What we really need is better hardware and software architectures that allow better security. We are currently building computers like we built cars in the early 1900s. No seat belts, let alone air bags. This will change, but I am afraid we will have to endure a few (or many) disasters before we decide to take the time and money to build in user-friendly but effective security.
It is pretty unlikely that most governments will agree on the Clipper approach, since, as defined, it involves a secret algorithm developed by the U.S. government and therefore at least potentially capable of being easily breakable by the U.S. government. There are enough other viable alternatives out there that other governments can use other schemes.
The gap between rich and poor is increasing as a result of these technologies … Left to its own devices, it will increase much more.
It will become critical for everyone to be connected. Anyone who doesn’t will essentially be isolated from the world community.
As an ink-stained journalist, I doubt it ever will replace the printed page, but businesspeople of all types and home users will take to the World Wide Web in increasing numbers. The Internet will be as pervasive as the air we breathe … By year’s end, it will be a permanent fixture, and you will go through withdrawals if you are on the Net every day. Surfing will give way to serious Web diving.
As we become more fragmented, the virtual communities on the Internet can help people put together a community of conviviality and a support structure. Sometimes, strangers can be surprisingly supportive.
Technology may settle down fairly quickly because people just demand it; they can’t stand all the change. Or it may settle down later because it evolves, it comes to a point where people are kind of comfortable and a number of things hold still and that’s fine. Or it may simply not settle down at all. And then we’re forced to just become used to always surfing a constant wave; it’s never calm. And that would be a very interesting thing for civilization because we’ve never done that before … The great thing about the future under these circumstances is that it is fundamentally unknowable, and that’s both terrifying and very attractive.
We need … a firm idea of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future.
My guess is that the information revolution is so pervasive that you don’t have to worry about being on its cutting, bleeding edge. It’ll get you anyway, and that’s fine if you’ve got a comfortable way to sort of go along with it. You don’t have to get version 1.0 of everything. In fact, you’re much better off usually getting 3-point-something, when all the bugs have been sorted out.
The digital telephony bill passed last year, the Exon amendment recently passed by the Senate and the efforts made by the government to criminalize encryption technology so threaten First Amendment rights that they could presage “the end of the American experiment in democracy.” … The future may hold “a darker path,” Rheingold said, “and that is the path marked by surveillance, by censorship and by monopoly.”