Internet

"It wasn't our intention to shut down the Web site. Our intention was to remove the documents."

"[Wikileaks] could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act."

"Wikileaks' silencing was sought by antidemocratic governments worldwide - including China, whose censors work mightily to block all access to the site. Wikileaks' plug was pulled, ironically, (not in China) but by a federal judge in San Francisco."

"The Government holds that Microsoft is illegally using the near-monopoly of its Windows operating system to dominate the market for software used to view the World Wide Web. In addition, its lawsuit says the company is doing the same with Internet commerce. The Government insists that traditional antitrust safeguards must be enforced to prevent a dystopian situation in which consumers one day find themselves utterly dependent on Microsoft for all things digital -- not just one product or one industry but all the facets of life that are rapidly being transposed to cyberspace."

"Satya Nadella"

"Steve Ballmer"

"Bill Gates"

"One of the most painful things in our culture is to watch other people repeat earlier mistakes. We're not fond of Bill Gates, but it still hurts to see Microsoft struggle with problems that IBM solved in the 1960s."

"While we have seen great success, we are hungry to do more. Our industry does not respect tradition — it only respects innovation. This is a critical time for the industry and for Microsoft. Make no mistake, we are headed for greater places — as technology evolves and we evolve with and ahead of it. Our job is to ensure that Microsoft thrives in a mobile and cloud-first world."

"We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data, we don't participate in it."

"Microsoft has had two goals. One was to copy the Mac and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet. And over the course of the last 10 years, Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost. They were able to copy the Mac because the Mac was frozen in time. The Mac didn't change much for the last 10 years. It changed maybe 10 percent. It was a sitting duck. It's amazing that it took Microsoft 10 years to copy something that was a sitting duck. Apple, unfortunately, doesn't deserve too much sympathy. They invested hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into R&D, but very little came out They produced almost no new innovation since the original Mac itself."

"Perhaps the most successful global monopoly is Microsoft, which has succeeded in gaining global market power not only in PC operating systems but in key applications such as browsers. [...] Microsoft's monopoly power leads not only to higher prices but to less innovation. [...] The failure to develop a global approach to global cartels and monopolies is yet another instance of economic globalization outpacing political globalization."

"What is different about Microsoft is its distance from Silicon Valley. Rather than trading jobs for a better deal down the block, employees tend to stay put. With only a 7 percent turnover rate, Microsoft will hire 3,000 recruits this year. The insularity helps to reinforce a monolithic culture in which employees cultivate an almost fanatical devotion to their work and to Mr. Gates, whose combative cross-examinations on minute details are as legendary as his accessibility by E-mail to the lowliest employee. ("Even reasonably cynical people get starry-eyed over Bill," observed one of Microsoft's newer managers.)"

"Don't bother trying to create a better commercial desktop OS -- it doesn't matter how hard you try, how many engineers you throw at the problem, how much money you spend, or how many years you put into it. Microsoft owns that space and, worse, the public is totally complicit with that fact. People will not stop using Windows. It is a losing battle."

"Throughout the industry, the quality assurance departments are treated poorly, paid very little, and treated as replaceable cogs"

"Our head of HR has taken personal accountability and resigned from GitHub yesterday morning, Saturday, January 16th,"

"I think most people either forget or don't know that Microsoft only hires people with I.Q.'s well over 130."

"I thought I would learn faster, and it's a very complicated company. There's a lot of tradition there, and I just wasn't a part of it."

"'They're operating in a mindset that's outside the tautological knowledge structure of most of the people who run the country. Microsoft is getting all this flak for not paying attention to Washington. Why should they? Gates has created an operating system that's become the central nervous system for an entire global culture."

"Media Piracy's core thesis is simple: people in the poor world don't pay for software, games, music and movies because these goods cost too much. Whereas a DVD here might cost you an hour's wage, the same DVD in a poor country could cost a day's work, or a week's, or even more. In poor markets where legitimate media costs the same (in relative terms) as it does in rich markets, the amount of licit purchasing is about the same. But that's not what the media companies say they believe. In their official narrative – bolstered by a long line of studies with undocumented methodologies and assumptions – is that poor countries simply lack a "culture of copyright" that can be reinforced through education and enforcement. Karganis and co have much to say on this score. They document the way that the airwaves and newspapers in poor countries are dominated by the official, Hollywood view of piracy, presented uncritically and at length. The message is even integrated into the school curriculum through official teaching units produced by American entertainment conglomerates and given to teachers to be delivered verbatim to their students. On the enforcement side, entertainment companies often secure a kind of rough, streamlined justice that allows them to race to the head of the justice line, pushing past criminal and civil cases of much larger magnitude. They get their own police forces tasked to them, and their own special high-grade punishments that treat offences against them as inherently graver than offences against local firms and people."

"I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans in jail for downloading music. It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail. Here in America we create new opportunities out of adversity, not punitive laws, and we should look to new technologies like Apple's new Music Store for solutions. This way, innovation continues to be the hallmark of America. It is the fans that drive the success of the music business."

"If they succeed in destroying our books or even making many of them inaccessible, there will be a chilling effect on the hundreds of other libraries that lend digitized books as we do. This could be the burning of the Library of Alexandria moment—millions of books from our community's libraries—gone."

"Media piracy has been called "a global scourge," "an international plague," and "nirvana for criminals," but it is probably better described as a global pricing problem. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the price of a CD, DVD, or copy of Microsoft Office is five to ten times higher than in the United States or Europe. Licit media goods are luxury items in most parts of the world, and licit media markets are correspondingly tiny. Industry estimates of high rates of piracy in emerging markets- 68% for software in Russia, 82% for music in Mexico, 90% for movies in India-reflects this disparity and may even understate the prevalence of pirated goods. Acknowledging these price effects is to view piracy from the consumption side rather than the production side of the global media economy. Piracy imposes an array of costs on producers and distributors- both domestic and international- but it also provides the main form of access in developing countries to a wide range of media goods, from recorded music, to film, to software. This last point is critical to understanding the trade offs that define piracy and enforcement in emerging markets. The enormously successful globalization of media culture has not been accompanied by a comparable democratization of media access - at least in its legal forms. The flood of legal media goods available in high-income countries over the past two decades has been a trickle in most parts of the world."

"[D]omestic piracy may well impose losses on specific industrial sectors, but these are not losses to the larger national economy. Within a given country the piracy of domestic goods is a transfer of income, not a loss. Money saved by consumers or businesses on CDs, DVDs, or software will not disappear but rather be spent on other things-housing, food, other entertainment, other business expenses, and so on. These expenditures, in turn, will generate tax revenue, new jobs, infrastructural investments, and the range of other goods that are typically cited in the loss column of industry analyses. For our part, we take seriously the possibility that the consumer surplus from piracy might be more productive, socially valuable, and or job creating than additional investment in the software and media sectors. We think this likelihood increases in markets for entertainment goods, which contribute to growth but add little to productivity, and still further in countries that import most of their audiovisual goods and software - in short, virtually everywhere outside the United States."

"P2P continues to account for a high percentage of total bandwidth utilization in most poarts of the world, and infringing files represent, by most accounts, a very high percentage of P2P content (Felton 2010; IFPI 2006). ISP-traffic monitoring firm ipoque put P2P use in 2009 at roughly 70% of total bandwidth in Eastern Europe, 60% in South America, and slightly lower percentages in northern and southern Europe (Schulze and Mochalski 2009). US rates are generally estimated at 25%-30%, reflecting not so much lower utilization of P2P as higher utilization of streaming video services such as YouTube and Hulu."

"Recent IIPA reports cite rates of music piracy in excess of 90% in China, India, Mexico, and Brazil. Less and less of this traffic takes place on the street, as physical piracy shifts toward the narrower stock and higher margins of DVDs."

"Child pornography is great. Politicians do not understand file sharing, but they understand child pornography, and they want to filter that to score points with the public. Once we get them to filter child pornography, we can get them to extend the block to file sharing. We must filter the Internet to win over online file sharing. But politicians don’t understand that file sharing is bad, and this is a problem for us. Therefore, we must associate file sharing with child pornography. Because that’s something the politicians understand, and something they want to filter off the Internet."

"If there's anyone out there involved in illegal movie piracy ... don't do it. Take a good look at these people. These are the people you're stealing from. Look at them! Face what you've done! There are women here who can barely afford enough gown to cover their breasts."

"There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture."

"Napster affected rock CD sales disproportionately when it first came out in the late ’90s, because rock was what a lot of college students were listening to, and they were early MP3 adopters (and early pirates.) They figured out quickly how to download MP3s for free, so rock sales were the first to decline. It would take a while before piracy/the Internet/MP3s/downloads would cut into other genres, because it took old people a long time to figure out the Internet."

"Better access to information increases farmers' effectiveness in agriculture. And fintech [financial technology] can make transactions more effective and less corrupt."

"High-speed internet has a positive impact on poverty reduction."

"Things have been going in the wrong direction -- more surveillance, more control of everything we do on the net and also stricter copyright laws -- that's the wrong course for Europe. We want to set a new one."

"Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly."

"I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating."

"NPR's coverage of the post-web era describes a "great online awakening" driven by an explosion in the number of internet-connected people. "The result is more chaos than you can imagine and literally thousands and thousands of websites," Rich Dean reported for NPR in 1996. By the end of 1995, more than 24 million people in the U.S. and Canada alone spent an average of 5 hours per week on the internet."

"In conclusion, computer-mediated social interaction technologies have facilitated significant changes in how people relate to members of their personal and professional social networks. For example, physical distance or proximity between network members is becoming increasingly less important. Thus, as Meyerowitz (1985) observes, “Where one is has less and less to do with that one knows and experiences. Electronic media have altered the significance of time and space for social interaction” (p. viiii). These changes in social interaction channels also create new challenges for parents. Growing concerns about children's safety online, for example, stem from the increasingly permeable physical boundaries that once separated families from the larger community. Meyerowitz (1985) notes that “the walls of the family home, for example, are no longer effective barriers that wholly isolate the family from the larger community and society. The family home is now a less bounded and unique environment” (p. viii). As computer-mediated social interaction becomes more widespread, we can expect that physical location will become an increasingly less salient predictor of with whom we interact. Hampton and Wellan (2000) make a similar point, observing that “whatever happens, new communication technologies are driving out the traditional belief that community can only be found locally” (p. 195). Clearly, communications scholars will need to adapt communication theories to evolving technologies and changing contexts in order to understand the uses and effects of computer-mediated social interaction technologies."

"Young (1998) reported that dependent users mainly utilized the social and interactive functions of the Internet, whereas nondependents used the Internet more for information gathering. Similarly, Young and Rogers (1998) note that problematic or abusive Internet use involved primarily socially interactive uses, which also appear to be associated with low self-esteem. In another study, Morahan-Martin and Schumacher (2000) found that the social aspects of Internet use consistently differentiated those with more Internet use problems from others, as the former were more likely to use the Internet for seeking emotional support, talking with others, and playing highly socially interactive games. LaRose, Lin, and Eastin (2003), based on uses and gratifications as well as operant conditioning theory, argue that when individuals have received repeated expected grafifications (or rewards) from Internet use over time, their Internet use behavior can turn into a conditioned habit (operant conditions). If these individuals subsequently preoccupy themselves with this habit due to deficient self-regulation of their Internet use behavior, they can go one step further and isolate themselves from society to the extent of becoming addicted to Internet use."

"In terms of communicating social support, Burleson and Goldsmith (1998) argue that the type of conversational environment most conducive to effective comforting requires reducing the distressed other's self-presentational anxiety. Caplan and Turner (in press) propose that establishing such an environment might be easier and more effective if the conversation is computer-mediated. They further assert that computer-mediated social support interactions might be especially helpful at creating a conversational context that is less socially risky than its FtF counterpart. For example, Walther and Boyd (2002) contend that computer mediated discussions of stigmatized topics are likely to be perceived as less threatening than their FtF counterparts due to their increased anonymity and increased social distance, which facilitate better stigma management. These findings that reflect how CMC social support affords its users reduced social stigma and increased anonymity were further validated by other similar studies (Gustafson et al., 19999; McKenna & Bargh, 1998; White & Dorman, 2001; Wright, 2002). Online health applications are discussed further in chapter 12 by Whitten (this volume). Caplan and Turner (in press) also point out that computer-mediated emotional support allows support seekers who have limited mobility to participate in groups that they would be less willing, if at all able, to attend if offered in an FtF format (Braithwaite, Waldron, & Finn., 1999; White & Dorman, 2001; Wright, 2002). Along a similar line, online conversation partners are not bound by proximity and geographical barriers; individuals can communicate with a seemingly limitless number of diverse people who would be difficult or impossible to locate in most FtF cases (Barrera, Glasgow, McKay, Boles, & Feil, 2002; Braithwaite et al., 1999; Finfgeld, 2000; Finn, 1999; Sharf, 1997; Walther & Boyd, 2002; White & Dorman, 2001; Wizelberg, 1997; Wright, 2002)."

"[I]n one study comparing FtF to CMC romantic relationships, Cornwell and Lundgren (2001) found that CMC partners engaged in greater misrepresentation during self-presentation than their FtF counterparts. They attributed the difference in levels of misrepresentation to a lower level of relational involvement among CMC romantic partners, compared to those using an FtF channel. In another study, Joinson (2001) reported that levels of spontaneous self-disclosure were greater in CMC exchanges than in FtF interactions when there was a heightened sense of private self-awareness and a lower sense of public self awareness associated with CMC exchange. Other researchers have reported that, compared to FtF interactions, CMC exchanges include more direct and more intimate uncertainty reduction strategies (e.g., greater proportions of direct questions and self-disclosing statements; Tidwell & Walther, 2002), along with less detailed and more intense impressions of communication partners (Hancock & Dunham, 2001). As Rabby and Walther (2003) explain, “The development of relationships online may simply be temporaraly retarded in comparison to FtF relationship development” (p. 148). Empirical evidence supports this hypothesis. In one study of CMC and impression formation, Walther (1993) found that members of FtF groups developed impressions of one another more quickly than their CMC counterparts. But after a 6-week period, the CMC groups formed impressions that were as well developed as those exhibited by the FtF participants."

"In addition to research on CMC and relational communication, in general, other studies have examined therapeutic relational communication online. There is a good deal of evidence suggesting that online support and therapeutic discussion groups are an important positive aspect of the Internet (e.g., see Caplan & Turner, in press; Walther & Perks, 2002; Wright, 1999, 2000, 2002; Wright & Bell, 2003). To date, researchers have not firmly established whether participation in online emotional support has therapeutic value that is less than, equivalent to, or beyond that obtained via FtF support (Finfgeld, 2000; Owen, Yarbough, Varga, & Tucker, 003; Walther & Boyd, 2002). The few studies that have compared computer-mediated and FtF psychotherapy sessions have reported that participants in both groups exhibited relatively equivalent outcomes (e.g., Cohen & Kerr, 1998; Day & Schneider, 2002; for a review, see Rochlen, Zack, & Speyer, 2004). To advance understanding of online emotional support, Walther and Parks (2002) recommend that researchers begin to develop explanations for why CMC might be particularly effective as a support medium."

"The social identification model of deindividuation effects (SIDE) proposed that, despite offering fewer interpersonal cues (e.g., Culnan & Markus, 1987), CMC is not necessarily impersonal; rather, impression formation online results in more socially categorical, rather than personal, impressions of others (Lea & Spears, 1992; Reicher, Spears, & Postmes, 1995; Spears & Lea, 1992, 1994; Spears, Postmes, & Lea, 2002). Similarly, social information-processing (SIP) theory (Walther, 1992, 1993; Walther & Burgoon, 1992; Walther, Loh, & Granka, 2005) also takes issue with the notion that CMC is necessarily impersonal; instead, SIP theory suggests that online interpersonal relationship development might require more time to develop than traditional FtF relationships."

"Researchers have sought to understand and explain the core differences between computer-mediated and FtF communication processes (for reviews, see Caplan 2001, 2003; Hancock & Dunham, 2001; Ramirez, Walther, Burgoon, & Sunnafrank, 2002; Riva, 2002; Walther, 199,, 2004; Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Walther & Parks, 2002). Among the earliest theories to emerge was the cues-filtered-out perspective (Culnan & Markus, 1987; also see Walther & Parks, 2002), which suggested that some forms of CMC are less personal than FtF activity because of the reduced number of contextual and nonverbal cues available in text-based online social interaction. The cues-filtered-out perspective asserts that the diminished available cues available in CMC create a heightened sense of anonymity, which leads to a more impersonal communication exchange than is present in FtF interaction. As Ramirez and Burgoon (2004) note, however, researchers have moved away from early perspectives focusing solely on cue deficits, toward more sophisticated theories that consider the cognitive and behavioral mechanisms people use to compensate for the lack of cues available in text-based CMC. One particularly influential theoretical perspective that describes how CMC and FtF processes differ is Walther's (1996) hyperpersonal communication perspective. According to Walther, interpersonal CMC can become hyperpersonal because it affords message sender a host of communicative advantages over traditional FtF interaction. Compared to ordinary FtF situations, due to the reduced number of available nonverbal cues, a hyperpersonal message sender has a greater ability to strategically develop and edit self-presentation, enabling a selective and optimized presentation of oneself to others (Walther, 1996, Walther & Burgoon, 1992). This process then allows senders to selectively control the quantity, quality, and even validity of personal information available to other participants (e.g., age, race, physical appearance, sex), to form idealized impressions of their partners and, consequently, engage in more intimate exchanges than people in FtF situations (Tidwell & Walther; 2002; Walther, 1993, 1996 Walther & Burgoon, 1992)."

"The Internet has made me very casual with a level of omniscience that was unthinkable a decade ago. I now wonder if God gets bored knowing the answer to everything."

"The utopian vision of an open, reliable, and secure global network has not been achieved and is unlikely ever to be realized. Today, the internet is less free, more fragmented, and less secure."

"Imagine being able to communicate at-will with 10 million people all over the world. Imagine having direct access to catalogs of hundreds of libraries as well as the most up-to-date news, busi-ness and weather reports. Imagine being able to get medical advice or gardening advice immediately from any number of experts. "This is not a dream. It's internet."

"Only 12 years ago the networks were fragmented, today the Internet unites the world."

"The Internet is like a vault with a screen door on the back. I don't need hammers and bombs to get in when I can walk in through the door."

"Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive Threatens the Internet"

"There are some people who imagine that older adults don't know how to use the internet. My immediate reaction is, "I've got news for you, we invented it.""