Author: Matt

“The world is changing very fast…. Big will not beat small any more. It will be the fast beating the slow.”

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch, who’s been getting remarkably jiggy with the Internet and other hipster accoutrements since wedding a former TV personality half his age, The Guardian, 2 July 1999

“I think that any new technology that benefits society as a whole benefits the criminal element of that society…. [A]utomobiles cause a lot of crime.”

Jim Bidzos, vice chairman of Security Dynamics, arguing that an encrypted society is a polite society, ZDNN, 30 June 1999

“People have intellectual property on their sites, and they think our intention is to take that and use it for some other purpose rather than serving up Web pages and seling advertising.”

Yahoo production chief Tim Brady, on recent clarifications to Yahoo’s terms of service that disclaim any ownership of user-created homepages — just the right to republish, distribute, and modify them in just about any media Yahoo chooses, without permission or payment, The New York Times, 1 July 1999

“We didn’t have any interest in the business side. You know, the marketing things and the things that the guys that wear the suits and the ties figure out. We don’t care about that.”

Slashdot founder Rob Malda, explaining why he sold his news-for-nerds site to little-known Internet concern Andover.net, Wired News, 29 June 1999

“We aren’t techies or bankers. We’re ink-stained wretches. Then the Internet came along…. We’ve been able to keep Salon alive and independent. But you don’t read much about that.”

Salon.com editor-in-chief David Talbot, whose definition of independence apparently includes answering to a board dominated by a handful of venture capital backers, San Francisco Examiner, 27 June 1999