Jim Nielsen reflects on the concept of blank pages and the "This Page Intentionally Left Blank" project, which aimed to reintroduce quiet, empty spaces on the web. He created his own intentionally blank page as a deliberate act of creativity and quietness in an age of generative AI and overcrowded online spaces.
Background
- Jim Nielsen is a web developer and blogger who writes about the craft of building websites, often focusing on simplicity, intentionality, and pushing back against modern web complexity.
- "This Page Intentionally Left Blank" is a real print-world convention: technical manuals and legal documents sometimes had empty pages due to printing constraints, and the phrase assured readers nothing was missing. A now-defunct website (preserved on the Internet Archive) repurposed this idea for the web, offering intentionally blank pages as a quiet respite.
- Blake Watson is another web developer; his "blank" page post inspired Nielsen's.
- The piece is a playful commentary on AI web crawlers: by creating a blank page that is nonetheless full of meaning (an intentional pause), Nielsen contrasts human intent with the mindless consumption of content by bots that scrape everything indiscriminately.
- The mention of robots.txt — a standard file telling crawlers which pages to ignore — is a recurring theme in Nielsen's blog; he deliberately doesn't use one, meaning bots crawl his entire site.
Troy Hunt compares deleting personal data from the internet to removing pee from a swimming pool—once it's in, it's nearly impossible to eliminate. Data spreads across multiple broker sites, and opt-out processes are often ineffective and require constant repetition.
Troy Hunt discusses the difficulty of permanently deleting personal data from the internet, using the analogy of trying to remove urine from a swimming pool—once data is out there, it's nearly impossible to completely erase. He explains the technical and practical challenges of data removal, including backups, archives, and third-party copies.
Op 25 juni gaf de auteur de openingstoespraak van de Surf Privacy en Security Conferentie, waarin hij opriep tot concrete actie op het gebied van digitale autonomie. Ondanks meer dan 50 eerdere presentaties over dit onderwerp, werd nu voor het eerst een volledig transcript gemaakt.
In this weekly update recorded from a riad in Marrakech, Troy Hunt discusses the futility of trying to delete personal data from the internet, comparing it to removing urine from a swimming pool, while covering recent data breaches.