Skip to content
This repository has been archived by the owner on May 26, 2021. It is now read-only.

Latest commit

 

History

History
379 lines (315 loc) · 58.9 KB

02_quotes.md

File metadata and controls

379 lines (315 loc) · 58.9 KB

Quotes

In this file, you'll see a list of various quotes that I like. Some of them were collected from various websites, other were collected from TV shows, but most of them were collected from various book that I have enjoyed reading. The content of this file do not fall under the Public Domain (un)license as do the rest of the files from this repository. Instead, they remain under the original license by their creators and are shared here under the fair use.

If you're the copyright holder of any of these files and you want this content removed, you're a dick. But you can contact me on aleksandar@r3bl.me and I will comply with your decision. The purpose of this file is not to infringe upon anyone's copyright, it's just to share my favorite works.

Table of Content

Le random quotes from the interwebz

This is the list of quotes where I find the inspiration that drives me forward.

  • Aaron Loeb: The art of good headline writing and image selection in order to get someone to click and go to a website is usually called “clickbaiting,” but I think we should call it “bullshit curation.”
  • Alan Kay: Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
  • Arnold H. Glasgow: Success is not spontaneous combustion. You need to set yourself on fire.
  • Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic.
  • Barry Schwartz: But in addition to creating things, science creates concepts, ways of understanding the world and our place in it, that have an enormous effect on how we think and act. If we understand birth defects as acts of God, we pray. If we understand them as acts of chance, we grit our teeth and roll the dice. If we understand them as the product of prenatal neglect, we take better care of pregnant women.
  • Brian Benchoff: For every computer error, there are two human errors, and one of them is blaming the computer.
  • Chaouki Bekrar: I'm just an actor. I want to talk about the movie.
  • Dan Brown: The only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten you are divine.
  • Dante Alighieri: The path to paradise begins in hell.
  • Duane Michals: Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." And then do it.
  • Elon Musk: Essentially, if everyone’s from planet Krypton, that’s great. But if only one of them is Superman and Superman also has the personality of Hitler, then we’ve got a problem.
  • Elbert Hubbard: One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
  • Frank Zappa: If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche: In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
  • Henry Davis Thoreau: What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving them.
  • Jim Morrison: There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.
  • Jon Westenberg: Don’t hide your passions. They’re the key to doing awesome shit.
  • Jon Westenberg: Life is too short to waste while you lock yourself away and pretend your past and your passions never existed. So get out there. Do you. And be a fucking weirdo.
  • Joseph Brodsky: There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
  • latin: Imperare sibi maximum imperium est. - To rule yourself is the ultimate power. Vladati nad sobom najveća je vlast.
  • Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
  • Mae West: You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
  • Mark Victor Hansen: Don't wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.
  • Mark Twain: I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
  • Mark Twain: Never let your school interfere with your education.
  • Martin Fowler: Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
  • Michael Jordan: I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.
  • Muhammed Ali: Don't count the days, make the days count.
  • Mobutu Sese Seko What is important here is cash. [A] leader needs money, gold and diamonds to run his hundred castles, feed his thousand woman, buy cars for the millions of boot-lickers under his heels, reinforce the loyal military forces and still have enough change left to deposit into his numbered Swiss accounts.
  • Napoleon Hill: Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
  • Nick Gillespie: Public debate, it seems, is no longer a means by which to search for truth, knowledge, and common ground, but only a venue for speech that expresses unthinking solidarity with whatever you already believe.
  • Oscar Wilde: Give a man mask and he'll tell you the truth.
  • Quinn Norton: Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public.
  • Richard Jeni: Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you're in.
  • Rick Cook: Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to build bigger and better idiots. So far, the universe is winning.
  • Ser Tim Berners-Lee: Aaron is dead. Wanderers in this crazy world, we have lost a mentor, a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down, we have lost one of our own. Nurturers, carers, listeners, feeders, parents all, we have lost a child. Let us all weep.
  • Tim Urban: The reality is that we’re whizzing down a very intense road to a very intense place, and no one knows what it’ll be like when we get there. A lot of people find it scary to think about, but I think it’s exciting. Because of when we happened to be born, instead of just living in a normal world like normal people, we’re living inside of a thriller movie. Some people take this information and decide to be like Elon, doing whatever they can to help the movie have a happy ending—and thank god they do. Because I’d rather just be a gawking member of the audience, watching the movie from the edge of my seat and rooting for the good guys.
  • Will Smith: You don't try to build a wall. You don't set out to build a wall. You don't say, "I'm gonna build the biggest baddest greatest wall, that's ever been build,", you don't start there. You say, "I'm gonna lay this brick, as perfectly as a brick can be laid," and you do that, every single day. And soon you have a wall.
  • /u/ryans01: Rule numero uno - There are no more zero days. What's a zero day? A zero day is when you don't do a single fucking thing towards whatever dream or goal or want or whatever that you got going on. No more zeros. I'm not saying you gotta bust an essay out everyday, that's not the point. The point I'm trying to make is that you have to make yourself, promise yourself, that the new SYSTEM you live in is a NON-ZERO system. Didnt' do anything all fucking day and it's 11:58 PM? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. You feel me? When you're in the super vortex of being bummed your pattern of behaviour is keeping the vortex goin, that's what you're used to. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn't happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS. That's rule number one. Do not forget.

Quotes in Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian

  • Black Hole: Ako se neko pita „šta koj moj hadroni imaju veze sa mnom“, treba reći da su neki hadroni barioni. Ako je sad neko zapenio „šta bre barioni sad koj moj, ne izmišljaj“, treba reći da su neki barioni protoni i neutroni, a većina vidljive materije u kosmosu je izgrađena od njih, pa i ti, hobgobline jedan, što se pitaš šta bre barioni, i ti si jebeni barion.

Le tumblr quotes

  • Our entire universe is probably in a tiny glass jar somewhere placed on a shelf in an alien child's room as a science fair project that got a C-.
  • Everyone should smile. Life really isn't that serious. We make it hard. The sun rises. The sun sets. We just tend to complicate the process.
  • They wanna see you do good, but never better than them. Remember that.
  • This is not the end. Death marks the beginning of a new life.

George Carlin quotes

  • Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
  • I wanna live. I don’t wanna die. That’s the whole meaning of life: Not dying! I figured that shit out by myself in the third grade.
  • If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say that the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.
  • The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.
  • I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.
  • I don’t like to think of laws as rules you have to follow, but more as suggestions.
  • I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a man nailed to two pieces of wood.
  • In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.
  • Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.
  • Atheism is a non-prophet organization.
  • “No comment” is a comment.
  • So far, this is the oldest I’ve been.
  • If the cops didn’t see it, I didn’t do it!
  • I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

What The Hell is St. Louis Thinking

Bunch of unknown authors from a book called What The Hell is St. Louis Thinking.

  • We all drive on, walk past each other, not really knowing who we are. We’re all just strangers passing in the street, never stopping or taking the time.
  • At quiet times like this, I realize how alone I really feel.
  • There is no reason to simply exist. You need to exist for a reason. That reason can be silly to everyone but you. Hold it dear to your heart. Never forget it and never deny it for it is the reason to keep sucking oxygen.
  • What you do in your life changes what someone else does in theirs, and that changes everything.
  • We are all raindrops. We might seem small and insignificant but together we have the power of the world.
  • Fear keeps me from dreaming so I will not live my life in fear!

Notes from Share This Book (2012)

It's about understanding and celebrating the Internet culture and all aspects of open, decentralized and accessible forms of communication, exchange and creation. It's about the empowerment of individuals and the networking of the like-minded people. It's about setting the values and new standards that will prevent any kind of oppression, censorship and surveillance for future generations. It's about understanding the alternative economic cultural and educational models. It's about the Internet ecology and struggles to protect the Internet as open and free territory for all of us. It's about energizing sub-cultural groups and praising their diversity. It's about promoting open access to software, hardware, information, knowledge, science, government, design and almost anything that can be open. It's about sharing. It's about how to do it yourself.

Some Intro Text

  • Share conference was envisaged as a series of small workshops for Serbian activists, and it developed into a massive gathering, taking place on two different continents, with a foundation trying to handle it all.
  • Twelve years after the uprisal and the social change in Serbia, we are stuck in the remains of an unsuccessful transition, with the media controlled by the political parties and purely economic interests, the subcultures on the edge of extinction, a bureaucratized NGO bourgeoisie and the rise of nationalism and homophobia.
  • Under such circumstances, we believed that a gathering of progressive, young and creative people, the opinion makers of an alternative future, is important for this society.
  • Every generation tends to think that they are living in the exceptional and revolutionary times.
  • The public needs to defend its interests, which could be quite different from the interests of the commercial or government sectors in this matter.

Decentralize The Internet (by Yazan Al-Saadi)

  • The Internet is being controlled by a corrupt industry. We need to stop it. (Peter Sunde)
  • All other sites unexpectedly decided to close down under these threats, so in the end we became the biggest site by durability and stubbornness rather than technology. (Peter Sunde)
  • I'm sad that TPB is still needed and that there is little or no competition. (Peter Sunde)
  • 99.9999 percent win from file sharing. The people that lose are the ones that are trying to control distribution that no longer have a place in the online world. (Peter Sunde)
  • Look up "theft" or "stealing" in the dictionary. It means that you're removing someone's ability to use a certain item. A copy is something totally different. (Peter Sunde)
  • The US should not have access by default to personal data of citizen and resident in, for instance, Sweden, Finland, Lebanon or New Zealand. (Peter Sunde)
  • We want a global network, distributed and fair. Not run by any single country. (Peter Sunde)
  • The copyright laws never really matched the public views on copyright. It's because copyright is a really boring subject and no one was interested. It was illegal 30 years ago to copy a cassette, but people still did it. No one from the industry cared because there was no public discussion about it. (Peter Sunde)
  • Copyright is one of the most powerful tools for censoring competitions now. (Peter Sunde)
  • It will be sharing in the future, but we should not decide already which type. It's more fun waiting to see what clever people come up with. (Peter Sunde)
  • We all feel that we understand the US and that we actually know the country. (Peter Sunde)
  • We need to understand that centralization is always going to be a problem for diversity, no matter how good the intentions might actually have been. (Peter Sunde)

Designing for Collaborative Consumption (by Michelle Thorne)

  • Firstly, I'm a remix kid. I come from the generation of sampling. So the talk you're going to hear is a remix of arguments made by lots of great and interesting people, notable Aristotle, the Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom, Lawrence Lessig, Sean Bonner, Fight Club, Bruce Sterling, and the authors of a book that helped bring these ideas together, Collaborative Consumption.
  • We want things, we buy things, we throw away things. And what's worse, this endless cycle is pitched as "good for the economy." It's our duty to BUY BUY BUY.
  • The name for this unsustainable design principle is planned obsolescence. Objects designed for a limited lifetime. And unfortunately, it's the most predominate business strategy of our time.
  • ...to the smartphones we replace faster than we can remember their names.
  • We're buying more stuff. So much so, we can't even manage to keep it all in our homes, and have to pay a premium rent to store it elsewhere.
  • Shared objects should be easy to repair and amend. You shouldn't have to throw away your entire phone because it's scratched. Building modularity means fostering generativity.
  • Don't design for the dump. Don't design for the 20th century hyper-consumption. Design for things to last, to be shared, and to be part of the future, a future of collaborative consumption.

Crowdsourced Constitution (by Lily Lunch)

  • From Cyber Yugoslavia to Iceland, online democracy is no longer just a fantasy. Plato must be turning in his grave.
  • Could a "real" crowdsourced constitution have helped to forestall Yugoslavia's own crisis and collapse?
  • Constitutions are art. Law is art. Building societies is a form of art. We've just become incredibly adept at ignoring its artistic value. (Smari McCarthy)
  • We go around assuming that the way things have been for the last five minutes is the way it has always been and always will be, which blinds us to an astonishing potential. (Smari McCarthy)
  • Crowsourcing isn't about getting everybody fully engaged, it's about allowing self-selection in engagement, creating implicit information flow structures rather than defining explicit structures and assuming fairness. (Smari McCarthy)

Report from Public Library (by Marcell Mars AKA Nenad Romić)

  • In the catalog of History the Public Library is listed in the category of phenomena that we humans are most proud of. Along with the free public education, public health care, scientific method, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, Free Software...
  • A place where all people can get access to all knowledge that can be collected seemed for a long time a dream beyond reach.
  • Internet has overturned what we take as given and as possible. The dream of all people getting access to all knowledge suddenly came within our reach.
  • Software is perhaps the ultimate heterogeneous technology. It exists simultaneously as an idea, language, technology, and practice. (Nathan Ensmenger)
  • When tips & tricks of trade get embedded into the drop-down menus it's time for the experts to move on, full steam ahead: design after Photoshop; journalism after WordPress, advertisements after AdWords; photography after Instagram.
  • Book lovers, avid readers, and brave researchers, learning from Wikipedia, shouldn’t give up and let the other side to control the catalog because with enough of amateur librarians the future public library will appear. When everyone is a librarian, library is everywhere.

Advice for Living in this World (by Quinn Norton)

See the whole text here.

Face to Facebook: Smiling in the Eternal Party (by Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico)

  • Social networking is naturally addictive. It's about exploring something very familiar that has never been available before: staying in touch with past and present friends and acquaintances in a single, potentially infinite, virtual space.
  • Social network platforms are not public organizations designed to help support social problems, but private corporations. Their mission is not to help people create better social relationship or to help them improve their self-positioning. Their mission is to make money. Economic success for these corporations rests on convincing users to connect to the several hundred people who await them online.
  • Facebook is not home - it is way larger and more crowded. And it's not the street, because you're supposed to know everybody in your space. Facebook is an eternal, illusory party, under surveillance and recorded for all time. The price the guests are unconsciously paying is that they are giving away their (constantly updating) virtual identity. Guests, in fact, organize their own space, and therefore their own "party", offering the party owner (Facebook) a connected, heterogeneous group of people who share interests.
  • Any virtual identity (composed of a face picture and some related data) can be stolen and become a simple re-contextualization of the same data.
  • When we smile in our profile picture, we are truly smiling at everyone on Facebook.
  • Almost everything posted online can have a different life if simply re-contextualized.
  • Facebook, an endlessly cool place for so many people, becomes at the same time a goldmine for identity theft and dating - unfortunately, without the user's control. But that's the very nature of Facebook and social media in general.
  • We should be able to unveil how fragile a virtual identity given to a proprietary platform can be.

Digital Vertigo (by Andrew Keen)

  • We would have lived our lives differently if we had known they would one day be searchable. (@alexia)
  • Rather than virtual or second life, social media is actually becoming life itself - the central and increasingly transparent stage of human existence, what Silicon Valley venture capitalists are now calling an "internet of people".
  • We lived in farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're gonna live on the Internet! (from The Social Network (2010))
  • (...) My job (...) is grabbing other people's attention on Twitter and Facebook so that I can become ubiquitous.
  • The future is always sooner and stranger than you think.
  • I update, therefore I am not.
  • We broadcast ourselves and therefore we are (not).
  • Today's Internet is the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen, with Facebook being the world's most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence. (Julian Assange)
  • Facebook is the novel we are all writing. (Katie Rolphe)
  • Mark Zuckerberg uses the word connect as believers use the word Jesus. (Zadie Smith)
  • Connectivity will become the electricity of the social epoch - so ubiquitous that it will be invisible and so powerful that it threatens to become the operating system for the entire twenty-first century. (Mark Pincus, CEO and co-owner of Zynga)
  • By September 2011, more than 500 million people were logging onto Facebook each day with its then almost 800 million active users being larger that the entire Internet was in 2004.
  • Four out of five college admissions offices, for example, are looking up applicants' Facebook profiles before making a decision on whether to accept them. (source: How to Use Social Media to Help Get Accepted to Collage)
  • "In today's executive search market, if you're not on LinkedIn, you don't exist," job search expert told The Wall Street Journal in June 2011. (source: Updating a Resume for 2011)
  • Mark Zuckerberg once said "movies are naturally social things." What he forgot to add is that in this brave new world of shared information, resumes, pictures, books, travel, music, business, politics, education, shopping, location, finance and knowledge are, it seems, also naturally social things.
  • You see, on today's Internet, it seems, everything - and I mean absolutely everything - is going social.
  • Everyone in Silicon Valley, it seems, is going into the business of eliminating loneliness.
  • Netflix is so committed to deeply integrating its service with Facebook that its CEO, Reed Hastings, acknowledged in June 2011 that he has a "five-year investment path" for making social central to his company's product development.
  • Microsoft's intended $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, announced in May 2011 (...) is an attempt to socialize its Internet business. This acquisition seeks to leverage Skype's active 145 million users into a Microsoft centric social network that will maintain the company's relevance in the social media age.
  • Has Nineteen Eighty-four finally arrived on all of our screens?

Content (by Cory Doctorow)

  • Bruce Schneier has said, "Making bits harder to copy is like making water that's less wet."
  • Globally speaking, if your country imports sugar and exports sugar cane, chances are you're poor. If your country imports wood and sells paper, chances are you're rich.
  • You know the joke about European hell? The English do the cooking, the Germans are the lovers, the Italians are the police and the French run the government. With Sony, it seemed like music was designing the walkmen, marketing was doing the catalog, and electronic was in charge of selling.
  • In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time.
  • This all starts with my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which came out on January 9, 2003. At that time, there was a lot of talk in my professional circles about, on the one hand, the dismal failure of ebooks, and, on the other, the new and scary practice of ebook "piracy". It was strikingly weird that no one seemed to notice that the idea of ebooks as a "failure" was at strong odds with the notion that electronic book "piracy" was worth worrying about: I mean, if ebooks are a failure, then who gives a rats if intarweb dweebs are trading them on Usenet?
  • Perhaps if Facebook takes on some of the characteristics that made the Web work — openness, decentralization, standardization — it will become like the Web itself, but with the added pixie dust of "social," the indefinable characteristics that makes Facebook into pure crack for a significant portion of Internet users.
  • Metcalfe's Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system."
  • Brook's-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance."
  • In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts.

Internet of Garbage (by Sarah Jeong)

  • The public's understanding of speech online has undergone a serious paradigm shift. Even in tech-centric communities generally supportive of "free speech" on the Internet, there is a pervasive feeling that harassment must be rooted out and solved. Anonimity and freedom of speech have become bad words, the catchphrases of an old guard that refuses to open its eyes to a crisis for the Internet.
  • The Internet isn't breaking. Beneath the Wikipedias and Facebooks and YouTubes and other shiny repositories of information, community and culture — the Internet is, and always has been, mostly garbage.
  • [fight against garbage] is a ranging war that the average user gives little thought to, because, well, the anti-spammers are winning. Emails go through (mostly). Inboxes aren't hopelessly clogged. The Internet, overall, is operational.

Quotes from Aaron Swartz's blog

From I Hate the News:

Some people start their day by reading The New York Times. Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show. Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody seems to agree: it’s a citizen’s responsibility to keep up with the news. Everybody except me. I think following the news is a waste of time.

From The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz:

  • Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn't stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There's no ethical problem.
  • Think deeply about things. Don't just go along because that's the way things are or that's what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.
  • There is no justice in following unjust law.
  • How does someone get experience in Congress in the first place? By applying to be an intern. Imagine the sort of college student whose idea of a great first job is to run errands and fetch coffee to whichever random person happens to represent their hometown. They're not likely to be someone who cares passionately about making the world a better place—if they were, they'd be working for some activism group. They're not someone who's interested in judiciously weighing the facts and trying to come up with good solutions—if they were, they'd be working for a think tank. Instead, they're someone who gets excited by proximity to power—who's turned on just by striding the Capitol's marble halls, by sitting in a closet next to a Man with Vote, by running into the leaders of the Free World in the elevator. There are people who thirst for a chance at power, and for them, fetching coffee is a trifling price.
  • Transparency is a slippery word; the kind of word that, like reform, sounds good and so ends up getting attached to any random political thing that someone wants to promote.
  • Remember that money is just a kind of illusion. In reality, there are just people who want things and people who make things. But we're stuck in a completely ridiculous situation: there are lots of people who desperately want jobs making things—they're literally not doing anything else—while at the same time there are lots of people who desperately want things made. It seems ridiculous not to do something about this just because some people have all the little green sheets of paper!
  • They [voters] sat in their houses, watched a bunch of fuzzy TV commercials, and took in news coverage that recited the same vague themes. And then they voted based on which fuzzy image they liked the best. There's a word for stuff like that. It's not pretty, but I think it's appropriate. It's called propaganda. This was an election on the basis of propaganda.
  • [On babies] The world is confusing! It's filled with strange sights and sounds and smells, a new world of taste and touch. The only way to make sense of any of it is to work at it is as best you can, looking at all the new things you see and trying desperately to figure them all out.
  • I've never liked history. It's always seemed like an abstract distractions of events and activities that had no relevance to my life and were just plain uninteresting. Worse, the only thing I was graded on was how well I memorized this boring stuff.
  • "They" tell you to behave: to follow the rules, to do what they say, to be quiet and polite and kind. Don't listen to them. It's a scam.

Talks that are too good to take some quotes out of them because they are perfect as a whole:

The Filter Bubble (by Eli Parser)

  • The new Internet doesn't just know you're a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.
  • When I interviewed Jonathan McPhie, Google's point man on search personalization, he suggested that it was nearly impossible to guess how the algorithms would shape the experience of any given user. There were simply too many variables and inputs to track.
  • If we're not careful, we're going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We'll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.
  • You may think you're the captain of your own destiny, but personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational terminism in which what you've clicked on in the past determines what you see next — a Web history you're doomed to repeat. You can geet stuck in a static, ever narrowing version of yourself — an endless you-loop.
  • "If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." Andrew Lewis, under the alias Blue_beetle, on the Web site MetaFilter.
  • In the Google mythology, it is PageRank that drove the company to worldwide dominance. I suspect the company likes it that way — it's a simple, clear story that hangs the search giant's success on a single ingenious breakthrough by one of its founders.
  • "The technology will be so good, it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO
  • Walter Lippmann, the father of modern journalism, put it more eloquently: "All that the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true, if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news. Incompetence and aimlessness, corruption and disloyalty, panic and ultimate disaster most come to any people which is denied an assured access to the facts."
  • Whereas once you had to buy the whole paper to get the sports section, now you can go to a sports-only Web site with enough new content each day to fill ten papers. Whereas once only those who could buy ink by the barrel could reach an audience of millions, now anyone with a laptop and a fresh idea can.
  • Professional human editors are expensive, and code is cheap. Increasingly, we'll rely on a mix of nonprofessional editors (our friends and colleagues) and software code to figure out what to watch, read, and see.
  • A spicy headline will win over a more trusted news source any day. "People don't make much of a distinction between the New York Times and some random blogger," the executive [of Yahoo! News] told me.
  • "We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on," Apple founder Steve Jobs told Macworld on 2004. Among techies, these two paradigms came to be known as push technology and pull technology. A Web browser is an example of pull technology: You put in an address, and your computer pulls information from that server. Television and the mail, on the other hand, are push technologies: The information shows up on the tube or at your doorstop without any action on your end.
  • We pay attention to our mental processes when they fail, but that distracts us from the fact that most of the time, our brains do amazingly well.
  • Because personalized filters usually have no Zoom Out function, it's easy to lose your bearings, to believe the world is a narrow island when in fact it's an immense, varied continent.
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) founder John Perry Barlow dreamed of "creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth." The freedom that this offered anyone who was interested to transgress and explore, to try on different personas for size, felt revolutionary.
  • Most personalized filters are based on a three-step model. First, you figure out who people are and what they like. Then, you provide them with content and services that best fit them. Finally, you tune to get the fit just right. Your identity shapes your media. There's just one flaw in this logic: Media also shape identity. And as a result, these services may end up creating a good fit between you and your media by changing ... you.
  • When our online actions are tallied and added to a record that companies use to make decisions, we might decide to be more cautious in our surfing. If we knew (or even suspected, for that matter) that purchasers of 101 Ways to Fix Your Credit Score tend to get offered lower-premium credit cards, we'd avoid buying the book. "If we thought that our every word and deed were public," writes law professor Charles Fried, "fear of disapproval or more tangible retaliation might keep us from doing or saying things which we would do or say could be sure of keeping them to ourselves".
  • Your identity shapes your media, and your media shapes what you believe and what you care about. You click on a link, which signals an interest in something, which means you're more likely to see articles about that topic in the future, which in turn prime the topic for you. You become trapped in a you loop, and if your identity is misrepresented, strange patterns begin to emerge, like reverb from an amplifier.
  • When you model the weather and predict there's a 70 percent chance of rain, it doesn't affect the rain clouds. It either rains or it doesn't. But when you predict that because my friends are untrustworthy, there's a 70 percent chance that I'll default on my loan, there are consequences if you get me wrong. You're discriminating.
  • Rather than decentralizing power, as its early proponents predicted, in some ways the Internet is concentrating it.
  • I once explained to a Google search engineer that while I didn't think the company was currently evil, it seemed to have at its fingerprints everything it needed to do evil if it wished. He smiled broadly. "Right," he said. "We're not evil. We try really hard not to be evil. But if we wanted to, man, could we ever!"
  • We may now face what persuasion-profiling theorist Dean Eckles calls a friendly world syndrome, in which some of the biggest and most important problems fail to reach our view at all.
  • If code is law, software engineers and geeks are the ones who get to write it. And it's a funny kind of law, created without any judicial system of legislators and enforced nearly perfectly and instantly.
  • Kranzberg's first law: "Technology is neither good or bad, nor is it neutral."
  • We need more programmers to go beyond Google's famous slogan, "Don't be evil." We need engineers who will do good.
  • If I only get the news from my code and my friends, the easiest way to get my attention might be friends who are code.
  • "Give us 14 images of you," [Eric Schmidt] told a crowd of technologists at the Techonomy Conference in 2010, "and we can find other images of you with ninety-five percent accuracy."
  • As sci-fi author William Gibson once said, "The future is already here — it's just not evenly distributed." It shows up in some places before others.
  • Media have always been vehicles for selling products, the argument goes, so why not just cut out the middleman and have product makers produce the content themselves?
  • Why should Web sites look the same to every viewer of customer? Different people don't respond only to different products — they respond to different design sensibilities, different colors, even different types of product descriptions.
  • We ought to be able to say, "You're wrong. Perhaps I used to be a surfer, or a fan of comics, or a Democrat, but I'm not any more."
  • As billions come online in India and Brazil and Africa, the Internet is transforming into a truly global place. Increasingly, it will be the place where we live our lives. But in the end, a small group of American companies may unilaterally dictate how billions of people work, play, communicate, and understand the world. Protecting the early vision of radical connectedness and user control should be an urgent priority to all of us.

Algorithms to Live By (by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths)

  • Even in cases where life is too messy for us to expect a strict numerical analysis or a ready answer, using intuitions and concepts honed on the simpler forms of these problems offers us a way to understand the key issues and make progress.
  • Over the past decade or two, behavioral economics has told a very particular story about human beings: that we are irrational and error-prone, owing in large part to the buggy, idiosyncratic hardware of the brain.
  • Assuming that his search would run from ages eighteen to forty, the 37% Rule gave age 26.1 years as the point at which to switch from looking to leaping.
  • We don’t have an objective or preexisting sense of what makes for a good or a bad applicant; moreover, when we compare two of them, we know which of the two is better, but not by how much. It’s this fact that gives rise to the unavoidable “look” phase, in which we risk passing up a superb early applicant while we calibrate our expectations and standards. Mathematicians refer to this genre of optimal stopping problems as “no-information games.”
  • Your stomach rumbles. Do you go to the Italian restaurant that you know and love, or the new Thai place that just opened up? Do you take your best friend, or reach out to a new acquaintance you’d like to get to know better? This is too hard — maybe you’ll just stay home. Do you cook a recipe that you know is going to work, or scour the Internet for new inspiration? Never mind, how about you just order a pizza? Do you get your “usual,” or ask about the specials? You’re already exhausted before you get to the first bite. And the thought of putting on a record, watching a movie, or reading a book — which one? — no longer seems quite so relaxing.

Zen to Done (by Leo Babauta)

  • Why “Zen To Done”? Well, first off, the blog is called Zen Habits, and “Habits To Done” doesn’t sound cool enough to me.
  • Each of these habits should be learned and practiced one at a time if possible, or 2-3 at a time at the most. Focus on your habit change for 30 days, then move on to the next.
  • Three MITs (most important tasks) per day and three per week. Constantly reviewing the tasks, having daily/weekly reviews with myself about the tasks that I have set.
  • If the task will take 2 minutes or less, just do it rather than adding it to your to-do list. If it will take more than 2 minutes, add it immediately to your to-do list to do later.
  • Keep flat surfaces clear. Never toss something on a countertop, table, desktop, bed, dresser top, coffee table, or the floor. If you do, catch yourself, and find another home for it. In fact, while you’re at it, clear off all these flat surfaces, tossing half the stuff and finding homes for the rest. Ahhh! Isn’t that nice? Who knew there was a desk under there?

Stealing the Network: How to Own the Box

  • You would not describe a criminal auto mechanic as simply a mechanic, and you shouldn’t do the same with a hacker, either.
  • I love doing disassembly. I don’t even miss the sleep for the first 20 hours or so. After that, I’m usually done (well, done enough), or I need to grab a few hours before I start again. I’m past 30 years old— too old to go 48 hours anymore.
  • An idea pops into her head when two formerly unrelated synapses made a sudden decision to join their forces: Douglas Adams should have made spaceships travel by 0day exploits instead of bad news.
  • Kiss a politically incorrect place of your choice on my body.
  • Dizzy hates flying around. Not that he is afraid of flying itself; that’s actually something he enjoys, but it’s the process of getting there.You’re standing in more lines than are required in some poor countries to get your food vouchers. Your stuff is taken apart several times, just to make sure you aren’t a terrorist. And onboard, it’s not a bit better. Just to make sure it doesn’t end there, you need to hunt down your luggage on arrival. It’s even worse on international flights, when you’re required to tell the immigration officer why you’re going to spend money in his country and why you sure as hell will leave again when your return flight is due. But the worst thing about all the airlines and airports is the unbelievable amount of lies. Every “Hope you enjoyed …” is a slap in the face of the passenger. Actually, you could die of starvation and rot away right there in front of the gold members lounge, and nobody would care.
  • He can’t believe it. After all, bszh.edu is not interesting computing-wise. Heck, if they had anything interesting on their boxes, Dizzy would know about it; well, and download it, too.
  • She does him the favor of putting together a Perl script that will automatically send the right requests when called with start and end times on the command line—much easier to use than grabbing the mouse or fingering around with the little rubber pointer control element on laptops, commonly referred to as clitoris.
  • “Do you accept this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife?”
  • “I do.”
  • “You may share your root password.”
  • “l1ve-n00d-girlz-unite!”
  • “su –l”

He calls these “The Ten Immutable Laws of Security.”They are:

  • Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
  • Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
  • Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
  • Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your Web site, it’s not your Web site any more.
  • Law #5:Weak passwords trump strong security.
  • Law #6: A machine is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.
  • Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key.
  • Law #8: An out-of-date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all.
  • Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn’t practical, in real life or on the Web.
  • Law #10:Technology is not a panacea.
  • The full list (with explanations for what each rule means) can be found at www.microsoft.com/technet/columns/security/10imlaws.asp.

As I Was Saying... (by Jeremy Clarkson)

  • ****By and large, the world seems to have sorted out most of its boundary disputes. Yes, there's still a bit of argy-bargy in the south Atlantic and the Palestinians would argue that their allotment is a bit meagre. But even in the former Yugoslavia new nations can play football against one another without having to dig a mass grave afterwards.
  • I'm constantly being hauled over the coals in the Daily Mail and in the Daily Star and the Mirror for all sorts of things. Calling Gordon Brown a one-eyed Scottish idiot. Saying public sector workers should be executed. Sparking fury with fox enthusiasts. I'm portrayed as an evil, racist, homophobic misogynist who goes through life stabbing baby badgers for fun. And I've worked out that it makes no difference. Taxi drivers still pick me up. People still watch my television shows. My books aren't remaindered for weeks; sometimes months. That's because the endless criticism is just a background hum.
  • Often when I am interviewing someone on Top Gear, the audience bursts into peals of laughter and I have no idea why, because I simply haven't heard what the person just said. My elder daughter, being a teenager, speaks at 5,000 words a minute, and while I know that some of those words are 'like' and 'I'm not even joking', the rest, I'm afraid, are just noises. It's like listening to a goose, most of the time.
  • This entire article: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/comment/columns/jeremyclarkson/article1387530.ece
  • You simply don’t know any more when you’ve passed from France into Belgium and the only way you know you’ve gone from Italy into Austria is because there’s no litter, or graffiti, or untidiness of any kind. It’s like you’ve gone from a Roman orgy into a Victorian lady’s underwear drawer.
  • I encountered a problem with this sort of thing recently while skiing with a charming Dutch family in the Alps. Keen to let them know that I paid attention to their ways and their culture, I described someone who had queue-barged us as a ‘swaffelaar’. It’s a word that has no equivalent in English because ‘swaffelen’ means ‘to bash one’s penis against the Taj Mahal’.
  • This is the great thing about small countries such as Norway. The chances are you were at school with the prime minister, and that you live next door to the chap in charge of transport. So if you run over a pothole on your way home, you can pop round and ask him to fix it. This means the politicians are truly accountable. They know that if they have taken all of your money, they had damn well better do a good job when it comes to spending it. Or you’re going to poke them in the eye at the supermarket next weekend.
  • I’ve never really bothered with cooking in the past because it would have meant using a recipe book. And as a man I can’t do that, for the same reason I can’t use instruction manuals or listen when someone is giving me directions; because it means admitting that someone out there knows something I don’t.

The Dictator's Handbook

  • Journalists, authors, and academics have endeavored to explain politics through storytelling. They’ll explore why this or that leader seized power, or how the population of a far-flung country came to revolt against their government, or why a specific policy enacted last year has reversed the fortunes of millions of lives. And in the explanations of these cases, a journalist or historian can usually tell us what happened, and to whom, and maybe even why. But beneath the particulars of the many political stories and histories we read are a few questions that seem to emerge time after time, some profound, some seemingly minor, but all nagging and enduring in the back of our minds: How do tyrants hold on to power for so long? For that matter, why is the tenure of successful democratic leaders so brief? How can countries with such misguided and corrupt economic policies survive for so long? Why are countries that are prone to natural disasters so often unprepared when they happen? And how can lands rich with natural resources at the same time support populations stricken with poverty?
  • Each explanation, each story, treats the errant leader and his or her faulty decision making as a one-off, one-of-a-kind situation. But there is nothing unique about political behavior.
  • After all, even if politics is nothing more than a game that leaders play, if only we learn the rules, it becomes a game we can win.
  • Knowing how and why things are as they are is a first, crucial step toward learning how to make them better.
  • The truth is, no two governments or organizations are exactly alike. No two democracies are alike. Indeed, they can be radically different one from the other and still qualify perfectly well as democracies. The more significant and observable differences in the behavior of governments and organizations are dependent on the absolute and relative size of the interchangeable, influential, and essential groups. The seemingly subtle differences between, say, France’s government and Britain’s, or Canada’s and the United States’s are not inconsequential. However, the variations in their policies are the product of the incentives leaders face as they contend with their particular mix of interchangeable, influential, and essential groups.
  • We must remember that labels like democracy or dictatorship are a convenience—but only a convenience.
  • [...] there are five basic rules leaders can use to succeed in any system:
    1. Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures.
    2. Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced.
    3. Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy.
    4. Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Remember, your backers would rather be you than be dependent on you. Your big advantage over them is that you know where the money is and they don’t. Give your coalition just enough so that they don’t shop around for someone to replace you and not a penny more.
    5. Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your coalition of supporters. If you’re good to the people at the expense of your coalition, it won’t be long until your “friends” will be gunning for you. Effective policy for the masses doesn’t necessarily produce loyalty among essentials, and it’s darn expensive to boot. Hungry people are not likely to have the energy to overthrow you, so don’t worry about them. Disappointed coalition members, in contrast, can defect, leaving you in deep trouble.
  • Even though [the democrats] generally provide a much higher standard of living for their citizens than do tyrants, democrats generally have shorter terms in office.
  • Dying leaders face almost as grave a problem. If essential backers know their leader is dying, then they also know that they need someone new to assure the flow of revenue into their pockets. That’s a good reason to keep terminal illnesses secret since a terminal ailment is bound to provoke an uprising, either within the ranks of the essential coalition or among outsiders who see an opportunity to step in and take control of the palace.
  • The sad truth is that if you want to come to power in an autocracy you are better off stealing medical records than you are devising fixes for your nation’s ills.
  • Good ideas that help the people are rarely the path to power in a dictatorship.

Countdown to Zero Day (by Kim Zimmer)

  • Although more than 12 million viruses and other malicious files are captured each year, only about a dozen or so zero days are found among them.
  • The truth was, Stuxnet appealed to him [Liam O'Murchu] because it was a huge adrenaline rush of a puzzle—a virus far too complex to be merely a tool for espionage, and far too sophisticated to be the work of mere cybercriminals. He just had to figure it out.
  • Cryptographer Nate Lawson's comments dripped with disdain when he wrote in a blog post that Stuxnet's authors "should be embarassed at their amateur approach to hiding the payload" and their use of outmoded methods that criminal hackers had long since surpassed. "I really hope it wasn't written by the USA," he wrote, "because I'd like to think our elite cybearweapon developers at least know what Bulgarian teenagers did back in the early 90s."
  • A top-notch zero-day bug and exploit could sell for $50,000 or more on the criminal black market, even twice that amount on the closed-door gray market that sold zero-day exploits to government cyber armies and spies. Either the attacker had an unlimited supply of zero days at their disposal and didn't care if they lost a handful or more, or they were really desperate and had a really good reason to topload their malware with spreading power to make certain it reached its target. Chien and O'Murchu suspected that both might be true.

Over the years, malware had gone through a gradual evolution. In the early days, the motivations of malware writers remained pretty much the same. Though some programs were more disruptive than others, the primary goal of virus writers in the 1990s was to achieve glory and fame, and a typical virus payload included shout-outs to the hacker's slacker friends. Things changed as e-commerce took hold and hacking grew into a criminal enterprise. The goal wasn't to gain attention anymore but to remain stealthy in a system for as long as possible to steal credit card numbers and bank account credentials. More recently, hacking had evolved into a high-stakes espionage game where nation-state spies drilled deep into networks to remain there for months or years while siletly siphoning national secrets and other senstive data.

But Stuxnet went far beyond any of these. It wasn't an evolution in malware, but a revolution. Everything Falliere and his colleagues had examined before, even the biggest threats that targeted credit card processors and Defense Department secrets, seemed minor in comparison. Stuxnet thrust them into an entirely new battlefield where the stakes were much higher than anything they had dealt with before.

  • Each time engineers would leave [Joe Weiss'] conference fired up with ideas about improving the security of their networks, they would run up against executives back home who balked at the cost of re-architecting and securing the the systems. Why spend money on security, they argued, when none of their competitors were doing it and no one was attacking them?
  • They all knew that Stuxnet was the job of a lifetime. "We understood this is the biggest story in malware ever," [Ralph] Langner recalls. "It was absolutely fantastic work. It was the best work that I have ever done and I'm sure I can't do any better."
  • Ralph Langner's assertion that Stuxnet was a precisiou weapon aimed at Iran's nuclear program must have caused a lot of consternation and panic in the halls of the White House and the Pentagon, as a plot that had been meticulously planned and executed over a number of years was slowly unraveling before their eyes.
  • You couldn't bomb a plant you don't know about, but you could possibly cyberbomb it. If Iran had other secret enrichment plants distributed throughout the country that used the same equipment and configuration as Natanz, a digital weapon planted in the computers of the contractors who serviced them all could spread from known facilities to the unknown ones.
  • The problem with using a cybearweapon, says one former CIA agent, is that "once it's out there, it's like using your stealth figher for the first time—you've rung that bell and can't pretend that the stealth figther doesn't exist anymore. So the question is, which air battle do you really want to use that stealth fighter for?"