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Tag: internet

  • European alternatives for popular services – European Alternatives

    We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

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  • Free Media Heck Yeah

    The largest collection of free stuff on the internet! … Can I donate? We appreciate that people want to support us, but we never have and never will accept donations. We maintain this project because its fun and we want to help others, not make money.

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  • How to disappear completely – The Verge

    The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.

    This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.

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  • The best way to get past an article’s paywall – Lifehacker

    Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to quickly bypass a paywall that I’ve found, and I’ve been using it successfully for the past year across a wide range of sites. It’s a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. … you can often use this functionality to bypass a paywall and read an entire paywalled article without issue.

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  • The tangled tale of The Times’s URL – The New York Times

    In 1985, the Times editors A.M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb gathered a task force, which included Mr. Lewis, to work on a project called The New York Times in the Year 2000. … Then an editor for the Science section and a personal computers columnist, Mr. Lewis recalled predicting that by the millennium, Times articles would be read on personal computer screens, in cyberspace. “I recall Artie dismissing me with a wave,” Mr. Lewis wrote of Mr. Gelb.

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  • My machine and me – Los Angeles Review of Books

    Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.

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  • 52 things I learned in 2024 – Tom Whitwell

    4. Film studios now add CGI effects to behind the scenes footage to hide how much CGI has been used to make the film. … 35. People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames. Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers. A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed. … 47. In 2024, around 10% of Anguilla’s GDP will come from fees for its .ai domain name.
    education internet lists movies

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  • Did OpenAI just spend more than $10 million on a URL? – The Verge

    People hoarding “vanity domains” is a tale as old as the Internet itself. Just a few months ago, AI startup Friend spent $1.8 million on the domain friend.com after raising $2.5 million in funding. Having just raised $6.6 billion, OpenAI dropping more than $10 million —in cash or stock — is just a drop in the bucket.

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  • Leon Eckert

    Hallo! I am a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society. My work is inspired by the psychological, cultural and geopolitical processes at play in a time of large-scale data collection and analysis.

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  • ‘We were wrong’: An oral history of WIRED’s original website – WIRED

    Ian: Back in those days, we’d say, The nice thing about the internet is how safe it is. Everybody’s there to help you, and everybody just wants to do good things. People asked, Why require passwords for stuff, because who’s going to do anything terrible on the internet?

    Kevin: Today, a new thing comes along and people immediately say, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s going to hurt me. It’s going to bite me.” That’s definitely a change that wasn’t present when we were starting.

    Jeff: But nostalgia can be dangerous. It was really hard what we did, and stressful, and we didn’t know what we were doing. When people say, “If we could only go back to then,” I’m like, no, we only had modems. It was terrible.

    John P: As a business, HotWired failed. But all that stuff that we were doing, it was scientific investigation.

    Jonathan: We thought the internet was going to be good for people. We were wrong.

    Jeff: I still feel like literally anybody with an idea can start hacking on the web or making apps or things like that. That’s all still there. I think the nucleus of what we started back then still exists on the web, and it still makes me really, really happy.

    John: We were lucky with WIRED. With HotWired there was no choice, and we couldn’t do it differently if we went back and tried. But we were unlucky to be first.

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