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The Future of the Internet

Jonathan Zittrain

The First computer worm 1988. It was traced back to a guy named Robert Morris who was trying to count the number of computers connected to the Internet (at the time there were about 60,000 of them). But the program was so badly coded it wound up drastically slowing down every computer it infected. He got a $10,000 fine but didn't get kicked out of Harvard. He and some friends later started a dot.com company which was bought by Yahoo! for $4 million in 1998, and he finished up as a tenured professor at MIT.

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Dutch town of Drachten experimented with the removal of road signs. Counter-intuitive but a dramatic improvement in road safety. Drivers were forced to pay more attention to what they were doing - more communication and more eye contact

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Lesson is - maybe we need standards, not rules. The more we are regulated, the more we worry about the letter of the law rather than the reasons behind it. Difference between self-interest and common interest.

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Jumbo Wales originally started with the Boomis engine in 1996 to help people search for porn. He used some of the ad proceeds to start Nupedia, which was an encyclopedia with articles by commissioned experts.

Wikipedia very similar to the Dutch traffic expt: standards not rules. Neutral Point of View, ignore rules that get in way of building a great encyclopedia. Wiki software made the price of a mistake low, because automatically tracks mods and edits. A discussion page alongside each main page where you can explain and justify changes.












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