The thing that always amazed me about [the Internet] is that it was just there. It wasn’t a giant announcement. It wasn’t a person. It wasn’t an organization. It was just there.
I don’t want to live in a world where ISIS is scarier than hackers, especially in 2016. We previously held the title in 2013, ’14, and ’15. And to be honest I was a little bit disappointed when I saw this result. So I thought I’m in my 40s now, there’s a lot of young hackers in the audience, and I’m not going to pass the baton to you guys unless we have that number one spot back in our pile.
In addition to freedom to connect, there also needs to be the ability to connect, and that we need to model best practice at home and around the world, and the policies that relate to that.
General purpose computers are in fact astounding. So astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them. To figure out what they’re for. To figure out how to accommodate them and how to cope with them.
The email @-sign, all that business, sort of never came to light until about 1994, at which point somebody asked “Where did email come from?”
PGP Started out as a human rights project. At the time, there was no way for ordinary people, as opposed to governments or sufficiently resourced institutions—there was no way for ordinary people to communicate securely over long distances without the risk of interception. And so PGP was to change that.
When you move out of this room, you cannot use the Internet anymore. Then what would you do? Today, we have two billion people, including us, who can access the Internet. Then there is just simple math. There’s five billion people who don’t have access to the Internet. That’s my concern.
My involvement with networks started in the late 70s. In fact, 1977 I was happily proving theorems in computational complexity, Petri nets, and at that point I’d learned about email and I learned about the ARPANET and realized for the first time that there was a real-world part of computer science, and not just proving theorems.
The way it all started was in 1964 I was at a conference in the homestead in Virginia. And Lick and I were sitting around talking with Corbató, who was running the time-sharing system at MIT. And Lick was talking about what do we need next? And I was very interested in that. And so he was saying, “Well, we need a network to tie the machines together. We need some way to have them communicate.”
We had to choose a name for the operating system for our network. We checked various things— We had a Sigma 7, we went Sigma 7 Executive, 7 Executive, just SEX. First post on the ARPANET, we put sex on the Internet. It’s documented.
You know, I got to thinking about—Tan Tin Wee beat me... Read more →
Carl Malamud: Internet Talk Radio, flame of the Internet. Malamud:... Read more →
I want us to play together… I've been thinking a lot about the black future. One, because I want to have one. Personally, I would like a black future. Because I want a future. And then I was thinking about just how many folks don't actually put black and the future together. Read more →
The thing about SecureDrop […] is that it's changed a lot in the past two years. But what I realized was that the core design, the core architecture, is almost completely unchanged from what Aaron created and called DeadDrop over 2 years ago today. Read more →
It's a great honor to be inducted in the Internet Hall of Fame. I don't do it in my name alone. I do it for all the Peruvians who work in this network we built in the 90s. We learned very well the teachings of Randy Bush. Sometimes when he taught us technology with love, and we saw poetic, hippie, unrepentant words. And we created with that a vision. Read more →