But in reviewing our interactions, the best way for me to honor Barlow's memory is to dust off our first joint publications, a 1995 position paper on the future of electronic commerce one with deep echoes to today's crisis of confidence in Internet businesses and how they collect and use customer information.
As I reported earlier this month, one group of security experts has even suggested that advances in math research could make those standard encryption techniques useless in just five years (see "Math Advances Raise Prospect of Internet Security Crisis").
The United States needs a strong federal standard for the reporting of Internet security crises to regulators and consumers, and Google's case highlights a gap in the rules that states already have.
This crisis has also seen the integration of Internet technology that will better prepare the Red Cross and other relief agencies for the next disaster.
David Weinberger, a friend of Mr Sifry's with his own online herd, is stranded in Barcelona, and believes that in a time of international crisis, the internet failed almost utterly.
Soon there was a debate about the nature of editing and journalism and so, as ever, in a time of international crisis, the internet was now three times removed from the main story, discussing its own workings rather than the world outside.
In Uruguay around the early 2000s, the country was in the middle of an economic crisis, broadband internet connection was virtually nonexistent and there was an overall lack of understanding of how the internet actually worked.
Although it is too soon to understand the full implications of these changes, they appear to have introduced a crisis of trust in the evolving Internet governance institutions and a growing rejection of the status quo and current distribution of power.
He points out that during the financial crisis of the summer of 1998, the leading Internet stocks fell an average of 50%.
The disclosures, moreover, have caused a crisis of public trust in the internet itself, and the corporations and technical experts that currently run it.
