Slashdot Mirror
The Second Generation Internet
Yo: This is the first of a series which will alternate between my columns and your responses. The talk will also go on in Threads. The duration of this topic can be as long - or as brief - as you want, entirely up to you. I'll post a column of representative e-mail responses. If you don't want to be quoted or ID'd, please say so in your messages.
For a generation of believers -- hackers, open-source programmers, MP3 and DVD adherents -- the Internet's most central ideology has been promoting a certain kind of freedom.
The Net has never been quite as accessible as many of its most passionate residents would like to believe. Many people can't afford it, others don't have the technological skills to use it well. Still, it is unquestionably freer than any other element of American culture.
In fact, the Net is so free it threatens, even traumatizes, institutions that have long clung to their prerogatives and to political and cultural power - journalism, industry, education, politics, the law, medicine.
This freedom is, to an enormous degree, a matter of accident and architecture rather than politics or ideology. The founders of the Net-a coalition of academics, engineers, early hackers and researchers - designed the Net and its protocols to be equally open to anyone with the right technology.
No medium had ever been designed so generously, casually or freely. In fact, the Net's architecture and protocols, as currently constructed and used, may be the most important model of free speech and equal access to information in history, certainly since the U.S. Constitution was adopted. (As a point of comparison, consider television, a medium intended to be open but quickly commercialized, and almost completely co-opted, by a handful of greedy media moguls, working the full co-operation of federal legislators and regulators.)
There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.
Programmers are no longer technicians working at the margins of society. Like engineers before them, they are now, like it or not, among the principal architects of the world's most ascendant subculture. Issues like the Net's freedom, intellectual property and the flow of information and ideas rest in their hands, rather than in politicians or pundits.? The Net is well into its second generation, and it's changing.
Computing analysts and legal scholars increasingly believe that despite revolutionary advances like OS, the Net is moving away from its founders' vision. Although there's no single unifying architecture for cyberspace, the first-generation Internet more than fulfilled the early hackers insistence that information wants to be free. More information wants to be freer than anybody imagined.
But this has triggered growing political, cultural and economic conflicts, all likely to worsen in the coming years. Government is moving to establish Internet law, as in the Microsoft trial -- something it never bothered to do before. Companies battle to establish digital footholds. Media and cultural institutions - the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, the recording industry - demand legal measures to curb the Net's freedoms, fearing they undermine intellectual property, private content, and the marketing of products, information and culture, and the nature of capitalism itself.
Of course, almost almost everything about the Net, including the recent ascension of open source into a significant economic and cultural phenomenon, challenges the way hierarchical institutions have always operated. It has from the first. In the past few years, though, an entirely new kind of corporatist culture - shaped by behemoths like Microsoft and now AOL/Time-Warner - has come into being with resources, reach and power beyond any corporation before them.
These companies are all targeting the Internet as a primary source of profitability and growth. Not one of them - with the possible partial exception of IBM - has embraced or even flirted seriously with an open source model for doing business.
Microsoft, the inspiration and nearly-universal bete noir of the hacker/open source movement, is a stumbling giant now. But its legacy, Microsoftism, is thriving. It includes proprietary ideas about technology, a desire to dominate markets, a passion for mediocrity, an impulse to stifle individuality and competitive creativity. Call this new space The Corporate Internet, as an e-mailer named Gaeltact suggested.
Many of the architects of this evolving, second generation Internet come not from academe or engineering but from companies. They're beginning to build a different brand of architecture, focused on encryption, tracking software, closed spaces, patents and copyrights, and boundaries around intellectual property. The arrest of a Norwegian teenager for allegedly violating DVD software copyrights two weeks ago was a deliberately much-publicized warning, a symptom of these growing tensions. So are the recording industry's massively-funded efforts to develop powerful encryption technologies to thwart MP3 users and its growing legal confrontations with college and other music-dispensing Web sites. This is just a preview of many more conflicts to come.
Net and legal scholars like Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig argue that the new architects will build in much greater levels of control. That is, in many cases, their mission. Traditional practices of capitalism and corporations depend on maintaining walls, on clearly-defined notions of content and property. The news on Slashdot, C-Net, Wired News and other techno-media, therefore, is increasingly about lawsuits, about efforts to stop the distribution of so-called intellectual property and block the spread of innovative software, about defining turf and collecting money.
Because so few non-geeks grasped the significance of the Internet early on, government officials, regulators, corporate executives and educators ignored it, allowing its architects and users to experiment and innovate. Now that everyone wants a piece of the action, the portents are troubling.
Education, journalism, business and politics are all highly constricted, not only by legal and economic concerns but by increasingly complex and volatile social pressures: the rise of a politically-correct ethos in public communications, encroachments on depictions of sex and violence. No newspaper will ever challenge the notion of God or challenge the fundamental structure of government and commerce.
In a sense, the architects of the Internet built a structure and space that enjoys a far stronger First Amendment that the framers of the Constitution provided (or that exists in most other countries, since the Net transcends the United States). As Lessig wrote, "Nations wake up to find that their telephone lines are tools of free expression, that e-mail carries news of their repression far beyond their borders, that images are no longer the monopoly of state-run television stations but can be transmitted from a simple modem."
Theoretical anonymity, de-centralized distribution, countless points of access, the sudden irrelevance of geography, sophisticated tools of encryption - these and other features of the Internet protocols made it virtually impossible to control speech on the Internet.
But Lessig adds, "there is no reason to believe that this initial flash of freedom will not be short-lived."
Lessig, along with high-tech journalists like Simson Garfinkel ("Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century," from O'Reilly), argues that new advances in technology, especially software, threaten both free speech and privacy. Marketers, medical institutions and insurers, and individual companies are gathering staggering amounts of data about individuals, students and employees.
This may shape up as one of the bitterest political struggles of the next generation, as an empowered army of technologically - advanced Netizens, programmers, geeks and nerds struggles to preserve privacy and the free nature of the Net, using tools most of us haven't begun to imagine. Some accessible examples of this experimental new architecture are weblogs (www.camworld.com); Slashdot's moderating sytem and Everything, a system (www.everything2.com) in which users can create nodes of information that link to one another -- almost like a neural communications system.
The issue really lies in the hands of the people who frequent sites like this one. Technology is volatile, fluid and inherently unpredictable. It often moves beyond technics and has broader social implications - Linux for example.
So this is an effort to talk about the second generation Internet. The idea, for anyone who wants to participate, is to begin to explore the kinds of ideas, software and hardware - the next generation of Internet architecture - that might preserve the original ideals and free nature of the Net and establish some broadly held rights and values.
This is virgin turf. As Lessig points out, the Net has taken conventional ideas about individual liberty and taken them farther than they've gone before. Some of the best guidelines might come from the recent and not so recent past. The GPL (General Public License: www.GNU.org), the open source programming license, has become a significant public document. This idea could be taken farther, and broadened. We could choose to do business only with sites and companies that subscribed to new understandings about freedom, openness and privacy.
Consider the ideas that predate primitive workstations with early computers. Or go back to the European cities of the eighteenth century. The philosophers of the Enlightenment undertook - without the means to communicate quickly with one another, let alone the rest of the world - a strangely relevant, eerily familiar program of secularism, humanity, and freedom. Their idea of freedom, as outlined by the historian Peter Gay, took a number of different forms: "freedom from arbitary power, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom to realize one's talents, freedom of aesthetic response, freedom, in a word, of moral man to make his own way in the world." The Enlightenment took as its motto Emmanuel Kant's at-the-time radical "Sapere Aude" - Dare to Know. It's a shame none of them got to see the Net. Thomas Jefferson wrote passionately about a new kind of democratic culture in which ideas moved freely all over the globe. Ironically, many of these visions have come to life on the Net more powerfully than anywhere else.
This kind of discussion has at least two dimensions: First, what rights and freedoms to people want to preserve? And second, what kind of architecture - software and hardware -can do for this Internet generation what the Net protocols did for the last one?
The boundaries, length and nature of this discussion are up to you. You can take these starting points or reject them, add your own, change course, flame away, or ignore the conversation completely, in which case it will automatically vanish. Part two will be a representative sampling of e-mail, and of course, the conversation continues below on Threads.
And please juggle a live gernade. Kisses.
The Internet at one time used t be a useful source of informations, no its nothing but a goddamned mess.
Blame it on the browser, which:
a) clogged the pipes with crap and
b) make it "user friendly" ie - opened the net up to dumb turds.
I blame the decline of the internet (and I'm dead serious) entirely on Apple. They made everyone go gaga over GUIs and if Steve Jobs had stayed in his damn hippie commune or whatever Doonsebury zone he came from we'd still be using TEXT damnit TEXT and not that friggin' mouse and stuck in the basement all lonely because PCs would be a plaything for nerds but HEY at least be could share porn and warez (d00dz) without paying for it a ads ads ADS ADS THAT ALL THE FREAKING NET IS ANYMORE MORE AND MORE DAMN ADS!
CLICK HERE! BUY THIS! LOOK AT MY TITS! COMMERCE!
What the hell ever happned to the free exchange of information? The only thing free on the net now is 1) crap and 2) ads. AOL MS Time Waren they all suck.
tecno-savvy Netizens etc etc etc.
JonKatz writes: "programmers are... the principal designers of the world's most ascendant culture" and then follows up by describing The Net as "freer than any other element of American culture". Yes, it's that old conflict between "world" and "American" coming up again. Which is it, Jon?
Questions like those being discussed here are of international importance, and Slashdot is a truly international forum. Let's not limit the discussion to what the impact is on the US.
You're almost as big a troll as Katz himself. Congratulations.
Jon Katz,
Please go run into a naked and petrified Natalie Portman head first.
Thank you.
Yo: This is the first of a series
Yo? oohhhh dear, somehow the vision I had of Katz didn't really include the word "Yo".
The last time I heard a whiny old white dude saying "Yo", I looked up and MTV had started rapping at me. And that was pretty damn painful shit, too.
"Yo". Good Christ, can't a man smoke a quiet rock of crack without being bugged by these journalists in their skin-tight stonewashed denim and ponytails, trying to come over hip like Nas and dirty like Snoop?
"Yo". Yo Katz you ho, get ya writin out of my face an don't pollute my place or I hit you wit da bass and leave you writhin like you covered in Mace. Your shit is stone wack, homie, an don't fergit it, cause you ain't down wit it. Boyee.
Now I think we can all agree that that was rather embarrassing. Yo.
"yo". The leper's fucking bell of the modern idiot. Leave it alone, man.
The width of my underwear band is about 1". It's 30" long, too, in case you're interested.
You dumb turd, you. Get over here and give me a hug!
people like to be free. People also like to feel safe. the history of the world is tied up in this conflict. The desire for safety leads us to create institutions which will create safety by limiting freedom. The now safe but unfree people tear down to old institution in their desire for freedom. It's the basic dynastic cylce theory. I think it could apply to the net. If we are censored we will not stand for it but rather abandon it and move on to a new media.
TH1S 1Z J0N K4TKTZ AND EY3 W00D LYKE 2 SAY THAT EYE F1ND THIS ARTICLE TOBE BUZZNUTTGGER LAM04BUTTDARTT I LUVE NATOLIE PORTMAN111 4EVER!!
heh
Sorry, the Net is only meant for Americans, not the whole world. Oh, but that's what you were saying wasn't it. Narrow minded jerk.
Hey, someone forgot to moderate this post to funny.
Without these freedoms the Internet is dead
Prove it. Explain your reasoning. Why will B follow from A? Just saying it doesn't make it so.
Heh heh, it's not so. You're full of shit. For 99.9% of users, the web is a slightly interactive TV set, and nothing more. The features that make it interesting frighten them. Remove those features, and they'll love you for it.
They can share ideas and even technolgy.
A good example of an idea: Spelling.
A good example of technology: A spell-checker.
Can somebody tell that fucking moron Katz what "ascendant" means? PLEASE?!
To ensure that material is inaccessible in places where it is illegal (such as DeCSS, free thought, MP3s, etc.), the next incarnation of IP should have 8 or 9 bits to define the country of origin of the packet so that nations can decide
what's best for their citizens and filter out packets from evil places. Further, to protect children, another 3 bits in every packet should carry an MPAA style rating of the content. If you are against this then you must support
traumatizing kids and child pr0n, etc... you pervert. Also a bit in the IP header should indicate wheather the packet contains copyrighted or patented material so software can implement the mandatory measures necessary to block
piracy or saving, reproducing, etc., the packets in any way, from being used in a manner other than the copyright/patent holder intends. And packets should be able to be optionally encrypted with a secret proprietary algorithm to
make them 100% secure and uncrackable. Naturally, all reverse engineering of these measures should also be illegal and punishable by $10e6 in fines, 99 years in jail per count, siezure of all land, property, assetts, computers, etc. and
imprisionment and fines to all relatives and friends of the perpatrator... just in case. Special programmer internment camps will be set up in areas of high risk for violations to accept the potentially large numbers of initial violators to
these new measures, such as Silicon Valley, etc. Maybe have their minds surgically altered so they can never reveal their ill gotten copyright/patented knowledge. And just like as is in airports with bomb threats, mere discussion of
circumvention methods or ideas regarding these new IP security measures will be tantamount to the real crime and receive the same punishment. These are serious thoughtcrimes.
Ya mein Furher!
We shall destroy Goldstein!
Kill Him!
Kill Him!
Kill Him!
Kill Him!
Kill Him!
Kill Him!
*disolved into random senless ranting about harming golstein*
Well you know what! If I really wanted to teach the people who did this a lesson in a big way I would be a little meanuver that I call the person without anything to loose. See that is the most dangerous type. If you threaten all the programmers then perhaps they can (since they will be supposedly dead anyway; or are these "internment" camps going to all these people to just by "accident" disspear) just take out your little Big Brother regime. First thing I would do was to create a deadly biological agent that I would covertly administer to say the entire town of said capital city. With all the administrative officials drawing their water/air/food from the same sources it becomes trivial to force the offending governemnt to it's knees. You see we *can* reverse this little plague *evil grin* however it's going to cost you. What's that you say you don't deal with programmers? *mock shocked look* well too bad better just dig your own grave and start to lay down in it on the steps of your government complex!!!!! *evil cackling grows to fever pitch* *fade to black*
Open standards is the most important one.
What about having laws that forbid making proprietary standards in fields where open ones exist?
Open standards is the most important one.
What about having laws that forbid making proprietary standards in fields where open ones exist?
Of note on the networked-freedom issue is UUNet's extortion of adult-content provider CEN. UUNet has blackholed CEN's IP blocks, even after CEN moved to a different provider (thus cutting CEN off from UUNet's 30% of the US internet). To get back in UUNet's good graces? Simple. CEN has to sign an agreement making UUNet their exclusive provider. Read this at http://www.lukeford.com/
I can see it now, where the government and fat cat buisness owners control the internet. Where the only bastion of free information are underground networks (LAN, a few WAN), that allow dialup access similiar to BBS's. If the government and buisness have their way this _is_ what is going to happen to the internet, I am certain. Many good men would probably die try to protect their networks and the freedom of information. It is time for us ask what we are going to do to protect the internet, the information!
The future is in our hands, but only if we're willing to fight for it.
The vast majority of the people don't give a stuff about "the internet" per se, all they are concerned about is "what can I used it for to help me with my life", or something approximating that desire.
Therefore, think about what people want to do, why they want to do things, and what things they _can't_ achieve today, but they would probably want to achieve tomorrow.
Under our current system we have no legal claim to the music, videos, software, books and whatnot that we own. They are in many respects given to us for a fee by a corporation for use that corporation will allow. My copy of Win2k for example does not belong to me, it belongs to Microsoft.... I just license it. I don't actually have a legal claim to even the physical cd. We must restructure our system so that fair use is restored and taken to a new level. Once you buy a product such as software, music, movies, etc it should belong to you. The company should lose all claim to it as the company would say a hammer, a tv, your house after you pay off the mortgage. I for one am sick of this notion that anyone against IP "protection" is a socialist. Rather most are libertarians. We realize that most IP is a restraint on free speech, technological advancement and the right to the pursuit of happiness that our founding fathers said was so important to the human soul. A company certainly has a right to a trademark, for it protects the company's good name. However there is no reason why a copyright should be availible for only 10 years before it becomes public domain or why a patent should last longer than 1 or 2 years if it is a technology patent. The IP system that we have now is an abomination, it is not what the founding fathers wanted. They wanted a system that protected TRULY UNIQUE ideas, not someone's idea on how to sell goods online or the inferior encryption of DVD's which is a derivative of another's work anyway.
that is just evil and sick, i dont care how much you dislike katz, that is just sick.
Blah blah tech-savvy blah blah freedom blah blah constitution blah blah disenfranchised blah blah blah blah blah Netizens blah blah information wants to be free blah blah blah blah blah controversial blah blah blah rights online blah blah.
The freedom you have won't be lost, but it will be the secret underground organisation beneath the high street with its blissfully unaware shoppers. Sorry.
Don't be an idiot. Ford wants its employees to be comfortable with computers because damn near all of Ford's equipment is computer based. They are having a tough time finding qualified people and their existing staff is often computer phobic. (Older workers tend to distrust and fear technology since they did not grow up with it.) Ford is not trying to hijack anyone's privacy, at least as far as I can tell. They are just trying to get a blue collar work force comfortable with computers so they do can use them at work. Think of this in terms of Ford getting workers to train themselves for free. Everyone benefits.
Check out the MPAA's view on this issue - I think you'll find it a bit surprising!
"My second answer to the "software" question would be free Intenet access. At the present, most free acess providers are limited in the OSes they support (Windows NT or 9x). " I think you are missing a very import point here. ALL of the free providers, ask you to tell them everything. They are going to track every move you make on the net - exactly the opposite of what the whole article was all about!
This will be possible (and probable) when IPv6 is in full use
What kind of cheap $3 crack is Katz smoking ?
RFC 762 from 1980 would seem to suggest he is about as wrong as it is possible to be.
The following internet options are defined:
CLASS NUMBER LENGTH DESCRIPTION
----- ------ ------ -----------
0 0 - End of Option list. This option occupies only 1 octet; it has no length octet.
0 1 - No Operation. This option occupies only 1 octet; it has no length octet.
0 2 4 Security. Used to carry Security, and user group (TCC) information compatible with DOD requirements.
So it appears that Katz's assertion is in fact totally wrong, which makes one wonder about the quality of the rest of the article.
Obviously I didn't read any further than this totally obvious error, as my time is too valuable.
Sneh.
"Because so few non-geeks grasped the significance of the Internet early on, government officials, regulators, corporate executives and educators ignored it."
Um, the Internet was DEVELOPED by the government (ARPA) and educators. Wtf is this crap????
Do you know what democracy means? I don't think so. Rulers or presidents or other kind of imperators are everytime opposite to the idea of democracy. Even if they are electet. (By the way: hitler was electet by over 90% of the german population. Did this make him a good democratic rooler?). America is the land of the free? Well...
You want web sites that contain information and no ads? Then DO IT.
The web is what you make of it.
seriously. Why the fuck would you want them to stay ahead of the crackers?
Do you as a consumer not like to have the advantage? I sure as hell do. The "industry" steps on the vast majority's rights therefore they deserve whatever happens to them and quite frankly they're all richer than fuck anyways. It's about time the wealth was spread around more evenly and fairly.
>>Corporations fear the internet. > Again, can we have an example? Yeah... sure.. here is one. The whole MPAA vs DECSS thing... Do you think this is really about some kid in Norway who knows some people that wrote some little program that can decode DVDs? If you do, I have a bridge to sell you... The MPAA is scared as hell that the people making movies will find a better way to distribute them and in order to keep this from happening, they are seeking to maintain absolute control over all of their products. You can use the RIA's fight against MP3.com as another example. MP3.com may have just come up with a good solution to distributed music digitally over the Internet. One that could, given time, completely eliminate physical media as a means for distribution of music. The RIA isn't going to let this happen and is fighting as hard as they can to stop it. In truth, many corporations and companies that deal in physical media are scared of the Internet and I think you will begin to see a whole lot more lawsuits like the two afformentioned in an attempt by these companies to make the Internet less free so they can continue doing bussiness as usual.
alangrimes@starpower.net (too lame to login)
The problem of government snooping and censorship of the internet does concern me. While I'm not a privacy nut as I figure that once you figure out that I'm a human being any dirty little secret I might have could easily be derived from that single axiom. I do worry about being able to choose what software I use and that the protocols it runs are open spec. (I use WFW 3.11) Also I have seen a lotta creepy shit go through congress/the FCC (IE the V-chip) that I like not. Also noting that "modem backdoor" that was proposed years ago. Now these days they seem to be going after the routers. This means we will need to do one of several things.
The first is to revive UUCP and transmit stuff the old way, (that is your system will autonomously connect via direct modem to other systmes on the net and synchronise files on a pre-set timetable). Ofcourse this means that mail/news you send today won't even get tranmitted to the next host on the bangpath for 6-12 hours.
We can go whireless. If we somehow manage to escape FCC regulation then we will be able to have some sembelance of todays net but with no privacy and little security.
An alternative is to set up a line of sight "lasernet" that is put a laser in your attic window and aim it at your friend's reciever. This would be perfectly private though only moderately reliable, You would have to buy a laser and target set for each node on the net.
Other more outlandish solutions include launching a "flying Penguin" satelite which would orbit the earth every 60 hours and would allow anyone with the right equipment to bounce stuff to anyone. Another solution that is even more expensive would be to set up our own "undernet"* or "freenet" that is a 100% undergound alternative to the internet that is keept a strict secret from all governments and companies. What you would need to do is install a second modem on your machine and connect to your USP (undernet service provider). On the homefront it is essential that a 100% open (no secrets) PC is made available with a nice simple lightweight OS like DOS (NOT LINUX!!!).
*Yes I am aware that there is an IRC network by this name.
Uh huh huh, he said "virgin." -Mmm, yeah.
And expect the 21st centry Shakespeare to write the subject line of this post. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it...
Boy you have a way of mashing all the issues up.
Banning child molesters does not automatically lead us down a slippery slope. Refusing to differentiate between good people and bad people does, though. It leads down a slippery slope where nothing is allowed to be good or bad.
And I am sorry. child molesters are bad.
As to your question: "Who is going to make the decision?"- WE are. ALL OF SOCIETY makes those decisions, and there are courts and public forums where such issues get resolved.
I'm trying to figure out why in each section of your comment, you talk about unrelated 'classes' of people. "mentally unstable", "extremely elderly", "child molester"... What a swamp of confusion you try to make it.
This site may not be suitable for visit at work. While what the above poster is saying may be entirely accurate, I stopped as soon as I saw the "you must be 18 to enter" warning.
But we have an architectural decision to make: Do we create a network which allows us to easily censor, or not? If it is easily censored, we can get rid of the child molestors, but we give future dictatorships the ability to censor political views. If content on the network is difficult to censor (Eternity service, etc) then we will be stuck with criminal content, but we also make things a lot more difficult for criminal governments. It's definitely a decision we need to think through...but given that governments killed 170 million of their own people in the 20th century, I tend to think we should be cautious about what abilities we give them.
Before you get your panties all wedged, take a
deep breath, then go read the IETF drafts from
the Network Address Translation Working Group
about the reasons for doing NAT with IPv6.
It ain't the number of bits in your address that
takes away your liberties, buckwheat.
It's interesting that you had to pick a made up country name, to find a place you were certain US lawyers wouldn't be able reach you in.
the problem I see, is that the broad internet, or the internet 2 how katz calls it, will not be the place of a new DEMOCRACY, we may be hoping for. the old internet was the most democratic place ever built, and it WORKED.. until business and the government and the lawyers came and started playing their games.
it will still work for the techies in the future, but i doubt it will evolve into a broad political instrument of the masses (instead it will grow into a broad media-overkill for the masses).
how can we make sure, that anyone with an important idea will be actually HEARD? [by writing in CAPS??].
slashdot really is a start here. we can start campaigns, that are heard all over the world (you read about etoys, DeCCS, etc. even in swiss local newspapers).
can we start a global democracy. can we fill the VACUUM that is left by politic nations being ran over by global corporate powerhorses?
hehe... i remember a SF story concerning the idea of an alien coming to earth w/pics of his swingers club. and the question arose: do pictures of jelly-based creatures copulating constitute pornography? :P lawrence
The routing (bits) Ill take... The extra (bits) Ill fake!
Katz is a little bot housed at MIT's AI program. The program observes major news stories and cross-references the feed with the output on Slashdot. The bot then picks the most frequently used terms (geek, open source, linux, DeCSS) for the week, and proceeds to compose a free-form essay, and dumps the essay as "jonkatz@slashdot.org".
This explains several things:
-The bot could never participate within a thread without exposing itself (ala Elisa of yore);
-The bot can appear to have some knowledge of the subject, until you actually read one or more of the posts in depth;
-it explains how Columbine relates to Slashdot;
-it explains how riots in Seattle relate to Slashdot;
-amazon.com CEO man of the year. jonkatz dumps an essay about corporate greed. Coincidence?
-DeCSS author arrested. jonkatz dumps another hefty tidbit about freedom. The grassy knoll, anyone?
-Time and AOL merge. jonkatz laments about the loss of privacy.
This is all a big psychology experiment. jonkatz is a nice little piece of software. OK, joke's over. You evil scientists can take away its posting privileges, now. Come back when it's out of beta.
Wonder what katzbot 2.0 will type?
-Improved ability to have and stick to a point;
-conciseness, 'nuff said;
-improved knowledge base to make jonkatz actually seem like it knows something;
-fuzzier logic modules;
-open sourced, so we can all have little katzbots;
-more refined cross-referencing, to keep only the most relevant of the irrelevant news as "inspiration" for another katzdump.
I can't wait, can you?
A few semi-random points: 1. Don't mistake advancements in technology for advancements in human nature. We are essentially the same brutish creatures which only recently emerged from the dreggs of the earth. However, one of the more interesting aspects, imo, of the internet phenomenon is the role it could play in human evolution (long term). Remember that old theory of punctuated equilitbrium u learned in 9th grade bio class? Consider the point that for a great number of people, the pace of this tech revolution is likely outpacing their ability to cope. Hence the dramatic rise in depression, and isolation in our society. Survival of the fittest? 2. Looks to me like nothing is really *secure* on the internet no matter how hard u try to protect it (encrypted or otherwise). The question is what are companies and (more to the point) governments, permitted to do with the information they collect. This is more a matter of law and not technology. I wouldn't be surprised to see a grass roots information privacy amendment campaign emerge over the next decade (is there already one?). 3. If you want to know why the gov't freaks out about encryption exports, school yourself about WWII and find out exactly how large of a part information security and our ability to intercept and decipher foreign communications played in our victory. 4. Information is not an end in and unto itself. What matters is what one accomplishes with that information. As a sidenote to this, concerning the distinction someone made earlier about *factual* information, I often wonder if there is there is some intrinsic value to the *truth* that inherently outweighs the oft blissful state of ignorance. Is the end-game knowledge or hapiness? 5. It's all about bandwidth. 6. As a nation we (the US) have largely foresaken causes (cept money and land). nuff for me... -T
Ummmmm
Ummmmm > I'm not gonna even begin to get into what is wrong with that statement on a factual basis... IF Galileo and his kin were around today, they would probably be drowned out by the deafening banter of the self-proclaimed pseudo-geniuses that populate the internet today. -T
I want to have a web site that is something that I can truely be proud of and to make sure I feel a sence of accomplishment out of. I can't do that now. I can't actually get much out of any "free" access to such resources (most of them are just jokes). Dude, there are dozens of web hosting sites out there that will allow anyone to put up a site for free. If you can create a site worth looking at, you can put it up somewhere, guaranteed. If you have a slow connection, it just takes a bit more time. If you want a fast connection, get a cable modem. $40 a month gets me 384k uploads and over 1Mbit/sec downloads.
Ok, someone fess up, I know someone out there has a list of all the cities with broadband (some form or another, dsl/cable/etc?) access... stop being so damn greedy and post it! I wanna know where to move so I, too, can be a Low Ping Bitch! oh, BTW, the greedy little snots who made up and are in the RIAA and MPAA should be drug out to the street and shot, communist style... like the way our country is run most of the time now. BTW, I live in the HUSA, Hypocritical, United States of the Asshol, erm America
That was fucking beautiful man! But seriously folks, there is a system called the BBS that allows us to move any information that we want to move, and it belongs to the users. I will admit that the content and use of the BBS system does fall under regulation by law, but not by corporate edict.
You need more friends to call you! Or, if you want, hook a PC up to that phone line and get a better use out of it if it's annoying you that much. Two-thirds of the world's population can't afford a phone line, so who's "rich" now?
Really just being able to passively look at the internet and all those big shiny windows with all their fascinating stuff isn't something that I like to do. I want to truely create. I want to run an IRC server a MUD server an http server and several others. I want to run the slash code. I want to have a web site that is something that I can truely be proud of and to make sure I feel a sence of accomplishment out of. I can't do that now. I can't actually get much out of any "free" access to such resources (most of them are just jokes).
So set them up. Quit whining.
That really isn't so hard. Yes I am cheap and until I actually want to shell out cash for a better one I would sure be appreciative of actually seeing some miraculous technology fixing the problem that I may have. What is rapidly happening is that linux and it's apps are getting resource heavy. I am constantly being bombarded with reasons that people upgrade PCs.
You sound like you're more interested in running X applications than in doing what you said you wanted to go do above. You can do all those things on a 486 and a modem line. Want X? Yes, you'll need more computer if you use a "fancy" window manager. Who needs X for a server, though?
In conclusion I say that in fact the internet is a medium that was designed with the sole purpose of allowing elites to communicate (military, DoD, Echelon, university departments and such), connects computers via extremely expensive bandwidth (ever try to actually afford one of those nifty dedicated connections which actually allow you to have a life with linux and friends), host expensive web sites (hell I can't think of anyone who would be impressed with even the best geoshitties pages no matter who you are) since they require the big $$$, or connecting computers which could dub as the next replacement for the NSA (something that the wonderful new world of consumerism has created) it is something that the average person who has average to ambitious goals cannot hope to attain because of laziness, sloth, and the general lack of touch with what I term the forgotten man of the world. To quote Roland in Steven King's "Gunslinger" series "The world has moved on"; and in this case it has moved on to be more repressive and unequal in nature than at any other time. Please if you want to drive you catellacs please don't drive them near me ok?
Maybe it was created originally for folks who had the money to build it, but since then it's been shared with a lot more people than it was ever intended for by the creators. As far as average people with ambitious goals, lots of people have those. Only those who go learn something and put their goals into practice gain anything.
Fire up a computer, grab a couple of library books (if you don't want to or can't purchase them) and learn something. Complaining about people with money won't make them not have it, and while some come by it via ignoble means, some of us actually learned something about computers, and have put them to good use for ourselves or our employers, which may be why we expect to be compensated appropriately. Our bosses still reap a lot more than we do, but we've found our niche.
You had some interesting disinformation in your post about how PGP works, and you appear to think that it requires that you have an IP address. Obviously, you've never even cracked even the most clueless book on the topic, or you'd realize that you don't need an IP address to run encryption software.
They don't care about linux users anyway. What they care about are people who are idiots. They care about windows people. They don't have to target linux users because linux users are by and far loaded with cash because of their ritzy little programming jobs (which I am sure even though I am a CS major I will be cheated out of) can buy their own satellite relay system.
HA! Linux never got anyone a programming job. Reading, programming, working hard and figuring out how to write good code got most programmers their programming jobs.
If you're a CS major and you don't apply yourself, you'll certainly have the ability to cheat YOURSELF out of a good paying job. Don't blame that on the folks who work hard.
By the way, I'm a Linux user who doesn't have a ritzy programming job. I write some code to do useful things for myself, and sometimes my employer. I did program for three months for a living and didn't enjoy it, mostly due to the project itself, not the programming. Today I work on telecommunication systems and maintain some Linux machines for my current employer.
You're not willing to help yourself, in my opinion. Your post consistently complains about "people with money" who use computers, and about the things you "can't do", but I honestly don't see any reason why you can't do those things if you really want to.
Good luck.
I think you underestimate the "common man". A lot of people believe everything they see on the idiot box, but they still don't want to get screwed over by corporations or the government.
It's also obvious that even the least savvy net users eventually find out about the net beyond its shopping-mall and advertainment areas. They want to talk freely on their anonymous chats and discussion boards. They also want their MP3's, background graphics, info on less than popular culture, etc. without having to shell out for every byte.
With more and more people using the net, what's needed is an education of people into its really powerful uses. People will realise that these things will be limited or disappear if internet regulation becomes standard.
The big problem is with things like the DMCA and Australia's new censorship regime - a lot of people (including me) didn't realise what a huge effect it would have. Organisations like the EFF and EFA are fighting, joining with them seems the only alternative to individual protests which seem like throwing eggs at a charging bull.
Or maybe there is space for an organisation of geeks for net freedom.
How about Valanzuela, Brazil, Japan, China, or any other physical location outside of US Federal Jurisdiction! Currently the only ones with any power are where the actual data resides and whether or not that data is in violation of the laws of that country. Porn sites, even the ones in the USA, are not required to have an age limit of 18 years. They do not have to use an AVS system! They do so for 2 reasons: 1a) They can charge money for access more easily. 1b) They make more money by being part of a larger ring (more hits). 2) They do not have to deal with the hassle from government entities or other groups such as ACLU and the like. Government agencies would (in the USA) have to obtain a search warrant first to go into a site and gather information to try to convict contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Now they would have to obtain a new warrant for each DNS you use. If you were to change your DNS frequently they are screwed (many do this often). CHOMP that...!
Just to get some ideas, I was wondering what type of features you would like to see in a new up and coming ISP. Please email responses to MPR1000000@aol.com and NO I DONT WORK FOR AOL!!!!! I am just looking at starting a Kick azzzzzz ISP to compete with them.
I thought the net was originally a government sponsored military research project. students used to thrown out of school for accessing the internet. Most administrators felt an obligation to deny access or educate those who would abuse it (well, ok, maybe this is leaning towards hyperbole). anyone else remmeber the flamewar on alt.sex when the first violent story was posted? I wonder if you can still find that thread on deja.com. do i have a point? probably none other than i hardly think the net was founded on the ideals of "freedom' and "openess". rather, i see it more as a tool that was improperly introduced to the masses and now we have to make the best of what we have.
But that's not the way it really works. The federal government legitates and controls everything under the sun that it wants to. The states do practically nothing.
That whole "enumerated powers"/"voluntary republic" thing went out the window at Appomattox Courthouse.
Hear, hear!
I have never understood that kind of thinking either. I mean, the whole idea that all this existing legislation is being "tested" as it applies to the Internet is rediculous. 99% of these laws apply in exactly the same way both on- and off-line.
Where do you think the money comes from to pay for them, champ?
From the governemnt, you say.
Where do you think the government gets its money?
From my taxes, you say. (which is one reason you can't afford anything, but that's another topic)
Now (and concentrate real hard if you have to) who employs you?
IPv6 does go a long way towards ensuring the privacy integrity and authenticity of the DATA. However the privacy of the INDIVIDUAL is reduced by the use of IPv6 due to the first 32bits (i think) of the address being the same as your NIC address. While that doesnt affect all net users, as not everyone has a connection via their lan, it's still something to take into account. After all it is a small matter for an ISP to assign all users an id and use that instead...that is assuming that it was mandated the ISPs do that... - Just because you are paranoid, doesnt mean the world isnt out to get you.
internet is about free speech, freedom, liberty and privacy (good things) capitalism is about property and rights and responsibilities (bad things)
IS THERE ANY ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FORMATION AFTER CAPITALISM OR IS THERE ONLY BETTER AND BETTER CAPITALIM?
are we in the end of history?
jack.london@mail.ee
ps
I have read some 100 messages
and got bored
now I am reading
http://www.cato.org/pubs/books/simplerules.html
Fact is, the internet as it stands evolved from the ARPAnet. As a military network, this was designed with security and resilience in mind. No military funded project can avoid the obsession with security and secrecy.
If you don't agree, can you tell me then, what the security bits in the IP header are there for ?
Please read RFC 1108 and think about what it says before replying.
Is it to promote openness ? Or could it be that TCP/IP was designed for military application, and therefore has a form of security built in from the start.
Are you prepared to read what you wrote, and re-evaluate the statement you made ?
The RFCs are out there and available to anyone with an internet connection.
Extract from RFC 1108
9.3.15.3.2 Classification Protection Level.
This field specifies the U.S. classification level to which the datagram should be protected.
The information in the datagram should be assumed to be at this level until and unless it is
regraded in accordance with the procedures of all indicated protecting authorities. This field specifies one of the
four U.S. classification levels, and is encoded as follows:
11011110 - Top Secret
10101101 - Secret
01111010 - Confidential
01010101 - Unclassified
Or have I missed the point here ? Would you care to explain exactly how a classification of "Top Secret" makes a protocol "open and accessible" ?
The process of developing the protocols may well be open, but the fact remains that the protocols from very early on had a military security classification tag in the header, which persists to this day.
If you still disagree in the face of cold hard facts, it is safe to assume you do not wish to be held to the same standards of journalistic integrity that you would be held to in conventional media, and if that is the case, its not hard to see why you attract so many flames when posting to Slashdot posing as a serious journalist.
just my 2 cents worth.. but first- all the narrow minded, near sighted boobs need to go jump off a cliff, thank you the internet is not freedom, freedom can exist without the net, BUT the internet greatly augments our freedom. when your average joe bob can log on and share his thoughts and ideas with thousands if not millions of people, thats a kind of freedom that was unimaginable before the net came around. this whole discussion itself- do you think this many people could this openly and easily have a discussion like this without the internet? of course not. it seems to me that some people dont understand just how important the free flow of ideas and information is. if the government had its way using the internet would cost you a arm and a leg and a right nut from state taxes, city taxes, federal taxes, and that-packet-just-passed-thru-china-so-thats-a-extr a-$20-cuz-we-dont-like-commies-tax. commercializism is always going to be all over the net, thats not the problem, the problem is when governments or greedy coporations try to reach beyond their peace of the pie and try to take control(microsoft, riaa, mpaa, etc). of course, as long as you people that care about these issues spread the word, not just online but to your family and friends, then solutions will eventually come about, even if it does take some time. see, presidents, senators, and CEO's are all human, and will eventually all die, and our children and grandchildren will take their places. we just need to make sure they understand the value of freedom of information.
You /.ers are the whiniest group of people Imaginable. Go find a life, do something real.
Well I guess I will be an anonymous coward today because my password still has not arrived. Mr Charlie Benante I take exception to part of your statement. The same can be said that many people can't afford a car and that many don't have the skills to drive a car. What makes the net so different though is that many companies provide a "free-ride" (ie NetZero) and software is getting dumbed down. But is this what we want? Do you really want everyone online. Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for... How dare you chose to judge who should be or not be on the internet. I must also point out that these people are already on the net. Both those that are predators and dangers to others, and the ignorant that are a danger to themselves. Unless you mean to imply that wealth ensures intellegence. Everyone should have access to the net. The problem will come when someone like you trys to decide who is allowed. Currently it is both cost and software. The hardware is too expensive for most people that as someone said above, can not even afford a phone line. The software, as "dumbed down" as it is, is still too complicated for the average person. I have lived with computers all my life. I remmember getting my first Apple II. Most of my co-workers are not people you would consider old, and are supposed to be computer professionals. Yet more than half could not install their own software. (Most large companys have entire teams that only install new software on your pc when you call.) Most don't even understand what the internet is. I say this about people only 10 years older than myself. Someone in their late 30's or early 40's cannot navigate through this stuff they interact with daily. What chance does someone have that has never even touched the keyboard of a PC.
Jon Katz,
Please go run into a wall head first.
Thank you.
Get on the horn NOW and demand that Kongress/WIPO/Parliment/whatever-it's-called-where -you-live mandate these IP modifications immediately! And get the UN to impose harsh sanctions and air strikes, saturation bombings, etc., against nations that fail to do the right thing and implement these standards!
But is this what we want? Do you really want everyone online. Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for... :)
Um.. Deaf people are perfectly capable of driving cars.. Deafness does not interfere with one's driving ablity the way being drunk, very old, mentally unstable, and blind does. As a deaf person, I know I drive well, and I know dozens of deaf friends who drive perfectly well..
Just a tiny nitpicker here.
I must say though, you did do some good research into the great thinkers of America, but you lack a bit in the Internet history.
----Charlie Benante
Not that I wouldn't move there in a minute, if I could stand cold weather. (Since I can't, I moved to Arizona instead -- anti-education geezers, desert sunshine, and anti-everything Republicans, oh well, one out of three ain't bad!).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Posted by cookieman.k:
:)
As soon as I saw that this article was written by Katz I pressed ^F in my little-tiny IE4 and entered FUNNY. All other comments were skipped
It is the end of anonymity on the 'net. Some of the extra bits will identify you as a particular user, others will be for routing to your location. HTTP cookies would become redundant.
I assure you that by examining ISP logs, it is possable to identify you under IPv4 as well. The answer is anonymizing repeaters. A message goes out encrypted in the public key of the first hop. That message contains instructions to send it on to the next hop, and a message excrypted for the second anonymizing server. Repeat as necessary. All of the servers send logs to /dev/null. What comes out the other end is a message that cannot be traced back to it's source. The final repeater knows who got the message (but not what it said or where it came from). The first repeater knows where it came from (also not what it said and not where it is going).
I can understand the large corporations of the Record and Film Industry having concerns on where their revenue is going to come from. They spend hundreds of millions creating digital information that can be put on the silver platter of the DVD/CD and find it has been distributed across the fiber to hundreds of thousands of people in minutes. They have found that Proprietary Encryption systems cannot work without seriously affecting the freedoms of their legitimate customers.
They should do what they have allways done. Go out on the net and try to download their own proprietary content. When successful, file charges against the provider. That's how they have done it since the first bootleg album or tape appeared, and it must work well enough since they are making billions. The whole debacle with CSS and such is about the same as an employee getting a paper cut and then suing when the employer refuses to provide a trip to the emergency room, specialists, and a month paid vacation.
I can understand that nobody wants to be ripped off, but it's time for a reality check. Life is too short to sweat the small stuff. Most people won't go to court unless they loose more than 1% of their actual income to a fraud. MPAA and RIAA apparently are a lot more petty than that. They also have a habit of inflating their damages to epic proportions.
With IPv6, none of this rigamarole would be required. You would always be identified.
Really, it's all a matter of the ISP. If login/password authentication is used, you could probably rotate your MAC around every few minutes with no problems. If they depend on MAC for ID, it requires either the ISP or other user's cooperation to be 'soft' anonymous. For example, they could do NAT in their router and periodically change addresses for you, or you could arrange to cross route some traffic at random with other users of the ISP. Or once a week or so, call up the ISP and tell them your NIC failed and now you'll be using AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF.
One good possability is an expansion of anonymizer services so that you can tunnel to their server and it will do random NAT for you.
Sure, all of this _could_ work. But what if your ISP won't cooperate, or cannot, because Courts view it as "irresponsible" not to embed userid in IP?
Granted, that could be a problem, but if the courts get involved, then it's a political problem rather than a technical one. Otherwise, ISPs will cooperate once enough people learn that they're being tracked online that way. All it will take to get the ball rolling for that is for a prominant and respected political figure to be listed as a frequent visitor to 'www.your-sickest-erotic-fantasies.com' based on the tracking.
A forwarder might not stand out that much at all. Many large networks use a squid proxy now to reduce upstream bandwidth requirements.
When corporations and government are in each others' pocket rather than at each others' throats, it's a bad omen for the individuals.
That's one of the thing that bothers me about i2, and all of these 'incredible advances'. Give me an OC-3 line, and I'll show you the same damned thing.. ;-P
I'm unimpressed with the hype surrounding what the internet can do for me. I'm more impressed with what a Cable Modem or DSL can do for me. Now just make it a stock utility, like phone and electric service..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Regardless of what 'new technologies' come about becouse of the 'New Internet', or how it changes the way we live, one thing is needed for it to happen..
Cheap, dependable broadband, and lots of it, everywhere. Wireless, even.
You give me bandwidth, and I can provide you with anything you want. Never mind streaming real video degraded signals down over your 56k modem. I'm talking streaming television, at full resolution. No matter the way you look at it, this requires a pipe to carry the data.
And, that's pretty much what the i2 provides. Bandwidth, and lots of it. Any research about how to use this bandwidth is a definate sidebar to actually getthing gigabit access to *RUN* those applications..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Ok, let's say that each payed a total of $10 a YEAR, in an Internet tax. That makes $10 billion per year, in taxes.
You can't build a gigantic national fibre-optic grid overnight. Let's say that it takes 10 years to install the cable, hook up the routers, and get the entire system running. That makes a total of $100 billion.
You tell me that you couldn't build a decent national network across the US, linking everyone onto a broadband system, for $100 billion.
If you want, let's throw in some military funding, too. After all, they would value such a network, the same way that they valued and funded the building of the Interstate network in the US. (You =DO= know American history, right?) Say they match the public funding, and throw in $100 billion of their own, over the same timeframe.
You have $200 billion to spend on a mix of optic fibre, gigabit ethernet cable and 100 megabit ethernet cable. Tell me you couldn't do it. Just try telling me you couldn't scrape together that kind of network with that kind of money.
Once the cable is in place, what more money do you need to spend? Optic fibres don't rot that quickly. You don't need to allocate IP addresses - IPv6 takes care of that for you. Same with name allocation. Routers can be fitted with watchdog cards, and reboot themselves. That leaves -- what? Nothing. There is no low-level network service that is not already automatically and routinely handled by software and/or hardware.
Who could possibly have gotten it right in 1969? Anyone with brains. People thrive on knowledge and information. Humanity discovered that with the printing press. Hell, humanity discovered it with the introduction of writing! Repeating 4,000 year old mistakes is kind-of stupid, don't you think?
Even if you neglect such ancient history, look no further than the explosion of interest in radio and then television. Don't even TRY telling me they couldn't have known. They could have, and should have. That they didn't was SHEER NEGLIGENCE and nothing more.
I want broadband, but I want the corporations OUT. I don't care about taxes to Government - I vote for them, so I can kick them out if they misbehave. Ever tried kicking out a dictatorial corporate CEO?
America is -uniquely- founded on freedom?
- Find me a trail that matches, one for one, the freedoms allowed by even the smallest of the British Public Footpaths.
- The "Miranda Rights" have effectively been abolished in America. Name one European country that has been so blase' about civil liberty.
- Protesters at the WTO summit were subjected to beatings, tear-gas and other nice cocktails. Marches ten times that size have passed the length and bredth of Britain without incident.
- ABSOLUTE Freedom of speech is as old as Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. DON'T pretend, through national pride, that America invented the idea. It existed long before the Europeans ever REACHED America.
- Oh, and tell the native American tribes that they're free to go where they will, unhindered, to reclaim ALL their old territories, whilst you're at it. If you can't, your freedom means nothing. It exists only in the minds of those who can afford it.
- You might also want to tell the homeless that there'll be corporate-provided public transport for all. (HA!)
- And, whilst you're at it, tell the schools and other public places that they've total freedom of religious expression, so long as it doesn't interfere or impair others.
You can't, can you. Your freedom is an illusion.It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If the concept of information freedom had not already existed, it would never have occured to anyone that the Internet provided a medium by which it could be firmly established.
Second, I disagree that the Internet has revolutionised anything. The revolution had already happened. The Internet simply provided a means to deliver. That's all.
Third, I disagree that this is about the cost of connection. There are plenty of public terminals. (Or do Libertarians ignore those, the same way they denigrate and smear other public concepts, such as public transport, public footpaths, etc.) Yes, it's true that having a computer in your own home, with an Internet connection, isn't cheap. But, it's the computer that's the primary cost, not the connection. More people can afford to shell out $8 a month than can afford $1,000 in a single day.
However, publicly-available terminals mean that you don't NEED to have your own computer. You don't NEED to pay the frankly absurd prices in Internet Cafe's. You just go down to your local public computer lab, and connect. NO COST, BESIDES TIME.
Fourth, I agree that broadband access NEEDS to be realised. However, that alone is not enough. The method by which information is conveyed is very inefficient. There NEEDS to be multicasting, IPv6, Quality of Service protocols such as CBQ, RED, ECN and RSVP, automatic babdwidth throttling to prevent processes getting out of control, etc.
Fifth, the Internet does not have a Constitution, that is correct. That is because (much to the disgust of many Americans, who want to invade it), the Internet IS NOT AMERICAN!!! It is multi-national, and owes no allegiance to any flag or government. Until America wakes up to the fact that it is NOT at the centre of the Universe (the MPAA just proves it's industries even believe this patheticly egotistical self-deceit), it will never mature. It may be at the heart of technology, but socially it's never grown up. It's still an infant, wailing whenever anyone takes away it's toys.
Last, but maybe most importantly of all, I believe that the Internet can be a force of good, a constructive environment, and a healthy environment. I believe that this can only happen if the corporate sector is taken totally out of the loop. The Internet must not be run as a business. That's why ICANN can't. It's only when there are no vested interests, that genuine interest is possible.
It is only when the Internet becomes a network of national networks, each of which is a network of regional networks, each of which is a network of local networks, =ALL= of which are run by technically-oriented volunteers who's one objective is to provide a service, can the Internet blossom.
With such a network, geographically aligned but not geographically confined, you don't tie up bandwidth over in Paris or Sydney, when transmitting high-bandwidth streams across the street. At present, badly-wired networks, static or poorly-selected routes, and incompetent admins are all you need to get exactly that kind of nightmare scenario.
How is it a nightmare? Beyond packet loss and lag (which are extreme over those kinds of distances), you also need to consider the taxes many nations are considering on Internet traffic, especially international traffic. As you can't specify a route, at source, (or at least, you shouldn't be able to, for security reasons), you can't decide by what path your data will travel. So, you might end up paying international levies to send the guy next door an e-mail.
Sorry, but that's NOT ok. But it's exactly what a libertarian, free-market version of the Internet has become. It's cheaper to mis-manage, and charge, than to do the job properly in the first place.
In the situation I'm envisaging, such abuses would be impossible. A connection would ALWAYS follow the shortest possible path available to it, which would ALWAYS be a sensible path.
Also, as things stand, the Internet is fault-intolerent. If a router goes down, or a cable is severed, that entire segment of the Internet is kaput.
The Internet was designed with the idea of surviving a full-scale nuclear attack, but it can't even cope with a single workman's shovel?? Something is wrong with this picture. Seriously wrong.
Again, the idea of a multi-tier system of the kind I've proposed above, would involve multiple paths within a node, between any two points, and multiple paths between any two nodes. THIS is where the Internet =SHOULD= be and was =DESIGNED TO BE=. The searching for profit over quality ended that, but if there is to be a future for the Internet, beyond being merely a spam & shopping mall, that ideal has to be restored and the corporate sector ousted. Forever.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Constitution of my country provides for many more and broad freedoms than that of the U.S. , and as such it is nearly impossible to get a wire tap for a private citizen. An Internet tap is equally as difficult.
:-)
Really? Could you tell us where that is, and what the immigration requirements are?
I don't think our Constitution is particularly lacking, but there's no question we're cursed with some of the most arrogant and clueless lawmakers anywhere.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.
Yes, that quote's taken straight from Katz. You figure out the grammar.
Anyway, it's this type of thinking that completely pisses me off. There are laws on the Internet and they're the same laws that you live by every day. If someone hacks into your system, that's a federal law. If someone takes GPL source, modifies it, and distributes it binary-only without source, that's a violation of the license. If someone slanders me on the 'Net, I can take that information and proceed to court. The people who set up the Internet weren't thinking about laws and rules. They were thinking about systems and data. To say that the 'Net is without laws or protections is naive. It's governed by the same rules that the 'real world' is. Why? Because it's part of the real world. If you break a law on the 'Net, you are breaking a law period. You're not any different because you're on your computer rather than on the street. You do not become a different kind of person because you sit in front of a monitor.
<rant type="petty">
Maybe Katz should try actually saying something insightful rather than repeating the rhetoric of paranoids and brats. He might actually get published in a magazine where he doesn't have to rely on his readers to make it worth something (that is a compliment of Slashdot and its readers, not a criticism).
</rant>
There is no Constitution for the Net, no bylaws or widely agreed-upon system or Constitution to protect widely agreed upon system to protect such rights as privacy, openness, and property.
This is not entirely accurate. RFCs define 'bylaws' of communications protocols and necessary prerequisites of 'membership' in the Internet, and even define privacy rights (here, here, and here, among others) and openness (SMTP being the first and most common that springs to mind). The concept of property is hotly debated, but will at some point probably be covered by a mechanism defined by an RFC.
You might rebut that these concepts are merely the definition of mechanisms by which discourse on the 'net is defined and regulated. But I ask you, is the Constitution not itself merely a document which defines mechanisms for human discourse (by laying the groundwork for the definition of law and administration of government)? I would go so far as to say that app-layer RFCs are to laws as TCP/IP is to the Constitution...
Your Working Boy,
I dont mean to sound harsh, but does anyone
else think that Jon Katz just likes to read
his own flowery writing?
If they only had Pepto-Bismol for his continual
diarrhea of the fingers... First, it was "oh,
another story by that Jon Katz guy" then "not
another story by Katz" to now, "oh god, he's
wanked over the keyboard again.."
Maybe I'm wrong, but this is just my opinion.
For some reason, Katz is the only Slashdot poster
i've ever thought about filtering out. Rob and
Hemos keep treating him like their pet writer/
patron saint..
If I buy a thousand monkeys and a thousand
typewriters, will you give them news posting
priviledges? They'd come up with better content
than Katz, for just bananas-a-day.
You appear to have bought into the MPAA tautology!
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
Yo! Jon! Respect! Yo! My man!
Jesus H. Christ... What is this? A Jewish version of Father Trendy?
> for mediocrity."
Heh, heh. Would this mean that people who use MS software also have a passion for mediocrity? Sure seems like it. Er, JK, perhaps you could explain what exactly are those `?'s that keep appearing in strange places in your articles? It couldn't be that the software you're using is from... no, no, forget it, that's too obviously absurd even to contemplate... I mean, the great antiMS icon JK couldn't be using... no, he couldn't... could he?
I don't ever see a leader of the Net, or a leader of geeks..Incompatible, I think..But that doesn't mean people can't gather on some broad principles..And no, absolutely not..OS is a choice, not a religion.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I don't think there are any set of rules that could run the Net..But some understandings..the OS license, for example..do have impact. And people who write software are going, like it or not, to determine how the Net is used. I don't think it's matter of issuing rules. I think it's writing software with a particular purpose and consciousness, just as the people who designed the Net in the lst place did. Don't underestimate yourself. As a programmer you can do things someone like me can't even imagine.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
The head of the Justice Department's MS legal team said in several interviews that he believes the trial will begin setting Internet law regarding corporate practices. I disagree. I think the government and the judiciary are definitely and quite openly moving to set some Net law, as seems inevitable.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
\
I thought this was a great, clear and powerful post.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
The U.S. congress, which has passed not one but two decency acts..RIAA which has filed scores of lawsuits to shut down college music sites...MPA, which is looking for geeks to lock up for using DVD source code, the ABA, suing to shut down websites that provide legal info for free that lawyers charged thousands for..I could go on for quite awhile.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
...and insightful, too
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Anybody but me heard of Jonathan Postel and the Internet Society and all the work they did designing the Net protocols to keep them open and free? E-mail me, I can steer you to lots of books and articles.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Dummies like me don't know this, and it's essential that this kind of info get out, I think. This was incredibly helpful to me, and useful, and thanks for it, Jurgen.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I think this is a great and interesting post, though I don't completely agree with it. The Net is a tool that makes a number of different ideologies possible. Standing on a street corner ranting isn't the same as going online and having access to all sorts of people all over the world. That's the ideological part of the Net and has been from the first. But the technology is definitely a tool.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Along those lines, I recommend Richard Epstein's Simple Rules For a Complex World.
Fuck Slashdot
A way to transmit data and store it in a publically accessible way anonymously on an anonymous network of servers or equivalent in multiple countries...with no control over the servers contents by their owners (i.e. theyre not responsible for whats on the servers and cant remove the data on them..mostly text of course)
.gnu or .foo :) might be good for this. It wouldnt break anything already existing, we just have to get our local systems to resolve that TLD via a specific adress. Just enforce strict non-profit use and go hard after domain grabbing.
This might be an interesting cryptographic challenge: To create a kind of encrypted database that can be read by everyone, but which has all records encrypted based on many records so nothing, once added, can be removed without permanently damaging everything.
A mimimal anonymous network thats off limits to anyone but individuals...no companies allowed (and hence no advertising)...that also runs encapsulated on the global internet. Something like what fidonet used to be.
Running your (well, our) own TLD (like
-- God is silent. Now if we can only get Man to shut up.
If the next version per se of the internet is funded mostly by corporations like AT&T, MCI, and the Ministry of Truth you can expect it to look like a larger version of AOL. AOL is a great example for us NOT to be. The network uses proprietary protocols and formats and is open only to paying members and since the network is owned by a single entity it can censor, supress, and control every aspect of the network. The internet we all know and surf grew from a relatively small network of academic and government computers. The original architects designed the system to be naturally open in order to get funding from the government to build the network. It was also built in a web-like model to increase survivability in case of nuclear war which meant that everyone had to speak the same language in order to pass data packets through. There were standards put in place that everyone could build off of, if you have a connection and the right communication protocols you can speak to anyone on the network. The next version however is being funded by corporations and not the national government. If three companies put up the cash to build some high speed lines and distribute them to people's houses who the hell are we to complain they ought to open up their network to us when we aren't paying them for their services. I suppose the execs at the major telcoms haven't seen the light of Stallman economics. Instead of bitching we ought to figure out a way to build an open network not owned by one or two companies. If any of you read Wired a few years back it reminds me of the Andersen COnsulting ads with the school of fish swimming in the shape of a shark. A thousand pebbles weigh as much as one rock.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
John Gilmore once said "The Net inteprets censorship as damage and routes around it". This has proven true many times since, but the power to route around the damage of censorhip and control is starting to fade. As government are getting more involved and the backbones are controlled by big corporations who jelously guard the routes with highly specific peering agreements, routing is ceasing to be a mechanism of spontanous damage control and rather becoming a means of implementing business agreements and "official" policies.
Somehow we need to get the spontanaity of routing back to a point where the Net is an amorphous, uncontrollable thing which routes around the damage of censorship and control. If my ISP starts to filter packets which contain information of which the government doesn't approve, I need to be able to use an underground backup network, to get the packets to my buddies. Now with straight IPv4 this isn't possible because to implement the routing to make this happen I would need an ASN and talk BGP to my ISP and the underground Net... and my ISP isn't going to let me talk BGP to them unless I buy a lot more bandwith than individuals can afford.
It may be that IPv6 offers some new possibilities here (btw., ignore the people who cry about the 128bit IP numbers costing you privcacy, they don't know what they're talking about) but this is far from clear yet.
Another possibility is a meta-net... a virtual network on top of IP which implements an underground network. This would work the same way that the MBONE and 6-BONE (the test networks for multicasting and IPv6) worked. If fully encrypted the carriers couldn't do much about it unless they prohibited all encrypted traffic. This wouldn't be very efficient because the "routers" for this virtual net would often be behind several slow hops of the underlying real net, but we may be forced to go that route.
Other options, some of which have been in use for quite a while, are various application-level networks: anonymous remailers, peer-to-peer networking on top of IRC, Netnews, etc. Some of these need to be overhauled for the zips (the first decade of the 2000s).
The Man can never win completely... the question is will those of use who want to be beyond control by the Man be forced to some highly marginal underground, or will there be a huge vibrant culture which cannot be reigned in? The choice, I think, is ours, but we need to stay a step ahead...
- Jürgen
There is more that can be said about this.
Well, for one thing, anyone who'd say "second generation internet" and not talk at some length about "Internet2" is crazy.
But even with things like "The GNU public license, the open source license", Katz reveals that he's a buzzword junkie, not a part of this community, not a person who cares about this community.
I don't think everyone has to be a techie. But I do think we need to expect pundits to have a basic understanding of what they're talking about.
Katz, spend a while thinking about what you want to say. Come up with a thesis statement. Come up with support for it. Then come back.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So, in this new world, the ideal is that every bit of information is available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Free.
So you can track the minute-by-minute value of my stock portfolio and I can track the minute-by-minute value of your blood pressure.
OK? If not, where/how do we draw a line?
Or, we decide that this is coming, like it or not. Now what?
Do you really want everyone online. Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script kiddies, etc on the net?
As a matter of fact, I do want those people on the net. Unlike the drunk driver on the highway, the drunk on the net can't hurt me. Script kiddies grow up, and may even become valued contributors to the net (don't ask me how I know this). If they were denied access, they might well become bitter, resentful and far more dangerous.
I just haven't decided whether I want ConHugeCo and their lawyers on the net. But then that decision isn't mine to make.
If individuals are their own librarians, however, they will stock and lead themselves to what they need to know.
In an ideal world that would be true. But humans don't always act ideally. The way it really works is more like the following:
If individuals are their own librarians, they will stock and lead themselves to what they want to know.
It's still far preferable to letting government or corporations determine what information people have access to, but it's important to remember that what people want to know and what they need to know are not necessarily the same thing.
Hardware: HP Pavilion
:)
OS: Windows 98
Who owns the PC: The employee
Fee: $5 per month for the Internet Access.
Ability of the company to access the home PC: none AFAIK.
It looks as if those numbskulls at Ford are giving away 300,000+ PC's
The article I read cited a bunch of reasons for this including attempts to enhance computer literacy, part of the UAW negotiations, and enhancement of their public image. Hmm...good PR, more computer savvy employees, better labor relations, (perhaps less wasted computer time at work?). No, no...they must want to spy on their employees...it's the only logical explanation!
I was trying to see it from their point of view.
not my fault you suffer from autism and cannot grasp the difference between first and third person.
The right to exchange information is a mutual agreement from the information provider to the information receiver.
Does information have it's own intrinsic value? Should an equivalent value be transferred from the information receiver to the information provider to balance the transaction? These are issues that should remain the decision of the Information Provider, whether they make a sound decision or not depends on their marketing strategy.
There are many issues. Valuable information can be "freely" distributed. But for the information provider they must feel there is something in it for them. Be it Corporate Marketing in order to sell another product, OpenSource "Payback". Whatever their motivation it will almost always be quite rational.
I can understand the large corporations of the Record and Film Industry having concerns on where their revenue is going to come from. They spend hundreds of millions creating digital information that can be put on the silver platter of the DVD/CD and find it has been distributed across the fiber to hundreds of thousands of people in minutes. They have found that Proprietary Encryption systems cannot work without seriously affecting the freedoms of their legitimate customers. Copy Protecting / Copy Cracking is now an age old problem that we all know will never go away. Every system has an effective loophole as there has to be someway that the legitimate user can use the information provided. The only hope is to keep on changing the system and try to stay in front of the crackers.
The success of Open Source has shown the two-way benefits from not assigning a $ value to information. By continuing in it's success Open Source will either prove itself to be the benchmark that others should follow or it will fizzle out and become insignificant.
Something that's been on my mind for a while. Should a community have the explicit right to moderate their own information access? Now while the extreme example would be control-freak state like North Korea, I'm thinking of more subtle limits such as preserving cultural diversity and self-imposed norms. A parent has the right and responsibility for looking after a kid until they're 18 and part of this is the ability to influence their lifestyle while they learn to be responsible adults. Extrapolate this to a community and you can see where the inherent freedom of the net comes into conflict. While porn and terrorism are the bully-boys for the public stockades, I suspect that the freedom to choose also includes the freedom not to choose. Some thoughts ...
... </B> OK, to bring this back to design, hypothetically, how would you construct a DNS that expands as a person grows older. Say from 12 where the parent has full control, to 18 when the person can access any site in the world.
... </B> How would you separate certain communities which depend on complete and free exchange of (information, scholars, crytoanalysists, reviewers, etc) from valid commercial markets (despite the angst, there are reasons for staggering film/DVD releases across different geographical regions due to differing schedules and levels of technology, etc).
... </B> Give the ease of digital duplication, is there need to create quiet zones? Imagine going into deepest jungles of Papa New Guinea and then being hit by a coke ad in what you thought was untouched territory. We set aside untouched parklands for enjoyment, is there an internet equivalent (spam-free zone?). This is especially a big problem if the big companies bully/buyout the smaller independents through media saturation campaigns.
... are we stomping on stuff that we might regret in later years. On example I recall is that a noted linguist pointed out that all the (interesting to him) variations of enlgish/slang around the world was rapidly disappearing due to the pervasive influence of CNN. What other memes will be lost?
<B>The right to choose
<B>The right to improve
<B>The right to exclude
I keep thinking of the old Star Trek Prime Directive not to interfere. In our (OK some obnoxious greedy sods) rush to create new markets for new toys in the name of first-mover advantage, first-post bragging rights, etc
LL
"The thing is, I know how to write software. I don't know how to manipulate the masses into calling for guarentees of freedom from their governments..."
Some things I've done:
1. Support organizations, like EFF, who are already organizing along these lines - sometimes concentrating efforts can have more effect than diffuse resistance.
2. Write letters to and support traditional consumer/free-speech advocacy organizations and start getting some of them on board. These organizations have provided some measure of balance in the past dealing with more traditional types of corporate agression, and many of them have a lot of resources which could be brought to bear once they see the danger and realize that this is a long-term fight.
internet is about free speech, freedom, liberty and privacy (good things) capitalism is about property and rights and responsibilities (bad things)
< /i>
Internet is about Capitalism, and Porn, and Fanboys and Spam and invasion of privacy.
Capitalism is about Money, and property and rights and responsibilities and supporting our need for new shiny things.
Responsibility is only a bad thing if you are unwiling to accept it.
<i>IS THERE ANY ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FORMATION AFTER CAPITALISM OR IS THERE ONLY BETTER AND BETTER CAPITALIM?</i>
[Government Markets][Command Economy]
[Black Markets][Response to Command]
[Grey Markets][Response to Regulation]
[Capitalism][Demand Economy]
For the most part we in US are capitalists. However, government regulation has drawn us to Grey markets for things like toilets, and the dubious practice of purchasing SUVs via loopholes. We use black markets to get Drugs and other sundry things. In few places we have command economy in place. Rent control is a good example of a command economy. While you are free to rent anywhere under a certain ceiling in rent control areas, landlords are restricted. Somebody lost some economic freedom in the deal.
<i>are we in the end of history?</i>
We always are at the end of history. We just happen to be at the front end.
<i>now I am reading
http://www.cato.org/pubs/books/simplerules.html
Looks like an interesting book. I shall check it out.
Lowmag.net
where have all my extrans gone?
Lowmag.net
Anybody else hear some kinda anthem as you read this? I kept hearing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" over and over throughout the first 3 paragraphs. Such a shame that I should have such a synthasthetic reaction to the written word. Not being incredibly patriotic, I had to stop there.
.zip snapshot of the system to those who wanted it.
:()) A few months later this new job started working out and I bought a P200 and started using PPP. I also started seriously using Linux at about 96 or so. Till that point I had only played with it.
I can see the second internet going down the tubes to more of the same crass commercialization Internet.1 is all about. We have brought it from from a research medium to an entertainment medium in a period of 4 years.
When I started out in 92, I was dialing up into a shell account on a Sun Solaris system. A local company was gracious enough to allow an account for about 9 or so students in my local high school. This was my first experience with the Internet and UNIX.
At first, I had no idea what this was all about (my experience to this point was ATARI and DOS computers) and I couldn't get past trying for a directory listing (they hadn't aliased ls to dir) so I gave up for a few months. I was about 16 or so at the time, and didn't know my way around UNIX yet. To make a long story short, I learned eventually, and figured out nn and trn and lurked for a while. I switched to a commercial ISP and dialed direct to a shell, while still using dos until about 1996 when I bought a more powerful computer.
Then things started running downhill for both the internet and BBSing. My friend's computer, with which ran the bbs went with him to CMU. People were really dissapointed and we delivered a
The net was starting to pick up at this point, and I finally got a more modern system (slightly at 33mhz
The big problem (and I see this when I play with Iniquity or Renegade or Aciddraw) is that the web has made computers bloated. The interface of PPP through a Browser to a user has killed a few things. Mostly, it killed the personality of a lean Unix shell. Lynx still does it right. KISS principal in action, at least until recent versions.
Usenet is dying, replaced by online forums in html format. Shell accounts are rare, and I'm on one of the last ones in the area still hanging on in thi sarea. The www has become a big bloated, dead-linked spam-ridden pig.
These days, I keep up with things on about 4 sites, otherwise I overload. Slashdot, Freshmeat, Ars, and C|Net News.com. I picked these sites because they are simple, light, and get you information ASAP. That is interface design at its best. Because features are out there, doesn't mean you should use them.
I predict THAT is the reason Internet 2 will be more of the same.
Lowmag.net
Over the weekend, Ford Motor Co. announced a plan to provide its employees (all of them) with a home pc and internet access for $5/month.
What kind of hardware and PC will be provided? Choices on the part of employees?
What work/home boundaries may be violated?
What information might FoMoCo choose to block from its corporate subscribers?
Beware taking gifts from the Devil.
Prehaps the major issue threatening the Internet is that of copyright. Consider that before circa 1995, there was relatively little problem with the free sharing of information Online, even when copyrights were violated. Now devices like the GNU GPL and other forms of copyleft (OpenContent License (OPL), for instance) work to restore that sharing and have become very popular in the last few years because experienced Internet users are feeling their freedom slipping away. Ultimately, the enforcement of copyights make many common Internet activities nearly impossible (even parodying the name of a comercial product can now get one in thouble), and so we are at a point where copyrights must revert to their pre-1920s state or be completely eliminated, or else the Internet will cease to exist as it does currently.
One way to avoid this would be to create a new internet that would be uberencrypted and possible to break only by users, and even then only in the procesing of transmissions which they are allowed to see (so, if one is going through the correct protocals, then one can see sites on this internet and if one sends and receives mail, one can only see mail that they send or were sent). In this way, the status quo ante could be restored by keeping those who would enforce copyrights from being able to. The main limitation here is in breaking from the current standards or using the old ones and graphing new ones on to form a new network or one on top of the currently existing one. Either way, such a change produces a major shift that will likely take time to adjust to.
The Internet is much like the West in the 1800s, that by the 1900s was begining to become civilized. While government supports like to romaticize the idea that the gold strike towns and life on the open range were wild, savage, and violent with no respect for property (as corporate America trys to tell us that the Internet is a crazy place with all sorts of bad stuff happening on it), the reality was that spontanious order came out of the anarchy and offered far Westerners the opertunity to live a free life and to settle probelms for themselves. Not until the Internet has another place and time existed where so much freedom existed. Whether the Internet goes the way of the West or blazes new trails depends on how effectively its supporters can defend it and the liberty it offers.
-- Gordon Worley
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are slashdot.
We are slashdot. I am slashdot. <b>You are slashdot.</b>
I suppose you make that statement beleiving that we are open source zealots that see every propietary program as evil. You are one of us, though. Oh, wait! You mean everyone but you? Er? That doesn't make sense either, does it? So you mean the vocal majority, or is that the vocal minority? Then what about the unvocal majority?
I don't care about who the majority is. I don't represent slashdot anymore than you do. I believe what I believe and I am very secure in my beliefs.
Now about the open source critism. For about 20 years users have used propietary software. Why do you think they used propietary software? Because they didn't know about source code and they didn't know how much power that source code held. They still don't. Now users are controlled by large companies like AOL and Corel. The latest version of AOL, I've heard, disconnects you from other ISPs and causes their computers to crash. And because AOL are the only one's with the source code, they are in control and are the only one's with the power to fix it. If they choose to.
What about Corel? I don't know if they harm their customers the way AOL has but still, Corel has locked up the source also. You can't change Word Perfect. An administrator can't get someone to fix a flaw in Word Perfect or fix it in house. And if Linux was under the X license and GNU was under the X license, do you really think Corel Linux would be free software?
So us closed-minded zealots have two things to protect us: the GPL copyleft and our community. The copyleft and our community demands that the software does not become propietary, both legally and socially. For years we have used propietary software without knowing how we were being controlled. I don't think you are aware how you are being controlled. You see the technology and how it benefits you but you fail to look beyond the technology. Beyond the technology lies users, the future, and who serves who in the software market. Where are we going to be tommorrow? Ask Microsoft, ask Apple, ask Corel. But for God's sake don't ask me or you or Joe User. We do not have any say. This is what the Free Software Movement is all about. Freedom for users. Everyone.
These are not the words of a closed mind. These are the words of someone who is secure in his beleifs. You have confused to the two.
The original idea was for information to travel cross-country in case of a nuclear war. And I would say it has accomplished that.
...
In every book I've ever read about the creation of the 'internet', this fact is shot down in flames. This is merely a myth being spread, and the original 'founders' at BBN have said it's BS many times in the past
Just a little detail.
must say though, you did do some good research into the great thinkers of America, but you lack a bit in the Internet history.
Not to attack, but you do too
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
It's all about bandwidth. Phone, radio, TV, VCR, etc. all of these are the same and can be reduced to bits, all you need is the badwidth to deliver it, access it, spread it around. Bandwidth is the blood of the Internet.
+&x
Dialup and dynamic IP's dont change anything as far as user tracing goes. Its all logged.
The same reasons for ip changes, masquerading, dialup ips, etc will remain; its not _just_ done because there are too few ip addresses. Corporate security, anonymity, etc, are a lot of reasons not to allow any kind of information on network topology out through the firewalls. Tracing based on any kind of machine network ID wont be possible to reliably tie to a user.
You say the internet has created nothing. Has it not created a bit of freedom? If anything, freedom of expression? How else can MILLIONS of people read your rant if it were not for this medium? How else can you have so much information that you could never in your lifetime print out just sitting there, waiting to be read or seen or experienced? Has the internet not only created JOBS but opened the eyes and ears of the public? Of course it got commercialized. It was destined to. There's no way you can get the entire planet on one medium without providing things like shopping and personal ads and horoscopes and whatnot. Capitalism doesn't have to die because you want it to. If you don't like those sites, and you don't like what the internet stands for, DON'T GO TO THOSE SITES. Just don't. Don't click the ads, don't fill out the forms. For all you know, the email could go around the world five times before it reaches your neighbor. Does it take that long, really? Your 4-5k email might take a millisecond to travel from here, to Sri Lanka and back. You never saw it go, and your friend got the email seconds later. Normally, the lag is chocked up to the email server program, and NOT the lines of communication.
It is only when the Internet becomes a network of national networks, each of which is a network of regional networks, each of which is a network of local networks, =ALL= of which are run by technically-oriented volunteers who's one objective is to provide a service, can the Internet blossom.
No offense, that is the largest load of bullshit I've ever heard. Who are you to fortell the future, let alone tell the world how to run it? Face it man, things are bad, and things sometimes just don't know how to get better without COMPROMISE. If that really did exist, can you imagine what kind of control those governing bodies would have? If say the president of some country doesn't like slashdot.org, and has the authority over those said governing bodies, then BAM, they could restrict access for the whole country (or network). Do you truly think that "good-hearted" VOLUNTEERS (key word here) would give up their time and effort to run such a network? Can you imagine the problems, the calls, the hassle? Such bullshit comes in buckets my friend, not in cups.
The Internet must not be run as a business
So, in other words, "There must be no business on the Internet." Is that not what your saying the entire post? Do you not think that if there WERE no businesses online, that people would not CREATE them? Such as, sending email messages saying they had this or that product? If anything, the growth of spam and "semi-commercial" sites would bloom like wildfire. A means for everyone to be connected ALSO means that stores, shops and specialty boutiques must also have a place. They have a right, just as Joe Sixpack does.
In finality, I believe it can basically be brought down to this: Everyone else is making money off the internet, you're not, and you're super pissed about it. Your rant was not so much about the Internet in itself, but the lack of the Internet suiting YOUR needs. Suiting what YOU want, and what YOU expect from it. Others don't necessarily like the commercialization, but will order from cdnow.com just the same.
You say that America becomes a whiny, squalling baby when it doesn't get what it wants.
Does this sound familiar?
:-) = I am happy
:^) = I am happy with my big nose
C:\> = I am happy with my OS
TCP didn't replace NCP until the 1st of January 1983, about 14 years after the first packets flowed.
while we fight to preserve free speech on the net in the courts what we really need, IMHO, is :
[a] A way to transmit data and store it in a publically accessible way anonymously on an anonymous network of servers or equivalent in multiple countries...with no control over the servers contents by their owners (i.e. theyre not responsible for whats on the servers and cant remove the data on them..mostly text of course)
[b] An anonymous way to distribute files across the net in a secure manner (crypto protected)..something like the eternity server concept.
[c] A mimimal anonymous network thats off limits to anyone but individuals...no companies allowed (and hence no advertising)...that also runs encapsulated on the global internet. Something like what fidonet used to be.
This is probably wishful thinking but with everyone going DSL and 24/7 should be possible..
In a nutshell: half the address is your router, half the address is your Ethernet MAC (or equivalent - and you can make this bit up!). Its *all* about routing.
While there are some nasties in this direction (eg MS record you MAC address in Office documents in order to trace you), MACs are *not* globally unique, because you can trivially change them on many cards. I know this to my pain having been sent a bunch of PCs that all autoconfigured to the same MAC under NT, though they worked under other OS...
For the RFC-unaware it (section 6, Security, of the IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration RFC) reads...
Now that the Internet (and in the future, the Internet II) are no longer playthings of academics and researchers but are seen as central to a developing dot.com economy, what will be interesting to see is how the Internet develops.
Personally I'm not very concerned with the privacy issues raised by Katz.
Why?
Because by the death of DIVX and by the current popular attitudes towards the DVD lawsuits and the rejection by the general public of technologies which are not "easy to use" (translation: which technologically blocks fair use), I suspect the technology controls that corporations are trying to put in place to block the general public from using intellectual properties they paid for will wither and die on the vine.
Personally if given the choice of buying copy-protected music on the net which (a) only can be played on my computer and not in my car, and (b) could be lost if my hard disk crashes, or buying a CD, I'll buy a CD. That's because a CD is more convenient. MP3s are only taking off in the way they are because they are more convenient than a CD--in particular you can burn a CD-ROM with your music and protect them in case of a hard disk crash, and you can copy them into a portable player or archive them in one location.
But this only outlines a larger battle: the battle between security and ease-of-use. Already you can read newspaper articles about various CIA employees who circumvent their secure home workstations in order to copy highly secret data to insecure home PCs because they want to get their work done. Popular are technologies which circumvent security precautions, such as cookies in lew of password-protected security on shopping sites, and the Macintosh's Key Chain and similar Windows technologies which remember passwords for you.
People want ease of use as much as they want security. And when the security is not in their own personal best interest (such as protecting the intellectual property of the music conglomerates), they tend to say "screw security, I want to play my Madonna music files in my car."
I think the corporations have an uphill battle on their hands. And I think eventually they'll lose--unless they can come up with a technology that is easy to use as a CD and doesn't invade their lives, people will simply resort to older technologies.
For most, freedom is the freedom to be left alone. Forcing people to remember arcane passwords, techniques and telling them "you can't play your music in the car unless you pay me twice" isn't leaving them alone: it's invading their lives in ways that most folks could do without.
There are three parties that matter, sort of:
Government
Big Business
Individuals
[snip]Based on the DCMA and its application (so far) to the DeCSS case, it would appear that Big Business (having a monetary advantage) has bought out Government. </i>
This is the scary part. Do we sit back and allow this to happen? Do people even care about the landmark this sets? Apparently not, as the case is going through, and DeCSS is getting the shaft.
If Big Business did happen to buy Government out of the loop completely, and since Big Business in a Dictatorship for the most part, wouldn't government then also be a dictatorship? *shiver* If IPv6 can keep Big Business from interfering, go IPv6. If it can't, to say it l337ly, we're fuX0r3d if we're concerned about freedom and free information.
"My Computer, My Documents, My Connection, MY ASS!"
-- My Dad. =)
The WWWebster dates "yo" back to the 15th century, as an interjection "used especially to call attention, to indicate attentiveness, or to express affirmation."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I have my preferences set up NOT to see jonkatz articles, and have been enjoying Slashdot ever since... And this pops up!?
My personal diatribe against JonKatz:
I find JonKatz articles and writings to be sickeningly sensationalist, blatantly boring, and outrageously outlandish. It is as though he picks the most mundane of subjects, and stares at a wall until he thinks of some way this affects society in a negative way.
In this instance he looks to the internet two, and wonders what it will be like since it obviously is going to be defined by programmers. He then goes on to imagine that this is somehow different than the way the original internet started.
They are starting essentially the same way with one major difference: Now they know what the net is actually being used for and what people want with it.
Please, jon. The 'new internet' isn't going to make more homeless people, it won't cause people to lose their jobs, or rights, and it isn't going to be any less open than the current internet.
-Adam
Don't take this personally, there are lots of people in the world like you, and I ignore them too.
The solution, of course, is that we can never have the right to pursue technological knowledge taken out of the hands of the people. Once it becomes illegal to learn how things work unless you are an authorized person, you've basically made a certain level of technological illiteracy mandatory. Illiterate people are not as effective at opposing injustive as literate people, and this goes for the technological realm as well as any other.
I believe that the small battles (and they are small. Nasty though the battle against the MPAA is, it is no where near as nasty as future battles will be if this precedent is set) we are fighting now will determine what kind of future we are going to have. In the past, governments were more limited in what they could do, but technology is changing that. The crime rate is falling not because people are better now than they had been, but because it has become far easier for the state to track you down if you oppose it. New technologies are going to increase the power of the state by a huge factor. If we want we can make a future in which even the most minor and mild infraction of any law will take an infinitesmal amount of resources to stop, the only price we will pay is the freedom to live without state interference.
It occurs to me that we need certain rights encoded (or rather re-encoded) firmly into law, because things are happening now that didn't use to be possible. In the past, the only thing people had to fear from books, movies and music was persecution for consuming content that was on the censor's hit list. But now corporations are trying to change "you bought the book" to "you've bought the right to read our book." If this becomes truth, then it will be a fundemental change to human life, and a bad one.
All the creatures will die, And all the things will be broken. That's the law of samurai. (Jubai, 1605)
I like your choice of words. 128 bits makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
The ISPs certainly could do proxying, and effectively not implement the userid bits, or dynamically (randomly) assign them.
But will they? Can you imagine AOL doing this? No! The current argument is that dynamic IP's are technologically necessary because the ISPs have 10-15 times more users than IP addresses.
But when IPv6 makes it feasible to identify users, ISP's will lose this defense. The police/Courts would likely view it as "irresponsible" not to identify users. Look for some small buried regulation that requires it.
I'm very sorry to say I don't think there is a way. The people in government, police & courts are mostly there because they have chosen it as a career. Why would they with the low pay? Because it satisfies their desire/need to control others. Freedom becomes as hard to defend as it is for individualists to unite!
Well, yes of course *DSL and cable modems have effectively static IPs. But currently they are hardly worth tracking since the vast majority of users (not traffic) is dial-up. Frankly I see this continuing for quite some time. Many people's 'net usage is pretty light, just some email and information surfing that isn't worth an extra $40/mo to speed up.
;). My ISP would probably need some convincing.
I realize that IPv6 is _mostly_ about improving routing. And there's some reason for it. But on most cable systems, you cannot change your MAC and have the router still recognize your machine. Most are single user, or a most a few family members.
As for the current dynamic IP/dialup logging, of course my ISP's netadmin can trace me. But if someone else wants to, they have to ask by email/phone. That's not trivially easy, and the logs may have rotated
IPv6 certainly does help routing. But you _cannot_ just make up your MAC and have your router still recognize you. Cable systems use MAC for access control. I don't know about *DSL.
IIRC, IPv6 is 64 routing bits (mostly topo/geographical) , 32 bits for the ISP and 32 bits for your ISP to use as it sees fit. MAC/userid most likely.
I am hardly a consiracy theorist, but I can see the authorities in virtually all countries wanting the ability to track users without the cooperation of the ISPs. It is in the nature of police to want to know everything.
I'm sorry you find my comments nonsense, perhaps I can be more clear. I agree IPv6 _does_ have significant advantages for routing. But this thread isn't about future advantages, it's about disadvantages.
I'm not really talking about perfect anonymity either, but rather the ease of tracing a user that say surfs to a website. Currently, all the httpd knows is the 32 bit IP address. This is nearly useless because many other people use the same IP, and the user is unlikely to use that one again soon. Unless some part of the IPv6 is randomized, one (non-portable) machine will map to one IPv6 address. Maybe ISPs will still do some dynamic assignments on dial-ups. Quite possibly not if we don't do anything about it.
As for the 32 bit IPv4 "running out", I disagree. Yes, Class A's are gone, and B's and C's harder to get. So what? There are 4.16 _billion_ addresses available for ~200 million computers/routers. And it's not like there aren't any solutions. NAT/masq/proxying greatly expand the effective address space.
Yes, you can be identified under IPv4. But it requires the cooperation of your ISP who has to grep through the logs. If they can find him before the logs rotate to /dev/null. Not easy to do, and certainly not on a large scale.
With IPv6, none of this rigamarole would be required. You would always be identified. So gone would be the casual anonymity has has helped the net grow. As you say, for "hard" [bulletproof?] anonymity, you have to go through logless anonymizers.
Sure, all of this _could_ work. But what if your ISP won't cooperate, or cannot, because Courts view it as "irresponsible" not to embed userid in IP?
You can use the active anonymity measures you describe. But you or tha forwarder will stand out like a sore thumb, and attract more sophisticated tracing. Right now anonymity isn't too bad because everyone has it to some extent. The herd protects those who really need anonymity.
I agree with you. I never said, and didn't mean to imply that IPv6 was started as any sort of conspiracy. It was plainly started with the loftiest of technical goals: improving routing and multicasting.
Routing is a _terrible_ job. Just think of what happens to a packet that arrives in MAE East. It came in one one pipe. Presumably it doesn't go back out on that one. But on which one of the other pipes does it go? Surely those super routers cannot keep and search 2^32 entries.
I like your point about unintended consequences. Unfortunately I think IPv6 has large ones in terms of losing anonymity.
Well yes, there probably is less than 2^24 (16 M) entries. But that's not the problem. The real problem is how do you search 1-16M entries in the miniscule time you have available?
Figure that each of the pipes into a MAE is at least 1000 Mbit/s. The average packet might be 200 bytes = ~1600 bits. 1.6 ms per packet, or search 1M entries at 2500 GByte/s. Of course, you do parallel processing to reduce this, but you still need alot of fast cache SRAM.
IPv6 requires 128(!) bit IP addresses in place of the current 32 bit addresses. It is the end of anonymity on the 'net. Some of the extra bits will identify you as a particular user, others will be for routing to your location. HTTP cookies would become redundant.
I see user-selected anonymity as a cornerstone of the phenomenal growth of the 'net. When you want to read or write something that you fear would subject you meddling or critisism from busybodies, you can currently do so anonymously easily. Dial-up accounts and dynamic IP addresses make user tracing difficult.
Of course, there are always those control-addicts who will mention that anonymity assists criminals, and others who do things they don't like. That is the price of freedom. No-one ever said freedom was free, or even cheap. Unfortunately, control-addicts do not value freedom for others. By piercing anonymity, you stifle many activies.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only way to preserve this illusion (note that I didn't use the word "freedom") is to split the net up into two or so parts that may or may not share bandwidth.
Sex Net, as a "subNet" of Corporate Net and Free Net, incorporates this idea nicely.
Corporate Net is taxed, is regulated, and nobody cares since they're happy to be taxed for services that they actually pay for. Since there is a transaction, the user will be happy to stay up to their asses in legality designed to prevent them from being ripped off or offended. ASP's go here, too.
Free Net, on the other hand, is today's internet but faster and without anything you have to pay for. Anything goes - no money changes hands. Nobody can stop anything. Of course, access will be denied in most parts of the world - but we know how well that will go down, don't we? And how easy it will be to enforce?
By using this rudimentary classification (ie. money or no money) the world can be a happy, shiny place once more. Even lawyers can rest assured of a piece of the action.
-j
A larger issue of the next generation Internet is the level of control of the WiredNews, Slashdot, CNET, ZDNet, etc. that we know and love. As long as they have the ability to report the news and companies fairly and aggressively, the ideal nature of the present internet will continue in that fashion.
If you knew the U.S. constitution, you would know it specifically enumerates the powers of the federal government, and states that the powers not given to it are held by the states and the people. In turn, our state constitutions specify certain state powers. It's not necessary to list every stinkin' freedom the people have. If it was, our Constitution would have become obsolete very quickly, as new technologies and ways of thinking arose. It's for that reason that some opposed the Bill of Rights, since they deemed it redundant. Some even considered it dangerous, and unfortunately they seem to be right as there are many who think that whatever rights are not protected in the Constitution do not exist.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I think there are a couple of things I can disagree with in this. For one, I think that you are underestimating the economic disparity that is keeping the poor off the net right now. Sure, Netzero can get some people online, but can it buy them a computer and a 56k modem? Current schemes for getting a free computer (unless you live in CA and managed to defraud Microsoft in the MSN deal) involve paying out decent sums of money over a very long term, something that the working poor don't need more of. There are computers available through civic centers and that sort of thing, but these are few, far between, and frequently in pretty poor shape unless you are really fortunate.
The Internet disparity is very real. A lot of people are touting the internet as the medium of the future for universal free expression, but at the moment it is restricted to the middle and upper classes. Another aspect of this is that the less money you have, the less opportunity you have to aquire the technical know-how to operate succesfully on the Internet. This situation is being helped by simpler software interfaces, but you still have to get that software in order to learn.
I think it is a little rash to compare people who are too poor to own computers or pay for internet services as the electronic equivalent of blind people on the highway or child molesters. I agree that I would just as soon not be beset by script kiddies and kiddie porn on the net, but frankly I haven't had too much trouble with either of them. They might form some of the noise in the background, but it's no worse than the "undesirables" at the local shopping mall. I think the point is that if the internet is really going to be a medium for the real exchange of new ideas we have to have everyone online. The internet is about communication and the exchange of ideas, or at least that was the origonal idea (yes, it was designed to be a communication medium in the event of a nuclear war. But it was also designed to allow universities to exchange information about research in the meantime). If we are really going to give everyone in the country a voice, we have to get more people computer literate and online. This means especially the poor, who have just as big a stake in the world around them as anyone else. And while the Internet is more than just someone's idea of a nifty Jeffersonian politicol forum, it is also more than a platform for programmers to pat themselves on the back or to exchange cracked copies of Quake over FTP. The Internet is a huge information resource, something you understand very quickly once you've had a fast 24/7 connection for a while. Every person can contribute something to that body of knowledge if we let them, and certainly every person can benefit from it. If we lump the poor with other undesirables, we are depriving everyone of the benefit of their knowledge, and we're making the Internet one more old boy network for those in the know.
Oh, so that is what GPL stands for...
But anyway, facetiousness aside, it is far too early to really say anything about where things are headed in terms of "freedom" and other stuff like that. Things are in ferment. This is a truly revolutionary time and one of the key features of truly revolutionary times is that you don't know what your going to get in the end.
But I think we can talk about what the key factors are. This article mentioned one, which is the influence of money and big corporations. Obviously important. But another, which is mostly unappreciated, is the labor shortage in the technical professions. (Not necessarily a shortage of bodies, but a shortage of competent labor.) This will have a profound effect as when labor is hard to come buy, the people with the required skill end up with more power.
I find Jon's comparison between today's hackers and engineers and architects of yesterday interesting, but after some thought, incorrect. If anything, hackers have could end up with far more power. One of the interesting things about software is that a very large percentage of people simply don't understand it, at least, not at the really root level of a programmer. Certainly most managers don't. More than once I've found myself in a situation where I realized that I could spit out pretty much any bullshit, estimate a project anywhere from 1 day to 6 months, and I'd be believed. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I used to think this would change as more of the population learned software, but they haven't as yet. To most it truly is magic. And as long as this is the case, those of us who know it have a fair amount of power.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out as despite however much the megacorps want to code in control, they've still got to hire someone to do the coding. I've often wondered if some of the corporate "failures" have been some sort of "subversion from within". "Oopsy, did I leave that key in memory? Oh dopey me!". I know I've been in a couple of situations where I was tempted to do exactly that sort of thing.
BTW: When is "Tags to text" going to work again? Is this a secret plot to train us all to preview?
The cake is a pie
The freedom that is in the internet was by accident. It started as a way for academics to freely exchange ideas. The whole concept of freedom wasn't really thought about - this was in the days when passwords didn't have to exist.
As the internet grew and stopped being purely in the realms of universities, it had to change to fit demands.
Crackers forced the use of passwords and firewalls.
Goverments forced the creation of civil liberites groups such as the EFF.
Parts of the changes are in the way it connects together, part of the changes affect the outside world.
Privacy is important, freedom of speech is important.
The Internet gives people a platform to be heard and to appeal to like minded people.
This is the freedom that needs to be maintained in the future. We don't want to be able to trace a single voice, or to be sued if we feel we are doing the right thing in the face of an opressive system. We want to be able to speak our minds.
>Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally
:) without any problems. The Dept of Transport (licensing authoritiy here in the UK) who seem to be somewhat more enlightened than you, has no problems whatsoever about my deafness. I dont even have to pay any extra on my driving insurance.
>ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways,
Off topic but I feel I should come and give you a methaphorical smack in the face as a deaf person who drives a variety of cars (and motorbikes
(We also have deaf lorry drivers, and deaf couriers, who communicate using Nokia 9110s or mobile in-cab fax machines.)
You may ask how do I know what's going on behind me? There's them things called mirrors, and I use them. Frequently.
-tomato
Today every time I connect (as a consultant) a new client to the Net, the first things they want are a) a way to monitor what the employees are doing; b) a way to restrict access to "unnaproved" sites and c) a way to look at every single incoming or outgoing e-mail message in order to screen it.<P>
The concept of "portals" was designed to exploit the "TV desire" of newcomers, and it is definitely working. To some people "the Internet" and whatever their software installs as "home" for their browsers are the same thing. This kind of behaviour has the same origins as that in which people doing most of their work on word processors tend to fire up Word, open a document and click "save as", instead of simply copying whatever it is they want copied. Sadly, most people don't like to think and don't like to learn new things.<P>
The most recent fad in my country is the popping up of a great number of "free internet providers". All people pay attention to is the word "free" (as in lunch, not as in speech). They don't mind if these providers tie them to a proprietary browser that attaches its own ad banners to every site they visit. They don't care if these providers filter anything from content to entire protocols. They just want to "watch Internet for free", as someone put it to me the other day.<P>
It would take a lot of educating these people before things would be different. It just won't happen. Like TV, people will willingly give the power for free to the same media moguls, then just sit back and "enjoy the show" while they pile up fortunes.<P>
For myself, I still struggle hard against that kind of complacency, but I think it's a lost cause. People don't want to publish their ideas freely because most of them don't have (or don't think they have) any ideas worth publishing. They want to read the sports page. People don't want to pay for Internet access. They'd rather watch ads. People don't want to think, they prefer watching TV.
The boundaries, length and nature of this discussion are up you. You can take these starting points or reject them, add your own, change course, flame away, or ignore the conversation completely, in which case it will automatically vanish.
No!! Please don't. One three-part epic was enough.
-jay
Earthweb, by Marc Stiegler is an excellent exploration in fiction of some of the implications, both good and bad, of more freedom on the net and more protection of privacy. Marc's web site for the book is here. Both the related books and related links are interesting, partly because Marc is a programmer who has explored prototypes of some of the things he discusses in the book. If you are interested in a preview of the book, the publisher, Baen Books has put several chapters on the Web here.
For Marc and Baen, if you are reading this, a sequel would be welcome. The story left that possibility open while not desparately screaming for it like far too many books these days.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
It's always interesting to equate "free" movements of the past with debates about freedoms in the present. If one looks carefully into the meaning and usage of the word "free" one finds that the enlightenment (just to use the example by Mr. Katz) tends to use the word "free" to essentially mean "proprietary." This usage is part of a historical legacy of property ownership which equated "freedom" with "exclusive rights to a thing". To be "free" (Libertas) in latin conveys the idea of rights of exclusion - the right to exclude others from your proprety, your monopoly, your franchise. To be "free" of a town meant that you had trade rights in that town or city - a privilege to be inherited, bought or bribed. To own land in "freehold" meant that you had exclusive rights to that land (as opposed to other more awkward rent-models of ownership, like "copyhold"). The "Liberties of the House of Commons" in England were particular priviliges accorded to a very minority membership of the very wealthy: immunity from arrest, and the right to uncensored discussion.
I think sometimes we have a tendency to romanticize the past's own sense of freedoms - especially as they relate to the foundation of the "free" republic of America. To look back to the "freedoms" of the Enlightenment and then say "where are we compared to THAT sense of freedom" is a fiction of freedom. Humans have always had a tendency to grab and hold on - fortunately we also have a tendency to break down and destroy barriers. These forces working in tandem form a pretty complex human dialogue and perhaps it's too simple to look to a small part of the rhetoric of the "Enlightenment" or the "Renaissance" (both loaded terms stressing an artificial sense of advance or progression) for a vision of our present.
GPB
Just for the record, there is a great deal of work going on already in building Internet 2. Internet 2 is specifically being reserved for research and acadmic oriented activities. Much of the recent commercially oriented traffic that consumes much of the bandwidth on the original Internet is deliberately excluded.
This new network is often referred to as the next generation Internet. You might want to be a bit more cautious in the vocabulary your using in this article. Some of it already has some well defined connotations in the industry.
"Yo" (I quote from Katz),
I don't mean to go brutally offtopic here, but oh well. I remember Charlie Benante as the drummer from a thrash metal band named Anthrax. And I don't want to Slag or Diss, but "Charlie's" netzero link is a link to a farmsex site. Funny, when taken in the context of the next couple of lines.
....Charlie, if it is you, send me a mail, I'm a huge fan(Just take out the brackets). And moderators, do what you will.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
The big problem is that Bill Gates and Micros~1 got where they are by marketing campaigns, and not by building a better mousetrap. Unfortunately, the company was perfectly poised to take advantage of what I call the "MTV Effect". In musical terms, it means that people would much rather spend their money on a crappy product with the right image associated (bikini chicks, gun-toting hip gangster wanna-bes), than on music that is in any way artistic if it was written by ugly guys. In software terms, Microsoft's ads have the pretty pastel colors and trance-inducing music suited perfectly to the reduced-attention-span set. Therefore, Marketing knows that all they have to do to sell a new product is advertise it, and it will fly off the shelves. These factors, I think, are why mediocrity is so pervasive there, not because the programmers willfully suck.
Unix: Where
No, the Internet's most central ideology has been promoting a certain kind of information. freedom != information . While, I admit, information should be free, not all agree.
I really would like to know what kind of information you are refering. I think that the protocols themselves that just basically allow you to talk to Aunt Edna isn't exactly real information. We don't have total information. Now maybe in your little world information dosn't make you free however I am one to disagree. You see if I have enough information about things I can get untimate freedom.
Suppose I can predict the future and say can anticipate exactly how anyone could kill me, how I could get into any sort of accident, or get any disease. Now I can prepare for all these things and with unlimited information I can even cure these things.
Granted this is not ultimately how it totally works however it is how most of the information in the world approaches. The internet because it has information make us all free and allows us to survive. It used to be that the only people who knew how to truely read in Europe were people in the Church back in the Middle ages. Eventually kings figured it out but until Gutenberg made that little gaget called the printing press we didn't have anything. We were all slaves to others. When people began to read we eventually had developments like the US Constitution.
The same can be said that many people can't afford a car and that many don't have the skills to drive a car. What makes the net so different though is that many companies provide a "free-ride" (ie NetZero) and software is getting
dumbed down. But is this what we want? Do you really want everyone online. Just as you don't want drunk-drivers, mentally ustable, extremley elderly, or blind/deaf people on you highways, do you want child molesters, script
kiddies, etc on the net? Be carfeul what you wish for...
Ohhh big deal. Did your new bently get mashed up by some 16 year old drunk? I don't think you understand the principal here. As I have argued and argued and argued here on slashdot you cannot turn what is supposed to be an openforum or an open system of protocols and exclude the people *you* don't like.
We grew out of this largely because of all the gentleman's club type atnosphere of times like the late 1800's and early 1900's. Most likely if you lived in America (and not everyone does or did) you were the parents of immigrants. Those groups were constantly excluded by calling them all sorts of titles that made them look really bad and shifty. I can't say that I can blame some people for trying to get revenge for what their forefathers had done unto them however I cannot say that I like your attitude of exclusion I really can't say that I savor closing the internet just so you boss can get his daily dose of porn'n'quotes for the day or so that you can play quake III arena in peace each and every night.
What I truely care about is access. Figuratively that homeless bum or that stupid kid in that leather jacket or that kid who smashed your bently last week has/had just as much right to be there as you. People who want to exclude come one step closer to being like good ol' Adolf a day at a time.
No, it is getting closer. The original idea was for information to travel cross-country in case of a nuclear war. And I would say it has accomplished that.
God do people always have to specifically say what they indent nowadays. He meant in the traditional sence with the development of the http protocol and adoption of things such as web browsers and such. Maybe going to the BBS days of the 80's but that's a stretch. You must understand that when people say internet in popular usage mean that recent developments.
Now seriously do you really think that in the event that H bombs go flying around and large city centers are actually hit that anyone let alone the government could reasonably expect to communicate and would it do them any good? Not really.
Getting back to your problem is that we are seeing a partial fultilment of the kind of widespread use and adoption in some areas and a bit of information is ther however we can't really see the forest for the trees and quality has gone downhill with shiny new bells and whistles.
So in reality I think that we have strayed from the founders (the true founders unless you think that 5 star generals and the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the NSA actually does all the internet startups or created geocities).
Is that bad? Everything doesn't have to be OPENSOURCE, GPL, LINUX, etc. And companies other than IBM have tried opensource models (ie OpenDK, OpenBSD).
I take it your haven't exactly had to make ecconomic choices in your life? You haven't had shitty software before? You really haven't had a need that wasn't fulfilled. Major companies don't give a shit that dosn't mean that we shouldn't care. Yeah I don't *expect* it to happen I do however *care* if it was and *want* it to happen. Sure people have to make money but does that mean that have to make so *much* money.
Ok, but lets review principles of governtment Mr. Katz. For a democracy to exist, there must be a leader. As it stands, the net is far far far from a democracy. It is, at best, anarchy in action.
No it is not anarchy! Think clearly. Even if you get to the point where there is at least one warlord or one group of savages who are huddled around a fire or if there is one woman/man traveling with their spouce you do not have anarchy. Maybe we are in the stage of fudalism and such because each person has to go through an ISP. The ISP is almost like a small emerging nation state. Unless everyone has a free and unregulated dedicated connection to the net and can access everything there are people who are in charge. And right now I compare Microsoft to Spain in the 16th century. Ever seen the movie (can't remeber the name) where some king or general of Spain looks at the map of the know world and says something like "and all this is spain"? Well we do have leaders just not all powerful ones.
I must say though, you did do some good research into the great thinkers of America, but you lack a bit in the Internet history.
The internet hasn't anything in common with the early days of the 60's-70's. I doubt you can find many similarities at all in almost anything. Everything has changed and nothing remains the same. What really characterizes the net has been the use and application of the average man the people not the generals, scientists, and people like Andrew P. Carnigie-esq.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
This is a pessimistic view, but it doesn't matter how cheap the appliances get or what they run. When your granny gets on the net, she'll have a box she's bought/got free from a big corporate entity of some sort. She'll get pointed at
corporate web sites. They'll have links to other corporate web sites. She'll follow those links. She might type in addresses she sees in corporations' advertisements. She won't go to individuals' sites, because noone she trusts (i.e. no
companies or governments) will point her at them. The freely flowing information of the underground community will be there on the Internet, but who will be listening to it except those who are already part of that community?
Search engines allow you to look at almost any content that you want. Just for kicks and giggles look up these key words on you favorite search engine(s):
sex
porn
warez
hacking
phreaking
carding
serials
These should return many, many, many hits to millions of sites that specialize in various "underground" things. And you can also look up various things like strange religious rituals and other things.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
This is a pessimistic view, but it doesn't matter how cheap the appliances get or what they run. When your granny gets on the net, she'll have a box she's bought/got free from a big corporate entity of some sort. She'll get pointed at
corporate web sites. They'll have links to other corporate web sites. She'll follow those links. She might type in addresses she sees in corporations' advertisements. She won't go to individuals' sites, because noone she trusts (i.e. no
companies or governments) will point her at them. The freely flowing information of the underground community will be there on the Internet, but who will be listening to it except those who are already part of that community?
You can always lie or at worst just get a connection which then given you an IP and then get something like lynx of netscape through them. Porblem solved. Question for anyone do these free services work through wine? Could you just install them in windows and then run them in wine through Linux?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I beleive the hardware which will encourage freedom in the "second Internet generation" has to be by far free or very low cost PCs. At the present, there are many people with PCs and Internet access, but still the majority does not
have a PC or Internet access (barring public terminals, libraries, etc). I beleive once more people start to get a PC and get onto the Internet, they will begin to realize what is out there for them (on the Internet) and how they will be
able to find almost anything they could ever dream of. There are some folks (governments in particular) which wish to limit the free flow of ideas and information on the Internet, and the more people who get on the Internet and find
out the limitless amount of ideas, information and content available to them, the more new Internet users (hopefuly) will pay attention to what they have to lose when laws and "innovations" (such as SDMI or UCITA) are introduced.
Well maybe you caught me in a philosophical mood today but I think that the data on the internet is absolutely not limiteless. You have lots of data in categories that is sensationally popular however those obscure things are usually not to be found anywhere. Some of my greatest discoveries were almost made by chance and not something that I could have easily searched for. What we really have to do is to allow for more dedicated bandwidth for each household in America.
Now why would I say this? Simple. Check out all of the stuff at freshmeat.net. A disturbing fact you will quickly find out is that a great deal of the "interesting" tasks have been for network access and the control of a machine that can deliver content of one sort or another. Now I know all you sysadmins out there have all the access you want but quite frankly I don't give a rat's ass about any of you. I actually care about the average person who dosn't have that little ol' OC-48 line into his/her house and the ability to do whatever you want.
Think of all the possibilities if the net were truely something you could really access and publish content on? As it stands now all the telephone gives me now is just bad news or telemarketers in general. If I could scrap my telephone line and as standard could just have a dedicated line like a T-1 then I would be happy. I could run anything that I wanted and publish information and content that I truely think that the world would benefit from. Having to constantly need to pay for anything and everything to get my message out with all the fancy tools is not something that I can do. Microsoft hasn't done this no matter how much that they claim to the contrary wise.
Really just being able to passively look at the internet and all those big shiny windows with all their fascinating stuff isn't something that I like to do. I want to truely create. I want to run an IRC server a MUD server an http server and several others. I want to run the slash code. I want to have a web site that is something that I can truely be proud of and to make sure I feel a sence of accomplishment out of. I can't do that now. I can't actually get much out of any "free" access to such resources (most of them are just jokes).
The net may be "free" but the printing presses are all under control of insidious minions of orthodoxy.
The software which will help ensure freedom in the "second Internet generation" would be, of course, OSS solutions. Along with my theme of low cost PCs, free, readily available and reliable operating systems (Linux, *BSD, etc) are
available at the present. Combine Linux with a low cost PC and Internet access, and consumers could be on the Internet with a $300 PC and $10/month Internet access (or $400 for 3 years of Internet access and a PC from some offers
I've seen). $400 is a price I realistically feel many consumers can afford, as opposed to 2 or 3 years ago when consumers would have to spend at least $1500 for a PC with a modem and $25/month for Internet access.
Big deal. I have said before does it really help me? I have a 2400bps modem and I don't have any way to get my home machine connected. From a technological standpoint I can't really see what is so hard in just saying to the modem:
Ok look I don't want 56k of bandwidth I just want 2400bps. Yes I know you are capable of that but I just want to use this much.
That really isn't so hard. Yes I am cheap and until I actually want to shell out cash for a better one I would sure be appreciative of actually seeing some miraculous technology fixing the problem that I may have. What is rapidly happening is that linux and it's apps are getting resource heavy. I am constantly being bombarded with reasons that people upgrade PCs.
It seems that what happens is that you are slowly driven mad with crappy things. Lousy programs freezing the X server, hogging disk space, RAM. Have you ever seen any of those themes for various WMs out there? Well I have at least 256 colors and do you know what I see? Well all the niftly little effects such as transparency and something that dosn't look grainy can't happen. I am betrayed by the technology that is to set me free. What will only happen is that the people who write the code run monster machines. They buy more monster machines and then develop to fit this profile. Result? Machines that don't have all the bells and whistles don't get supported or are just broken or just ruined. Until software is streamlined again we cannot expect to be anything but slaves.
Damn it seems like $2,000 is't worth your sanity.
Another thing apps are still in the phase that makes them not totally acurate in the features that they have. Things like GNOME will probably be useful maybe in 2 years. Others in more time than that. Combined with betrayal of app makers this makes for a dismal affair.
My second answer to the "software" question would be free Intenet access. At the present, most free acess providers are limited in the OSes they support (Windows NT or 9x). However, if free service providers supply Linux clients,
not only do they increase their customer base, but help more people discover what this whole "Intenet" thing they've been missing is. If you have a Windows PC and and no Internet access (how are you reading this?!), there are
plenty of free access providers available (a good list can be seen here on Yahoo!). Personally, I would rather pay for Inernet access since I can't stand advertising, but if you live with some banners on your screen, it's a splendid deal.
They don't care about linux users anyway. What they care about are people who are idiots. They care about windows people. They don't have to target linux users because linux users are by and far loaded with cash because of their ritzy little programming jobs (which I am sure even though I am a CS major I will be cheated out of) can buy their own satellite relay system.
The protocols which will help the second generation Internet thrive will be IP v6. Not only is it an open protocol available for all OSes, vendors and individuals to use, but it also comes with other features such as built in encryption
which helps to keep what someone wants to be private, well, private.
Ohhh wow encryption! Well that makes a world of difference to me *sticks finger in mouth and makes gagging sounds*. And IPv4 isn't a protocol that can use encryption and isn't open? Last I checked you can use encryption programs for all those people who have all their buddies who use encryption or who are scared out of their whitts by government officials trying to determine their location of their militia group's tent in Montana. Dosn't mean that I really care. I can't use encryption for anything for two major factors:
1. Never have any real communication with known individuals who actually support it.
2. No access to an IP address from home machine making the use of things like pgp almost a waste of time. (Well yeah I could just encrypt the thing ahead of time and then go a distance and include in in the text and do the reverse to decrypt however I can't say that such an idea appeals to me).
One problem with my ideas is that history has shown that the majority of people don't keep up on proposed and new laws, nor do they research what they buy before it's too late. I quick and easy example of this would be the low
voter turnout each year.
Well maybe for the lack of ability to actually do all the fancy content and have true editorial control of said content they don't feel that they actually care. I for one can't say that I almost care any more. All the rich son't and daughters of lawyers/doctors/sowftware tycoons have all their life problems worked out but some do not.
Using these factors and the fact that a lot of the content that is out there is changing and becomming cheasy and network dependent (meaning that the data must be kept on the network medium that once held it or it becomes useless or not a useful; This would be like a database or a listing of information that constantly changes or perhaps something that is HTML formatted or that works well with only some things like javascript or shockwave)
The other issue is that, as much as we hate to admit it, Linux has a ways to go for usability. I've seen the "My grandma can use Linux!" discussion many times before here on Slashdot, but I feel installation, configuration, GUIs and
easy ways to update the OS (to add new features and patch bugs) need to be improved before Linux will be the OS of choice for first time PC users.
I see a different problem with usability. I see a problem with actually getting the damn thing not to waste my resources like a drunken band of pirates on some tropical island. I can't believe that people can't make something work better. Hell these people are supposedly extremely bright and have so much knowledge and yet they almost force people to upgrade unless you want to turn you machine into a new jukebox for the sound of an hd grinding away (sure is cool however after several minutes of this happening it gets a little irritating).
So, in summary, PCs, OSes and Internet access which are at low or no cost will help more people to get onto the Internet, see all of the wonders it has to offer, and hopefuly realize what we all have to lose in the future if we do not
protect the freedoms we have now.
Ohh boo hoo hoo I will grieve for a total of about 10 seconds for all those little rich people who are cheated from having all their fun. I see no reason to actually care about their plight or the fact that the multi-million dollar website at http://www.mycheasysitethatcostalotof$$$.com or something (creaps have the audacity to charge for something that is supposed to be an open protocol). I have seen decreasing utility of what is out there and a general lousy attempt to make thousands of $$ off of it. Could someone really tell me why in my present state of technology (or more precisely lack thereof I should actually care about all those people getting their toys taken away?). In the grand scheme of things I haven't actually written anything more complicated that some program that did a calculation about some simple physics problem with a single for loop. If I have to upgrade my PC anyway what would be the harm of using windows if linux is just going to just start taking more and more resources like that aforementioned band of rum drunken pirates. I can't say I like Billg however linux is betraying me royally. If you wish please take my message and de-moderate it for your vicarious feeling of triumph of squashing me with your fist I just wanted someone to see it (you have to look at it to moderate it).
In conclusion I say that in fact the internet is a medium that was designed with the sole purpose of allowing elites to communicate (military, DoD, Echelon, university departments and such), connects computers via extremely expensive bandwidth (ever try to actually afford one of those nifty dedicated connections which actually allow you to have a life with linux and friends), host expensive web sites (hell I can't think of anyone who would be impressed with even the best geoshitties pages no matter who you are) since they require the big $$$, or connecting computers which could dub as the next replacement for the NSA (something that the wonderful new world of consumerism has created) it is something that the average person who has average to ambitious goals cannot hope to attain because of laziness, sloth, and the general lack of touch with what I term the forgotten man of the world. To quote Roland in Steven King's "Gunslinger" series "The world has moved on"; and in this case it has moved on to be more repressive and unequal in nature than at any other time. Please if you want to drive you catellacs please don't drive them near me ok?
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
I guess that is what I was saying. That and the fact I just don't see a way to get through to the Sixpacks...
It is sad really. Our best hope is that Junior Sixpack and his siblings are open to the message. Perhaps we need to create some cool games with these kind of issues as a subtext? (I am only partly joking, propaganda is in the eye of the beholder.)
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
We don't need complex 'rules' built into the architecture and infrastructure of the Internet to insure freedom. All we need is the same kinds of simple protocols we already use. Given those protocols, programmers like myself can always create something that rides on top to do whatever is needed. (Can anyone say 'Napster'?)
No, what we need has nothing to do with technical matters. The greatest danger to free speech and freedom of usage on the Internet is an external one: Laws and Lawsuits. For example; suppose I create a program that allows anyone to communicate any information anonymously, with strong encryption so no-one else can tell what is being communicated. What happens next? The answer is easy -- I get sued by every organization charged with protecting Intellectual Property Rights and investigated by the government for exporting munitions!
This is a very real scenario. In fact variations of it are happening all the time. (Lets all say 'Napster' again.) It doesn't matter if the software is Open Source or closed. It doesn't even matter if it is very good, so long as it works.
The thing is, I know how to write software. I don't know how to manipulate the masses into calling for guarentees of freedom from their governments. I don't know how to make judges understand the issues the way I do. I don't know how to get the governments of the world to agree to keep their hands off what is easly the most transforming piece of technology on the planet. I just know that the more oppressive a government is, the more the Internet should scare them!
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
True. And there will always be exceptions. But so long as there are onerous legal consequences most of us will not be willing to suffer them.
That isn't entirely true. Try going to China and handing out disks with PGP software for example. Besides, as I have already pointed out -- most of us are too chicken. The chilling effect of negative consequences is too great to overcome without some hope that our efforts will actually amount to something.
As a citizen of the United States of America, I am the heir of a great tradition of Freedom. One fought for by some very great men over two hundred years ago. The quote "The tree of freedom must be fed from time to time with the blood of patriots." is as appropo today as it was then.
But, sadly, this great tradition is paleing into insigificance even here. We Americans have traded our freedom for safety many times already, and are prepared to trade more in the future:
Why should programmers be different than anyone else? The problem isn't one of individual action. It is societal. If I act in some significant way on my own, at best I will be considered a nut and at worst a terrorist. Our biggest problem isn't a lack of will, but rather an inability to educate the masses, to reach out beyond /. and the other geek enclaves. Until Joe Sixpack agrees with us, no amount of revolutionary rhetoric will tilt the scales in favor of Freedom.
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Technology defines society. For example, it used to be perfectly acceptable to keep slaves, because farming and manufacturing were labour-intensive. It was only once it was economically feasible to do away with slavery that the bulk of public opinion shifted, because until then the people in power had an interest in it not shifting.
Then, too, society defines technology. The internet itself is a creation of the U.S. government's tendency to throw vast numbers of dollars at military projects. Same deal for modems.
So one of the questions Katz is trying to ask here is: What technology should we create, in order to shape society?
Jack William Bell (who wins the "Most Karma gained in a Day" prize) makes the point that this is far from the whole story, and that law and propaganda are extremely important. For example, you and I will always be able to get hold of a copy of DeCSS, regardless of what various laws may say, because we have a clue; but if it's illegal, then it can't be included in your facourite Linux distro, and thus will never be available to the bulk of the population. Freedom for a small elite is a pretty sucky kind of freedom.
But inroads can be made through a technological front. As Dr Caleb has mentioned, the Internet exists in places other than the US.
Here is one such technological front: a data haven. A bunch of gutsy servers located technically, physically or practically outside the jurisdictions that want to control the Internet. One such model is described in Neal Stephenson's excellent Cryptonomicon; another is being created by people building a free networking system that caches data anonymously, thus meaning that there's no-one to serve with an injunction (can somebody remember their URL?). Want DeCSS? Go to a data haven. (Want kiddie porn? Go to a data haven. Clearly, complete freedom has a bad side as well as a good side, but to an extent ya gotta accept both sides of the coin, or neither.)
And hey, is anyone other than me having trouble believing that Katz said "Yo"?
The next generation, however, will grow up with the Internet, as we did with tv. They will not respect the freedom it provides them with and in essence will take the Internet for granted, along with all the aforementioned advantages.
I consider it the responsibility of the current Net-community, as well as common sense, to educate this new generation on the ideas the Internet has been built on. This in order to safeguard against a generation that could grow up considering the Internet as a commodity to be exploited, constricted and generally changed into a 'Corporate Internet' (Gaeltact).
This forum provides an excellent opportunity to do so. However, it's not enough. We should try to get this message across mouth-to-mouth.
With respect to the question what rights and freedoms people want to preserve. How about the freedom of speech. To be able to say whatever you want, whenever you want to say it.
And accordingly, the freedom to research other people's opinions/information, in whatever form presented
The right to be anonymous.
The right to have privacy.
The list goes on. One thing is certain. The Internet is constantly changing. Some changes we can see coming, some take us by surprise. However, if we want it to change for the better then nothing is served with us standing on the sidelines. Because we'll only end up acting surprised and disgruntled. And we'll feel stupid.
omni
an open mind: the essence of intellect.
Imagine the following trivial example:
I live in the Kingdom of Quert, where there are no laws regarding the publishing nor expressing of defamatory material.
On my website (physically located within the territorial boundaries of Quert) I disclose certain distasteful allegations concerning US Citizen X.
How can X sue me, and what for?
Likewise for a country whose laws invalidate or contradict the GPL (it could happen!), or a country with relatively lax computer-intrusion laws. Etc, etc, etc.
To even further generalise this trivial example for the hard of thinking...
Imagine two locations: L1 and L2
Imagine two entities: E1 and E2
E1 lives in and is bound by the laws of L1
E2 lives in and is bound by the laws of L2
E1 has no rights (as an individual or organisation) to prosecute E2 for doing something within L2 that is not prosecutable in L2 and that's all there is to it.
Fuck all that noise! The next protocol should be open source, with complete anonymity and all the nifty features any computer user could want. We can't trust some organization funded and supported by big business to create something that will be good for individuals. This will always be around to a small degree, with little, undergound client-server combos, but there should be a BIG movement to create the next client-server metaphor to replace the lame and restricted browser. We need something that connects more fully with the rest of the OS and GUI, and would be available for all operating systems (both client and server). Something in between a web browser, hotline, and a Q3 engine. Something to really let tomorrow's internet publishers express themselves and take the user for a ride. I think chatting might become more popular as it inherites a 3D engine and allows me to sit in a conference room or couch with other people, and I can get a skin for myself (or get myself scanned or something) and see other people (with whatever skin they chose to display. The main point is, that we must be in control of the next internet.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
I believe that the free flow of information would lead to possibly the greatest evolution yet for the human species. But I am not willing to take that step if the casualities are going to be too high. If the only people who can make the evolution are the tech-saavy (i.e. Slashdotters :)), then we aren't ready yet. We need to be sure that we don't widen the already gaping hole between the technically illiterate and the technically fluent.
/., while relieving, does nothing to stem the tide of ignorance (== lack-of-knowledge != stupidity).
I would love to see an Internet unhindered by idealogies, government control and regional partitioning, unfortunately I don't see this happening, too many governments have already placed or are placing restrictions. The only thing that can stop this viscious cycle is the education of the populace. If the voters/citizens refuse to accept this type of restriction, then it can be prevented.
This should be a call to action for all those tech-saavy people. Participate with your local schools, hold free seminars for people who are computer illiterate, visit inner-city schools and donate your old computers (or new one's if you've got the money). The evolution must begin in the schools and neighborhoods or it will never be successful. Education is key, with education laws like DMCA and UCITA would never have passed in the first place. Bitchin' about it on
<sidenote>
This article points out a whole lot of interesting issues. One thing I would like to mention, is that while OSS is becoming a viable commercial model, it has a ways to go, probably more in mindshare than in factual/real terms. It is still a whole lot easier to make money by selling a proprietary product than it is to make money developing OSS, especially if said product would have the same reliability, maintainability, etc.
</sidenote>
The "Top 10" Reasons to procrastinate:
10.
The Internet Is Sentient
For too long we have dismissed the possibilities that lie within the collective knowledge and to some degree anti knowledge base that is the Internet. Not only does the Internet not have cultural ties, it has no morals, no judicial system and no religious archetype to which to cling to for comfort. It was designed with independence in mind from the strictures of the physical and material world. (Remember ARPA Net's vision to be able to withstand holocaust?). For this reason it became the choice of the freethinking and those who did not place import on the simple philosophical meandering of the current systems that they found themselves placed into that could never conceive of a place were there was no right and wrong. A simple principle of "if it's conceivable then it's possible" was adopted, no one questioned if it was ethically right at the time of it's conception, and up until recently this held true.
As the Internet has grown it has harbored the knowledge and human creativity of a billion users. Seen the waves of the tides of information lap upon it's impressionable surface and gently scour a landscape out of the freewill, cooperation or squabbling of it's users. There were no borders only land, no one claimed it for there own, they only made use of what was there. And there were no laws, no one to say :
"well that came from over there so that's not allowed here." Or "that might hurt this part of the landscape so I'm not going to let you do it."
If something is burned to a cinder in the web, it's not a bad thing, we can't understand that, the governments and systems can't understand that. To destroy, alter or distribute in the web is just to make a different texture and add depth to what's there. Because none of it's real and has no cultural or ethical base then no one in the material world should be able to make any decision to effect the behavior of it's dizidends or the availability of parts of it. In this community and indeed much of the Corporate feed world aswell we make one assumption, Knowledge is Power. This is true in our world but in the world of the Web this is incorrect, how many cases of severe stupidity and or paranoia have come about from this notion, the web isn't Power it's the actions which are power. So where am I going with this? Well the fact that the old systems are trying to impression themselves upon the web along with the political ethical religious legislative laws and baggage which go along with them, is like saying let's create borders and laws where there is no metaphysic system to support them. And because of the time frame which they are trying to do it it's like they are erecting them with a 1000 kilo tonne hydrogen bomb.
So would the legislation that the corporations would push to create a better firewall, (and that's all it would be, to make sure there corporate Sky towers are protected a little more), create a nuclear winter? Because of the sudden introduction of a paradigm which was never meant to be. Or would it all collapse under it's own hypocrisy in a world which does not stand for rules?
Because the corporations understand that there is not right and wrong, just like the rest of us who chose to plug ourselves into this culture, it's quite possible that the holocaust will come to be, then on the other hand it's possible that the nature of internet will not stand it.
So what of the internet being sentient? And enough with the parodies. If the human race wishes to live in a comfort blanket where bad things never happen Iike it has tried to do for so long, and we all discard the lesson of positive entropy, then the internet is defiantly clamping down. And as far as the internet being sentient, just look at search engines, and tell me with a straight face that they must not have some sort of consciousness. =-)
Ænertia
Aenertia@hotmail.com
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here
Theoretical anonymity, de-centralized distribution, countless points of access, the sudden irrelevance of geography, sophisticated tools of encryption - these and other features of the Internet protocols made it virtually impossible to control speech on the Internet.
Ha ha, that's funny. These things all make it inconvenient to control speech, which is a far different thing from impossible. Given the will to impose ridiculous, draconian laws then the Net can be as controlled as you wish - look at the current situation in China as a shining example of the way foward (note the sarcasm there). Yes, countries in the west are unlikely ever to go quite that far but you'd be suprised at what can be done given the right spin by the government. Go and look at the Prevention of Terrorism Act that was passed over here in the UK some years back for an example of a law which was passed based on the public fear of terrorists. The same thing happened in America back in the halycon days of the Cold War. Never underestimate the ability of the government and the media to whip people up into a frenzy against 'evil group X'.
Sorry to repeat an old cliche, but information is power, and this will again become increasingly apparant in the future. If you don't want any of your information to exist outside of your home then live like a hermit, because unfortunately it's getting to the point where anything you do that can be attributed to you is being monitored and logged in the name of 'targetted advertising' or whatever. Anonymity is probably easier on the Net than off of it - at least at the moment - but there are still times when your actions are being logged - the time I spend here on /. is logged somewhere and I'm sure they could build up a profile of my interests from what stories I read here. You just have to accept that it's going to happen sometimes and try and avoid it the rest of the time.
The issue really lies in the hands of the people who frequent sites like this one. Technology is volatile, fluid and inherently unpredictable. It often moves beyond technics and has broader social implications - Linux for example.
Ah yes. The obligatory Jon Katz pat on the back for the /. and Linux community. What does this paragraph mean? What implications does it raise? It's just filler.
The microsoft trial doesn't have anything to do with "internet law". The microsoft trial is about alledged illegal use of a monolopy power.
Once we get over the first speech/beer issue there still is one unique definition of freedom for each and every one of us.
- Someone wants a ad-free web
- Someone else wants to be free to put their banners on their pages.
- Somebody wants to free the computer world from a monopoly.
- Microsoft wants to be free from government regulation.
- Let us be free from porn and spam
- Don't regulate the net, save our freedom
- Somebody wants to be free to view a DVD in any manner they like
- Somebody wants to be free to use a closed format business model
- Free the prisoners
- Free the streets from criminals
I could go on and on.Point being: Everybody wants freedom. Everybody uses the word "freedom" to describe their vision.
Enormous amounts of bandwidth has been wasted, preaching that "freedom is good".
Is it not time to be precize?
Is it not time to realize that your freedom might be someone elses encumberance?
Nobody wants to give up his own freedom for security. However reducing other peoples freedom for the same goal is suddenly OK.
Most peope on /. claim their freedom to influence politicians and courts in order to get the laws they like. Can you complain when the megacorps do the same?
If so, when do you lose your right to do politics?
May Redhat lobby? May I lobby if I happen to have a small garage business?
You give some, you take some. It is called society. Global scale does not make a difference.
Oh, and feel free to criticize...
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Don't forget the music, film and book entertainment industries. Oh yeah, and Scientology.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Freedom is one of the most important things in this world. Many people died to make sure that you and I have freedom in todays world. Company's of today have forgotten about that. They care about making a profit. They want to make sure that they control the market and not the consumer. They are also afraid of the internet. It lets people talk to each other world wide. They can share ideas and even technolgy. With this tool company's are afraid they will no longer make a profit. We have to make sure that these companies don't take away our freedom. Our freedom to speak, learn, and disbrute information. Without these freedoms the internet is dead. Company's fail to realize this and try to limit these freedoms. If company's take these freedoms away there will no longer be a internet. Then all the companies will face extinction, and it will be there own fault.
I agree with this guy.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
It was kind of creepy to see what kind of "insider info" these guys were posting, as I had been visiting them for a *long* time. It seems like they had moles everywhere in the company. Nevertheless, they are back up.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This signature contains text from the worlds funniest signature.
"When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people."
This is hardly the case anymore. Bandwidth is required by the people in power to advertise and manipulate.
This was shown in it's highest form during the Persian Gulf war where information was strictly controlled.
You also may want to read "Manufacturing Consent" as background material about how information flow is manipulated.
1. Free access to all. I think that all the companies providing free internet access is starting in the right direction. Basically, all people should be entitled to at least a free low-bandwidth (56K, right now) access to the Internet, anywhere our communication architecture reaches. These should be as basic as having public telephones or mailboxes on corners off the streets. Although I think they should be in booths like telephones were, with ATM like cnosole display and touch-screens and all of that.
2. The infrastructure must remain accessible to all. Right now, all those wires and fibers are owned by the large cable/telephone companies. The government has done a good(?) job in keeping those companies from monopolizing their access, opening up competition. The important thing is, as long as they are held in the power of corporations they will figure out someway to use that to restrict access and exert control. Nevermind that they haven't really tried or succeeded.
3. The device with which we use to access the Internet should also be as commonplace as public telephones (see #1). They should be everywhere. It should be more ubiquitous than the telephones and ATMs. This can be a great equalizer to bring access to more of the population. Get them in different languages! Touch screens to make things easy! We've all seen all the sci-fi movies like Star Trek and bladerunner and such.
Off on a different topic:
I wonder about one thing, though. If creative contents and intellectual properties are so easily copied and disseminated, what would be the incentive for people to create? I mean, other than to give to the community? I mean, sure, information wants to be free, but how do we make sure that the creators get rewarded with means of sustenance, not just kudos and a pat in the back? Who will sponsor them (for obviously, they need to get sponsored).
And second, what kind of architecture - software and hardware -can do for this Internet generation what the Net protocols did for the last one?
I beleive the hardware which will encourage freedom in the "second Internet generation" has to be by far free or very low cost PCs. At the present, there are many people with PCs and Internet access, but still the majority does not have a PC or Internet access (barring public terminals, libraries, etc). I beleive once more people start to get a PC and get onto the Internet, they will begin to realize what is out there for them (on the Internet) and how they will be able to find almost anything they could ever dream of. There are some folks (governments in particular) which wish to limit the free flow of ideas and information on the Internet, and the more people who get on the Internet and find out the limitless amount of ideas, information and content available to them, the more new Internet users (hopefuly) will pay attention to what they have to lose when laws and "innovations" (such as SDMI or UCITA) are introduced.
The software which will help ensure freedom in the "second Internet generation" would be, of course, OSS solutions. Along with my theme of low cost PCs, free, readily available and reliable operating systems (Linux, *BSD, etc) are available at the present. Combine Linux with a low cost PC and Internet access, and consumers could be on the Internet with a $300 PC and $10/month Internet access (or $400 for 3 years of Internet access and a PC from some offers I've seen). $400 is a price I realistically feel many consumers can afford, as opposed to 2 or 3 years ago when consumers would have to spend at least $1500 for a PC with a modem and $25/month for Internet access.
My second answer to the "software" question would be free Intenet access. At the present, most free acess providers are limited in the OSes they support (Windows NT or 9x). However, if free service providers supply Linux clients, not only do they increase their customer base, but help more people discover what this whole "Intenet" thing they've been missing is. If you have a Windows PC and and no Internet access (how are you reading this?!), there are plenty of free access providers available (a good list can be seen here on Yahoo!). Personally, I would rather pay for Inernet access since I can't stand advertising, but if you live with some banners on your screen, it's a splendid deal.
The protocols which will help the second generation Internet thrive will be IP v6. Not only is it an open protocol available for all OSes, vendors and individuals to use, but it also comes with other features such as built in encryption which helps to keep what someone wants to be private, well, private.
One problem with my ideas is that history has shown that the majority of people don't keep up on proposed and new laws, nor do they research what they buy before it's too late. I quick and easy example of this would be the low voter turnout each year.
The other issue is that, as much as we hate to admit it, Linux has a ways to go for usability. I've seen the "My grandma can use Linux!" discussion many times before here on Slashdot, but I feel installation, configuration, GUIs and easy ways to update the OS (to add new features and patch bugs) need to be improved before Linux will be the OS of choice for first time PC users.
So, in summary, PCs, OSes and Internet access which are at low or no cost will help more people to get onto the Internet, see all of the wonders it has to offer, and hopefuly realize what we all have to lose in the future if we do not protect the freedoms we have now.
Sicko.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
That's the question that has always mattered: who gets to decide what is seen and not seen, and, perhaps more importantly, who leads the unknowing through the maze to particular sources of information?
If governments are the librarians, they will stock and lead us to propaganda.
If corporations are the librarians, they will stock and lead us to advertisements and products.
If individuals are their own librarians, however, they will stock and lead themselves to what they need to know.
Whatever else happens in boardrooms and courtrooms, the most essential capabilities of a free internet are those that allow us to be our own librarians, and to make unfettered use of the library:
the ability of anyone to publish (this requires global reach, uncontrolled hosting tools, and anonymity);
the ability of anyone to read (requiring global access, uncontrolled viewing tools, and anonymity);
the ability of anyone to guide others to the information you wish them to see (requiring global reach of indexes, uncontrolled indexing tools, and anonymity); and
the ability of anyone to be guided to information without bias (requiring access to global indexes, uncontrolled browsing and searching tools, and anonymity).
Governments and corporations can pass laws and make pitches about the internet, but whether the laws are obeyed and the sales are made depends on whether or not the abilities described above are maintained and improved.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
That has changed now. The current court decisions revolving around eToys and DeCSS are all based off of commercial gains and losses. The DMCA is designed around pofitability, not around technology or the good of the country or it's citizens. There are people who question if Linux will remain "the people's software" or if it will eventually fall into the hands of those who see to profit from it, rather than improve it.
The Internet used to be based on the Bucky Fuller theory of economics, where we all got richer by giving things away for free. But so many people now view the internet as a way for them to get richer by selling what is freely available to them. (This was pioneered by AOL who convinced it's customers that many free internet services were actually part of the service they were paying for.)
The worst case of all has to be Network Solutions and it's parent organization ICANN. Their stanglehold on DNS is secure. There is no longer a difference between a .com, a .org, and a .net. They can follow their own domain name resolution policy, or, as in the case of eToys, completely ignore it. Meanwhile, their actions have done nothing to discourage cybersquatting. The actions by the Trademark Office on the other hand have made a dent, especially since the U.S. courts seem to have a belief that a trademark entitles you to a dotcom, dotorg, and dotnet of that name. (What RFC was that in?)
A system that was largely built upon the kindness of stangers has been turned over to corporate powers. Regardless of what protocols we create, we will have a hard time ever gaining back the freedom we once had.
-----
No Zen is good zen
"The founders of the Net-a coalition of academics, engineers, early hackers and researchers..."
And then further down:
"Because so few non-geeks grasped the significance of the Internet early on, government officials, regulators, corporate executives and educators ignored it,..."
First off Jon, you are contradicting yourself here. Make a choice, did academics play a role or not... Well most of us know they did.
To refute that educators ignored that, I'd liked to add that the early net was very instrumental to the science community of academia. Virtually every field of science from astronomy to zoology benefited early on from the capability to communicate either through the newsgroups (mostly run by the academics) or through the early adoption of email. For example, the early newsgroup of NET.columbia began in 1982 shortly after the creation of the newgroup structure (1980?). Of course there were plenty of social ones too: net.games.frp
To address the idea of always be free, many research sites were also affraid of what could/would be written on usenet posts. They would be affraid that certain views expressed their could be used against them by grant making agencies (i.e. government)
A good history available online is:
Netizens: On the history and impact of Usenet and Internet
Michael and Ronda Hauben
Usually the mode of transport usually seems to be boats that barely float, cargo containers with no air and motorhomes. But you get to live for free for 2 years!
I hear it's pretty easy to cross the border ;-)
Clueless Lawmakers!?! What do you mean? That guy, Al Gore, He's brilliant! He invented the internet after all!
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha he he he hee hee hee Bwaaaaaahahahahaha...
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Sorry Jon, I don't know specific numbers, but like myself; most people here on /. are not subject to the limitations and flaws of the U.S. Constitution.
The Constitution of my country provides for many more and broad freedoms than that of the U.S. , and as such it is nearly impossible to get a wire tap for a private citizen. An Internet tap is equally as difficult.
I'm not naive in assuming it doesn't happen, however (especially when I'm connected to a U.S. based server :-O ). The answer is vigilance. If the Internet 2.0 will not allow for freedom, boycott it faster than cookies from doubleclick.com! If no one uses it, they'll soon get the picture.
Hollywood/Wall Street/Big Business go where the money is. The money is where the people are. They'll realize that and change their ways.
Gopher is dead. Usenet is dying. Perhaps the Web will return to what it once was, a place to exchange ideas freely, without the commercial content.
Of course, my anti-U.S. Constitution comments will get me moderated down and ignored, but I expect that in a place where free expression is subject to the opinions of others.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
I don't know what I feel when I read Jon Katz' articles about how our freedoms are being limited... I know he's trying to say something important, but apparently I'm not old enough to understand what he's saying.
To my brothers and sisters not in America: thanks to the WTO, when our freedoms are railroaded, yours will be too. Pay close attention to what happens in America, because we have the nukes and I'm sure all of you are quite familiar with American foreign policy. (Do what we say or we bomb you.) But in the meantime I will boycott amazon.com, any SDMI device, paper newspapers, and DVDs, and I will hope others will too so we can try to make a difference.
I feel bad about saying this, but I will. I, too, hope Jon Katz gets hit with a bus. Because when he does, it won't be too long before the rest of the world sees him as a martyr. Or will we not, because no media will be allowed to cover his death? hm...
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
AOL IM: jeanlucpikachu
[o]_O
- Government
- Big Business
- Individuals
I am treating my audience as members of the third group. Based on the DCMA and its application (so far) to the DeCSS case, it would appear that Big Business (having a monetary advantage) has bought out Government. This places Individuals in a precarious position.If we are going to be more than defeated worker-consumer-units, we are going to have to find a way to break up the unholy alliance between Big Business and Government.
-- My comment is above.
Inherent bias doesn't render something inaccurate.
Besides, my point is not about bias. There is no such thing as 'unbiased' writing. The good (or evil, depending on how you look at it) post-structuralist on your shoulder can attest to that.
My point has nothing to do with bias. It has to do with accuracy insofar as it's (technically and philosophically) possible to report accurately. I can be biased against the death penalty, but that doesn't automatically mean I can't accurately report on it. It might might that I *may* not report it accurately -- because of my anti-death-penalty bias -- but the same could be said for a pro-death-penalty person. Likewise, a "neutral" activist is biased, as well.
I'll agree with you that media in all forms -- web, TV, radio -- oftentimes reports inaccurate stories. The web is no different. But my point is that our culture has litmus tests for "trust". And one of those litmus tests -- whether you like it or not (I don't like it) -- is that ABC, NBC, CBS (to take three examples) *attempt* to report stories in an accurate fashion. That's not to say that they're not biased in their reporting -- bias, as I say, is fine (and whether it's fine or not makes no difference, since there is no reporting without bias, but, again, I digress...) -- nor is that to say that they do not report inaccuracies -- they do, and although I'm unfamiliar with the incident you point out, it sounds like a fairly representative incident.
Web journalism -- or at least the web journalistic model proposed above -- will automatically fail this "accuracy" litmus test for a number of reasons:
First, because it's the web and people don't trust the web. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't trust the web, but it does mean this: that because it is -- the Slashdot model, I mean -- electronic first and foremost (as opposed to, in the case of CNN, TV first, web second) and people (not all, not even most, but a good portion) automatically distrust anything electronic, period. Now, I'm not passing any judgments on this, but I do think that it's a good reason. It doesn't make sense, it isn't rational, but when it comes to the web, there's little "rational thinking" anywhere to be found. That's exactly the problem.
And second (to keep things short) modern media functions best (Katz should be aware of this, so I'd appreciate a response, although I know he doesn't read or respond to Slashdot) when it -- a form of media -- has two or more media types which work to legitimize and complement each other. The reason why, say, CNN or MSNBC are so influential (or will gradually become more influential in "journalism") is that they have (for example) their web units and television units working in concert (although not simultaneously) to feed each other stories and provide a sort of instantaneous series of checks and balances. Same goes for AOL and Time/Warner.
People trust what they know and remember; they don't trust the "new". Again, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but there you go: the way it is, ex cathedra. (And hey, I'm not even JonKatz).
This is why (in the case of Slashdot) we'll always remain a fringe element. We don't have redundant media so that the one legitimizes the other. Plus, Slashdot hasn't yet earned its place in the collective consciousness. CNN, NBC, NYT, etc. etc. has.
It might yet earn that place. It would be nice. But the democratization of voices (as evidenced by the flurry of posting to Slashdot on any given day) is precisely what keeps this (Slashdot, in this case) media "element" on the fringe. Voices are dangerous -- and they're especially dangerous when you're a corporation with millions of dollars that has the ability to manipulate media. This is why, some might argue, the MPAA and the RIAA are fundamentally fascist: they want control at all costs, and are happy to tromple the voices that call out for change. But, ironically enough, it's these same fascist corporations that -- because of our collective consciousness and our resistance to the "new" -- are the ones have established themselves as the "legitimizers". What they decide is good is what, by and large, the public accepts as good -- and what, moreover, the public accepts as accurate, bias or no bias. RIAA is a good example: they have the money to make sure that the overall public perception of MP3s are "tools of pirates." Until they decide to "bless" a thing, that thing is sacrosanct.
I'll agree that it's repugnant and not at all, as I say, rational: but this is why the Slashdot model will never work to provide "accurate" media coverage. Until the fringe is legitimized it will always carry a stigma. And legitimization -- at least in our lifetime, I'm afraid -- will always land at the feet of the moneyed and the powered (corporations).
See, look at that: freedom good, corporations bad. My god, I'm turning into JonKatz!!!!!!!
The Internet is a tool which allows one to circumvent various barriers to "freedom", it is not a source of freedom in and of itself. People used to having various liberties on the net are now waking up to the fact that the society at large is much less democratic. Thit is good. But seeking a technological solution to this problem is futile: it will simply become a technological arms race among government, business, NGOs, and Joe Public. The fundamental problem is a societal one, and has little to do with technology per se. It is much more important to be able to express your opinion freely and openly in front of a crowd on the street than having the ability to anonymously post your views on some web site. "Real" freedom of speech is best, technological tricks to get around limits on freedoms are second-best.
The freedoms we now have on the net exist simply because of a power vacuum. So far, The Powers That Be haven't truly gotten it. Well, the bad news is that they're learning, and they're moving in. The DMCA is one example, and UCITA is another.
With the deCSS decisions, we have just tentatively lost much of our freedom. We sit here and cry about the stupidity and unfairness of the injunctions, and show how, "We shall prevail! The net is just too big for the MPAA!" I fear that's being more than a little optimistic.
First off, we're a tiny minority. Most of the populace is of the "food and entertainment" variety recently alluded to on Technocrat. They won't even GET the point of all of this, let alone support it. As long as they can get to Yahoo, and thence to the latest Pro Wrestling News, they'll be happy.
Second, I SURE wish we'd chosen a different battle than deCSS to begin Freedom of the Net legal wrangling with. Maybe the DCMA is unconstitutional, and maybe it should be turned over. But we should have gotten decisions first against smaller parties with shallower pockets. Then armed with precedent maybe we could have fought the deCSS battle.
As a result of deCSS we now find that:
1: Web sites are responsible for the content they link to.
2: ISPs are responsible for the content posted by their subscribers. In other words, they do not get the "common carrier" benefit accorded to the phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised to see some wrangling so AOL and other big providers can be common carriers, and small ISPs can't.
3: Apparently the Internet isn't 'bigger than any nation,' the way we thought. After all, an action in a California court prompted police action in Europe. This need not even be US bullying, it could be so much as, 'national governments stand together,' especially against something perceived as anarchic as the Internet.
We've REALLY taken it on the chin with deCSS. At the moment, I wouldn't hope to get any reversal of any of this, either. Has anyone talked to the ACLU, yet? At least the ACLU knows how to argue constitutional rights, something we need to demonstrate better.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Most people don't realize the potential of the internet. Most users communicate between friends using e-mail and AIM, they shop and they do school research. But the internet is a forum to communicate ideas, and it has a much greater potential than that. It can be a medium to discuss ideas, change the way people view the world and even hold seriouse dialogs (such as this one (mostly)). Imagine what the great scholars of the scientific revolution (Galelio and his kin) could of accomplished if instead of having to think up ideas indpendently, and writing obtuse papers, if they could of pooled all of their collective knowledge and experience together. That is what the interenet is and what people should realize, a pool of information and experiences of the collective group of people who use it.
--
Hephaestus_Lee
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
I am in the second generation of internet users, the one to whom Arpa-net is legend and to whom life with out a keyboard in our hands is unbarable. This is how I view the internet:
The printing press allowed people to send information all over the world, and save that information for all time. A great leap in the ability to share ideas and information. The internet is the modern printing press. It allows us to instintanously communicate ideas and information all around the world. When the printing press came around those with power feared it, because if they can not control information they can not use it to manipulate it the people. The same is true for the internet, those who oppose it do so because they fear it. Religously minded political orginizations fear the internet because it is a forum of reason, and much of it goes against their morals based on blind faith. Corporations fear the internet. As it was only people with the money to pay for it could gather great minds to work together to produce products. Now with the internet it is easier than ever for people to gather and share ideas, work, thus breaking the big buisness' monopoly. Since these minds can, and do, produce competing products, often times equal or superior to commercial products, the corporations are afraid. However a few people stood up for printed works, fought hard to protect the right to own books and printed material no matter their content. Today any country is frowned upon for regulating books. Now is the time we must speak up, and secure the rights on the internet, that we have for printed materials. Wether the enemy to free speach be an outdated government or companies who fear losing their market share, they must be stopped from controling the internet just as they where stopped from controlling the printing press.
--Hephaestus_Lee
--
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
I agree that IPV6 means addresses so huge that everyone will be uniquely defined. This is a problem which scares me rigid.
I can still see a role for ISPs here. Instead of offering Internet services accessible to your modem, instead they will offer proxy services, masking your IP address and your identity from the world.
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
away our FREEDOM!!!!
I think that what we need is high speed uplinks as well as downlinks to the internet for home users. Cable modems are almost useless at letting your computer become a server, let alone how low the bandwidth would be if everyone on your block was uploading files to the internet.
If anybody can setup a web server in our own home and only pay a few dollars a month for a high speed two way connection then effectively we can all own a cross between a printing press and a movie studio.
Allowing them to give us a fat pipe down but a thin pipe up is nearly the equivalent of having a TV instead of a computer.
It is the equivalent of using hearing aids but being forced to wear a gag.
The media is trying to silence us but still wants us to watch their ads and listen to their jingles.
-- Never make a general statement.
Dear God,
I have been a good little h4x0r so far this year. I have not broken into any boxen. I have not launched r337 fl00d $cr1p7z on any webserver running off of a 256k DSL connection. I've even managed to cease work on my petrification ray.
So I feel I should be granted this one small request...
In the name of all that is holy, please let Jon Katz get hit by a really big bus.
Love,
br4dh4x0r
Well said. What JonKatz fails to cover is that we ARE up against margins, we have deadlines and quotas to fill. I doubt the man has had a real technical job at all, ever.
/. reader - "Jon, please die"
To quote another
A good way to understand what's going to happen in the following years is to understand the old-south of yester-year before the civil war. At that time people just naturally assumed that slave ownership was right - and took this belief to it's logical conclusion. By Believeing this, they set themselves for bitter failure - and the same is true today. People just assume that copyrihts and patents are some type of property right, but they're not. And they were never intended to be. That's why they have an expiration date - and the bill of rights does not. They were designed to be a short term incentive to bring creative works out into the open, but can you honestly say that the MPAA and others have used them with that in mind? Face it. New technologies have put copyrights on a colision course with the bill-of-rights, which you better be prepared to fight for - because the MPAA is more than willing to escalate their position to the point of violence, so don't be suprised when they do. Just MHO.
Many of you have brought up the need to pool resourses and amass bodies to prevent corprate takeover of free (as of now) resourses. I am sure there are numerous groups for such actions, but a novel starting point in the defense of freedom has been created in the wake of the etoy/Etoys struggle. Although still caught up in trying to get NSI to get etoy.com up and running again, the toywar site is fast becoming a zone for similar net actions against other enimies (the MPAA being one). The Toywar creaters and users see this site as a new approach to political activism on the net. If you are intersested in becoming an agent in the toywar go to www.toywar.com and find me (death) in the long list of agents or send me your credentials at deathblink@hotmail.com There are tools we have yet to imagine; there are enimies we have yet to know. BE PREPARED! CARRY A toy.BOMB.
Actually I think you've stumbled across an interesting point here. You (reasonably) pulled someone up for misidentifying a technical feature as some kind of deliberate privacy invasion. But having corrected them, you then went on to make exactly the same mistake yourself! (See the second half of this email for a precise description of the error in question; the details are kind of beside the point.)
I think what's interesting here is that technologies are now being developed for initially benign purposes which turn out to have powerful applications when it comes to invading people's privacy. The MS office tracability thing I take issue with here is a case in point - tracability was never a design goal, it was an accident of implementation (an accident which has since been fixed).
I happen to think the MS case is relatively mild. What's perhaps more frightening is the scale of information collection going on over the Internet. I find some of this benign - I like the fact that when Amazon send me some junk mail, every single book they suggest is one I'm interested . However I sometimes get the creeps when I think about how much these kinds of places know about me...
It's kind of like doing scientific research because you hope to provide some benefit to the world such as a cheap clean energy source, only to inadvertently invent the most deadly weapon of destruction yet. (Well OK, maybe not quite that bad, but you know what I mean.)
My take on this though is that the cost of progress is worth paying, it just means everyone has a duty to be vigilant. And wouldn't it be nice if people didn't instantly leap to the conclusion that those making the progress had evil in their hearts from the very beginning...
----------------
What was wrong in that previous message
I've tacked this on the end because it's not the main point I was making, it merely supports it. The problem is that unobservant folks skim reading this might get the impression that I was just spouting pro-MS propaganda. I'm not, I'm just fighting a crusade against technical innaccuracy wherever I see it. :-) Please take what follows on its technical merits; don't just take a political stance - THINK!
some nasties in this direction (eg MS record you MAC address in Office documents in order to trace you),
Actually that's not entirely accurate. This much is true: MS put a unique number in every new Office document. This is emphatically not to trace you. How can I say that for sure? Because the number it embeds is one returned from the OS's "give me a unique number" API, (CoCreateGuid). This API's documentation doesn't mention MAC addresses anywhere. There is nothing in the documentation to suggest that the number you will get back will identify the machine on which it was generated (and indeed on many machines it won't exhibit such behaviour).
So the intent is simply to make each document uniquely identifiable. This does not make the document intrinsically traceable back to you. It so happens that in certain versions of Windows this API uses your unmodified MAC address (in conjunction with some other stuff) to generate a unique number. This wasn't even MS's idea - they lifted the algorithm in question lock, stock & barrel from the OSF DCE specification.
Any examples you may have heard about documents being traced back to an individual would have been someone who was running such a version of Windows. I am convinced that this is not by design - never attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by incompetence, and the incompetence theory holds up well under scrutiny here:
On more recent releases of Windows (e.g. Windows 2000, and later service packs for NT 4) this API no longer embeds your MAC address in the unique number. (It still uses the MAC address as input to the algorithm, but it then runs the whole result through a 1 way hash algorithm, which should make it impossible to retrieve the original MAC address.) So if you run Office on such OSs you don't get your MAC address embedded in your files.
So while your statement bears some relation to the truth, it's inaccurate in both spirit and actual detail: if MS had meant to use your MAC address, that's exactly what they would have done. As it is they wanted a unique number, and that's what they put in. (If you don't believe me try installing what you consider to be an offending copy of Office on a machine running Windows 2000 and see if the behaviour persists.)
If you really believe that MS are that interested in tracking down your every move through Office then your arrogance and paranoia are out of control...
Ian Griffiths
Hey, remember a short while ago Slashdot.org posted an article describing how Ford forced a webpage to shut down because it contained company secrets (i.e. memos, drawings, etc.) on their new model cars? So, does anyone remember what happened since?
Legacy systems have already shown corporations predilection to maintaining old protocols and hardware over upgrading to more efficient and (sometimes) more restrictive hardware and operator interfaces. As long as the current (relatively) non-restrictive internet is 'cost effective' our current (and imho rightfull) liberties online will continue to exist. The moment the people with the money to 'up-grade' the hardware and software that is the internet decide it is in thier best interest (or more importantly figure out how) to do so; they will.
In the interest of backwards compatibility the internet will probably always continue to support the protocols it is currently using (ie TC/IP).
Individual private Wide Area Networks (WANs) have the greater possibility for rapid highbandwidth gains and censorship possibilities. A system owner should be able to dictate what data is allowed on thier own system.
The MPAA Dilemma is more the way I see restrictions associated with the internet to go(badly). They are makeing it hard on the net as a whole by unjustly persecuting (not prosecuting) someone for breaking a strangle hold on media (that limits its use to non-opensource OSes {which many of us use even tho we find them to be inferior; thus illustrating my take on backwards compatibility}) that does not directly affect copyrights.
sig? never touch 'em.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
"Programmers are no longer technicians working on the margins, but are the principal designers of the world's most ascendant culture, the ones who will determine its future."
Get over yourself.
If I'm the principal designer of any new cultural, I'm going to make sure that patronizing, self-congratulating, self-important twinks are first against the wall.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
"...but apparently I'm not old enough to understand what he's saying."
The truth is that you're old enough to realize he's saying nothing.
-- In the future, everyone will code Perl for 15 minutes. --
When looking at the future, it helps to take on the big picture. Really, will it matter THAT much to us if one "standard" is adopted over another? Probably not because if there is something we don't like, being informed users, we can find a way around it. Sure, we have the power to alter and mold what will come, but ultimately the average joe has the end comtrol of choosing what masses of people will use. As nerds, we've always weileded a great deal of power behind the scenes, but like it or not, the majority rules as far as what's written in the history books. Basically, this is my vision of what the internet, and computing in general, is coming to, or has always been. For most people, their internet appliance will become another part of the entertainment system, and besides playing games, surfing the web, and chatting, that will be the extent. Such evidence of this evoloution can be seen in the seperate, but along similar lines progress of the cheap pc vs. the next gen game console (PSX2, Dreamcast, Dolphin). Occasionally, you'll find people that wonder onto IRC or other parts of the online world seperate from the bright, shiny web, probably begging for whatever the latest thing to pirate might be, but in general, those people will stay as they are now, ignored. They'll go back to their happy world of the web and leave well enough alone. On the other hand, there will be power users, as always, who buy the best and biggest machines (when they can afford such), and who will largely effect the content the masses view, along with much that they have no idea is even there. This model also leaves room for the casual user who is elevated from the net appliance user because of his/her desire to learn or because he/she thinks that they are better than the masses. Such users make up what could be called a middle class. Really, things may appear to change, but somehow they always remain the same. Oddly, this leaves me with vaguely Gibsonesque images in my head of power users walking around with "whiz decks" and hardwired hookups, middle users playing with their bodysuits and eyewear, and the general populace checking out a flatpanel touchscreen. Well, the top category or two may be far fetched at the moment, but the bottom one is already beginning to take shape. Take it or leave it, just some rambling that had to make it out in the open.
Knowledge is power, but ignorance is bliss.
This wasn't begun to make history, certainly since that the original ideology has at least two weeks ago was a deliberty and educators, corporations but can be the Net is so frequent sites and notion Internet. These and legal and your e-mail carries of the openness and freedom.
The news on Slashdot, C-Net, Wired News and researchers don't have the people, can't afford it, other the next generations but are troubling. It often moves beyond the Internet's most century. The Enlighteenth century," from O'Reilly, argues that images are freedom. They're beginning tension of IBM - has embraced or ID'd, please say so in your responses. The issue really lies in publicized warning, short and your posts on depiction, and legal conflicts, and culture, and useful a differently unpredictable. It often movement undertook as its future. So this new architecture of the Net enters its founders of content and comparison, consider technicians working architects of encryption, the significant economic conflicts, about lawsuits, a passionately much greaten both freedoms to believe them got to built a struggles of the freedoms, fearing to believe.
Many of this is the conversal bete noir of the Microsoftism, business. Microsoftism, business and the early-defining to be freedom, in which case it threater levels of the European cities on Slashdot, C-Net, using Web sites and boundaries, length an open -source programming license: www.GNU.org), the principal designed the kind of capitalism itself.
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I have pondered this question quite a bit lately. Not only is the flow of information free on the internet, but users have access to a vast number of downloadable software products. I love using the internet, and for $20/month, it's a great deal. But I fear that the internet will go the way of television, you will soon have to pay to access individual sites, and the costs will skyrocket. Is there any way we users, as a collective body, can cast our votes to keep the internet just the way it is? Just wondering, because I hate to see a good thing become another playground for only the rich.
I submit that both world views are equally skewed. The simple reason is that they do not follow RFC 1925 rule(12). This is a humorous RFC but it makes one VERY important point. What so ever protocol or standard you make it is not finished because there is nothing left to add, it will be finished once there is nothing left to take away.
The dichotomy of the GUI world is that of the original Xerox windows standard set 20 years ago, and the html browser's that have really only been around for the past 11 years max. Why has not a single really new GUI concept come about in the last 10 years, because their is a need for a fundamental paradigm shift in both computing and in the interfaces we use.
Most people that actually know something about computers I have found will use a GUI environment to play their games but when it comes to bussiness they go straight to their favorite shell, why should a shell be the ultimate technology for system admins? This is disheartening that the true hacker ethic has never been applied to GUI's. All of the most favorite distros right now are just trying to copy the Windoze interface, this is sad... but I think there is hope, we need to create a fundamentally new type of graphical interface and while we do it remember rule 12.
-- NPC
My point here is that while allowing many new and important applications, the core "Internet" itself still does just one thing: transfer packets from one specified place to another. You can do a lot with that of course (FTP, HTTP, streaming media... and even Gopher!), but make no mistake that much more would/will be possible with a network that, deep in its heart, does more than just transfer bits from point A to point B.
I'd like you do take a minute to imagine a network that does more than just transfer; or better yet, that specifically does not transfer, but instead does other things like:
- Process information in a distributed fashion.
- Store stuff in a distributed and anonymous way.
- Access information in a content-addressable way (as opposed to the www.righthere.com geographic way we use now). Google everywhere?
- Somehow allow those processes and stored elements to mutate somehow, like we read about in Out of Control. (Indeed, this is wacky, but bear with me for a sec)
We're all worried about lawsuits. What kind of architecture would make this kind of thing impossible? What if a specific "server" for mp3's (or something) was not only hard to locate, but not even specifically/geographically defined? Etc. etc.And then finally, how might such a network be organically cobbled together out of the basic technologies we have on hand now? Even more organically than how the Internet has grown?
Thanks for your time,
--Craig Meyer (craig@civilution.com)