PR’s problems, 20 years later
I was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up...
Can’t lose, in a way
I grew up in New Jersey and New York, rooting for the Giants. (And, in the Namath era, the Jets too.) Then, after 20 years in North Carolina (mostly as a college basketball fan), I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years, and rooted for the 49ers there. One daughter lives in the Bay...
OpenID Connect Test Servers
Here are some experimental OpenID Connect server configurations:
https://connect-op.heroku.com/.well-known/openid-configuration
{
"version":"3.0",
"issuer":"https://connect-op.heroku.com",
"authorization_en...
Discovering Raditaz
Read here about Raditaz, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a competitor to Pandora. Some differences: unlmited skips, no ads, geo-location. I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig: Not...
Ancient present
Reality 2.0 was my original blog: a pile of stuff I wrote before there were blogs. All of it is old now, but some of it still rings new. Since Reality 2.0 is deep in the Searls.com basement, I’ve decided to surface some old pieces that might be interesting, for whatever reason. The one below was...
Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could...
My Letter to Senator Hatch in Opposition to PIPA
The Honorable Orrin Hatch
104 Hart Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Fax: 202-224-6331
Dear Senator Hatch,
I'm writing to express my opposition to the Protect IP Act (PIPA). I have a PhD in Computer Science, have taught Computer Science...
Numbers of Mass Distraction: Part 2
Some years ago, incensed by the jiggery-pokery of the “copyright industries”, I wrote a post seeking to expose the way they went about making the most outrageous claims when it came to the volume of illegal downloads prevalent. I described them as Numbers of Mass Distraction. It is clear that recent events surrounding SOPA do...
What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,...
Initial IETF JOSE Specs: JWS, JWE, JWK, JWA
The initial versions of the IETF JSON Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE) specifications are now available. They are: JSON Web Signature (JWS) – Digital signature/HMAC specification JSON Web Encryption (JWE) – Encryption specification JSON Web Key (JWK) – Public key specification JSON Web Algorithms (JWA) – Algorithms and identifiers specification They are refactored from the...
You Can Make SOPA and PIPA Irrelevant (But You’re Probably Too Lazy)
SOPA and PIPA are bad laws. And Clay Shirky's TED talk about why they're bad laws is great. But he gets the most important point wrong. Right at the end, he says there are two things you can do.
He says you can call your Congresspeeps, an...
No 2 SOPA
Today I’m in solidarity with Web publishers everywhere joining the fight against new laws that are bad for business — and everything else — on the Internet. I made my case in If you hate big government, fight SOPA. A vigorous dialog followed in the comments under that. Here’s the opening paragraph: Nobody who opposes...
