The Boy Who Could Change the World Read Online Free

everything. On the other, I heavily defend people’s rightto privacy. Of course, as you point out, keeping your privacy is hard because if you slip once, it’s out there forever.
    I’m not sure what to say to people who want to protect their privacy except be careful when you give out private information and think about where it could end up.
    When did you find your way toward the web?
    I’ve been using the web since the days of Mosaic, since I was a little kid. I still wish I had been there since Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, but I guess I was only 4 then, so it’s not all that unreasonable that I wasn’t. So that was probably ’94/’95. I think I wrote my first web page a couple years after that (’97/’98) and probably started programming database-backed websites around 1999. Actually, it must have been a little earlier, since my first db-backed website won an award in 1999. That was an interesting era.
    Tell us some things you’ve seen that made you think “This will be huge one day or another” on the web. Which turned out that way? Which ones are on their way? Which ones failed completely?
    Well, weblogs, wikis, wireless were widely well received. Database-backed websites have done well too, although I’m a little surprised there hasn’t been as much standardization as I thought.
    I guess I thought things like anonymous remailers and other crypto stuff would be more popular than it has, but there’s still time for that. File sharing sure came out strong, though. The Semantic Web is probably one to watch. And I think we’ll see a lot of interesting stuff with Voice over IP in the next year.
    In general, we’ll see everything move onto the Internet and, as it does, we’ll see it open up room for the little guy to compete. So newspapers moved onto the Internet, but that also gave everyone the chance to start their own newspaper. Directories moved onto the Internet, but with Google even the little guys can be in the directory. Same with encyclopedias (Wikipedia) and ads (AdSense). And, of course, at the same time, you open yourself up to easy copying of your work.
    So the same pattern has happened in a more forcible way to music, movies, television. TV companies may not like having their shows on the net, but they’re there, and stuff like Red vs. Blue is there to compete right alongside them. So, uh, if you’re a company that’s in the business of moving information around, I’d watch out. It’s one thing to say that copying music is wrong because it hurts the artists, but what will the telephone companies say when Voice over IP drives them out of business, completely legally? How will the Encyclopedia Britannica stop Wikipedia? You’re next! :-)
    One thing I’ve noticed while using open-source software or other free software is that it usually tends to have a very poor user interface. Since these guys are all out to beat Microsoft and other “bigco”s in their own game, why is no or little attention paid to the most important part of the software, the UI? UI designing standards are standards just as the other standards they embrace, right? Or is it all just laziness; to make the product work is enough?
    Well, for most of these programmers UI is hard, because they don’t understand it. They see things textually, not visually. The free software culture comes very much from the Unix culture, and Unix is very much expert-oriented. Experts don’t need “good UI”—they know exactly what to do already and they just want to be able to do it as fast as they can.
    This is related to the other problem, which is that free software programmers code mostly for themselves. And since they completely and intuitively understand the software, it doesn’t seem like the UI is bad to them—to them, it makes perfect sense. There are certainly attempts to fix this—GNOME has been great about