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Mitch Kapor: business in the lotus position, second life and electronic frontier

"Information wants to be free, this is true in any field, not only in information technology."

Today marks 66 years old Mitchu Kapor .


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Lotus


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The program was named 1-2-3, as it included 3 elements: tables, graphs and basic database functionality.

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Lotus 1-2-3 was first introduced on January 26, 1983, and during the first year the sales of the program surpassed the most popular VisiCalc table program. In the following years, it was the most used spreadsheet program for the IBM PC. Its popularity was largely determined by the inerrancy and high speed of work; the latter was achieved due to the fact that when writing the program the assembly language was widely used, and the output to the screen worked without using relatively slow BIOS calls by directly writing to the video memory. [ Wikipedia ]



Second life


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Second Life is a three-dimensional virtual world with elements of a social network that has over 1 million active users. The project was developed and launched in 2003 by Linden Lab .

Linden Lab was founded in 1999, with the aim of creating a revolutionary way of sharing knowledge in three-dimensional space. At the beginning of his work on Second Life, Rosdale's (founder) goal was to show an effective model of virtual society and economics. He himself notes that he is not building a game, but a new country (“I'm not building a game. I'm building a new continent”)


Second Life Characters

The turnover of money as a result of transactions between individual users in 2009 amounted to 450 million dollars.

On the relationship in Second Life filmed " Are you there? "


But perhaps humanity is not yet ready for “depth” and permissiveness, as described by Lem and Lukyanenko.


Electronic Frontier Foundation


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The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed in July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitchell Kapor in response to a series of actions by law enforcement agencies that made it clear that the authorities have significant information about new forms of communication on the Internet and that there is a need in enhancing the protection of civil liberties on the Internet.

The scope of activities includes support, development and development of new bills to protect the civil rights of users, strategies for general censorship requirements, community diversity, etc. There is due to the contributions of individual members and corporations [1]. The EFF participated in lawsuits against organizations such as the US Department of Justice, Apple, Sony BMG and AT & T.

EFF promptly helps the “snowdens” with lawyers, and even (according to rumors) promised support to SciHub.

EFF have established the Pioneer Awards for leaders in the field of freedom and breakthrough technologies in IT. Its co-founder, Mitch Kapor, was awarded in 2005.

Also, the EFF has a premium for large prime numbers. In 2009, they paid $ 100,000 for " 2,43112609 -1".

Useful article: Self-defense against listening .

Startups and geniuses search


“Geniuses are evenly distributed across the zip code, but the possibilities are not.”
("Genius is evenly distributed by zip code but opportunity is not")

A key factor, Kapor highlights diversity, and in support of his words, he allocated $ 40 million to invest in support of the initiatives of women and other IT “minorities”.



“Creating startups is now so simple, in a sense, that we often confuse two things:“ How far can we go on the first day of the journey ”and“ How long will the entire ascent to the top of the mountain ””

Mitch considers Wikipedia The Next Big Thing in IT .

“I think that in Silicon Valley they do not understand the whole power of Wikipedia, how it works and what opportunities it opens, including for business. Wikipedia has a great way to compile collections of information on any topic. This technology is easy to apply to any other tasks. ”

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/313904/


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