Expert insights. Personalized for you.
Just learned of The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates. This is in addition to the UK’s Coronavirus Bill 2020 , which is (as I understand it) running the show there right now. MORE
On the left is a photo taken with my trusty old (also much used and abused) Canon 5D Mark III. On the right is one taken by a borrowed new Sony a7Riii. Below both are cropped close-ups of detail. The scene is interior, illuminated by incandescent track lighting. It is not an art shot, though it does contain photo art by our good friend Marian Crostic , of whose Sony a7R she has kindly offered to let me take over. She has replaced it with an a7Riii like the borrowed one I used here.). MORE
What you see there is a cumulonimbus cloud rising to the north above Ranch 2 , a wildfire about fifteen miles east of here in the San Gabriel Mountains , just north of Asuza (one of too many towns to remember, in greater Los Angeles). MORE
A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google: The result was this: Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this: [link]. MORE
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. MORE
Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.†. Think about how hard that job is. MORE
On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered :::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was at the top of the bell curve, and they put me in the smart kid class. MORE
My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago. MORE
As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom , is doing very well. Hats off. But Zoom is also—correctly— taking a lot of heat for its privacy policy , which is creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech ). MORE
It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of Doctor Dave , my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk, whose nickname at the time was Czuko (pronounced “Chuck-o”). MORE
201 
On Quora , somebody asks, How can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and podcasts? Here’s my answer: It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio. MORE
Have you ever wondered why you have to consent to terms required by the websites of the world, rather than the other way around? Or why you have no record of your own of what you have accepted or agreed to? Blame the cookie. MORE
When some big outfit with a vested interest in violating your privacy says they are only trying to save small business, grab your wallet. Because the game they’re playing is misdirection away from what they really want. MORE
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. The greatest example of “gone” rock is what John Wesley Powell discovered in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon. MORE
Bits don’t leave a fossil record. Well, not quite. They do persist on magnetic, optical and other media, all easily degraded or erased. But how long will those last? Since I’ve already asked that question , I’ll set it aside and ask the one in the headline. MORE
So I ordered one of these yesterday… …and got a notice that said, That was to my building in Manhattan. I’m on the third floor, so I went down to the front, and saw it wasn’t there. MORE
On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars? MORE
One year ago exactly (at this minute), my wife and I were somewhere over Nebraska, headed from Newark to Santa Barbara by way of Denver, on the last flight we’ve ever taken. Prior to that we had put about four million miles on United alone, flying almost constantly somewhere, mostly on business. The map above traces what my pocket GPS recorded on various trips (and far from all of them) by land, sea and air since 2007. This life began for me in 1990 and for my wife long before that. MORE
For a few years now, T-Mobile has been branding itself the “un-carrier,” saying it’s “synonymous with 100% customer commitment.” ” Credit where due: we switched from AT&T a few years ago because T-Mobile, alone among U.S. MORE
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen ( @firstpersonpol ) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” ” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website. MORE
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end. MORE
The Web is a haystack. This isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the Web. Nor is it what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they invented Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web , which later became Yahoo. MORE
In Your favorite cruise ship may never come back: 23 classic vessels that could be laid-up, sold or scrapped , Gene Sloan (aka @ThePointsGuy ) named the Carnival Fantasy as one those that might be headed for the heap. MORE
I’m trying something new here, speaking instead of writing. Here it is: [link]. I recorded it last night while walking twelve thousand steps, briskly, on the deck of my house. Think of it as a kind of voice mail to readers. The topic I cover is one I’ve written about here; but I’m not going to provide any links—at least not yet. That’s because I want to see if what I’m trying to say comes across better in speaking than in writing. MORE
Since I’m done with fighting in the red ocean of the surveillance-dominated Web, I’ve decided, while busy working in the blue ocean (on what for now we’re calling i-commerce ), to bring back, in this blog, some of the hundreds of things I’ve written over the last 30+ years. MORE
John Prine and I are both from Maywood. Well, not the same one. His was in Illinois and mine was in New Jersey. So that wasn’t a connection. Instead it was just one of many small doors between souls with some common likes. One of those likes was country. MORE
As a follow-up to what I wrote earlier today, here are my own favorite podcasts, in the order they currently appear in my phone’s podcast apps: Radio Open Source (from itself). Bill Simmons (on The Ringer). Fresh Air (from WHYY via NPR). JJ Reddick & Tommy Alter (from ThreeFourTwo). MORE
163 
My post yesterday saw action on Techmeme (as I write this, it’s at #2) and on Twitter ( from Don Marti and Augustine Fou ), and in long from blog posts by John Gruber in Daring Fireball and Nick Heer in Pixel Envy. All pushed back on at least some of what I said. MORE
In Winter, the cap of dark on half the Earth is cocked to the north. So, as the planet spins, places farther north get more night in the winter. In McGrath, Alaska, at close to sixty-three degrees north, most of the day is dark. This would be discouraging to most people, but to Paul B. MORE
If the GDPR did what it promised to do, we’d be celebrating Privmas today. Two years after the GDPR became enforceable, privacy would be the norm rather than the exception in the online world. That hasn’t happened, but it’s not because the GDPR is poorly enforced. MORE
On Quora , somebody asked, Which is your choice, radio, television, or the Internet? I replied with the following. If you say to your smart speaker “Play KSKO ,” it will play that small-town Alaska station, which has the wattage of a light bulb, anywhere in the world. MORE
Our Christmas evening of cinematic indulgence was watching Wonder Woman 1984 , about which I just posted this, elsewhere on the Interwebs: I mean, okay, all “super” and “enhanced” hero (and villain) archetypes are impossible. Not found in nature. You grant that. MORE
The original Matrix is my favorite movie. Not because I think it’s the best. I just think it’s the most important. Also among the most rewatchable. Hear that, Ringer ? Rewatch the whole series before Christmas.). MORE
It bums me out that Gail Sheehy passed without much notice—meaning I only heard about it in passing. MORE
I think there are more reasons to believe in the Bucs than the Chiefs today: better offensive line, better defense, Brady’s unequaled Super Bowl experience, etc. But the Chiefs are favored by 3.5 MORE
130 
On Quora , William Moser asked , Would the KPIG radio format of Americana—Folk, Blugrass, Delta to modern Blues, Blues-rock, trad. & & modern C&W, country & Southern Rock, jam-bands, singer/songwriters, some jazz, big-band & jazz-singers sell across markets in America? MORE
The goal here is to obsolesce this brilliant poster by Despair.com : I got launched on that path a couple months ago, when I got this email from The_New_Yorker at e-mail.condenast.com: Why did they “need” a “confirmation” to a subscription which, best I could recall, was last renewed early this year? So I looked at the links. MORE
The antenna for KPCC/89.3. NPR, which turned 50 yesterday, used to mean National Public Radio. It still does, at least legally; but they quit calling it that in 2010. The reason given was “…most of our audience — more than 27 million listeners to NPR member stations and millions more who experience our content on NPR.org and through mobile or tablet devices — identify us as NPR.” ” Translation: We’re not just radio any more. And they aren’t. MORE
NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens —are hot s**t. Wikipedia explains (at that link), A non-fungible token ( NFT ) is a special type of cryptographic token that represents something unique. MORE
Is this the way you want your brand to look? Digital advertising needs to sniff its own stench, instead of everybody’s digital butts. MORE
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler , which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended. MORE
The best new phones come with the ability to shoot 108 megapixel photos, record 4K video with stereo sound, and pack the results into a terabyte of onboard storage. But what do you do when that storage fills up? If you want to keep those files, you’ll need to offload them somewhere. MORE
I wrote this fake story on January 24, 2005, in an email to Peter Hirshberg after we jokingly came up with it during a phone call. Far as I know, it was the first mention of the word “iPhone.” ” Apple introduces one-button iPhone Shuffle. MORE
I guess (though I don’t yet know) that we drive a bucket of lithium around in the battery our new hybrid Toyota. MORE
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 8, 2021
Passwords are hell. Worse, to make your hundreds of passwords safe as possible, they should be nearly impossible for others to discover—and for you to remember. Unless you’re a wizard, this all but requires using a password manager.†. Think about how hard that job is.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 2, 2021
On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars?
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 15, 2021
The Web is a haystack. This isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he invented the Web. Nor is it what Jerry Yang and David Filo had in mind when they invented Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web , which later became Yahoo.
Doc Searls
JULY 12, 2021
It seems fitting that among old medical records I found this portrait of Doctor Dave , my comic persona on radio and in print back in North Carolina, forty-five years ago. The artist is Alex Funk, whose nickname at the time was Czuko (pronounced “Chuck-o”).
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 9, 2021
The original Matrix is my favorite movie. Not because I think it’s the best. I just think it’s the most important. Also among the most rewatchable. Hear that, Ringer ? Rewatch the whole series before Christmas.).
Doc Searls
MAY 14, 2021
Have you ever wondered why you have to consent to terms required by the websites of the world, rather than the other way around? Or why you have no record of your own of what you have accepted or agreed to? Blame the cookie.
Doc Searls
MAY 7, 2021
I wrote this fake story on January 24, 2005, in an email to Peter Hirshberg after we jokingly came up with it during a phone call. Far as I know, it was the first mention of the word “iPhone.” ” Apple introduces one-button iPhone Shuffle.
Doc Searls
MARCH 27, 2020
As quarantined millions gather virtually on conferencing platforms, the best of those, Zoom , is doing very well. Hats off. But Zoom is also—correctly— taking a lot of heat for its privacy policy , which is creepily chummy with the tracking-based advertising biz (also called adtech ).
Doc Searls
MARCH 12, 2021
NFTs—Non-Fungible Tokens —are hot s**t. Wikipedia explains (at that link), A non-fungible token ( NFT ) is a special type of cryptographic token that represents something unique.
Doc Searls
JUNE 24, 2021
The best new phones come with the ability to shoot 108 megapixel photos, record 4K video with stereo sound, and pack the results into a terabyte of onboard storage. But what do you do when that storage fills up? If you want to keep those files, you’ll need to offload them somewhere.
Doc Searls
MARCH 16, 2021
On Quora , somebody asked, Which is your choice, radio, television, or the Internet? I replied with the following. If you say to your smart speaker “Play KSKO ,” it will play that small-town Alaska station, which has the wattage of a light bulb, anywhere in the world.
Doc Searls
MAY 29, 2021
If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way.
Doc Searls
MARCH 11, 2021
For a few years now, T-Mobile has been branding itself the “un-carrier,” saying it’s “synonymous with 100% customer commitment.” ” Credit where due: we switched from AT&T a few years ago because T-Mobile, alone among U.S.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 19, 2021
My parents (that’s them, Eleanor and Allen Searls) were married on 17 August 1946, seventy-five years and two days ago.
Doc Searls
MARCH 10, 2021
A few minutes ago I wanted to find something I’d written about privacy. So I started with a simple search on Google: The result was this: Which is a very very very very very very very very very very very very very way long way of saying this: [link].
Doc Searls
MAY 31, 2021
On the left is a photo taken with my trusty old (also much used and abused) Canon 5D Mark III. On the right is one taken by a borrowed new Sony a7Riii. Below both are cropped close-ups of detail. The scene is interior, illuminated by incandescent track lighting. It is not an art shot, though it does contain photo art by our good friend Marian Crostic , of whose Sony a7R she has kindly offered to let me take over. She has replaced it with an a7Riii like the borrowed one I used here.).
Doc Searls
MAY 4, 2021
As a follow-up to what I wrote earlier today, here are my own favorite podcasts, in the order they currently appear in my phone’s podcast apps: Radio Open Source (from itself). Bill Simmons (on The Ringer). Fresh Air (from WHYY via NPR). JJ Reddick & Tommy Alter (from ThreeFourTwo).
Doc Searls
MARCH 1, 2021
In Winter, the cap of dark on half the Earth is cocked to the north. So, as the planet spins, places farther north get more night in the winter. In McGrath, Alaska, at close to sixty-three degrees north, most of the day is dark. This would be discouraging to most people, but to Paul B.
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 17, 2020
The goal here is to obsolesce this brilliant poster by Despair.com : I got launched on that path a couple months ago, when I got this email from The_New_Yorker at e-mail.condenast.com: Why did they “need” a “confirmation” to a subscription which, best I could recall, was last renewed early this year? So I looked at the links.
Doc Searls
MAY 4, 2021
The antenna for KPCC/89.3. NPR, which turned 50 yesterday, used to mean National Public Radio. It still does, at least legally; but they quit calling it that in 2010. The reason given was “…most of our audience — more than 27 million listeners to NPR member stations and millions more who experience our content on NPR.org and through mobile or tablet devices — identify us as NPR.” ” Translation: We’re not just radio any more. And they aren’t.
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 27, 2020
When some big outfit with a vested interest in violating your privacy says they are only trying to save small business, grab your wallet. Because the game they’re playing is misdirection away from what they really want.
Doc Searls
OCTOBER 15, 2020
In Your favorite cruise ship may never come back: 23 classic vessels that could be laid-up, sold or scrapped , Gene Sloan (aka @ThePointsGuy ) named the Carnival Fantasy as one those that might be headed for the heap.
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 14, 2020
On Quora the question went, If you went from an IQ of 135+ to 100, how would it feel? Here’s how I answered :::: I went through that as a kid, and it was no fun. In Kindergarten, my IQ score was at the top of the bell curve, and they put me in the smart kid class.
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 15, 2020
If you listen to Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source of the latest Reality 2.0 podcast, you’ll learn that I was blindsided at first by the topic of Parler , which has lately become a thing. But I caught up fast, even getting a Parler account not long after the show ended.
Doc Searls
MAY 25, 2020
If the GDPR did what it promised to do, we’d be celebrating Privmas today. Two years after the GDPR became enforceable, privacy would be the norm rather than the exception in the online world. That hasn’t happened, but it’s not because the GDPR is poorly enforced.
Doc Searls
JANUARY 26, 2021
Just got a press release by email from David Rosen ( @firstpersonpol ) of the Public Citizen press office. The headline says “Historic Grindr Fine Shows Need for FTC Enforcement Action.” ” The same release is also a post in the news section of the Public Citizen website.
Doc Searls
MARCH 11, 2021
One year ago exactly (at this minute), my wife and I were somewhere over Nebraska, headed from Newark to Santa Barbara by way of Denver, on the last flight we’ve ever taken. Prior to that we had put about four million miles on United alone, flying almost constantly somewhere, mostly on business. The map above traces what my pocket GPS recorded on various trips (and far from all of them) by land, sea and air since 2007. This life began for me in 1990 and for my wife long before that.
Doc Searls
JUNE 22, 2021
So I ordered one of these yesterday… …and got a notice that said, That was to my building in Manhattan. I’m on the third floor, so I went down to the front, and saw it wasn’t there.
Doc Searls
JUNE 19, 2021
Since I’m done with fighting in the red ocean of the surveillance-dominated Web, I’ve decided, while busy working in the blue ocean (on what for now we’re calling i-commerce ), to bring back, in this blog, some of the hundreds of things I’ve written over the last 30+ years.
Doc Searls
MAY 15, 2020
In the library of Earth’s history, there are missing books, and within books there are missing chapters, written in rock that is now gone. The greatest example of “gone” rock is what John Wesley Powell discovered in 1869, on his expedition by boat through the Grand Canyon.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 17, 2020
What you see there is a cumulonimbus cloud rising to the north above Ranch 2 , a wildfire about fifteen miles east of here in the San Gabriel Mountains , just north of Asuza (one of too many towns to remember, in greater Los Angeles).
Doc Searls
JUNE 22, 2020
Remember the dot com boom? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. What does matter is that it ended. All business manias do. That’s why we can expect the “platform economy” and “surveillance capitalism” to end.
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 26, 2020
Bits don’t leave a fossil record. Well, not quite. They do persist on magnetic, optical and other media, all easily degraded or erased. But how long will those last? Since I’ve already asked that question , I’ll set it aside and ask the one in the headline.
Doc Searls
MAY 30, 2021
My post yesterday saw action on Techmeme (as I write this, it’s at #2) and on Twitter ( from Don Marti and Augustine Fou ), and in long from blog posts by John Gruber in Daring Fireball and Nick Heer in Pixel Envy. All pushed back on at least some of what I said.
Doc Searls
APRIL 14, 2020
Just learned of The Coronavirus (Safeguards) Bill 2020: Proposed protections for digital interventions and in relation to immunity certificates. This is in addition to the UK’s Coronavirus Bill 2020 , which is (as I understand it) running the show there right now.
Doc Searls
MAY 2, 2021
On Quora , William Moser asked , Would the KPIG radio format of Americana—Folk, Blugrass, Delta to modern Blues, Blues-rock, trad. & & modern C&W, country & Southern Rock, jam-bands, singer/songwriters, some jazz, big-band & jazz-singers sell across markets in America?
Doc Searls
SEPTEMBER 28, 2020
It bums me out that Gail Sheehy passed without much notice—meaning I only heard about it in passing.
Doc Searls
AUGUST 4, 2020
Is this the way you want your brand to look? Digital advertising needs to sniff its own stench, instead of everybody’s digital butts.
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 21, 2021
On Quora , somebody asks, How can the radio industry stay relevant in the age of streaming music and podcasts? Here’s my answer: It already is, if you consider streaming music and podcasting evolutionary forms of radio.
Doc Searls
FEBRUARY 7, 2021
I think there are more reasons to believe in the Bucs than the Chiefs today: better offensive line, better defense, Brady’s unequaled Super Bowl experience, etc. But the Chiefs are favored by 3.5
Doc Searls
JUNE 27, 2020
I’m trying something new here, speaking instead of writing. Here it is: [link]. I recorded it last night while walking twelve thousand steps, briskly, on the deck of my house. Think of it as a kind of voice mail to readers. The topic I cover is one I’ve written about here; but I’m not going to provide any links—at least not yet. That’s because I want to see if what I’m trying to say comes across better in speaking than in writing.
Doc Searls
APRIL 8, 2020
John Prine and I are both from Maywood. Well, not the same one. His was in Illinois and mine was in New Jersey. So that wasn’t a connection. Instead it was just one of many small doors between souls with some common likes. One of those likes was country.
Doc Searls
DECEMBER 26, 2020
Our Christmas evening of cinematic indulgence was watching Wonder Woman 1984 , about which I just posted this, elsewhere on the Interwebs: I mean, okay, all “super” and “enhanced” hero (and villain) archetypes are impossible. Not found in nature. You grant that.
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