The rise and fall of personal computing

Timeline of web browsers

Browser Wars

by Victor Starostenko, Kate Hsiao, Peter Nguyen

Last January, the New Zealand government took down Megaupload, a file-sharing site founded by Kim Dotcom, since the site was found guilty of disseminating copyrighted materials and committing racketeering. A year after the closing, Dotcom launches a new version of the site called Mega, which now encrypts files on users’ computer before they are uploaded, so files on Mega will not be able to be read by anyone, including government officials when conducting investigations.

Continue reading →

Watch people racing Pennyfarthing bicycles in 2010. Crash at the very end of the 1:33 clip illustrates their precariousness and what it looks like when someone makes a “header.”

On those who consciously resist adopting a widespread technology – an article in the New York Times on The Facebook Resisters. On one of today’s in class topics – the transition of a technology from increasingly widespread diffusion to near ubiquity.

In case you didn’t see the link buried in the ‘class participation’ page, here are 203 relevant links that we are continually collecting over at delicious.com.

GSIs:
Stuart Geiger, Office Hours: Tuesdays 1-3pm, 1st floor alcove, South Hall
Jen Schradie, schradie [AT] berkeley [DOT] edu, Office Hours: Thursdays 12:30-2:30, 1st floor alcove, South Hall

Prof. Jenna Burrell, Office Hours: Tuesdays 4-6pm, Room 312, South Hall

As I mentioned in class – here’s the article by Mark Weiser where he coins the phrase “ubiquitous computing.” This is probably as pure an example of an article that “presents a concept/vision” as we will find, though there are elements of an “argumentative essay” in this piece as well.

The Computer for the 21st Century (1991), Mark Weiser, Scientific American

If you still haven’t signed up to be on call yet there are a few sessions left:

INFO 203 On Call Sign Up

All three readings for Thursday can be downloaded from the course website. Subsequent readings will only be available in the course reader which you can purchase at Copy Central on Bancroft.

• Duguid and Brown, Social Life of Information (intro and chapter 1) [Not In Course Reader]
• Ackerman, M. (2000). The Intellectual Challenge of CSCW: The Gap between Social Requirements and Technical Feasibility. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3), 181-205.
• Winner, L. (1999). Do Artifacts Have Politics? In D. MacKenzie & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The Social Shaping of Technology. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press: 22-40.