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What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like?
kayser_soze asks: "I am curious as to what you guys at Slashdot think of the way the Internet as a whole will develop in the near, and not-so-near future. Personally, I always imagine something akin to the ideas William Gibson has written about in his books: a global matrix of information to which all have access. How do other people envision the Internet to come? What technologies do you guys see becoming prevalent, what things will become obsolete, and what are the most far-fetched things you can imagine will happen?"
When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)
Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)
Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.
This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".
We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.
The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.
Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.
Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.
And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.
The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.
Seastead this.
You want to know what will happen to the net? Then look at TV. Honestly. They both started on the same educational ideal (well actually the net first started military, but its public release was to the universities for educational purposes). With TV, people thought everybody could see and hear the greatest operas, plays, and cultural events in there own living room. And what has come of this? Advertising, advertising, advertising.... that and the quality of the programs themselves are way down. Have you watched much TV lately? I can count the number of shows I consider "good" on one hand, and even then, they're good in the kind of crappy funny way.
And the same thing is happening to the net. What people initially thought would be a way for everybody to access all the wisdom of everybody else has turned into so much else. The omnipresent ad banners are just.... hideous. And the ad banners are just the beginning. All of these .com IPOs are pretty ridiculous as well. All in all, it's the same thing all over again.
Now I'm not preaching against capitalism. I just thing that capitalism shouldn't necessarily be strictly applied to mediums of communication. Both TV and the Net would be sooooo much better without it.
You can already do that in many places. I can order a pizza on the web from Pappa John's and the order is automagically relayed to a printer at the local franchise.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How far into the future will that take? Remember that 40 years ago, people thought that we would be wearing space suits, using jetpacks, and flying around space. Things like that get over-rated. I predict that 10 years from now, the computer industry will be mucho faster yes, but it all depends on what the government allows us to have access to. They just recently unlocked the power of the GPS (so to speak) and don't forget that all the technology that we get is always used federally first. LCD screens, gps, the internet, they were all federally funded projects. Keep that in mind. I do wish I had a jetpack though. =)
-TimmyC, Tech Guru
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Soon we will have devices that we can hook up to our brain, which will connect us to the 'net. The 'net by then would become the collective conscious of the human race. And more than just the conscious... all info ever accumulated by the human race would also be available.
No more GUIs or human-computer interfaces... all will be available and accessable with just a thought. 8^D
Also, there's no reason why people can't form another grass roots network. With telecom prices falling daily, projects like the Linux router making a 486 into a decent, useful router, and telecom deregulation a reality, there is little reason to believe that it is not possible to build your own backbone (using wireless, perhaps?). Sure you may not be able to make any money at it, but from what I've seen of the .coms, I have my doubts that anyone will be showing profit anytime soon.
One last thing: Ham radio is dead (or, at least terminal). All the guys are over 50, and there are very few young people getting into the hobby. There is a large chunk of spectrum available, including very long distance bands, that specifically cannot pass commercial traffic. There is a real chance to recharge the hobby with getting higher speed, Internet-like networks working over these bands, but no one seems interested in doing the work (including myself, I guess). This is a golden oppertunity to create a network that can't be touched by the "suits," and push the state of the art as well. And getting your license is just about as easy as filling out a form, so it would be easy to get people signed up.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Now once VR is a reality, I would expect that the cost for access would rise just a bit. I expect that there will be two types of stratification that emerge at the beginning: coders vs. non-coders and rich vs. poor. The coders would be the people who could actively modify their simulations on the fly, possibly even while in a public area where things are supposed to be set. These would be like the hackers and crackers of today. Non-coders are stuck in the ride that they were given. In gaming, the rich/poor stratification is already happening. A player with a 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the best video card, and a T3 connection has a bit of an advantage over a person using a Celeron 400 over a 56.6 modem. In VR this gulf would get wider as a person with a lot of money could afford to stay on the net more, have the best equipment, buy special code, and have specialized devices to give advantages in various situations. Such people also will be likely to find less and less reason to leave home and may eventually build there real-life homes as glorified bedrooms with kitchens, because everything else they need and want is on the net.
As to the net itself, I forsee it developing a UN-style administrative counsel from the countries with heavy net usage. I see business and government comandeering about 75-90% of the web resources with the rest distributed to various individuals and organizations. There will be various disassociated networks that are difficult or impossible to get to via the net for when people want security or to get away from the rest of the netizens. Most literature, vacations, shopping, etc. will all be accessable via the net. Teaching about almost anything would be done via VR. Many people with good net access will suffer a decline in physical health due to simple lack of activity. In short, I see it being much like the first half of Tad Williams's book: Otherland: City of Golden Shadow.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
In idoru the internet is some virtual reality place that everybody can acces with a nintendo-style vr-set. However, it has been commercialized and is under control of the government. The only place where there is still some good ole internet anarchy is a hidden part of the net that only hacker know about and where 'normal' users don't have access to ("walled city").
With governments nowadays telling the people what they may put on their pages and what the must not, with content-rating systems openly supported by many countries and with companies making incompatible plugins and proprietary extensions to standard-protocols (and thus blurring the open nature of the web step by step) i think it is quite possible that the net may turn out the way gibson describes it in ~8 years.
Fortunately, prognoses about the future development of the computer industry have never beent accurate a lot. I hope *we* won't hide in some secret places but openly defend the freedom of our net before it is too late.
Dante' couldn't have writen a more evil vision.
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Back then, I looked at my computer with the bright green monitor and 300baud modem and wondered how this could ever be the case - since other technologies such as television and radio were far more advanced. Or so it seemed.
Now, ten years down the road, the Internet is huge and has an enormous impact on both society and business in such a way that I'm beginning to wonder if some of those theories from back then might become reality.
For example, digital information technology basically makes copyrights obsolete. You might disagree and say that the idea is still here and that a new form of media doesn't change the law or the morals, but once a system exists that allows you to anonymously create an infinite amount of perfect replicas of any work, it's time to wake up and be realistic.
Besides changing the way we look at copyrights on the Internet for example, it might change the way we look at copyrights in general. In other words: the Internet is possibly not just a revolution for business and technology, but very possibly also for society as a whole. And it'll be very interesting to see how this develops.
is wires. In the coming few years, we will surpass the number of wireline connections to the net with wireless connections. The Mobile Information Society- coming to your 3G handheld internet appliance in 2003. Nokia and a few others have already begun with Symbian.
As a counterpoint to all the CorpNet posts, here is a vision of what the Internet could be if we are vigilant about maintaining freedom, access, and openness:
In general, an internet that continues to be (or goes back to being) open and free becomes a place where everyone has an equal voice to communicate to as wide an audience as they want, everyone has access to the entire variety of information available, and the tools of the internet excel at ensuring that your message can be heard clearly, while you can also find out all that you want to know.
Commerce
The free internet of the future creates a frictionless, level marketplace where disintermediation has been taken to the extreme. Whatever business you're in, you have the means to compete on a sale-by-sale basis with anyone else in the same field. What will set your business apart is quality, service, convenience, and specialization.
As a consumer, you can use this situation to great advantage, always commanding the lowest price and greatest value available.
Some side effects: commodity products will be produced as close to where they're consumed as possible, with the most-available materials, by cottage-industry producers that can respond cheaply to the needs of local customers. Meanwhile, exotic products and materials will be made available to wider communities, increasing the value of local resources and skills. The economies of leverage and cartel will nearly disappear, allowing "banana republics" to develop independent, self-sustaining economies, while reducing inequities of wealth and power in all countries.
Culture
Broadcasters, advertisers, and media conglomerates will also succumb to disintermediation, making culture both more global and more heterogeneous. While the prurient will always survive, the hyped, ad-financed, over-promoted, cross-marketed garbage that we and our children currently have shoved down our throats will be rightfully outcompeted by those whose voices currently can't be heard because they don't market well or might make the media conglomerates uncomfortable.
Education, Science, and Technology
If discoveries can be kept from becoming property, and the advantages of open information and peer review are recognized, the internet can continue to benefit science and education as the evolving encyclopedia of our shared knowledge.
This all sounds pretty lofty and idealistic, but that's what freedom can do for you. And if it doesn't turn out the way I've described, we'll have to ask how our future got taken from us, and by whom.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
I predict that within 10 years we will have as much corporate control of the internet as the russians had government control of their lives during the soviet years.
I also predict that the real violations of rights will come from corporations, not the government as the government is often too clueless to be able to effectively handle technology. It will ultimately come down to libertarians (restrain the gov AND corps) vs the pseudo-libertarians (just restrain the gov).
My final prediction is that libertarians around the nation will begin seeing the publically traded megacorporation for what it is: a barrier to free market enterprise and an institution whose power must be limited just as the government's power must be limited. If we don't limit it then other companies cannot rise up and challenge it. God knows if teddy roosevelt hadn't done his famous trust busting we might have an industrial-aristocracy equivelent to the old European aristocracies.
It is difficult to get people to make changes together, but that is only required because people keep insisting on having the same protocol end-to-end.
I believe this needs to change. There is zero reason for the transport layer to be bound to the data it is transporting, protocol-wise. The application should be able to request a certain type and quality of connection from the transport layer, without caring if the data is going over IPv4, IPv6, ATM, IPX, SNA, or what-have-you. There is *NO* reason for the application to care what it runs over as long as the desired quality of connection is satisfied. The transport should be an opaque layer.
Undoubtedly there are people who feel some reflexive horror at the idea of not being able to look at the transport layer. (In the scenario I am envisioning, there would be no traceroute, perhaps not even a ping as we know it on the Internet today. No 'addressing' that is bound to the protocol (i.e. IP addresses and port numbers), no way to probe/scan a network.) Oddly, I would suspect a fair number of these people also chastise Microsoft for leaving the default setting of MS software products for the least security, and thus requiring user effort to secure the machines. Yet we insist on using a network protocol that allows for casual network probing, port scanning, untraceable DOS attacks, spoofing, snooping, and so forth that requires effort to secure from the defaults. (i.e. firewalls, anti-spoofing filters, add-on encryption, etc.) Where are the people working on creating new transport layer solutions that by default are secure? Where are the equivalent of the folks who urge people to change from MS products due to security reasons to urge people to change from IP for security reasons? But I digress.
i think in 5 or 10 years there will be a wireless PDA network that is largely, but not totally, separated from the rest of the internet, largely because of bandwidth differences.
.pda TLD is set up for PDA skewed sites hosted on the internet (to differentiate from the rest of the web, where the average page size is half a meg, mostly ads and all anyone does is buy stuff, look at pr0n movies or d/l large pirated filez). MS, yahoo, aol, etc will all have their presences on .pda, but bbs/irc/usenet culture will thrive there as well. .pda will be where to go to get actual information, or communicate with others, while the rest of the web will become primarily an entertainment medium.
.com sites.
what should happen:
an open standard PDA net is devised, based on ip, and using existing cell towers. PDA makers, digital appliance makers, and cell companies jump onto it because users like compatability. a
What will happen:
companies will compete over proprietary protocols for the next 5 years, until someone gets a monopoly. wireless access will be limited to about 200 monopoly approved
wisconsin does not exist.
I would direct your attention to this article about yet another microsoft scripting virus spreading across networks even as we speek. The original lovebug caused more than 10 billion in lost productivity and damaged data worldwide. This new one (and it's many variants) could double that 10B number before this is all over.
Given the above situation, using the word microsoft and security in the same thought is utterly laughable. What they know about secutity wouldn't fit up a knats ass.
I would submit that the transport security layer is statistically irrelevant when contrasted with such gross neglagence in the applications layer.
On the issue of TCP/IP being open, your forgeting that the reason the *BSD TCP/IP stack is so good is that it has 30+ years of expierience. Something MS is just starting to comprehend today, and will not fully apreciate for another 30 years.
Personaly, I have set a goal for micros~1. I'll consider deploying their products on my network when they're products cause less than a billion dollars a year in damages. Happily, at the current rate, I won't be doing any ms product evaluations for another 10+ years. ;)
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That's one of the most ludicrous, poorly informed comments I've heard in a long, long time. Bill Gates is a monkey's arse before he's a Republican supporter. Strongly supporting all kinds of abortion, and other such democratic ideals, Bill Gates closely alligns himself with SatanH^H^H^H^H^the Democrats. Not only is this ill informed, it's merely the poster's bias. Not based on fact in the least.
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If you do not get politically involved in protecting your basic rights on-line, such as privacy and anonymity, and freedom of speach, the internet will not look like anything Gibson envisioned.
Rather it will look much more like what Orwell envisioned: a boot stomping on the face of humanity.
FreeNet is one possible way of combating this, if everyone who can runs a freenet node and thus helps provide protection in numbers. However, even this possibility goes away of the "Progressive" Institutes recommendations are taken by congress and such anonymous, distributed protocols are banned outright.
But of course, it isn't cool to care too much about politicals and thus be labelled a "radical," is it?
To judge by comments here and in the old style media alike, it is far more hip to just be labelled "yet another mindless sheep," complete with social security number, Mediocre credit report, and Discount Card from your local Grocery.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The main thing that I see is the evolution of several distinct facets of access, with a couple of parallel net experiences evolving to be seperate from each other. I will call these Domains, cause they a name.
The first Domain I will call CorpNet:
Corporate/Media forces will continue to conglomerate, untill it is hard, or even imposible, to follow links from this top level net to anything non-corporate. They will even have their own search engines, that only search corporate sites (and are almost perfect, because the sites being searched are cooperating with the search engine). Everything will be beautiful, and big production. Most people wont even notice that they never leave CorpNet. Think of it as a Subspace (in the mathematical sense) of the internet.
The second domain I will call SchoolNet:
It will be much the same as CorpNet, except it will take up the academic world, and will be much less flashy, but even better indexed. This will be another subspace.
The third domain I call GovNet, and I think you get the picture about what it will be. Subsapce again.
The fourth domain will be the loose conglomeration of personal sites, and small interest organizations. Lets call it OrgNet. It won't be very easy to search, because it will be so HUGE, and at the same time run by people that are largely ignorant of the underlying tech. But it will leak out to all the other Nets, and as such it will NOT be a subspace (ie. it is possible to leave OrgNet, from within OrgNet)
The next domain I want to talk about is DevNet. This is where the developers will hang, and it will have some ties to OrgNet, but will be much more cohessive, and better indexed.
And of course there will be countless ShadowNets, domains that are diliberately closed, and probably encrypted, because, for whatever reason, their users want them to be. (criminal, 1337 h4x0rs, artists, bored teeners, etc.) Think of the anoying people over at http://hell.com
And as to VR interfaces, well, I really, really have a problem with the visualization of both Stephenson and Gibbson.
The net will not ever be one uber vr world. There will be different Portals, the same as we have now, that coordinate how the net is accessable from the portals. But we will never get rid of command line access, it is simply so much faster than anything else could be, and serious users are not gonna give it up, and take "trains" through the net, or "fly" when we are searching for something.
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"Elegant, Commented, On Time; Pick any Two"
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Geeks are good for the net, and will hopefully be around for a long time to keep it free and honest. Geeks are looked at by the business suits as people who want everything to be free of charge, and by the government suits as people who want anarchy. Geeks are the wild element on the Internet. Business are trying to develop (and exploit) it, and governments are trying to bring order to it because they can't stand disorder.
People are not going to like this analogy, but it is almost like the early United States. Geeks are the Native Americans. They have a primitive way of living in harmony with the land (medium). They have a problem with the concept of people owning it. They use it and live off of it, but leave it relatively unharmed. Business suits are like industrialist. They see natural resources to make money off of. They do believe that people should be able to own the land, and that the people should be them. Pretty soon they are running railroads, mining, and eventually polluting (advertising). Then you have the feds, who play pretty much the same role in both situations. They want to tame the wild frontier, make it safe for those industrialist because they are good for the economy, and basically push the Indians out of the way to make room for progress and bring order to the land.
It it a flawed analogy. People will point out that the government and modern business are responsible for the Internet's infrastructure, so it's not at all like taking land from Native Americans, and then trashing it. The point of the analogy was the show a pattern.
The Internet belongs to everyone, not just geeks, business, or government. But the geeks are the ones who will get trampled on. Business, especially established media types, believe that they should still be the content providers, like they always have been. They don't want anyone finding ways around them, and they especially don't want anything interfering with business operations. The government want's to instill order, so that the nation may prosper and be safe from wild people. Some geeks push back, like hackers. Some just want to be allowed to go about their lives and make their way just like they always did before business and government decided to start infringing.
-tta
Due to the population explosion and increased traffic, people will stay at home much, much more. We'll have little cameras everywhere in our homes and videoconference almost all the time. Want to have a party for New Years Eve? Send a video mail to all your friends so you can all get together in a video chat room 5 minutes before midnight. Television will be on demand; pay per view and all the "good" sites on the net will be pay per view. Everything will be ordered on-line and anonymity will be impossible.
:)
Does it piss you off to have to fill out a card at the grocery store to get "discount" pricing? Ha that's a drop in the bucket compared to what they'll know about us in another decade or two.
They opened up the GPS... why? Think about it what possible good thing can from them opening up the GPS? They want us all to GPS's that also send out position back up. Severe weather watchers have been using this kind of stuff for years.
The ability to open up your PC and mess around will be gone. The PC will be little box that's encased in epoxy with a really fast USB-like port, that handles video and sound output, with some kind of encryption (to keep us from recording movies we watch or music we hear), and a couple of IR ports for input. Monitors will be 4' X 8' flat panels that hang on the wall. The new net will handle all our phone calls, television, mail, court summons, paychecks, etc.
It's not all bleak though. There will still be hackers and crackers and the job of admining all this stuff will still fall to the geeks, as the average working stiff won't be smart enough to keep the hackers and crackers out. We'll still have horrible personal sites only instead of "Here's a picture of my dog Rusty" we'll get to see glorious high res movies of ol Rusty. The routers will be setup to scan packets for keywords and simply deny a route to sites that contain certain keywords. We'll just misspell these words (like Filez Warez etc.) and the elite will still be able to get around the BS.
Apps and drive space will be stored on central servers on the net and we'll pay as we go. Our little boxes won't have any non-volatile storage space whatsoever. We'll get around all that but it will be a pain in the ass. It'll be ruled illegal to use any non government sanctioned software on their network so as to keep a lid on cracking etc. We'll get around that too but more and more of us will go to jail and for reasons that have nothing to do with hacking, cracking or pirating (sorry). We'll goto jail for using our own rigs and software on their network. We won't buy those those little boxes we'll rent them just like we do cable boxes. The powers that be will occasionally ask for them back to "give" us the smaller faster ones just to make sure we aren't tampering with their little boxes. They'll send a signal to the GPS system to let the powers that be know where they are at all times. It'll be for our protection from theft of course. The little boxes in our cars will do the same.
Of course I could be wrong about everything
I envision a future where there are more banner ads than content, more stupid flash movies than written paragraphs, the moment you turn on your computer you're being tracked by companies like doubleclick, and a day when if you actually want to learn something, you'll pick up a book or a newspaper instead of logging on.
scary? I think we're just about there...
It's been my experience that the Internet turns geeks into suits.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
It may sound jaded, but my opinion as to what becomes of the internet is whether or not the geeks continue to maintain some basic control over the medium. We know what the suits do when they get enough control over it (see the RIAA, various federal governments, and my bet is eventually things like the DMCA). The fact is, we geeks tend to be free-information junkies and as far as the suits are concerned, at the risk of sounding silly, dangerous rebels at times. My fear is that eventually as the discovery period closes, the jobs once belonging to geek-types and technology adventurers will become the jobs of journeyman types who are doing their job as a job and not as something they enjoy and beleive in. Many of our managers even now are still geeks and understand and love what we do, but that won't last forever as the money men put their own into management positions and our chosen professions become just another semi-technical line of work. I fear we may not get the say on how it turns out. This may not answer the question as to What technologies do you guys see becoming prevalent, what things will become obsolete... but I fear our type may move on to the Next Big Thing and the internet will become just another commodity. And I also fear that the money men already know this, and the best of them are already planning for it.
My personal curiousity about this matter is wondering about the network that will replace the Internet. I do not believe that in the relatively short time computers have been around that people have already managed to develop 'The' network -- the Internet is just one of the first.
Any opinions on how long it will be until the Internet is either replaced by something new or it evolves/grows into something sufficiently different to be incompatible with what it is today? Given that the Internet only took a bare decade to go from backroom to mainstream, and that the rate of change has only been accelerating, it would be easy to believe that the Internet could find itself being replaced by something new in five to ten years. Just what that is, of course, is hard to say. I would prefer to see a new network evolve that was truly decentralized and dynamic (no central DNS servers to monopolize, no central authority required for addressing, real quality of service, etc.) If I had time, I would probably try to flesh out the ideas for how to build such a network someday.
My personal dark horse choices for setting up new standards/protocols (though not necessarily ones I would favor) in the near future are Nokia and Sony. My private guess is that in a few years those will be the two companies fighting it out for control of standards/access to data. (i.e. people will be accessing the network through cellphones/PDAs or through their home entertainment equipment/PSX[23...n].)
Then, using a beowulf cluster of opal photonic servers in his secret headquarters, he will connect to the implants of the mark of the beast (under ipv6.66) in everyones skin.
The situation will only be saved when Linus the Red, asssited by a crazed gun-totin survivalist ESR, manages to rise from the desert and save the monks of Qumran\Mirabilis, who were held captive by the beast; and they lead the armies of the 31,337 chosen to paradise.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
It will be the transport layer for various other networks such as Freenet. As time goes on and the network gets bigger, the need for having more specialized networks will grow.
The massive thing we call the internet today is going to be changing a great deal in the next ten or so years. Right now we're trying to max out a system that wasn't really designed to handle the traffic it now handles. Sure Cisco and Lucent make googabit routers and fibre lines but on those lines are flowing vast streams of packet switched data. Packet switched data was great for redundancy that would be needed were there some kind of bad thing happening that day, like a war. The problem with it is that many of those packets get lost or float about a while when someone set their ttl too high. Besides that the routers and switches made by Cisco and Lucent make take a while to send off your particular packet of data. If you need a really high bandwidth HDTV stream or something you probably ought not try a packet switched network. Many people realize this.
The network of the future will most likely be a hybrid of packet switching and circuit switching (soft switching mind you) with packet switching dying out until a need for it arises (hax0ring and IP spoofing don't count). The circuit switched network with give us a dedicated path between the server of our choice and us. The network will still have a web-like structure with variable connection pathways but when we talk over it we'll be speaking through a direct channel rather than scattering our packets to the wind with an address attached. As for content, more people and places are finding themselves with fat pipes with newer structures being installed all the time. Hopefully by 2010 we'll have a single optical fibre (or receiver dish depending on your area) that we'll stuff our media into and get hit by as it shoots out.
The final question is "What will we be getting hit by flying out of said fat optical pipe?" Right now everyone and their mother, literally, are hopping on the net and trying to find an idea that hasn't been flogged to death to run with. America is in lone with their moving pictures and teenage musical pop princesses. This means we're going to have plenty of media sites that resemble the broadcast networks of the 20th century. You'll be able to hop over to MTV's site and watch Carson Daily reminice about his "career" as an MTV VJ or maybe even catch a glimpse of those zany kids all living in a Winnebego on the open road trying to survive. The question of downloadable movies and music will be a long settled argument since everyone will have the bandwidth to download HDTV quality video on demand. Besides just static watching, kneeling, and praying to the glowing screens we'll be streaming our applications and such things through said pipe. The idea of the Network Computer will finally be realized since the average shmuck has the bandwidth to work off a network rather than a local drive. Maybe we'll even see the rebirth of mainframes-frame style time sharing. Instead of the servers residing on a college campus they'll be sitting in Joe Geek's livingroom or garage and people will be logging in with 3D avatars rather than terminal emulators. For the most part I think the shit we have to put up now is just the birth pangs of a bigger bitchier beast. I enjoyed the way it was, before the dark times, before Amazon.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Freedom is the most important issue at stake here. It is probably one of the few potentially negative side affects to having everyone wired to the net 24/7. As Micheal pointed out, many people are willing to give up freedom for safety. How many people would be willing to inplant a harmless tracking device on their children if it ment that no one could ever kidnap them, rape or abuse them, or that they could never get lost or run away. There are already people would would do this now. In fifty or a hundred years, I'll bet most people will. The idea will eventually cease to seem strange. People who didn't put monitoring devices on their children would be viewed as neglectful. The law might eventually require it. It could be used to fight crime. They may start with people who commit a crime. Eventually surveillance technology may eliminate the need to have an sort of implant.
I've always considered George Orwell a genius because he wrote 1984 well before the technology actually existed to realistically implement such a society. It was actually pretty low tech, except for the two way televisions (telescreens I think he called them). I remember once thinking that people would never allow such a thing in their house. Sure every house has at least one television, but they are only one way. I knew I would never allow it. Now I have a cable modem. Sure, no one can see what I'm doing in my living room. But if someone wanted to they could read my email (since I can't convince any of my email buddies to use encryption), they can see that I down load MP3's, visit porn sites, and post comments about the dangers of a surveillance society.
What were people thinking a hundred or two hundred years ago. Do you think they could even conceive of our society with all of it's technology? What do you think they would have thought of the notion of sacrificing liberties one by one to large powerful governments in the name of safety? Most of them would have considered our laws and dependence on technology a danger to personal liberty. Look how far we've come. Now imagine one or two hundred years into the future.
Chaos ----------------------- Order
Freedom ----------------------- Safety
We must be vigilant in maintaining a balance here. If we ever achieve perfect order, then it will be very difficult to regain freedom. Technology will be so advanced (in surveillance and perhaps even mind control), laws will be so restrictive, that it will be nearly impossible stage a resistance.
-tta
Come to think of it, I suspect we'll see the following:
1) An "Internet" tap coming into every home more or less like television cable does now: $20/month allows you to turn the Internet spiggot on. Ubiquitous "Internet" machines (similar to the iOpener or WebTV) will probably become the way many households who don't have home computers will get onto the Internet, and I suspect you'll see more and more of these machines in places such as schools and libraries.
2) While things like Napster and music (and eventually, movie) piracy will still be fairly popular, because the Internet spiggot is fairly large, I suspect you'll see more and more well-encrypted content delivery systems which permit the MPAA and RIAA to deliver content across that spiggot with strong copyright protection. And I suspect that piracy will become a smaller percentage of on-line content transfer than it is now.
Actually, I would hope that people here would help design these content delivery systems, as I suspect we would be able to come up with something that would simultaneously address (a) our right to "home copying" of content (say, from the home stereo to the car stereo), while (b) preventing wholesale rebroadcasting of content to millions of others. (Perhaps by embedding some sort of "number of copies" field into the encrypted data stream?) Of course there are some out there who would disagree with me--but then, I suspect they would also come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to advocate their argument in GNU-licensed space: that is, if I were to advocate using GNU licensed software in a proprietary system without making source code available.
3) Eventually, someone will figure out that having just one wire make the "last mile", and delivering all content across that wire, makes the most economic sense. In fact, I suspect the only reason why we don't have just one twisted pair handle all phone and cable service right now is more regulatory than it is technological. But eventually I suspect more and more people will have something like a "DSL signal splitter" device that's sitting underneath my house, with outputs providing cable, Internet, and phone lines for up to a half-dozen differnet phone numbers. Turning on each service then becomes a matter of hooking up a jack to the external box, and phoning the appropriate company and establishing service.
4) Movies on demand. Once the bandwidth gets large enough to allow broadcasting a movie digitally across the Internet, it seems inevitable that someone would set up a "movie on demand" service which would broadcast a movie to your television across the wire. And if everything comes across the same twisted pair, it makes sense to me that your cable company would figure out a way to handle this service.
The world is now in a situation in which a change of mind regarding genetics and biotechnology must take place. Whether it is for the better, I cannot say, but my opinion is that computers (and networks) will be really mature only when we can regard them as real extensions to our own senses. Not some clunky TV with a typewriter in front, but real mind interfaces.
Of course, this is dangerous in some ways. Of course, this might (and WILL) make lots of people scream "mind control!". Of course, I would never install Windows for Telepaths ;-) But, in the long run, I don't think merging biology with technology is avoidable. The benefits are too big - theoretically, you can replace every organ with a better working steel one (and I want a special high performance liver...)
And this is a topic that has been exploited in so many good sci-fi novels (Peter Hamilton, Asimov, Silverberg, etc.) ... I surely am not the only one taking this seriously.
Home Page
...you wake up one morning 10 years form now and you hit the power button on your computer and the cute microsft logo pops up. After that you see a dialog box that says connecting to internet-2 "The very best of the Microsft internet experience". Then Microsoft Outlook opens and connects to the Microsoft Internet using the Microsoft tcp/ip-2 stack with the microsft wire protocol from office 2000 built in it and you see all the ole objects being loaded up before a transfer can even occur.
After your connected, Microsft explorer then transfers to the Microsoft hotmail website. You recieve your usual email from work and work and one of the emails catches you eye. You select the message and a video pops up from your manager saying you have done a great job makeing the serers in the computer room more stable. He syas "Great work! I only had to get once last night from a server crash. Great work!
You then grin and feel good abotu your accomplishments and then you wonder about the good old days. Once a night is good hey? I remeber in the old days with unix that this was unaccep[table. Boy have times changed. You then hear a beep. You walk into the kitchen and the coffee is done and there is the paper clip from WOrd smiling at you on the coffee makers lcd screen. You have gulp slowly and dash as fast as you can towards the kitchen and hope the paper clip doesn't see you. The paper clip "says good morning ". Uh can I just have my coffee.
paper clip: "Would you like some help getting your coffee. "
you: NO!
paper clip: "How much cofee do you have left?"
you: I have plenty of cofee. GO AWAY!
paper clip: "I sense fustration, I will connect you to Microsoft Grocery store."
You then unplug the coffee maker and take the coffee out and our yourself a cup.
After this you get dressed and you enter your car for work. As soon as you start the care you here a the usual connecting shreiks of a modem connecting to the internet. You gulp and grip the sterring wheel hard for you know the paper clip will know to talk you on your way to work.
paper clip: I sensed you were difficulty with your microsoft coffee maker so I billed a repair man to your credit card and he shall be over at your house at noon today.
you: Cancel!
paper clip: sorry I can't do that for you.
A few hours later at work you were having lunch with your manager and you were telling him about the old days with linux and tcp/ip-1 stack which today is the iso tcp/ip stack and you mentioned that even though linux was banned by the dmca act of 1999 and also by Bill Gates the "King of the internet", you might still have a few old disks and you could run it at there servers.
The manager blinks at you for a few seconds and then laughs. He says, ", linux can't connect to the network. Remeber Microsoft changed the tcp/ip stack years ago by cripling virtually every client sold with there own tcp/ip stack that was protected by the DMCA act to prevetn linux form ever being compatitible. I am sorry but if the clients can't connect to the server, then teh OS is useless.
You then remeber that George W Bush cancelled the DOJ case the first month he was president and re-assured microsft that they could do whatever they wished because of there $300 million campaign contribution that rivaled Bob Doles whole entire campaign budget for 1996.
This is what I believe will be the scenario in 2010.
Have a look at The Guy I Almost Was by PSP... A comic book story, extremely well done, on this topic.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
The internet was a cool place back then. It was this incredibly cool system that would let you send mail anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes or to talk (talkd) to people in real-time. There were public message forums (usenet) that allowed people to converse, discuss, and exchange ideas. And yes, even then, you could download pr0n.
It was so cool because there was just nothing like it. It was cool because everyone using the system had a brain. And yes, it was cool because it was underground. Kinda like watching R.E.M. play to a club of 200 people.
And then, I guess maybe arround 1989, came the Portal System, the first real ISP, although they were called "Public Access Unix" systems at the time. And with it came the first flood of the clueless with their stupidity, bigotry, and spam. The Portal System died a few years later, but not before many other similar such systems spring up. The downhill slide had begun.
But it wasn't until 1993-4, with the introduction of Mosaic that things really started to change. Although http has been arround for a year or so, the text-based browsers really didn't seem all that different than Gopher. Mosaic's X/windows display and their addition of the img tag was what really kicked things off.
For a while, the web was cool, because it was very much a two-way system of interaction. Much like usenet news, but much more structured, and more permanent. But this didn't last long. In just a few years, big media and the advertisors discovered the internet.
And what have they done with it? Have they tried to push it in new directions? Have they tried to expand on the principles that made the internet so great to begin with? No, they have not. They have turned it into Television. As if 500 channels of crap were not enough, you now have five million.
So, what really has happened in the last 15 years? Sure, the network is faster and easier to use, but what has really been added since then? The only major new item I have seen in the past 15 years is that you can now buy stuff over the net in a fairly safe and reliable fashion. But that's hardly remarkable or revolutionary, and from a strictly practical matter, not very profitable for the seller either.
What do I see becoming obsolete? Not much. I expect things to become recycled more than anything. Slashdot, for example, is nothing more than a repackaged version of usenet news. Not that this is bad. On the contrary, the same things that made usenet news so great are the same things that make slashdot so great. Oh, and by the way, people were experimenting with moderation on usenet before the web ever existed.
But the major change? I expect TV to die and be replaced by the internet. By the time HDTV ever gets to the mainstreem market, every TV will come with a computer as powerful as today's desktops built right into it. And that will be the biggest step backward that has ever happened to the internet...
-p.
I think fiber to the home will replace the current DSL and cable modem kludges. The fiber will provide a multi-gigabit/sec interface to the neighborhood network. There will be thousands of IP multicast video streams available on the network, some free, some requiring a subscription. This will result in the death of conventional CATV systems. It will also destroy the economic base of local broadcast television stations. High-speed international data links will shrink the world to the point that regional broadcasting and distribution will become an anachronism. Telephone service over copper wire will disappear, replaced by wireless and VOIP.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Unfortunately, right now, we are headed that way, with various bills in the US and abroad which gives commercial copyright holders much stronger protection for their works in cyberspace than any other medium. And while most of the internet backbone and basics were developed by non-commercial interests, it's now nearly all in the hands of commercial developers, so they will have a say in what is done on *their* net assuming that nothing changes the way it's going. The Lars interview yesterday also suggested that while we're free to go out and create content that is our own, it's very hard to get people to see that content in the first place. Even nowadays, as the number of commercial 'content' sites on the web flourish, it is very hard to get a non-commercial content site up and running from scratch without a good starting base for the users.
Thus, if things keep going the way they are, we head towards the information kiosk; information and content controlled by a select few, pay-per-view or -use type pricing. The only people this benefits is the commercial business.
However, there are some major lawsuits and cases that are going to help decide if this is the direction that we will go. RIAA vs MP3 (in genenal), arguements against the DCMA, providing ISPs with no content liability, the legalities of linking, etc. There's a lot of cases that slashdot covers in YRO that if you don't follow and watch what happens, the free and open internet becomes the bleak future that Gibson descibed.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST: