Whedon • In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not. – Michael Specter • In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone. – Bill Gates Information, Pickles, Turns • Innovation is what America does best. Whether it is the Apollo Project to the moon, developing the most advanced defense technologies available, the rise of the Internet or the latest advancements in biomedical gene therapies, our nation leads the world in transformative innovations. – Martin Heinrich • Internet technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it’s a tool that needs to be used correctly. – Rainn Wilson • Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That’s the sky. If you’re still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. – Stephen Colbert • It all stems from the same thing – which is that when we are face to face – and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook … when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We’re aware that we’re with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being. – Sherry Turkle • It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides – after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. – Clay Shirky • It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. – Denise Caruso • Its flattering that there are lots of Internet fan sites about me. Im a bit of a technophobe and I dont even own a laptop, but its probably a good thing Im not logged on, checking up on what everyone is saying about me. – Jonas Armstrong • It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet. – George W. Bush • It’s like they say in the Internet world — if you’re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you’re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. – Bruce Feiler • It’s very advantageous to be sensitive with your work – and, yet, being sensitive, in reality, when criticized, it can annihilate you. It can destroy you. And with the internet there sometimes is a lot of harm, which I find must be very difficult for youngsters coming on – it can be very harsh; the criticism. And, sometimes, it can be a little cruel – which makes it hard for young performers coming on. – Michael Crawford • I’ve learned a lot about things because of the Internet. I’m happy with it, but it’s a long road for me. I’m still definitely a little anti. – Patrick Stump • John Kerry is finding out that it is no fun to be the front runner, that’s when you get all the heat. He had to deny internet rumors this week that he had Botox treatments. The Republicans say Kerry should have a clear, unfurrowed brow the old fashioned way by not giving a sh–. – Bill Maher • Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection. – Don Tapscott • Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. – Stewart Dalzell • Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC. – Andy Grove • Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news. – Jann Wenner • Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen. – Douglas Rushkoff • Most kids come home from school. They don’t go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We’re not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We’re going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I’m currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I’m on all that stuff. – Jimmy Fallon • My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.- Penn Jillette • My wife and I have purchased two hybrids. We bought a 3 kw photovoltaic unit. We recycle and offset our carbon emissions on the Internet. We turn things off. But we also spend two nice salaries every year, and here’s the dirty little secret – our environmental footprint is HUGE, I’m sure. We’ve all got to do what we can in our individual lives, but we’ve also got to drive the systemic changes that will make the big differences. – James Gustave Speth • Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government. – Ted Cruz • Net neutrality was essential for our economy; it was essential to preserve freedom and openness, both for economic reasons and free speech reasons, and the government had a role in ensuring that Internet freedom was protected.- Julius Genachowski • Newspapers and magazines didn’t want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that’s all the media wants. – Mick Rock • Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention – phones, Internet – and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present. – Nicholas Hoult • Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward. – Al-Waleed bin Talal • On Chinese Internet, freedom is a targeted and precise window. – Michael Anti • On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better. – Reed Hastings • On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.- James Salter • On the Internet, there are an unlimited number of competitors. Anybody with a Flip camera is your competition. What makes it even worse is that YouTube is willing to subsidize the cost of your bandwidth. So anybody can create and distribute for free basically, but the real cost is marketing. And that’s always the big cost – how do you stand out and what’s the cost of standing out? And there’s no limit to that cost. – Mark Cuban • One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. – Jared Sandberg • One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn’t always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources. – Chris Murphy • One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.- John Green • One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990’s citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China’s policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation. – William J. Clinton • One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. – Eric Kandel • People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there’s been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it’s actually kind of fragile.- Danny Hillis • People depend on the Open Internet to connect and communicate with each other freely. Voters need it to inform themselves before casting ballots. Without prompt corrective action by the Commission to reclassify broadband, this awful ruling will serve as a sorry memorial to the corporate abrogation of free speech. – Michael Copps • People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. – Ken Robinson • People wouldn’t go on Facebook unless they wanted to share with groups of people. But there is this perception that you have been on a course to push people’s information where it’s visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff. – Walt Mossberg • Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. – Gary Kovacs • Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; its a privately owned space on the Internet. – John Scalzi • Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. – Vinton Cerf • Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes. – Nicholas A. Christakis • Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. – Kurt Vonnegut • Thanks is part to our education system, we tend to think that we’re smarter than the stupid guys in funny wigs who came before us. But that’s because we are mistaking technology, progress, and access to information for intelligence. We think that because we know how to use iPhones (but not build them), browse the Internet (but not understand how it works), and use Google (but not really know anything), our educational system is working just great. By the same token, we think that those dumb aristocrats who used horses to get around and didn’t have electricity were neanderthals. – Glenn Beck • That is, we’re into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. – William J. Clinton • The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet. – Robert Darnton • The artistic desire reveals itself in dark form – in karaoke bars [or] trolling on the Internet. – Young-Ha Kim • The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. – Noam Chomsky • The big downside to the global village that the Internet has created is that nothing has time to grow out of the public gaze and, even more dangerous, whatever your personal interests might be, there will always be someone somewhere to provide validation and encouragement. – Derek Ridgers • The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. – Andy Grove • The constant buzz and pressure and noise and static of the Internet, and the way it makes young people feel makes it difficult to grow up and develop the way one might want to. – Ethan Hawke • The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder. – Al Gore • The Internet “browser”… is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later. – Dave Barry • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, “It’s the biggest thing since Gutenberg,” and then someone else said “No, it’s the biggest thing since the invention of writing.”- Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. – Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has really democratized ideas. There are no real gatekeepers any more, because if you have a great idea, and you put it online, people will find it and it will get in front of who it needs to get in front of. – Justin Halpern • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other. – Dave Barry • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other…. While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our “CONFIG.SYS.” – Dave Barry • The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity. – Clifford Stoll • The Internet is a very intimate entertainment experience. I’m in my own apartment talking to people, and I want them to feel like they’re with me in my apartment. So if I’m listening to them and taking ideas from them and being honest with how I’m feeling, it resonates even more that we’re having a real, actual conversation. – Grace Helbig • The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined. – Kim Dotcom • The internet is an amazing medium for languages. – David Crystal • The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. – Bill Gates • The Internet is disrupting every media industry…people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling. – Jeff Bezos • The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. – Jon Stewart • The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans. – Will Hobbs • The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. – Esther Dyson • The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that’s all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it’s incredible – there’s nothing that you can’t find out about. It’s not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don’t go into as many because any book I want. – David Bowie • The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available. – John Green • The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt • The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution. – Benazir Bhutto • The Internet is the greatest thing that ever happened to the entertainment industry. – Michael Ovitz • The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting. – Dave Barry • The internet makes everything not enough. – Alec Sulkin • The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it’s just terrifying when you’re actually experiencing it as a person.- Bradford Cox • The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it’s a valid thing. It’s a valid forum and I’m not going say that they aren’t valid feelings. But it’s sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it’s sad that it’s used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity. – Chris Gethard • The Internet shapes my life and work so completely that I couldn’t imagine living without it. – Nicola Formichetti • The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. – Alan Kay • The Internet will help achieve “friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other. – Bill Gates • The Internet, I’m trying to point out, is a kooks’ paradise. Anybody with a keyboard and a modem can spread fear, loathing, and just plain asinine ideas among hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button. Discouraging, but true. – David F. Emery • The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs. – Philip Elmer-DeWitt • The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. – Robert Waterman McChesney • The Internet]is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.- Theodore Stevens • The Internets distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom. – Jonathan Zittrain • The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering. – Charlie Brooker • The key is really just saying my brain isn’t big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet. – Rick Warren • The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation. – Sergey Brin • The most important thing for people to understand is that the basic rule that people have a right to send information over the Internet – even when they are using a wireless device – is part of the framework. – Julius Genachowski • The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. – Peter Drucker • The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google’s crawlers can’t climb. – John Battelle • The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation. – Julian Assange • The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. – Vinton Cerf • The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real. – Ivan Sutherland • The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.- Tim Berners-Lee • The serialization through the Internet or through digital portals, means of ways of communicating, and I think that’s great. – Keanu Reeves • The web site and the Internet are a whole new ball game. – Johnny Ramistella • The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge. – Clay Shirky • The worst and the best that the internet ever did was give everybody a voice. – Simon Pegg • There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet(…); the other was the fact that the century would end. – Douglas Adams • There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. – Monica Lewinsky • There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009. – Ben Parr • There’s no real organised body, … so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement. – Chris Hayes • Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.- Steve Case • Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. – David Filo • To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas. – Bill Gates • To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation. – Zeena Schreck • Today with technological advancement, with the Internet, with planes, with the rate at which we travel – even if you wanted, you cannot hide from the rest of the world. And whether you like it or not, you are part of this global marketplace, and so you might as well understand it, you might as well embrace it, because even if you hide, it will find you. – • Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives. – Hedi Slimane • Trade on the Internet is becoming very widespread. The problem is our laws have not caught up with electronic commerce. – Susan Bysiewicz • Turns out, theres not a lot of information about pickles on the Internet. – Brian Posehn • US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries. – Edward Snowden • US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory. – Edward Snowden • Use the Internet to get off the Internet! – Scott Heiferman • Video for the Internet has become a testing ground for mediums that actually have revenue. – Mark Cuban • We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches. – Larry Page • We believe we’re moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin’ Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. – Scott McNealy • We didn’t know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there. – Burt Rutan • We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. – Tony Abbott • We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country. But among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential. Of the information age. – Al Gore • We’re into tech stuff, gadgets, phones, video games. We’ll treat a video game premiere like a movie premiere. I’m just going to be honest with what I like and what I do. What I enjoy. We’re not going to hide the fact that people are on the Internet all day. I think a lot of shows don’t really mention that. – Jimmy Fallon • What we need is a plan B … independent of the Internet. [It] doesn’t necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department. – Danny Hillis • 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 – Dave Barry • When Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet. – David Leonhardt • When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they’re network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection. – Edward Snowden • When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition. – Neil Strauss • When you find yourself on the Internet when you’re supposed to be writing, you’ve already lost. It’s even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet. – Noah Baumbach • When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it’s a source. They don’t realise it is just one person typing out their opinion. – George Lucas • When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], ‘Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?’ – Clay Shirky • When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war. – Edward Snowden • Who needs evidence when you’ve got the Internet? – Christopher Buckley • Will the highways on the Internet become more few? – George W. Bush • With the development of the Internet…we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. – John Perry Barlow • With YouTube – with the Internet in general – you have information overload. The people who dont necessarily get credit are the curators. – Chad Hurley • You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It’s like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity. – John Legend • You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you’ve had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early ’80s. – Howard Warren Buffett • You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you’re crazy if you don’t get in on this. So it’s very human. – Howard Warren Buffett • You have to be very clear with yourself about how you’re going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don’t spend it surfing the Internet or reading. – Elizabeth Hoyt • You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains? – Shawn Achor • Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say ‘We have access to that, but we’re going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we’re going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.’ – Kathleen Hanna

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[deniscollins]

Ransomware Attacks Are Testing Resolve of Cities Across America

More than 40 municipalities have been the victims of cyber attacks this year. If you were Lake City, Florida city manager and your computer system was hacked and being held for ransom, would you pay the ransom demand of $460,000 in Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency because reconstructing its systems would be even more costly: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

At the public library in Wilmer, Tex., books were checked out not with the beeps of bar code readers but with the scratches of pen on notebook paper. Out on the street, police officers were literally writing tickets — by hand. When the entire computer network that keeps the small town’s bureaucracy afloat was recently hacked, Wilmer was thrown into the digital Dark Ages.

“It’s weird,” said Jennifer Dominguez, a library assistant. “We’ve gone old school.”

This has been the summer of crippling ransomware attacks. Wilmer — a town of almost 5,000 people just south of Dallas — is one of 22 cities across Texas that are simultaneously being held hostage for millions of dollars after a sophisticated hacker, perhaps a group of them, infiltrated their computer systems and encrypted their data. The attack instigated a statewide disaster-style response that includes the National Guard and a widening F.B.I. inquiry.

More than 40 municipalities have been the victims of cyberattacks this year, from major cities such as Baltimore, Albany and Laredo, Tex., to smaller towns including Lake City, Fla. Lake City is one of the few cities to have paid a ransom demand — about $460,000 in Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency — because it thought reconstructing its systems would be even more costly.

In most ransomware cases, the identities and whereabouts of culprits are cloaked by clever digital diversions. Intelligence officials, using data collected by the National Security Agency and others in an effort to identify the sources of the hacking, say many have come from Eastern Europe, Iran and, in some cases, the United States. The majority have targeted small-town America, figuring that sleepy, cash-strapped local governments are the least likely to have updated their cyberdefenses or backed up their data.

Beyond the disruptions at local city halls and public libraries, the attacks have serious consequences, with recovery costing millions of dollars. And even when the information is again accessible and the networks restored, there is a loss of confidence in the integrity of systems that handle basic services like water, power, emergency communications and vote counting.

“The business model for the ransomware operators for the past several years has proved to be successful,” said Chris Krebs, the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which has the primary responsibility for aiding American victims of cyberattacks.

“Years of fine-tuning these attacks have emboldened the actors, and you have seen people pay out — and they are going to continue to pay out,” he said, despite warnings from the F.B.I. that meeting ransom demands only encourages more attacks.

In Georgia alone in recent months, the tally of victims has been stunning: the city of Atlanta. The state’s Department of Public Safety. State and local court systems. A major hospital. A county government. A police department for a city of 30,000 people.

The Department of Public Safety was hit particularly hard and continues to feel the effects of an attack discovered on July 26. The computer network remains down. Every device, including laptops and tablets, is being examined and reconfigured. Much of the email system cannot be entered. State troopers are unable to use computer systems in their patrol cars; like their colleagues in Wilmer, they are writing out tickets.

An F.B.I. warning sent to key players in the American cyberindustry on Monday left unclear who was responsible for the malware afflicting Texas, a strain first seen in April and named Sodinokibi. On Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about a “Ransomware Outbreak,” cautioning cities and towns to “back up your data, system images and configurations” and keep them offline. It urged them to update their software — something Baltimore had failed to do.

Ransomware is hardly new, but it is in fashion.

A decade ago the most prevalent type of cybercrime was intellectual property theft — the stealing of industrial designs or military secrets. The American-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges brought a different kind of attack to the fore: destruction of infrastructure, which has taken many forms in recent years. But ransomware is different because it does not destroy data or equipment. It simply locks it up, making it inaccessible without a complex numeric key that is provided only to those who pay the ransom.

Two years ago such attacks were still relatively rare. But now they are far more targeted, and as companies and towns have shown an increased willingness to pay ransoms, criminals have turned to new and more powerful forms of encryption and more ingenious ways of injecting the code into computer networks. Only this summer did the United States begin to see multiple simultaneous attacks, often directed at government websites that are ill-defended.

In the 22 Texas attacks, according to several experts who have been called in, the pathway appeared to be through a once-trusted communications channel often used by law enforcement agencies, and managed by a private systems-management firm. Getting inside a channel shared by so many Texas localities meant the hackers had to target only one system, which ushered them into municipal networks across the state. Once inside, it was fairly easy to deploy software that encrypts a town’s data.

Fearing the worst, cities like Lake City, Fla., have bought cyberinsurance, and an insurer paid most of its ransom this summer. But some experts think that is only worsening the problem. Kimberly Goody, a manager of financial crimes analysis for FireEye, a major cybersecurity firm, said she expected in the future to “see some evidence that there is specific targeting of organizations that have insurance.” FireEye has responded to twice as many ransomware attacks this year compared with 2018, she said.

According to government and private experts, the ransomware business is now proving so lucrative that the hackers are pouring some of their profits back into their own research and development, making their attacks more precise, and more wily.

“We are seeing more ransomware attacks because they work,” said Eli Sugarman, who directs the Hewlett Foundation’s cybersecurity program. “Cities are struggling to secure their complex and oftentimes outdated systems, and when attacked some choose to pay.” And, he noted, there is “notoriety that comes from each successful attack.”

When companies are hit with ransomware attacks they often cover it up. But cities cannot — as Atlanta learned in March 2018, in one of the most serious cyberattacks against an American municipality. Attackers demanded roughly $51,000 in Bitcoin but, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the city refused to pay the ransom. A document leaked to local news outlets showed that responding to the attack could cost the city $17 million. At the time, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms called the attack “a hostage situation,” and threat researchers working on the response blamed a hacking crew called SamSam.

Two Iranians, Faramarz Shahi Savandi and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, were indicted on a charge in that attack last year, and there has been no major recurrence of SamSam attacks since. But new, more targeted malware has appeared.

The hackers who disabled Baltimore city computers in May demanded about $76,000 in Bitcoin to release the city’s files and allow employees to regain access to their computers. The mayor, Bernard Young, said the city would not pay the ransom, in part because there was no guarantee the files would be unlocked.

In the nearly four months since, the city has brought systems back online one by one, spending more than $5.3 million on computers and contractors brought on to help recover from the attack. An early estimate put the combination of lost revenue and city expenditures at more than $18 million.

Lester Davis, a spokesman for the mayor, said some lost revenue had been recouped and that it was impossible to quantify how much money the city lost by lack of productivity and missing payments. Baltimore issued water bills in recent weeks for the first time since the hacking, meaning many residents are facing payments three times as much as normal.

Five states — California, Connecticut, Michigan, Texas and Wyoming — appear to have laws that refer specifically to “ransomware” or computer extortion, although other states have laws that prohibit extortion and computer crimes such as malware or computer trespass, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Because most of the ransomware laws have been in place for only a few years, prosecutors, court officials and lawmakers say prosecutions have been nearly nonexistent.

Steve Stafstrom, House Chairman of the Connecticut General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, said the state had enacted its ransomware law in 2017.

While no one in the state has been charged with the crime, Mr. Stafstrom said the law gave prosecutors the ability to pursue either traditional extortion charges or those specifically related to ransomware. Those convicted would face up to three years in prison.

The coordinated attack in Texas began on Friday morning. State officials said a “single threat actor,” which could be a group, was behind the cyberattack, but they declined to elaborate or discuss details about how the virus spread, referring questions to the F.B.I. office in Dallas, which also declined to release details of its investigation.

Four of the 22 towns have a total of about 31,000 residents. Such small city governments, which often use motley collections of vintage software and lack the budget and sophistication for strong cyberdefense, have become a favorite target for ransomware attacks.

Last year, hackers based in Ukraine hit Allentown, Pa., a city of 121,000 residents, with a malware package that shut down the city government’s computers for weeks. No explicit ransom demand was made, but the attack played out like many that target cities, said Matthew Leibert, Allentown’s longtime chief information officer.

When an Allentown city employee took a laptop with him while traveling, it missed software updates that might have blocked the malware. The employee unwittingly clicked on a phishing email, and when he returned to the office, the malware spread rapidly.

The attack cost about $1 million to clean up, Mr. Leibert said. Improved defenses are costing Allentown about $420,000 a year, squeezing the city’s budget. He said one frustration was the scattershot targeting that happened to hit Allentown. “There are warehouses of kids overseas firing off phishing emails,” Mr. Leibert said.

Although some of the Texas towns’ computer systems are now back online, others are being restored by teams of state and federal cybersecurity experts and investigators, including those with the National Guard in Texas. In Wilmer, a team of National Guard specialists arrived Friday, dressed in T-shirts in the August heat and using the police station as its headquarters. They continue to work restoring the network and recovering data.

In Kaufman, located more than 30 miles southeast of Dallas, city employees were forced to conduct business manually instead of through computers. City staff members used their cellphones because the phone system was disabled.

Mike Slye, Kaufman’s city manager, said he was not permitted to discuss details of the attack, including how it was discovered.

Such a response is typical in the aftermath of small-town cyberattacks. Some local leaders are embarrassed, while others fear that by discussing the attack, they will invite future ones or will expose a weakness in their cyberdefenses.

Officials in Wilmer hoped to have the city’s systems fully operational in two to three weeks. The mayor, Emmanuel Wealthy-Williams, issued a statement as well.

It was neatly handwritten, on notebook paper.

[bountyofbeads]

The 'economy first' approach toward reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process could be a hard sell to a largely skeptical region

https://t.co/HvZ3lIS3r2

Brilliant plan and so easy to execute in a region that’s overflowing with goodwill, a fervent anti-corruption culture, freedom of religion, religious tolerance, and freedom of movement. Can’t fail, can it?

Weird that the plan says nothing about the occupation or the fact that all Palestinians live under military law, which bans or restricts all activity that the IDF sees fit to include in a military order, or its interpretation. All of are punishable w/ up to 10 years prison time.

The Kushner plan looks & reads as pie in the sky puffery. Two years of time & he writes as simplistically as a high school sophomore.

Nothing of government funding, or corporate partners who can help jumpstart retail businesses let alone infrastructure.

Thread by journalist Greg Carlstrom @glcarlstrom for The Economist in the region on Jared Kushner’s "Peace To Prosperity Plan" 👇👇🤔🙄😜

I'm reading the Kushner plan for economic peace—really, what else would I rather do on a beautiful Saturday evening in June?—and I'll tweet some thoughts on it as I go. https://t.co/rL28evnNzd

Just to start, the website for the "Peace to Prosperity" plan includes a glossy photo of Palestinians walking past a USAID-funded school. Donald Trump cut USAID funding in the Palestinian territories.

"Additional investment will finance the development of a transportation corridor directly connecting the West Bank and Gaza." Israel has undertaken to do this for decades. Never happened because, guess what, it's complicated! Not just a matter of building a monorail.

The plan will "help the Palestinians leap a generation forward in digital services" with 5G technology. Great! Except it was only last year that Israel let the West Bank install 3G (which the rest of us got in the aughts), for reasons no one can adequately explain.

It goes on to suggest developing Gaza's coast by "drawing from examples like Beirut," which suggests that none of the plan's authors have ever actually seen the concrete monstrosity that is Beirut's coastline.

"Just as Dubai and Singapore have benefited from their strategic locations and flourished as regional financial hubs, the West Bank and Gaza can ultimately develop into a regional trading center." Like Dubai or Singapore, just without an airport!

Kushner wants Palestine to achieve a World Bank Doing Business ranking of "75 or better." I sat with a Palestinian CEO last week who told me about having to transport his goods via donkeys when Israeli checkpoints closed the roads. That kind of stuff makes it hard to score well.

I could go on but, again, Saturday night. Suffice it to say this is a pie-in-the-sky document that presupposes Israel will agree to everything, the occupation will stop massively distorting Palestine's economy, and all the other political considerations magically vanish.

Oh one other thing. There's a whole section on the importance of sacrosanct property rights in the Palestinian territories which I simply lack the words to comment on 😂

Exclusive: White House's Kushner unveils economic portion of Middle East peace plan(VIDEO)

By Matt Spetalnick, Steve Holland | Published JUNE 22, 2019, 10:11 AM | Reuters | Posted June 23, 2019 |

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Saturday outlined a $50 billion Middle East economic plan that would create a global investment fund to lift the Palestinian and neighboring Arab state economies, and fund a $5 billion transportation corridor to connect the West Bank and Gaza.

The “peace to prosperity” plan, set to be presented by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner at an international conference in Bahrain next week, includes 179 infrastructure and business projects, according to details of the plan and interviews with U.S. officials. The approach toward reviving the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process was criticized by the Palestinians on Saturday.

The ambitious economic revival plan, the product of two years of work by Kushner and other aides, would take place only if a political solution to the region’s long-running problems is reached.

More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.

The plan also proposes nearly a billion dollars to build up the Palestinians’ tourism sector, a seemingly impractical notion for now given the frequent flareups between Israeli forces and militants from Hamas-ruled Gaza, and the tenuous security in the occupied West Bank.

The Trump administration hopes that wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors, would foot much of the bill, Kushner told Reuters.

“The whole notion here is that we want people to agree on the plan and then we’ll have a discussion with people to see who is interested in potentially doing what,” Kushner told Reuters Television.

The unveiling of the economic blueprint follows two years of deliberations and delays in rolling out a broader peace plan between Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians, who are boycotting the event, have refused to talk to the Trump administration since it recognized Jerusalem as the Israeli capital in late 2017.

Veteran Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashrawi dismissed the proposals on Saturday, saying: “These are all intentions, these are all abstract promises” and said only a political solution would solve the conflict.

Kushner made clear in two interviews with Reuters that he sees his detailed formula as a game-changer, despite the view of many Middle East experts that he has little chance of success where decades of U.S.-backed peace efforts have failed.

“I laugh when they attack this as the ‘Deal of the Century’,” Kushner said of Palestinian leaders who have dismissed his plan as an attempt to buy off their aspirations for statehood. “This is going to be the ‘Opportunity of the Century’ if they have the courage to pursue it.”

Kushner said some Palestinian business executives have confirmed their participation in the conference, but he declined to identify them. The overwhelming majority of the Palestinian business community will not attend, businessmen in the West Bank city of Ramallah told Reuters.

Several Gulf Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, will also participate in the June 25-26 U.S.-led gathering in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, for Kushner’s rollout of the first phase of the Trump peace plan. Their presence, some U.S. officials say privately, appears intended in part to curry favor with Trump as he takes a hard line against Iran, those countries’ regional arch-foe.

The White House said it decided against inviting the Israeli government because the Palestinian Authority would not be there, making do instead with a small Israeli business delegation.

POLITICAL DISPUTES REMAIN

There are strong doubts whether potential donor governments would be willing to open their checkbooks anytime soon, as long as the thorny political disputes at the heart of the decades-old Palestinian conflict remain unresolved.

The 38-year-old Kushner - who like his father-in-law came to government steeped in the world of New York real estate deal-making - seems to be treating peacemaking in some ways like a business transaction, analysts and former U.S. officials say.

Palestinian officials reject the overall U.S.-led peace effort as heavily tilted in favor of Israel and likely to deny them a fully sovereign state of their own.

Kushner’s attempt to decide economic priorities first while initially sidestepping politics ignores the realities of the conflict, say many experts.

“This is completely out of sequence because the Israeli-Palestinian issue is primarily driven by historical wounds and overlapping claims to land and sacred space,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator for Republican and Democratic administrations.

Kushner acknowledges that “you can’t push the economic plan forward without resolving the political issues as well.” The administration, he said, will “address that at a later time,” referring to the second stage of the peace plan’s rollout now expected no earlier than November.

Kushner says his approach is aimed at laying out economic incentives to show the Palestinians the potential for a prosperous future if they return to the table to negotiate a peace deal.

Kushner stressed that governments would not be expected to make financial pledges on the spot.

“It is a small victory that they are all showing up to listen and partake. In the old days, the Palestinian leaders would have spoken and nobody would have disobeyed,” he said.

TRAVEL CORRIDOR

Kushner’s proposed new investment fund for the Palestinians and neighboring states would be administered by a “multilateral development bank.” Global financial lenders including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank plan to be present at the meeting.

The fund would include “accountability, transparency, anti-corruption, and conditionality safeguards” to protect investments.

A signature project would be to construct a travel corridor for Palestinian use that would cross Israel to link the West Bank and Gaza. It could include a highway and possibly a rail line. The narrowest distance between the territories, whose populations have long been divided by Israeli travel restrictions, is about 40 km (25 miles).

Kushner said that if executed the plan would create a million jobs in the West Bank and Gaza, reduce Palestinian poverty by half and double the Palestinians’ GDP.

But most foreign investors will likely stay clear for the moment, not only because of security and corruption concerns but also because of the drag on the Palestinian economy from Israel’s West Bank occupation that obstructs the flow of people, goods and services, experts say.

Kushner sees his economic approach as resembling the Marshall Plan, which Washington introduced in 1948 to rebuild Western Europe from the devastation of World War Two. Unlike the U.S.-funded Marshall Plan, however, the latest initiative would put much of the financial burden on other countries.

President Donald Trump would “consider making a big investment in it” if there is a good governance mechanism, Kushner said. But he was non-committal about how much the president, who has often proved himself averse to foreign aid, might contribute.

Economic programs have been tried before in the long line of U.S.-led peace efforts, only to fail for lack of political progress. Kushner’s approach, however, may be the most detailed so far, presented in two pamphlets of 40 and 96 pages each that are filled with financial tables and economic projections.

In Manama, the yet-to-released political part of the plan will not be up for discussion, Kushner said.

The economic documents offer no development projects in predominantly Arab east Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

What Kushner hopes, however, is that the Saudis and other Gulf delegates will like what they hear enough to urge Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to consider the plan.

The message Kushner wants them to take to Ramallah: “We’d like to see you go to the table and negotiate and try to make a deal to better the lives of the Palestinian people.”

Reporting By Matt Spetalnick and Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Rami Ayyub in Ramallah; Editing by Ross Colvin and Chizu Nomiyama

[click2watch]

No, Bitcoin Isn’t Secretly Messing with the Mid-Term Elections

Brian Forde most recently ran for U.S. Congress in California’s 45th district and was the founding Director of the Digital Currency Initiative at MIT. Previously, he was a Senior Tech Advisor in the Obama White House.

On the eve of the most important election of our time, we’ve seen what misinformation gets us. Fear of the unknown, fear of change. In these times, we need to be vigilant about how we examine what’s new or different.

Hundreds of articles have been written about campaign contributions made with cryptocurrencies — and all too often they get it wrong. Many of these articles are riddled with factual errors, but more distressingly engender fear of something new based on a deep misunderstanding.

I know because, during my recent run for Congress, approximately $300,000 of my campaign contributions were donated in cryptocurrency.

I wasn’t a fringe candidate who rails against the government. I was a Senior Tech Advisor in President Obama’s White House who wrote the White House memo on Bitcoin and briefed the president on the technology.

After leaving the White House, I started the research lab on cryptocurrencies at MIT to help the world better understand this emerging technology and its global impact – and that’s what I seek to do in this article.

Here are some of the biggest misconceptions:

First, it’s important to understand the scope of campaign contributions made with cryptocurrencies. One article claimed that U.S. Congressional candidates have raised $550,000 in cryptocurrencies since 2014. To put that figure in perspective, the amount is equal to 0.032 percent of the more than $1.7 billion that’s been raised by candidates since the 2014 election cycle.While the amount donated in cryptocurrency is a fraction of one-tenth of a percent of total contributions, the author claims that the scope and threat are large because virtual currencies are used by more than 3 billion people. No, nearly 40 percent of the world’s population does not use cryptocurrencies.The words virtual currencies, virtual money and cryptocurrencies are incorrectly used interchangeably. As a result, we end up with wildly inaccurate information being given in U.S. Congressional hearings and parroted in articles.Virtual currencies are the most expansive name and include products such as airline miles and Starbucks cards. Star Alliance points are not a threat to the integrity of our elections, nor are cryptocurrency users who likely number in the tens of millions.

Second, some claim cryptocurrencies have been linked to illicit activities including money laundering, without qualifying that the same is true of cash and credit cards. The UK government ranked ways that money was being laundered. Banks were number one and bitcoin was at the bottom of the list.On that basis, the means of payment should not be our litmus test to determine how candidates, or anyone, can or cannot receive money. If it was, we would not be able to use cash, credit cards, or bank accounts. They further assert that foreign state actors have used cryptocurrency to influence U.S. elections without critical clarifying details. Foreign state actors used cryptocurrency to buy internet domain names and pay for server infrastructure – not to donate to Congressional candidates.Technology has always been used for good and bad purposes. Cryptocurrencies are no different. In a free and open society, we don’t ban the use of the internet or social media in response to nefarious uses by foreign actors.We work with leaders in the private sector, academia, and policymaking to develop sensible solutions to address the acute problem.

Third, critics also like to claim that unlike cash or checks, cryptocurrencies cannot be inspected easily by the public and that we should publish the wallet addresses of the contributions. Contributions made with cryptocurrencies require the same reporting requirements as contributions made with cash, checks and credits cards — publishing the donor’s full name and address.It’s important to note that cash is the most anonymous form of payment in the world — yet it is accepted by every campaign. The majority of campaign contributions are made with credit cards.The easiest way for a foreign actor to illegally contribute to a campaign is with a prepaid debit card bought with cash at a convenience store — not cryptocurrencies. It would be a violation of an individual’s financial privacy and security to publish their wallet address with their full name and home address. The same is true for publicly disclosing bank account numbers of donors who write checks or credit card numbers for those who contribute online. In fact, for security purposes, most campaigns don’t have access to credit card numbers of donors.

Fourth, misguided analysts infer that bitcoin is a “privacy coin” and therefore anonymous. Actually, it’s neither. It’s important to know that the use of cryptocurrencies is highly regulated in the U.S.In fact, every American cryptocurrency wallet company is subject to strict know-your-customer and anti-money laundering laws, overseen by a U.S. Treasury Department agency, that requires wallet companies to know exactly who is using their wallets.

While bitcoin was invented more than 10 years ago, there are still far too many misconceptions about the technology. The misconceptions lead to fear and fear leads to hysteria. It’s more important than ever that public officials are guided by facts and not hysteria.

For one, our elected representatives will be asked to regulate this new technology. Second, this technology is being developed for even greater participation.

In 2016, nearly 300,000 overseas voters who requested ballots were not able to return them to their county clerks. I wasn’t surprised by this number. I lived abroad while serving in the Peace Corps and sent in my ballots only for them to be infrequently counted during my time in Nicaragua.

Bradley Tusk, a supporter of my campaign, is working with officials in West Virginia to address this by enabling our Americans serving abroad to vote with a mobile application built with the technology powering cryptocurrencies, blockchain. This technology will ensure 19,000 service men and women’s votes — which previously went uncounted — are counted this midterm election.

So while cryptocurrencies are decidedly not “messing” with the mid-terms, the technology powering them could, in fact, make midterms more representative.

This is something worth understanding, and something worth writing about.

Flag and money image via Shutterstock

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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