Bibliograph

Blown to bits, your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion, Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis

Type

Label

Blown to bits, your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion, Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis

Language

eng

Bibliography note

Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-346) and index

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

Blown to bits

Nature of contents

bibliography

Oclc number

192042303

Responsibility statement

Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry Lewis

Sub title

your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion

Summary

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. Do 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? This book offers provocative answers to these questions and tells intriguing real life stories; it is a wake-up call to the human consequences of the digital explosion

Table Of Contents

Digital explosion: why is it happening, and what is at stake? -- Naked in the sunlight: privacy lost, privacy abandoned -- Ghosts in the machine: secrets and surprises of electronic documents -- Needles in the haystack: Google and other brokers in the bits bazaar -- Secret bits: how codes became unbreakable -- Balance toppled: who owns the bits? -- You can't say that on the Internet: guarding the frontiers of digital expression -- Bits in the air: old metaphors, new technologies, and free speech

Classification