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Author: Hal Abelson
ISBN : B001BFL9H6
New from $13.99
Format: PDF
Download Free Download Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link
Every day, billions of photographs, news stories, songs, X-rays, TV shows, phone calls, and emails are being scattered around the world as sequences of zeroes and ones: bits. We can’t escape this explosion of digital information and few of us want to—the benefits are too seductive. The technology has enabled unprecedented innovation, collaboration, entertainment, and democratic participation.
But the same engineering marvels are shattering centuries-old assumptions about privacy, identity, free expression, and personal control as more and more details of our lives are captured as digital data.
Can you control who sees all that personal information about you? Can email be truly confidential, when nothing seems to be private? Shouldn’t the Internet be censored the way radio and TV are? Is it really a federal crime to download music? When you use Google or Yahoo! to search for something, how do they decide which sites to show you? Do you still have free speech in the digital world? Do you have a voice in shaping government or corporate policies about any of this?
Blown to Bits offers provocative answers to these questions and tells intriguing real-life stories. This book is a wake-up call to the human consequences of the digital explosion.
Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion [Kindle Edition]
- File Size: 2885 KB
- Print Length: 384 pages
- Simultaneous Device Usage: Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
- Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (June 6, 2008)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001BFL9H6
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #426,757 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
Free Download Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion
This collaboration between a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at M. I. T., the Chairman/CEO of Nevo Technologies and a Professor of Computer Science at Harvard U. is a broad overview of the internet. While fact dense, it is very easy to read and understand. Even though I have used computers since 1970 or so, and a desktop since 1984, and the internet since 1995, most of the details were new to me.
Starting backwards, a fine Appendix explains how the internet works, and how brilliantly it was engineered for international compatibility by broad agreement and with no governing body, for indefinite expansion in the future, and for robustness in delivering packets of data of all kinds around any damaged area with perfect accuracy. (I recalled that this last was part of a military requirement from over 30 years ago.) Near the end of the book, the history of telegraph, telephone, radio and television was given to show how some regulation was essential to avoid overload and overlap of messages, and control of content. From the beginning of the book, the difference between the internet and any of these old models was elaborated.
In case you are worried about being overwhelmed, fear not. The technicals are easy to understand and require no math ability. Well-drawn diagrams, photos and reproductions of web pages abound. There is a good index. Many references are given at the back by page number, which I normally regard as a cop-out, but here the exact phrase on a page for which the citation is backup is given. Many URLs for websites are given that looked useful and were new to me.
So from the beginning of the book the various impacts of the internet are explained. The magnitude of the messages sent and web pages available was shown to be staggering.