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Death of Internet Predicted: Film at 11
Remik writes "The Register has a piece analyzing several threads of Lawrence Lessig's blog, and concluding that the Internet as we know it is dying. For anyone who reads the majority of YRO posts, Lessig's blog is one of the most important sites on the net." Another submitter summed it up well: 'Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over, and that as a result of FCC deregulation, the concentration of digital rights in the hands of just a few large media companies will kill the internet for good. Even former FOX and Vivendi executive Barry Diller has criticised the move.' We joke, but there are large elements of truth to Lessig's dour predictions.
And they say *BSD is dying ... geez ... :)
Maybe Al Gore can hurry up and finish Internet2?
I think spam is more a danger to internet. I think folks will say hey I hear the Internet as full of spam I don't want to go online if it's just a big ad space. I don't know if that makes any sense or not but some people may say why the hell do I want to pay 20-45 bucks a month to get ads.
Then again, /. just did a piece about minitel's 20-year anniversary. And it pales in comparison to the internet.
Newspaper editorial on the death of print
Movie-house trailer on why home DVDs will mean the end of film
"The End Of The Book Printing Industry" as seen at Border's
Puuuuhhhleeeeze! This is nonsense. It's buzzword fishing, it's -1 Flamebait
Michael, YHBT, YHL, HAND
--
And the resulting offspring will look like fox new's Bill O' Reilly.
This panic attack brought to you by the Internet. In the event of a real panic attack, you'll be advised to just stand over there until it's over. And stop looking at me. Thank you.
and commercialization, the internet will never die.
Hell, once the equipment gets cheaper, we can set up another 'internet'
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
hmm. The internet "like we know it" is never going to die. Even if mass media/television dominated the internet, the relatively low bandwidth things we have done for years would still be around, ie irc, usenet, boards, text, &ct. It may change, but the old stuff will be the same. Besides, the great hope is when people start entertaining themselves instead of going to some top500 corporation to do it. Bring back the home bands and the church and school plays.
pope is the antichrist. catholic pedophile priest scandal: http://home.fuse.net/gospel
thinks the sky is falling. Get over it, the Internet is only beginning we need to realize there is not a bandwidth glut and get to point where we can run large servers from there own homes this will bring out huge growth and de-centralization in the Internet. WiFi, code-morphing, VoIP, VR, Doom III, robots, kicking terrorist ass, tax cuts, the rocket is getting ready to launch again get on board...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
So in addition to BSD and Trinity, now internet is also dying !!
Or, at least I hope it will...
Wireless networks are what we need. Whatever problems exist are at least partially because we don't own the wires. But citizens can have more control of a section of the spectrum, and we can build little networks with that.
But who really said that the Internet has to be a bunch of commercial sites and spam-laden e-mail? If individual servers get too cumbersome to use, then they will be replaced with something else. When http and port 80 become nothing but a vast marketing wasteland, we can make something new. We've got our own publishing rights, so we don't have to eat what's shoveled to us.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Media companies must make sure no artists gain popularity without their approval and control.
Corporations need to ensure bad press and negative experiences with their products are buried.
The media must present the "correct" view of the world. Dissenters must be kept quiet.
"Your 15 minutes" must be in the form of a controlled "reality" show instead of a blog where you get people to boycott a company that screwed you over.
Even though movie grade cameras and editing equipment are priced within the reach of middle class citizens, they must not be permitted to make movies that threaten the Hollywood mainstream, or at the very least they must be prevented from distributing them.
There are more reasons, but I don't have time to type them now.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Can the telly and radio, shifting all the broadcasting to the internet where you'll need a daily patch to Windows XP in order to watch shows in Windows Media format.
Of course, a webcam will be mandatory so the computer can count how many people are in the room with you and charge you for the appropriate number of licences.
It is. It is turning into a corporate marketing playground. There are some very good points in this article and we should definitely consider its legitimacy. I for one hate to see the way the 'web is evolving. Just about every element of browsing has been touched by advertising and marketing and it's only getting worse. The dissemination of good information is becoming more and more difficult. I firmly believe the internet is heading the way of broadcast TV (commercials, pay options 'better' access, restrictions, etc.). There will always be a great repository of information, it will just be ever more difficult to tap. Unless of course you're looking for pr0n0.
"Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs" - George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)
The corps may want to own the (digital) means of communication for their various reasons. But that's not going to stop individuals with common interests from gathering together to discuss and share information.
Information's like water. You can try to control it, but get enough of it togehter and its erosive force will break down any barriers.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Truly an American icon ...
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
Maybe the internet experience isn't living up for BabyBoomers, but find me a GenXer or GenYer who doesn't use the net. Hmmm...for the price of an ISP (POTS, wireless, or cable/DSL), you can talk to your friends through instant messaging for free (so to speak); you can download purchased or *creatively acquired* software, music, and motion pictures; and you always have the most up-to-date news vs. from television. Spam? You just delete it. At least you don't have to physically shred it like junk mail because you don't want credit card account numbers getting into the hands of prisoners sorting the trash before it arrives at the landfill. So how is this internet do-hicky dying? And sitting in front of a noisy computer hasn't proven to cause you brain cancer, unlike a cell phone... I'd rather have my computer and broadband access than television, wired or wireless phone access, and cable television...or radio...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
I think what he's painting is a "worst case" scenario. Reality will be different, and I cannot predict what it will be like, but it will not be as bad as he thinks. Most really innovative work still has to be done. Did anybody here predict the social influence Google would have? I think not.
And to illustrate this with a recent development: iTunes. Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple's pants off, and Apple's new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by the some seriously pissed off record companies.
Kottke would like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren't stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly.
Things will be not develop in the way we are thinking now. Nevertheless, Lessig will remain a good read for quite a while!
-John
..the internet is dying in America. Luckily the internet is a global affair.
Once the Internet dies, perhaps there will be a new life for us Mac users. Perhaps we'll be able to set up another Internet, only accessible via Macs. Macs will quickly become in demand again--higher priced at first, then competitive once supply meets demand--and the Internet will return to its former glory! I'm serious, folks.
Harold
The "Web" died the moment companies started suing private individuals because those people got to the proper domain names first. Those corporations had zero foresight and should have had to do without. But nooooo, they sick'ed lawyers on everyone and everything until they got what they wanted, and then realising that they had this kind of power, started to "lobby" Congress into changing law to suit their needs.
Consider the DMCA, which seems to serve no other purpose than to harass "the little guy", when a big corporation would like to roll over on him.
Mind you, corporations would do it anyhow, but now they've made it legal, and are using your taxes to harass him -- they no longer need to spend their own money.
Consider that half the people I know are now afraid to put up websites for fear that if they link to somone or say the wrong thing online, they will get sued.
Thanks to spam, email has become near-useless, nobody uses usenet, and the web is controlled by the big boys.
The internet died a while ago.
You see that every time an AOL ad comes on TV.
Only the media conglomerates have control. We're just hanging on to the fringes, like sailors clinging to the wooden remains of a destroyed ship. But the ship has indeed sunk, and we're just treading water until we too, sink below the waves of internet-trash.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
If you do a little digging you will see that Michael Powell and his family own a lot of shares of AOL/Time Warner which is why he supports this change in media ownership as well as why he opposed any regulation to force interoperable instant messaging.
There is an interesting bit of information on this in the first chapter of Michael Moore's book, "Stupid White Men." Ignore the irony of the title considering Powell is not white.
Blame Al Gore for the internet problems. He invented it (or so he says).
If the Internet dies we can just get Al Gore to make us another one.
It not like he has anything better to do...
Virus Myths by Rob
This website talks about hype on the Internet and the worst of the fear mongers.
Why slashdot? Why not?
Although it's always risky to argue from analogy, think of the current internet as the world prior to the arrival of the nation state. No borders, as such, freedom to go wherever, little control.
The internet, as stateless entity, is dying, and being replaced by the internet as a paid-for, regulated utility.
For example, if the U.S bans spam, the spammers can move offshore. All that's happened is that the spammers have moved to a place where the same regulations don't apply. What'll happen? Probably somthing like the ITU, where nations get together and agree on standards for sending information, and then establish tarrifs.
Basically, the day is rapidly approaching when the internet will be like the current telephone or snail mail networks. Actually, it'll probably subsume them, and adopt most of their regulations. Then you'll have a collection of national intranets, with the internet being the scheme which negotiates communication among them.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Lessig is overly pessimistic. Unless the fundamental architecture of the IP stack is modified so as to allow for identification of the source of a transmission, there will always be those who create and maintain services that allow for anonymous use of the internet. If worse comes to worse, Triangle Boy won't always be just for the Chinese.
Someone contact Erich von Däniken immediately at his new theme park and inform him? If the Pyramids were too hard for humans to build this 'internet thingie' MUST come from his friends in space!
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
"The inter-net is being taken from the infidels! They will be boiling in their own blood! Our corporations, bless Allah, are overcoming them right now. As a matter of fact, you are not even on the inter-net now because it has indeed been shot down."
"Go home and pray to your collective saviors. There will be much gnashing of teeth. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria."
"There will be more beautiful news tomorrow. Out of my press conference!"
This space for rent.
How so? My film only goes up to 10.
Is the register now the tech equivalent of the weekly world news? Every damn article they run is biased and sensationalist with barely a grain of fact to back it up.
// my explanation while (numComputersOnline > 2) { internetIsAlive = true; }
The end of file "sharing", warezezed copy of the latest MS OS, and free porn for all.
The "intellectual commons" still exists, but it's voluntary, and always has been.
If I want to give my software/art/music/writings away for free, I can. Look at all the OSS stuff.
If I dont want to, I wont. And I'll fight anyone who tries to usurp my wishes. And so will anyone else.
Freakin chicken littles running around crying "the sky is falling, the sky is falling!"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
He's very simple, direct and down to earth without all the BS personal agenda cluttering his view. At least that's what I gathered from this article a few months back.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
i typed in http://slashdot.org and i got an error message to the effect of
404.04: page not approved by microsoft. your ip address has been logged. you have 5 more unapproved website attempts left before we audit your internet priveledges. thank you.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hell, once the equipment gets cheaper, we can set up another 'internet'
Ok, sounds great, let's see:
How? (without violating FCC regulations, among others)
What about privacy and encryption?
What is to keep the corporations from snuffing the second one too?
Who is going to come up with the technical methodology and how do you believe this will be implemented?
Hell, I'm just an end user, and even I can see the futility of just wishing for a second internet. We had the one shot, and for a mixture of different reasons, we blew it.
It's my opinion that there won't be a second chance, though I would desperately love to be proven wrong.
Stop these "_____ is dying" articles. They serve to just piss everyone off. The internet is not dying, please cordially f--k off, Mr. Lessig. This guy has enough exposure, why does he need sensational stories like these, to feed his ego? Come on /., I expect better. Please stop the "the sky is falling" articles. Please. I beg you.
I hate sigs.
He has refused to even *disclose* the proposed changes to the Media Ownership Rules.
You know, the disclosure that comes before public comment..
How in the hell is this jackass acting in the public's interest?
The average voter (or non-voter for that matter) doesn't really give half a hairy shit about the DMCA, fair use, divestiture of communications service, spectrum allocation, and so on. They probably never will. Outside of a few key issues (abortion, gun control), people just don't care about politics. Lots of people have their 'pet issue' (ie.
Taking that into account, when you realize all the money being fed into our representatives, it seems that the laws will be written the way that the corporations want them. Maybe the technology companies will stand up to the media industry, maybe they won't. Let's, for now, assume that they won't. What this means is that consumers will lose all rights, with respect to media.
Even if that does happen, I don't see it being enforced. What will happen is the media companies will push for prosecution of all the new "crimes". That's when people will start to care, because they don't want to be criminals (in general). Plenty of people who don't care about the RIAA/MPAA campaign against P2P found it pretty ridiculous to sue for billions of dollars.
The only way said media conglomerates will be able to heavily prosecute these "crimes" is by convicing the public that they are indeed crimes. So far, they're doing a very poor job of that. Most people feel that they have a right to "steal" content using P2P networks. All the lobbying in the world isn't going to change that feeling. Maybe some clever marketing will help them, but trying to convince someone that they're obtaining 'free stuff' is not an easy task.
Society, and almost any natural system, tends to settle into an equilibrium. There's a certain inertia that needs to be overcome in order to push out into some other stable region. The media industry is pushing really hard, but I just don't think they have the muscle to really pull this off. They can shake things up, but in the end, it'll probably settle back down again. Let's just hope they trow their collective back out in the process...
<Disclamer>
- I do, in fact, support the "criminalization" of certain things (ie. drug addicts are criminals).
- I do have my own "pet" issues (ie. affirmative action is discrimination against whites).
</Disclaimer>Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
We pay $20-$45 as it is for cable/satellite T.V. in order to watch a bunch of ads mixed in with the content.
It's like living under a flightpath: at first, you can't deal with all the jet planes, but after a while you don't even realize they're there.
i love lessig, and i think he makes very good points. i also understand the register article - basically, it is saying that since the internet isn't optimized for any one application, only until we decide what we want to do with the internet will the internet remain as is. once we decide that the internet is good for X and Y, we'll optimize a network for X and Y and forget about Internet principles such as end-to-end.
why are both lessig and the register wrong? because we will never want to limit how we can innovate. we may *think* all we want to do is X and Y, but the communications medium that the Internet has created is too powerful to simply limit to X and Y. the demand to innovate will fuel the existence of the interent. furthermore, the potential for further innovation is so great that it will be a long time until we tap all the potential uses out of the internet.
smd4985
Woefully, it's likely to happen.
Let me explain: Large ISPs are going to start to clue in that they can shape the Net by imposing restrictions on their users. As long as most people can surt the Web (through a proxy) and send/read mail (through approved servers), then this will work for said ISPs.
Thankfully, while such things (and the later changes that will doubtless be made such as proprieterizing the protocols) will break the Internet as we've known it for the last few years, the Internet as we've known it for the last 20 years will continue on. MIT isn't going to roll over and play ball with AOL, ripping up the IP infrastructure that they've maintained for 20 years. You will still be able to run a Linux or BSD or Darwin box and connect to anyone who wants to talk IP with you.
A few major revolutions like de-centralizing the DNS root might be required, but that's actually not much of a challenge, and there's no reason at all that universities world-wide could not get together and start Internet-prime and once again be the seed from which net Net grows.
IP is your friend. Open standards are your friend.
Even if our Bayesian filters win the arms race against the spammers, in terms of quantity as well as quality of communications, email has been a disaster.
Using this same logic you could conclude that snail mail (normal postal mail) is a failure. But yet it continues to thrive in various forms. Just because it doesn't meet utopian standards doesn't mean it's a failure.
I think the ultimate problem here is that not only does the internet allow anonymity, it virtually requires it. If we had a real working public-key infrastructure, then it would be easy to get rid of spam with forged headers, and block repeated spams from the same spammer. The lack of any such widely-accepted infrastructure means that spammers can spawn as many fake identities as they want.
It's a well known fact about online communities that anonymity encourages abuse. If in doubt, try reading the comments on this story with your moderation threshold set at -1. Why do people post AC on Slashdot? Well, most of the time it's because they want to act like jerks, and don't want anyone to know who they are. The only way to get people to behave well is to make sure their actions will affect their reputation within some community, or at least affect the opinion of the one person they're trying to communicate with.
The danger is that if the bearded-hacker set doesn't get a public-key infrastructure off the ground, we'll end up with .NET instead as a de facto standard. How would you like an internet where you couldn't send e-mail without having a .NET account? It's also important to make sure that anonymity is never forbidden, just discouraged -- but that distinction is probably not an obvious one to most corporations and governments.
The problem is that the open-source community is better at copying than inventing, and better at creating tools than at making them easy to use. Tools like GPG are just much much much too hard to use. They're written by people who have read Cryptonomicon one too many times. The average user just needs a little guidance in how to pick a passphrase that's resistant to dictionary attacks -- they do not need to be warned that GPG is running in insecure memory. There have also been some good proposals for sender-risks-paying systems for getting rid of spam. (Here's mine.) But now we run into the problem that the open-source community doesn't do a good job at innovation. It's relatively easy to organize hackers to build software that's supposed to use known, defined, public protocols to do things that everyone knows they want to do. It's much harder to build something novel from scratch.
Find free books.
I think the internet as we know it is dying. Namely, being overrun by advertising and being taken over by large corporations. Spam is choking email. I think my spam to intentional email ratio is 20 to 1. Pop up ads are killing websurfing. And lastly, more and more information is being monopolized by Yahoo, MSN, AOL, or some other big corporation. It's harder and harder to get to the smaller, independent sites.
None of the above should be a big surprise to anyone. But I think there are always ways out. I see glimmers of hope in programs that completely bypass the browser model, for example Watson ... why bother logging into MSN when you can get everything you need via a simpler user interface? Or RSS news feed browsers. Or the Apple music store. By having a specific program you get what you want, instead of having a generic browser looking at everything and leaving you to sort through it. Second, it's another layer above individual websites that the big companies can't compete with (yet). So I have hope.
The web need not be limited to a web browser (as we know it) or web sites. Maybe it's time we break these metaphors. The web site can just serve up the info, formatting left to the user, programs interchangeable. Go XML.
Okay, the earliest sightings of smileys were found. How long will it take us to agree on when the earliest reference to Imminent Death of the Net Predicted was? I found one dating to April 11, 1991. Does anyone know of an earlier one?
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The popcorn you're eating has been pissed in. Film at 11.
Nuclear missiles heading this way. Film at 11.
From the article:
An architect friend tells me that email has become the biggest productivity drain in his organization: not just the quantity of attachments, but the mindless round-robin communications, requesting comments that get ignored. Email has become a corporate displacement activity
Psh... this is hardly an Internet issue. It's more of a corporate-mail mentality. Spam is *the* internet-email problem.
Basic web surfing means navigating through web sites whose inspiration for their baroque overdesign seems to have been Donald Trump's wedding cake, all the while requiring the user to close down dozens of unrequested pop-up advertisements.
I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
Self-Respecting sites that want to keep their audience/customers will have a sensible interface or lose to the competition.
Users are not stupid.
This is where I agree. See comment above.
No sig
Such as? DeCSS? Warez? Mp3s? There aren't a whole lot of things that are potentially illegal to link to, and the few that are, are well known by everyone (and no one has all that much of an urge to link to them).
Kinda funny. First off, it's easy to protect against spam. Second, just because you have a bunch of spam doesn't mean that all of a sudden all other email is just worthless. I use email for a few different very useful things every day. FWIW, I don't even have any spam protection, yet I never get spam.
And if the internet died a long time ago, then how/why are you here? You are too alarmist for your own good.
1) Given that BSD is dying...
:)
2) Given that the Internet runs on BSD
3) The Internet is dying (1, 2, Modus Ponens)
There's that sorted out.
Actually, I tend to agree with Lessig. The Internet as we've known it is dying (or some would say dead) due to the concentration of control over the infrastructure. ....however, that doesn't mean that we can't regain some control. That's why we need to create a large scale, non-corporate-controlled wireless network. The internet as we've known it will become less and less free, but a wireless network like this would tend to defy corporate control. In essence we'll see two networks: the controlled internet and the unconrollable, ad-hoc wireless 'cloud' that is created by the people.
It could be that this is only possible in metropolitan areas and that we still need to tie these free networks together through the old internet. Also, another problem is that we probably can't get over the Pacific and Atlantic on our own, so there we'll still be dependent on the old internet.
This is just as much of a bummer as waking up from the Matrix. :-( Of course, I don't know whats worse, waking up from the matrix, or waking up from being obsessive about a stupid sci-fi movie and realizing that it was just a movie and reality isn't that sick and twisted..... or is it? :-) BTW, Thanks Wichowski bros for getting my blog back on! :-)
Can all fish swim?
It seems that the internet will survive just fine.
Unfortunately it may become a "pay per view" experience instead of a free roaming soapbox of the common folk!
Web Zombie
"I think I'll go for a walk..."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I've archive my porn on DVD.
I can't believe what I have just read. An article supposedly reporting the death of internet coming from the words of Lawrence Lessing that cites Lessing's words only once (not even linking to it), in reference to his worries about media concentration not stopped by the net.
/. for not reading the article. In this case do yourself a favor, skip it and for future reference, and especially skip Orlowski's (the author) articles
Then, the article goes on an on with self-referencing quotes (most from the register) complaining about spam, google bombers and whatnot, all of which are not evidence and will not cause the death of the internet, and none of which were connected by Lessig to the death of the internet.
Most people get flamed on
inside your tinfoil hat.
Seriously, this is silly. In the current economic crunch, all the companies I consult for are proceeding to streamline their business onto the internet, and in effect reducing cost beyond their imagination. As this continues, these companies are going to ensure that the internet grows and reaches more people.
Also, all of the off-shore outsourcing that is becoming so popular could not be done without a fast and robust internet...and we all know that is going to be a persistent trend.
Sure the internet is changing and people need to become more savvy to use it without getting frustrated. However, Humans have an amazing ability to adapt to new technology, despite the ever present naysayers of every technology.
Pop-ups spam windows servers etc.. Think of the possibilities.
For anyone who reads the majority of YRO posts, Lessig's blog is one of the most important sites on the net...
Why is it important for those interested in online rights?
This has really become as distorted as the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Please read this for the lowdown behind the wisecracks.
Way to "think different."
Lessig's blog is one of the most important sites on the net.
It is? Please get over yourself.
The war is over. Find another joke. They're much funnier when they're original.
BTW, please stop posting stupid "Is there a Mac version, is there a Mac version?" comments to /.
It's not a very far-fetched concept at all.
Lessig's blog is interesting.
One of his recent posts says that soon the internet will be controled by 3 company's. All digital rights etc will be controled by these 3 monoliths. He sights FCC "deregulation" as one factor that will make sure this is the future of the net.
This is not true, however.
First of all there will always be smaller ISP's. If theres not, broadband is getting cheaper and we can start our own. Secondly- as long as Kazaa etc exist, we have our own network which is not controled by anyone, where anything can be exchanged.
The internet will change. The things we like will just go back to the way they were a few years ago, if even. For example you might have to look a little harder for that new movie on Divx release. Boo hoo.
It will come full circle. Soon, the interweb will be constricted, yes, but people in the know (us) will know w0here too look to get what we want, how we want it.
soon there will be addons for your faveourite filesharing or Messaging program that will create a network within the interweb, its just a matter of time before someone gets so pissed off.
Yes roadrunner might block kazaa some day (if already?) but with wireless, there are always alternatives.
To be honest i want the internet to be cool again. I dont want the hassle of big corperations controling what i do, but they dont exist everywhere. THats an important point, esp since i live in Europe and get broadband from a local provider. Its just up to you to break free.
Perhaps he has an ego because he can read and understand conventions of the English language. Read the sentence; it says that Lessig's blog is most important for those who read YRO posts. That is hardly a claim that it is one of the most important on the web overall.
All this works fine. Where's the problem?
The Internet isn't about shopping.
The truth is that he took credit for creation of the Internet. He said this on a CNN show. His defenders counter that he helped the Internet after it was created (which has nothing to do with his false claim of creating it.
The utterly frivolous McDonald's lawsuit? Yes, it is frivolous. They said the coffee was hot. The "victim" spilled it on HERSELF. It was her own action. It is very wrong when lawyers lie in the courtroom trying to get someone else to pay for a person's own clumsiness.
This is correct. On backbone (tier1 provider) conflicting interests prevail over the common goals. Note that multicasting is still not available between ASs (except in a form of MBone), there is no agreement on how to do QoS, how to handle multimedia. All those wonderfull things we were waiting for -- they will never ever appear because every AS is now for itself, and its goal is to make money, often at the expense of other ASs. "To hell with standards and co-operation. We'll introduce something sooo unique that everyone else will be blown off the water". So - what we have at this point is some minimum of interoperability, and that's about it. It won't get any better. Internet is stagnating, in terms of services it COULD but DOES NOT offer. It's all very said, when you thing of all missed opportunities.
You use a page from Public Citizen as support for your defense of the frivolous McDonald's lawsuit/
This is not a very good source. "Public Citizen" is an extreme pressure group that specializes and revels in frivolous lawsuits (and participating in them). Its people file frivolous lawsuits, and its lawyers tell lies in court to move them forward.
Back in the day, people were complaining about the goverment putting restrictions on the roads (i.e. speed limits and licenses). The roads didn't die, people just got used to speed limits and the need to have a driver's license to drive on the main roads. The same thing will eventually happen to the internet. Like truckers have to go through weigh-stations on interstates, packets may soon have to go through verification-stations before they may enter the main backbone. If this happens, it will most certainly change the way we use the internet, but it won't kill it off. It's way too important right now. All I have to say is that our free internet will become a heavily regulated form of communication and we will just have to learn to live with it. No more unchecked piracy which we have all grown to love and hate. It'll be time to actually buy what we need and be indentifiable on the internet. No more hidding behind countless firewalls and proxies so your boss or wife doesn't know about your pr0n. It's time to fess up and be an honest person.
Totally Life!
ALL replies
Recognizing profound change = observant
Mistaking it for death = moron
And most of all, The Internet means sitting at noisy and unreliable machines that would land any self-respecting consumer manufacturer with a class action suit.
... I think the Internet will be very, very much alive, thank you very much. As it is, there are already 'off-the-net' networks springing up in big cities ... I know of at least two WLAN nets in Amsterdam (not far from here), for example, which are open and run in 10.1.1.0 subnets.
He's got a point here. The general public has a perception of "The Internet" as being something you can only access when you're sitting in front of a very boring, very uncomfortable, beige box PC sitting in some corner away from the other comforts of life.
The fact, though, that modern manufacturers are designing Internet-enabled devices (hey, we've considered it, even) which can provide Internet-class services in devices which *are* reliable, and which *are* pleasing/aesthetic to use, gives hope.
Being able to walk around my house with a Clie NX70V and WLAN has made the Internet a *much* more useful thing to me than it always used to in the beigebox days... well, actually, being able to roam freely around the place with a tiBook changed things drastically, too.
It won't be long until I can pretty much get on the 'net anywhere in town with the NX70V, and then
I bet it won't be long until WLAN's in most major cities begin to rival the bandwidth scenario we faced in the early 90's, even, when the Commons was waaay open, and new nodes were welcomed willingly by anyone already lucky enough to be on fast bandwidth.
The Internet is not dying. Its changing, as it always has, and becoming more and more important. And if the main trunks get subjugated, it will only be because everyone else has moved on to meatspace-community-scale WLAN networks, which can't be controlled by *anyone*.
{Except the manufacturers...}
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The revolution will not be blogged, Brother.
When http and port 80 become nothing but a vast marketing wasteland, we can make something new.
And what makes you think residential ISPs won't become WSPs (Web service providers), charging extra for access to ports other than 80 and 443?
Will I retire or break 10K?
I think the net will probably get caught in the Main Street v. Wall Street tug of wars. Quite a few small businesses and community organizations are making heavy use of the net. These local organizations are starting to grow their own formal and informal communication networks.
From my perspective, the dot com bust was the failure of the large sites that wanted to dominate the market. Small Main Street sites grew during the stock market crash. For example Moab, Utah is a town of 5000 and has about 150 independent active web sites doing this and that in the town. Most are simply business related, but many are starting to carry a little bit more source materials.
The media consolidation with the new FCC rules will likely get rid of a number of intermediate players, but the number of fringe players and independent providers of source material will probably grow.
It's easy to say "there's this problem and that problem and this other problem here, man the whole thing's just totally fucked!", reality is never that oversimplified.
Email is being destroyed by SPAM: So.. people are just turning off their computers? No! There's forums, there's instant messaging, and there's chat. If that's not enough reason to calm down, then consider that SPAM will force email to evolve to be more secure. Heck, just the other day I had to fill out a challenge in order to get a message to somebody. Sorry, I don't see this as reason for people to leave the net.
Google's getting flooded with crap: And Google's not going to work to fix that?
Tasteless web design and pop-ups make people leave: Cable TV has 70 channels and people have trouble finding stuff to watch. Yet, the few things they do like make it all worth it. Why is the net different?
The Internet means sitting at noisy and unreliable machines that would land any self-respecting consumer manufacturer with a class action suit: Uh okay. First off, computers aren't that unreliable. As a matter of fact, I think most people would agree they've improved considerably since 95. Remember the days when you'd get randomly disconnected from the net and you'd have to dial up again? Thanks to broadband, that's no biggie. Remember the Windows 95/98 days where you had to reboot at least once/twice a day to be productive? 2000, XP, and Linux have killed that problem. The standards on the internet have improved, so there's not so much in terms of "Oh you have to have this browser, or that plugin, etc". Fewer hiccups. It's even becoming hard to find broken links on the web. They're there, but in the olden days you used to cross your fingers and pray this link works.
So yeah, some annoyances about the net have been brought to light. However, predicting the death of the internet is ridiculous. Humans have a way of overweighing negatives and underweighing positives. "Hmm this new job pays more money, but I like the people at my current job and I'd probably die from missing them so much!" With all the problems he's listed, he's skipped over a few things:
- People have friends/communities on line.
- The internet has useful information and files available. Great for pursuing hobbies.
- There's still plenty to explore.
- The world is full of news (like the war in Iraq) that people want to be up to date on.
None of the problems he's listed will nullify any of the above points which are critically important to a LOT of people.
"Derp de derp."
Is Internet2 a separate network? Will Internet2 replace the current commercial Internet?
Internet2 is not a separate physical network and will not replace the Internet. [emphasis mine] So, for the purposes of building another alternative to the internet; internet two is VARY irrelevant.
That's the sound of the nickel I get every time someone predicts the death of the net.
I paid off my car with the proceeds from the non-death of USENET. I'll probably pay off my mortgage before the Internet truly dies.
Gee, sounds horrible. The internet might be useable again.
The internet is dead, long live the internet.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
I just love the tone of the article/blog. /sarcasm off
The belief that government control of broadcasting better serves the public interest is the same foolish arguement that the Russians used to enslave their people in a socialist economy. Government intrusion and regulation doesn't work, this is only a natural progression of a capitalist society.
This is what I wonder. While corporations may just kill off the internet as we "know it," I rather forsee that the internet may "splinter" into different networks.
This is the most likely way I see it. We might splinter into a controlled "internet" and a Free "internet."
The controlled internet will likely run using Microsoft owned protocols, have DRM enabled at every point to try to prevent people from swapping MP3s, warez, etc., etc. Most main stream ISPs will allow access to only this net (though might offere access to the other with an additional charge). This net will be deemed "safe" for children. In reality, this internet will be just as insecure as the first, but corporations will have much greater control of who can say what.
Of course, things could be worse. The controlled net might split further, into various networks controlled by different media conglomerates. So you'll have AOL/Time Warner's net, Disney's Net, etc.
The free internet would be operated in a similar fasion to the current internet, altough many corporations will probably no longer support it, and move their sites to the corporate net. Educational institutes will probably be the core fo this network. As a result, there will be far fewer people on it.
Depending on how things are structured, there might be points where the different networks intersect. Really, there might be one "internet" still, but ISPs will merely maintain huge blacklists of servers that they don't allow (servers that run a free OS rather than a DRM os, for example).
The problem with the "free" internet, as I see it, is that it might be labeled as a network safe for terrorists, and/or be considered a "pirate internet."
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
http://www.internet2.edu/about/faq.html
Where's Harry Seldon when we need him?
Was that too obscure? Bah! Not for this crowd!
There's a great need of more users and particularly more content, so I guess that means the 'net is not as dead as you think. But if the companies keeps it up, I can really see Freenet growing.
And never their customers. This is such hypocrisy...but you guys enjoy it too much.
Headline ala Fark?
*blinks*
Publicly available spectrum
How would you propose to route radio signals without line-of-sight? And because the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the First Amendment's protection on freedom of speech does not strictly apply to radio communication, what's to stop the FCC from banning wireless ISP services offered to the public without a license?
private leased lines
Crossing whose real property?
This time, we own it.
Until "we" become the target of a hostile takeover.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The biggest enemy of spam will be education.
Once the average Internet user learns that unsolicited email should be completely ignored/deleted - the spammers will not see any return on their "investment".
(And sure, they can say spam is great because there's almost no cost to them - but that's a thinly veiled lie! Somebody has to take the time to put together the message content, figure out ever-changing ways to get the junk distributed successfully, and maintain relatively useful collections of valid email addresses. I think in reality, most of the big spammers are making more profit convincing others the whole thing is worthwhile - and then selling them their address lists + spamming tools.)
sounds like you'll be spending tonight posting to slashdot and jacking off to pictures on thehun.net
I've heard it's dying ;-)
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Considering that the Internet has been designed to withstand atomic holocaust, it would be ludicrous to predict its death just because of some media control on the ISPs. The points made to support the claim fall down under scrutiny. They seem to apply only to a a very limited range of ignorant users (I'm not being elitist, I'm talking the "I broke my cup holder" kind):
:-) The Internet could live without the US. And at worst, some underground ISPs will still remain. It would be slow maybe, but it would work.
1 - "email unusable because of spammers"
A point which ignores the simple possibility of creating filters in any modern mailer to move your "trusted" sources to a specific directory, and ignore the rest. Of course, if you keep your modem connection your downloads will be slow. Time to upgrade.
2 - Google has problems with crap content
Time to stop clicking the "I'm feeling lucky" button and browse through results. Also, it would help to use advanced tools to refine your search. Site is bad? Click back on your 4th mouse button and keep looking.
3 - Popup blocking:the vast majority of IE users don't have that luxury, and their patience has already been tested to the limit
So, they are saying that because users don't have a clue, they will stop using the Internet? Suddenly this reminds me of the survey made in the US some weeks ago...
4 - Internet means sitting at noisy and unreliable machines
Mini-ITX 500Mhz fanless motherboards, customized linux distro (locked) for reliability. Voila, safe, noiseless, reliable netbox!
And finally:
5 - What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation
Freedom requires a minimum of effort and knowledge. You have to program that VCR to be free to see the show at a specific time.
So, in short, this article is predicting the death of the Internet for people who doesn't have a clue on how to turn on a computer and have no intention to learn it (reference to the US survey done a while back, obviously)... I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
Bonus: map of the internet
The ENIAC Demo Competition
Nerds whine about the Internet like men whine about annoying girlfriends. Sure, when you first met her, it was fun. You were making out, running your own free IRC servers on corporate T1s and using Napster. Then you started to get STDs, e-mail viruses, and pop-ups. Other parties all of a sudden became interested in your affairs such as parents asking for grandchildren and IPOs. Eventually, you realized that love is truly blind, as the dot-coms busted. Love was something that had to be paid for, i.e. iTunes. And that love involved, among other things, the law.
The Internet is not perfect, it's not all that bad. It can be gerat at times, and at other times it's a nuisance. What we all realize is that we can't live without it, and so we're pissed off when a part of our lives is far from ideal. Nonetheless, an air of detachment might help. Be practical, the Internet is just another tool for what you want to do: entertainment, communication, productivity. You can use or misuse it and nobody is forcing it down your throat. It feels that way though, because it has become habit, but an air of detachment is helpful.
Philosophistry
That guy who wanted to create a 802.11b wireless network from coast to coast did not have a bad idea after all....
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Maybe the "world wide web" as we know it is dying, but I doubt that the Internet is. :-)
I myself finds popups, spam and all those shits pretty annoying also but would it not be
possible to just build up a new "community"? Using newer protocols, newer tools etc etc?
Yes, their would be far less people at the begining, but it would be really cool.
It would be like a new beginning, like the BBS era, but better
And even simpler then that, just create better indexes on the web.
Not only search engines, but real directory where people could
maybe vote for the listed websites, I don't know.
Anyway, I was just guessing some possible "solutions" instead of just whining...
I'd rather be sailing...
All I ever see is people raving about what a huge success iTunes Music Store is (and will continue to be)? What planet are you on?
From The Register article :
What's dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that "freedom" in itself is a justification for this information pollution.
So, if you ever believed that the Internet would make us all free from tyranny, it is dead indeed.
BTW, I would tend to consider The Register part of the "information pollution" problem.
:wq
Media companies, spammers, stupid politiciians, etc might be able to kill of the Internet as we know it today.. but in doing so they'll force it to be reborn in a way that they should REALLY fear. People will always want to communicte with each other.. technology can make that communication faster, easier, and cheaper. Take away the distributed network we call the Internet and in it's place will form a grass roots fully decentralized Internet. Wireless networking is already being used for city wide networks and people are trying to span the country with it. Some people I know have some nifty ideas on how to span the oceans with wireless. Some groups have designed wireless systems that are good at finding each other and handling the problems of a less reliable network. Eventually it'll all fit together.. and will become more powerful than the controlled wired network. Sure such wireless networks may be outlawed but people will still use them. At the worst the network may get stomped in metro areas of the US and the countries that follow it around on their leashes.
As for the stories whine that computers are noisy.. speak for your own. My computer can't even be heard unless I've really got the hdd's busy and even then it's just a whisper. It's small, energy effecient, and stable.
Spam remains something of a problem but the solution is easy - use a new mail protocol that fixes the problems that allow relay hijacking and that requires digital signatures with all mail. Sure then people will have to first whitelist friends for email but it'll still ellimate 99% of the problem. Even now it's not THAT bad. I get 100's of spam's a day but only 2-3 make it through my filters and each of those are used to improve my filters.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Coffee is hot.
Coffee should not give third degree burns.
Original request of the suit was damages. The jury upped it to "One day of revenue from coffee"
If we follow the trajectory of Spam, DMCA, Super DMCA, Eldred, PATRIOT I&II etc. we won't see the death of the internet, just the death of the United States as a technological superpower. Between the near impossibility of programming new apps, hardware or media that don't infringe and the lack of support for education the US may lose any hope of keeping up with less litigated societies.
I just hope I'm very wrong...
However, people use it in a way that they find value. Ok, so we can't post copyrighted mp3s but we can share our own creations, we can look up information (I rarely turn to a book now-a-days), we can chat and debate and express opinions that can reach people that we could do in no other way.
People will still find it useful. It will still exist, maybe not in its current form, but it will evolve as it always has.
Kevin
"It's not the cough that carries you off, it's the coffin they carry you off in" O. Nash
Those with the historical perspective of a mayfly combined with "progressive" political indoctrination (nobody hates progress more than progressives) see every local downtick or potential for problems as signs that the world is falling apart.
We have more choices in music and easier access to it than ever before in history. We have more books to read. People in the wilds of Montana now have a greater selection available than residents of Manhattan had twenty years ago.
When I started using email, it was literally a tool of the military industrial complex. Now even children regularly use it and there's so much "power to the people" that it's as if everyone in the movie theater were given his own megaphone.
And I just love the endless blather about dissenters being kept quiet in this age of personal megaphones. Sure, if the world isn't paying rapt attention to me, then it must be the fault of some vast right-wing conspiracy silencing dissent. Yeah, what else could it be?
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
knows nothing...
John Kerry is a Joke!
A quote from Vint Cerf, an actual Internet inventor: "Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s."
:"Albert Gore, Junior, was not elected to Congress until 1976"
From the "Internet History FAQ" : "The Pentagon funded the original development of the Internet, and the military contracting company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) began constructing it in 1969"
From "Current Biography Yearbook 1987"
Look at those years. It is very clear that Gore, no matter how much he helped it, had nothing to do with creating the Internet (letting alone "taking the initiative" which implies that he led the creators). His claim of such (again his exact words were "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" is not a valid claim.
I periodically read a few usenet groups and there is still a large usenet community that regularly uses it. In fact, some of the groups I read have so much traffic (NOT spam) that I have trouble keeping up with them.
Try actually looking on usenet instead of spouting off false statements like that.
"al gore never claimed to have invented the internet"
He sure did. His quote is "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet". In this context, invent = create (bring into being). In actual Internet history, it was created by 1973: 3 years before Gore got into Congress (and people had been working on it since the 1960s).
This has nothing to do with Republican smears. It has everything to do with what happened and when and what Gore said.
Looks like the DEA had an easy time convincing you that putting chemicals inside your body is a crime. You thus come across as being just a little hypocritical.
And, the register included a bit about spam in emails in that story. I still don't get it. Why are people so upset about spam? Maybe I"m sheltered, but I don't have any problems with spam; I get maybe one a week, but I quickly add that domain to my block list on the server. Are they talking about AOL people?
AOL is kind of like a crutch for people. It allows them to use the internet without actually really knowing what they're doing. If AOL never existed, I wonder if we would still have the problem of spam that we have now?
Of course there's also hotmail...I don't know what to say about that, I've never wanted to use Hotmail after it crashed my friend's browsers repeatedly because of the amount of spam in their inbox...
The fact is, the Internet, as we know it, hasn't been "as we know it" for quite some time. Ever since it was opened to commercial exploitation.
This brought ads, banners, tracking of personal information, privacy invasion, email/macro viruses, monoculture, and the big Race To Be The Next Microsoft.
It's been widely recognized that the killer app was email, and that nobody ever really figured out how to profit from providing it as a service (as opposed to simply profitting from using it).
And the spammers have gone quite far to attempt to ruin it.
The other killer app is the blog - or really collaborative discussions - originally NNTP. And guess what? That was effectively killed by spam too.
The really neat thing was how everyone and their brother, back in 1996, could suddenly create a web page detailing their hobbies, their cars, their dogs, etc. And while that grew tiresome, the web, as a whole, was an incredible source for information.
Then the search engines were commercialized so that you couldn't find these sites anymore, only the big commercial ones.
And services were consolidated so that not everyone could afford their own web page or connection anymore, and simple, basic HTML was eschewed for "flashy FrontPage garbage" - this effectively has eliminated the democratization of the web.
And finally, the lawyers moved in. The whole point of the Internet was the free sharing of ideas and information. Until they figured out that theoretically, they should be making money off of this. And it was all shut down.
So now that the Internet is just one big commercial - what's the point? I can drive to Las Vegas, look at billboards, and see REAL naked chicks. Who needs the Internet?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
In Soviet Russia, the State is Dying
Cory Doctrow and Charles Stross are writing a short story extrapolating all this. Their work in progress is being tracked on a movable type blog at http://craphound.com/unwirer/
The popularity of the internet is built on four major components. Two of the four are most definately at risk:
* The Web
* Email & Messaging - Under attack by spammers, and even under worse attack by anti-spammers. The trend is towards central control of email to eliminate spam. The antispam camp should take note of the failure of the Instant Messenging networks to stop spam on their centrally controlled services.
* Peer to Peer Services - Tools that allow the exchange of information between two nodes like NFS, Gnutella, Windows File Sharing, Telnet, etc... These tools are under attack at the fringe, but how different is getting a file off Gnutella than an anonymous FTP or a windows share? Not very.
* Usenet - The surprising survivor. I can't believe that Usenet is still kicking and popular after all these years.
The key to the Internet's success has and will be:
* Easy and inexpensive access to information and easy and inexpensive publication of information. (web, usenet, file sharing, etc...)
* Easy,inexpensive and fast communication. (email, usenet, IRC, IM, etc...
The good news is that the market is too powerful to be co-opted. People don't want the internet to turn the clock back to the days of Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe.
-- $G
I haven't seen the movie yet. jackass!
"large media companies will kill the internet for good."
I have a better idea. Let's KILL the all the lawyers, patent lawyers, CEO's and other oppressors of freedom and free speech before it gets out of hand.
Drag them into the streets and with a gun to their heads and on international TV for all to see, execute them like filthy pigs, as an example to those that would suppress and oppress our freedoms..
That being said, the US is also the major reason why it is becoming so fucked up. If the US has such a huge influence on the net, then perhaps a majority of it will essentially be killed off by corporatism. But I think the rest of the world sees the value in the internet as it is (or was) and will hopefully not follow the same path of self-destruction.
Maybe our corporate-whore government will ruin it for us, but hopefully the rest of the world won't that that happen to them. At least then I'll have someplace to move when the time comes.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Follow-up question: if McDonalds served French-Fries that were 300 degrees F, would that be OK? We all know french fries are hot, after all.
I'm surprised you even felt the need to try to discredit the original poster. His ID is "I'm a racist!" and his homepage link points to an Aryan Nations-inspired race war video game called "Ethnic Cleansing."
Anyone who gives this joker the time of day is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Personally I'm getting tired of mainstream media sites whining about the "mindless links" on weblogs. PageRank is based on the idea that a link to a page is a vote for that page. Why should a commercial-site vote be worth more than an individual's vote? Half the sites I read daily are individual weblogs, and they're hardly mindless. In fact, they tend to be better sources than the media.
Back in the old days Bob Metcafte, inventer of the EtherNet, predicted the Net would die that year from clogging up. Took a lot of ribbing for that one.
..and Netscape, too.
I say that with tongue only partially in cheek. Consider that the Internet had been around for some years prior to Mosiac and, more importantly, Netscape, opening the net to a profliferating number of Windows users. Prior to that, the net was a relatively small community with high barriers to entry. Those barriers -- essentially, the skills necessary to use Unix --blocked the net's development into a populist medium with enormous financial potential.
The browser, of course, changed all that. Browsers drastically lowered the barriers of entry, allowing people wiht little of no computer skills to move files across the net, send and receive email, chat online, search archives, etc., while avoiding Unix tools like ftp, mail, gopher, and the rest.
Whatever the net was before the browser, it wasn't considered a medium. People actively participated in the pre-browser net, as tool users and community members. They did not passively view content via a device that has more in common with television than anything else. The browser made the net a medium. A medium with billions of potential consumers.
The shifting of the popular frame of reference from "community" and "users" to "viewers" and "consumers" marks the awareness that money could be made by creating net content and controlling access to it. Once that happened, the net became subject to the same economic forces that, absent government regulation, have fostered the increasing concentration of media ownership across the spectrum. Without countervailing action by the government, media ownership will concentrate in inverse relation to the size of a given medium's audience. I.e., the larger the potential market, the greater the tendency for an ownership oligarchy to develop and control that market.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
To make it even worse, the legislation he was involved in was the legislation that led to the commercialization of the internet and hence the popups we all loath. Not something I would be bragging about.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
It appears that he's never heard of freenet.
"Money is the greatest detriment to science."
And I believe him. If you look at why all these events that shape our history happen you will see that the motivating factors behind almost every action is somehow related to money.
How can a system based on greed possible build a good healthy society?
I bet mankind is smart enough to design a society that can give its people everything they want without needing any form of currency.
en masse
;)
1. Go here and have them remove your name. Don't give them money -- get out an index card, slap a 23 cent stamp on it, and mail it in. Same results, they get less money. It ain't perfect, but it will help.
2. Call your credit card companies. Ask them to be placed on their highest level of privacy list. Nearly all have one; you just gotta ask.
3. Do the same for your utilities, especially phone service.
4. Wait 3 months, and hten begin send back shredded crap in the postage paid envelopes.
For all you non-Americans... figure it out yourself.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
It's a well known fact about online communities that anonymity encourages abuse. If in doubt, try reading the comments on this story with your moderation threshold set at -1. Why do people post AC on Slashdot?
;-)
Originally I was planning on abusing you, that's why I posting as an Anonymous Coward.
But seriously, presuming the anonymity=abuse seems a little naive.
I mean its easy to point fingers, but the truth is there is always a small group of people who will act badly and this isn't unique to the internet anymore then it is the anonymity. You see it standing in line at the grocery store, during you commute to work. People express themselves and not always in a way we like or can easily understand.
The difference is no ones ever been killed by an anonymous post, at least not here on Slashdot (if it was going to happen it would be here!).
Big media is powerless against Slashdot and The Drudge Report to name two of a thousand independant internet media sources).
It's doubtfull they can survive even with broader ownership potential.
You can mod me down, but you cannot call me a coward.
"If you place a hot cup of coffee between your legs and open the lid, there's no reason at all why McDonald's should be held liable for your stupidity."
Exactly. If you run with scissors, you might get cut. It isn't Fiskar's fault. Missused, both scissors and hot coffee can do damage to your crotch.
Thanks to the likes of "Darth" Nader and Public Citizen, there is a certain overhigh percentage of the cost of any ladder that goes to pay frivolous lawsuits because some oaf climbed up a ladder and fell off.
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
>> ...talk to your friends ...download purchased or *creatively acquired* software, music, and motion pictures...up-to-date news...
These are attributes of content and a medium, not of a network. Once the net is percieved as a content platform, not as a network of users, you've opened the gates to its eventual control by a very small number of corporations.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Internet is dying? Huh? What's that you say? Ya know, from the moment we are born we begin to die. Brain cells die by the thousands, everyday, tens of hundreds of muscle cells die in our bodies, every day, telomeres in our cells shorten with every cell division. My Gosh, the sky is full of stars. Will I fly among the stars when I die? What if science is wrong about atoms, and they lose energy and the electron orbits decay into the nucleus? What will happen then? Post on Slashdot that the UNIVERSE IS DYING!!??? OMG!! OMG!!! I can't bre...bre...breath!! [cough, ack, cough]. Please, someone please, I need a perin tablet (an aspirin with the "A" and the "S" scaped off), perhaps a Zoloft (TM) or a Prosac (TM). Someone please mode me down as -5 TROLL, OFFTOPIC and reply with self help links, so that others won't suffer this horrible affliction...the rest of this post will be available for viewing HERE ON SLASHDOT at 11:00 PM.
Dour (adjective):
1)Stern, harsh
2)gloomy, unyielding
Dire (adjective):
1) warning of disaster
2) exciting horror
3) dismal, oppressive
Dictionary (noun):
1) a reference book containing words usually alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactical and idiomatic uses
2) Something the Slashdot editors need to buy.
Not meaning to be a troll...
"Follow-up question: if McDonalds served French-Fries that were 300 degrees F, would that be OK?"
If they served them the way they do now, they would quickly cool down to something much cooler than 300 degrees. If they served them like the coffee, they would be in an insulated container to keep their temperature.
If you are dumb enough to crush said container between your legs, again it is your fault.
...there's a world out there where the internet is NOT sponsorized by corporations and/or media giants, and where governments don't have things like MPAA and RIAA to fund them. Yes, it's not as-fast-as-in-the-US or bandwidth-is-not-as-cheap-as-in-the-US but it's still something better than the pure nothing that was before.
I'm not saying that in the US the 'net is faster, please - those are just 'common opinions' of the average netizen.
Anyway, I'm sorry if in the US things are going worse than ever. Really. The US were a great source of inspiration and knowledge. Time is passing, new countries are kicking in, and in those countries the government is not owned by whoever has the most beautiful logo (a.k.a. corporations).
Yes, I'm sarcastic. But please mod me down, otherwise you'll be marked un-patriothic forever.
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
This is the text of the letter that I just sent to my congress people. The only way I feel like I get heard is when I snail-mail my congress people. I get a nice form response in about 7-10 days that usually talks all around the issue that I bring up, but at least I made someone in their staff think about what I said.
:-)
,
And you should too!
Here's an excellent site for finding the particulars of your congress people: Vote Smart
Text:
Dear
I writing today to ask you to take up an issue that has the potential to vastly improve the quality of public domain works out there. A strong public domain gives people a creative background and a collective sense of culture. A strong public domain will offer an alternative to whatever the media is pushing as the "special of the week." Ultimately, it is what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they created our country: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
Right now, that "limited time" is much longer than the average life-span of anyone alive when the work was created. By the time the works come into the public domain, they are no longer relevant. I'd like you to introduce legislation that allows authors to be fairly compensated for their works, but also brings works into the public domain much more quickly.
There is a billed called "The Public Domain Enhancement Act" that aims to do just this. It proposes a tax of just $1 on any copyrighted work over 50 years old. If this tax is paid, the copyright stays enforced. If not, then the work enters the public domain. You can read more about the bill at a web site set up for this: http://eldred.cc/
Please help reaffirm the Constitution's concept of "limited time" and create a larger public domain by working to make this bill become a law.
If you take up this issue, the media companies will lobby, and lobby hard, against it. They'll see it as competition for the attention span of our citizens. And they're right. But competition in our society is a good thing. In the end, it's the quality of life of the citizens, over the short and the long term, that is the most important issue. A strong public domain, provided by a simple statute like this will secure a creative commons for all of us.
By the way, thank you very much for completing the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT). I appreciate your clear and concise explanation for your position on the various issues it covers.
Thank you,
1. 2.
"and in those countries the government is not owned by whoever has the most beautiful logo (a.k.a. corporations)."
Not the U.S. certainly. In the U.S., the government controls the corporations, often way too much (adding new regulations every year and taxing the hell out of them).
Why is it that people with an over-inflated sense of their own importance always assume that the consumer will respond to the market (be annoyed by pop-ups), but the market will not respond to the consumer (stop using pop-ups because everybody tells them their web site sucks)?
Yeah. The sky is falling. Film at eleven.
Not only that, but he fucked it up in ways that Slashdotters pointed out.
It's going to be a while before I believe anything he says.
... but in other countries (like France or Canada, for example), where there is not a bourgeois-implanted widespread distrust of the State, the State endeavours in protecting the public interest in restricting the "freedom" of the most powerful to crush the lesser folks.
Good analogy but to extend it: you probably wouldn't choose to live under a flight path without good reason in the first place.
If your first experience of the web was a deluge of deafening popups/unders/overs/whatever, as is common with some sites these days, then you mightn't bother with it after that. Which is especially true of the people that are offended by the porn.
Those that have been around for a while have learned to adapt and deal with these "jets" and other annoyances but there's a certain amount of skill to getting a good SNR from the internet nowadays.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
What? You want competition? Wow, there's lots of that. I have my choice of two providers with independent copper wires, a cable and phone network. The driving competition has forced all the Bells to offer restricted, dhcp, no servers alowed DSL lines. While in the other direction you can get AOL/MSN/McDisney cable and be charged for voice over IP, just like the old bells do it! Yeah! Who could want more? You want to run a server or something? What are you, a hacker?
No, I don't mean any of the above is a good thing. The whole freaking network is being consolidated, along with the music and film publishers, broadcasters and news print burger stands. Barf. Changes are occuring and they are backed by rotten laws like the DMCA. The tighter things get, the less possible it will be to publish inteligent opinion and the worse things will get. It's not so much a sighting as it is a continuing decay.
The internet as a collection of peer computers is indeed going away. People are being told that their computers are "clients" and that they are "consumers" and that they should never try to serve on the scarry world of the internet. Those who would stand against this are derided as dreamers without business sense, pasty faced geeks who need to get a life, perverts and even child molesters.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
--maybe you know the answer to this one. Long time ago, a friend of mine told me that publishers print up x-thousands of copies of a book, they'll ship them to the retailers. After a certain time they strip the unsold ones off the shelves and destroy them, then they'll print up the same book and stock it again.
I was floored, but have no verification or clarification of that.
If you've read his books Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace and The Future of Ideas, then you know that the future is turning out even more bleak than predicted. Even right now, more than half of my family can't use the pop mail server I set up for our use because their ISP's block port 25. I had to set up a webmail interface for them, which is too cumbersome to use as a main address. Stupid and frustrating, but true.
... mom and pop ISPs? Or I think co-op internets, like food co-ops, might be better. and thinking on it, that's a good place to garner interest in advance, use the exisiting food co ops all over.
Are there any good tutorials or packages out there for people who've never attempted a small scale ISP endeavor? I don't mean try to build an earthlink, just basic facts, lists of hardware and software required, basic setup, etc.
what the hell everything is ding its entropy Defenition: # Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society. everything dies without it we wouldn't need technitians :)
destruction is a GOOD THING belive it or not
I learned that in nature all things a breaking down and not just in nature the whole system is begining to colapse and I thought what a good thing maybe I can make some contribution to this myself --- George Carlin
Imagine that Earthlink, AOL and MSN are the only ISPs available to you. They block port 25 to force you to use their SMTP servers. (so much for that domain name you bought... random.coolzip@policestreet.com is useless now) They transproxy ports 80 and 443, so they can record all your web surfing and "share" the information with their "marketing partners". (Funny, though... goatse.cx won't load anymore, and neither will nra.org) Port 22 is blocked to "prevent hackers breaking into vulnerable machines with a SSH exploit". 23 blocked because telnet is insecure. Your TOS requires you to keep 137-139 open (and to run a machine to which those ports are meaningful) to monitor the quality of service. Oh, and everything above 1024 is blocked because there are no legitimate services running on those ports.
Beginning to get the (rather bleak) picture? It may sound corny, but maintaining the World of Ends we've come to know and love does not advance the cause of controlling the general populace. The Prime Directive Of Business is to Make Money. Individuals matter only insofar as they can be persuaded to spend. Big Business wants the net to be Television II: a model they understand and can exploit as an advertising medium to promote the consumerist culture. Geeks want everything to be free, and unlike Big Business, are willing to contribute to the effort without necessarily turning a monetary profit. ("Don't want money... Want admiration") Reality, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle... but not exactly centered.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Have you tried picking up a transsexual or transvestite instead of a regular chick?
Someone's post just reminded me of a discussion on Usenet some years ago where the PaperCupnString protocol was slugging it out with the incompatible PaperCupnString 2 (wet string) competitor. Must see if it's archived somwhere.
Yeah, the usual suspects will screw Internet users like they screw everything else. What's new? Greed and corruption underpins just about everything in public life these days. Even the administrators of global powers lie and, caught, lie and lie again to protect their weird, twisted agendas.
Disclaimer: Just the ramblings of a miserable old git, you understand.
Some of us are working on "Free as in Speech", but still unregulated, wireless. It will exploit the "Tragedy" scenario to achieve that most elusive of goals, a true free market based on purely technical measures and rational economic principles. It will even crowd out the spamlike approaches.
It isn't too popular with the populists fronting, usually unwittingly, for the usual oligarchic suspects who like to let idealists bleed out there on the cutting edge, before moving in for the kill, as is happening with the wired Internet, but it is gaining some support among the anarchists and libertarians, if not the socialists and politicians.
--rgb
Three years ago, I had my choice of two providers of fixed IP service neither of which restricted what I did with the bandwith outside of a few simple respect your neighbor, no spam clauses. Neither was a Bell company.
Today, that's gone. Telocity and @home are dead. In their place I have my choice of dial up, dhcp cable, and dsl that never becomes "available" from the local bell. Would you believe that they charge more for their inferior service? Monopoly rates are what we've got. Yep, I get to pay someone $8/month to have a web server to host 1% oh what I used to on a 486.
Tomorrow, as smaller ISPs are shut down and all the big boys merge under Disney/AOL/Mc$oft there will be fewer places to host your refugee content.
The internet as a network designed to share information and computing resources between peer machines is quickly dying as the ends are extinguished. The old world is triumphing over the new.
A community supported wireless network is the only viable alternative. The wires, running over public lands, have proved too easy a resource to co-opt and dominate. Build the new network and let the old morons revel in their owership of wires. The faster they lose cutormers the quicker they will be replaced by those more willing to serve the public. The wireless network will have to stick around to keep them humble.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"In terms of market share, BSD and Apple are indeed "dying"."
However, market share percentage has nothing to do with something "dying".
In an expanding computer market, you can have something lose market share while still selling more and more units and being installed on more and more desktops (or being a desktop, as with Apple), while the "other guys" are expanding faster (hence a shrinking market share).
However, you certainly can't say that something that is growing in real terms is "dying". Are *BSD and Apple dying in real terms: do fewer and fewer actual numbers of users use them?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Define "Internet".
Its good to hear they'll leave Martian TV stations alone.
So we encode other protocols for a replacement to work on port 80. Regular http would be rejected.
So then they put a caching proxy in the way that rejects anything but RFC-conforming HTTP. And you can't tunnel through HTTP because all incoming ports are blocked, and tunnels don't work from one firewalled computer to another firewalled computer.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"The word "invent" does not appear in that sentence"
So? A word meaning the same thing was used. You get all hung up on the difference between "create" and "invent", ignoring the fact that both claims are false and look silly.
"An initiative was passed by the Senate. Al Gore was the major person who pushed it. He deserves credit for that, not some half-arsed interpretation of his words "
The iniative (Gore's first involvement) was started and passed years after the Internet was created. His statement is "I took the initative in creating the Internet". There is nothing half-arsed in seeing the contradiction.
Yes, it can be said he helped the Internet along, well after it was created. He had nothing to do with its creation, however, so his statement is wrong.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. ... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
-- U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)
Have you gotten a clue yet?
This happens in the Rama series, when the humans wage war against the octospiders. This happens in Brave New World, as well as in Red/Green/Blue Mars. There must be a tremendous number of examples, and not nearly as many counter-examples.
When (if) the internet ceases to be what it was intended to be, will the creators "leave" and "colonize" somewhere else? If this cycle is an unavoidable result of mankind's shortcomings, why bother to continue to innovate?
I am sorry about the pessimistic tone. The above questions are not intended to be rhetorical, and I hope there are optimistic answers to them.
perhaps the mass in incapable of freedom. What do you do with no motivation? Dead to wake without returning to your vomit. Hamilton kicked Jefferson's ass. So instead of my farm, Ive got a $job$. What metaphors exist in the common man's job?
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
>>I believe this is only the case when you want to visit the page of the Smith Family from Anytown, USA, so you can see pics of their kids playing with the family dog.
You mean like Geocities, Yahoo, M$N or AOL "personal" web pages? The only place your corporate masters will allow you to post infromation? Yeah, that's true. Shame I can't use my 486 to serve web content over DSL or cable modem anymore. Just as I was learning to use the free software that makes such sharing easy, and getting over the FUD propaganda against it, poof, the rules change. Now I pay $8/month for a virtual Red Hat server in Canada some place. Shame on the USA, land of the free and home of the brave.
When you and I don't think of ourselves as peers on the internet, there is no internet just terminals and servers.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
In other news, the world will end in 2000 due to programming errors which prevent computers from recognizing the year y2k and above...
"By all means, cite the website"
These quotes and references are found on different web sites:
Vint Cerf, an actual Internet inventor: "Our work on the Internet started in 1973".
Cerf thinks that Gore helped the Internet a lot, so he defends Gore. But Cerf never claims that Gore had anything to do with creating it.
Internet History FAQ: "the military contracting company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) began constructing it in 1969"
Contrast these years with Gore's advent in Congress in 1976. He got involved years after others "took the initiative in creating the Internet". His statement is false.... WRONG!
From the "Internet History FAQ" : "The Pentagon funded the original development of the Internet, and the military contracting company Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) began constructing it in 1969"
I'm aware of the difference between the web and the net. One's a content platform and the other is a network. Unfortunately, the universal perception is that the internet is what you see through your browser. Assertions otherwise, however accurate, won't alter that percepton.
If the browser had not been invented, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
He has a point. The "flashy FrontPage garbage", Flash, Java and JavaScript means slow-loading pages that often crash. Since I don't use online games or online comic books, I have no use for Java of any kind, Flash, ASP or any other unnecessary stuff which has made the 'Net worse in every way (except for those who want the online 'toons and games).
"And "flashy FrontPage garbage" ensures that the masses don't need to learn HTML"
I'd rather they learn HTML than put another bloated useless page with unnecessary crap on it out there.
Not only that, but Granny might be able to install OS-X, but she won't be able to use it since there is hardly any software at all for it, and she will be met with angry looks from the grandkids when they stay for the weekend and find out that none of their files and games work on the thing.
a) you are reading this on the internet and b) this guy runs a blog. the internet wont die suddenly it will just slowly fade away...
in the meanwhile there may be a period of time not that dissimilar to the 80s style bbsing where the only communication is with small region sized groups...but hey...theres now always going to be email...
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
The claims of media consolidation are so funny. One of the most hilarious ones is the claim that Clear Channel controls everything so common in the left-wing media.
For those who do not know, Clear Channel is a company that owns less than 10% of the radio stations in the United States. Such a monopoly!
Popups are handled by mozilla just as well. Sure one popup occasionally gets through but it's no biggie.
You get occasional popups? I haven't had a popup yet with Mozilla or Phoenix.
With IE several of my users are getting popups on my company's intranet. I used one of my female user's PCs today to scan a document and WebDAV upload it and got popups for penile enlargement and celebrity pics! I figure that has to be adware but I haven't found it yet.
Here is my idealized view of what will happen:
1. Patent and Copyright knee-jerk reactions by the media controllers will get out of hand.
2. People will react by boycotting the 'new' technology, and the media mega-corporations will crumble; unfortunately this means our internet backbone will die, and broadband access will be priced out of the reach of the average person. This will feed upon itself until the only Telcos left are the mobile phone companies - and the few entertainment (news) corporations left will be viewed via satelite providers.
3. An emergence of a home grown wireless network will quickly spread across the landscape (a recent article spoke of a group trying to get a coast to coast WIFI link up in the near future); a sub-culture of music, writing, art, and ideas will spread across the land.
4. Cleansed of the old media controllers, new technology will flourish. (This will start about 2036).
Unfortunately I will be an old fart by the time all of this works out, with the battle scars to prove it...
There is no Utopia - and there never will be; life will always be about struggling for what is right against greed and stupidity.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
I have a couple of boxes I've abaondoned. I also have one I'll never need abandon, because it's setup to allow easy filtering of spam. We don't need more laws - not only because the laws will just cripple each of us a little more - but mostly just because laws will never solve the problem. Erect enough barriers and the internet will just become another tool of war; nations will unleash farms of open relays upon others, thus allowing "spam" (and god knows what other forms of propoganda) to clog the electronic arteries of "unfriendlies."
OTOH more laws in "the free world" might be just the equalizer:
Connect random third world dictatorial nation to the net with big, fat pipes.
Open up relay farms to the highest bidder
Profit!
Before AOL and its flood of newbies WHO COULDN'T FIND CAPS LOCK ON THEIR KEYBOARD, we use to be able to tell apart the newbies because they were the only ones who would pay attention to the "imminent death of the net" postings...
People, in general, have no self-control or discipline. It's rather pathetic. Look at all these fat cows that need to get their stomachs stapled because they can't stop eating. Fuck that, if they're hungry, they should get a belly full of lead. Why the fuck should those of us with some discipline have to put up with these pathetic shitbags?
The same applies to junkies and drunks. The only argument not to outlaw alcohol is that it was tried, and failed (prohibition). However, that's the defeatist stance. Using that same logic (read: "we can't hope to stop it completely") would mean that all drugs should be legal (and all murder/rape/robbery should be legal too).
I think alcohol should be illegal. However, it's very ingrained in our society, in fact, many social interactions rely on alcohol. Just like I said in my original post, it's hard to convince people to change their conception of what their rights are (vis a vis downloading off of P2P).
I hope anyone who has a problem with making drugs illegal (and treating junkies harshly) gets hit by a drunk driver... even better, the bastard will get hit, become a parapalegic, who has to spend the rest of his life watching his dick get hard and not being able to feel it. Oh yeah, let's not forget, he should spend the rest of his life ingesting his meals through a straw too.
In conclusion, alcohol and tobacco should be illegal. However, it's unlikely that that will happen any time soon (although tobacco is slowly on its way out). I suppose it'd be nice to be able to "feel good chemically", but this is unrealistic, and simply fucking dangerous. If anyone wants to kill themselves, fine, fuck 'em. But, they absolutely can not be allowed to be a threat to me.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
I just wish Larry would mention Gutenberg more...
Perhaps I'm new to this, but since when do fundamental ideas die?
Our internet as we know it, maybe die. But it will only be replaced by something better.
Look at mechanical clocks, they are being replaced by digital clocks. Sure some kids cant tell the time in old peoples houses, but who cares.
Just like in 10 years nobody will care about Internet1 when we have Internet 2.5 Service Pack 4.
C X RUN
It's on FOX, so it has to be true. Remember classics such as the "Moon hoax documentary" and the Iraq war coverage...
Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over, and that as a result of FCC deregulation, the concentration of digital rights in the hands of just a few large media companies will kill the internet for good.
Liberty is not convenient. What happens when we have freedom of choice? We incure the responsibility to make informed decisions.
Government regulation of speech and press is NOT liberty. It's pretty damned convenient though. Instead of having to make the difficult choice not to read a newspaper owned by a television station, we can just have the government forbid television stations from owning newspapers! No muss, no fuss, and we can stay home in droves on election day.
Seriously, why do we need FCC regulation of the internet? And how would US regulation of the US portion of the internet solve anything? And why is it seemingly okay to regulate commercial content on the web, but seriously bent to regulate porographic content on the web? Why this need to pick and choose who gets freedom and who does not? Like it or not, the internet has been wildly successful WITHOUT government regulation. Sure it has some problems, but I can't think of anything worthwhile that doesn't.
The word "commons" was feudalistic concept. The lord owned the land and graciously allowed the serf to graze sheep on it. If you want a Commons of the Internet again, first stop to think who gets to be the lord and who has to play the role of serf. A few decades ago you had to be among the technical "aristrocracy" to use that commons. But the internet "escaped" the manor of academia. Instead of the feudalism that was, we now have the anarchism of the internet today. Yeah it's pretty crazy, all anarchism is. But damn it's exciting.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Now even children regularly use it and there's so much "power to the people" that it's as if everyone in the movie theater were given his own megaphone.
I think the point of the article was that your 'personal megaphone' won't mean crap if hugely-conglomerated ISPs start filtering traffic based on content. Then the situation becomes one where turning on your personal megaphone gets you teleported right into your own personal black hole and no one ever hears from you again. And the choice of how and when you get filtered lies in the hands of the ISPs, and there's nothing you'll be able to say or do about it. Online, anyway.
Personal expression, meet corporate repression of speech.
Free yourself. Everything else will follow.
It's nearly ten years ago that we (a group of friends in the U.K.) were using the FM 'C.B.' band to transmit data between our systems over a 40sq mile area. - Sure, it was nothing more than an experiment but with todays technology......
:)
;)
Of course, we were using the 27/81 channels without a 'rig' licence. Working on the principal - if my wahing machine can legitimately generate this frequency at 10meters, why can't this little box do the same at 1000meters
The trick is to get good 'spotters' for when the DTI is in the area
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
AOL: Is it all you know is is it all you know?
Andrew Orlowski (of The Register) has lost his mind of late, so if he's preaching the word of Lessig, I'm inclined to get suspicious of Lessig, too. Especially when he's bandying about such nonsensical notions as "email is a failure" just because of spam.
This hysteria about spam is so laughable. It's like saying the postal system is a failure because of junk mail, like saying television is a failure because so much of it consists of commercials; might as well call American society a failure because of the degree to which we are constantly deluged with advertising.
Obligatory smart-aleck responses aside, it's all we've got to work with and most of us seem to manage. I don't see why we should go into hysterics just because the internet is no longer the Garden of Eden which it was in some imaginary golden era.
Nothing to see here, folks, move along and have a good weekend.
the Smith Family from Anytown, USA
I visited a personal site the other day that had both flash and java on the front page (neither of which was needed). It was also very poorly laid out with pictures and captions that had no obvious way to determine what went with what. It had unnecessary (and ugly) frames, the source had font tags scattered around with abandon and general isanity, and (best of all) it was put together by someone who claimed to be a web designer and who was trying to sell his services as such.
Users are not stupid.
No. But users also don't (all too often) seem to think that its necessary to be smart or to take charge of their computers/browsers/internet experience. Too often they have the attitude that they have no rights and no power(and indeed that seems to be the direction that governments and corporations want to take us) and that they must take whats given and as its given. I keep wanting a button : "Thank you sir, may I have another?"
Wow, this coffee is really hot. I better set it in my crotch to cool down.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
I don't think the end of open content is coming, in fact I think that it future is just beginning. Why pay for access to an encyclopaedia when you can get if free? Why pay for books when you can get them for nothing? Why pay for news when you can get it for free? (ok Slashdot isn't the best example)
Ok, so there are problems with both of these sites, the Wikipedia isn't peer reviewed and Project Gutenberg can only use books that are out of copyright (and that varies by country). But, even so, they both remain free.
So, I predict that as large companies try harder to be the only people who can provide information more projects like this will spring up. And when information is provided by only a very few companies/individuals then projects run by large groups of volunteers will become even more important.
We even have tools such as Google news that can gather information from multiple sources at once.
I recently joined a (sexually oriented) website and got a couple emails from them advertising evidence eliminator.
I posted in one of their forums pointing out the website evidence-eliminator -sucks.com and also pointing out a couple other ways to accomplish the same thing for free.
I was promptly booted off - without so much as an email "here's why".
And you will notice that I'm posting this as the cowardly anonymous lion that I am become.
<very-quite-and-tentative>growl </very-quiet-and-tentative>
"I do believe in lawsuits, I do believe in lawsuits...
To use this effectively.
I did get to watch a few Southpark episodes on the way home from work today. It was a fun flight.
+&x
If the internet dies it will because we let it die. Thru this medium we for once have the power to defend ourselves, whether we do or not is the question.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Actually, I have a local copy of that saved which I read through from time to time.
It is encouraging that the problem is being thought out; I don't know that the legal aspects can be over come (as someone already pointed out, many of the technical ones aready have been).
I dont get it...could someone tell me what this is an allusion too...on an unrelated note i'm slightly intoxicated
In Lessig's story he calls WiFi a lemon , and says the online experience is poor for most users .
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I think it is because AOL had 30+ million users
Spam sucks but it does not deter me in the least
Anything worth having is worth fighting for in my opinion
The 7-11 want it now, with homer simpson simplicity, does not
work well with the evolving creature that is the net
The average (l)user does not want to "learn" they want it served to them,
and do not want to download the latest plug-in or patch to make the newest coolest thing work
Our society has become lazy, and I have worked with these
"lazy" ppl as well, and they disgust me
Looking for any excuse to shrug off something they should
proactively take care of rather than reactively
Ppl often spend twice the energy pissing and moaning about
something, than the amount of time it would take a "informed"
user to make it happen
Back to WiFi, community Wireless LAN's where ppl share files, will take off
Rural communities with "zero" broadband can take 2 strands of
single mode long haul, and spray it from their water tower to
their whole small town
I am setting one of them up myself in a small town
I am setting it up as a Coop, the more ppl that sign up the
cheaper it gets because bandwidth is cheaper by unit
as it increases
A squid box to cache common sites, and monitoring to find
abusers , and rate limiting thru QoS if it is needed
A good BSD firewall to save shelling out a small fortune to Crisco
An ATM PCI card to bring in the pipe
This is happening in other places too, and will spread worldwide
802.11b is not going to redefine the net, or the world, but
it is going to make a super cheap last mile solution
We will not free outselves of the long haul carriers
for awhile, but bandwidth gets cheaper in bigger bundles
Coop's bypass the corporate cash cow collectors
www.cantenna.com is a sign of the changes to come
With better antennas, it will go further than a mile too , Ex.: Grid Antennas
Multiple yagi's pointing every 10 degrees, with sidelobe
shielding will provide plenty of bandwidth
After all the cell providers love to use water towers
for their antennas
Well I have rambled on enough
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
As from 2 days ago, I noticed a sudden and dramatic drop in the amount of spam and port scans hitting my domain servers. Then today, CNN reports that the Feds cleaned up the neighborhood. Go Feds go!!!
Oh well, what the hell...
"Lessig is predicting that the days of the Commons of the Internet are over,"
Many of us old-timers would say that happened the day AOL connected to the internet.
To survive as a free exchange of information, the Internet must move off of wires in this country! The problem with cable companies and phone companies is that they own the wires on the poles, and the FCC seems hell bent on keeping them from sharing them! WIRELESS can eliminate this problem. What I envision is a fiber node to serve each community that feeds a wireless network providing the 'last mile' to the home and office and completely bypassing the telcos and cable companies. And no, I would not feel guilty one bit doing this...it's their own greed that would have done them in!!
True, the internet isn't the liberating force it was hyped to be, setting even the lowest peons free in a world of free information (and that information is implied to be exactly what you want it to be, and no more). But the same can be said of the printing press. For some people, the press is a source of lurid photography (Playboy), cheap sensationalist "news" (USA Today), gossip and starwatching (People magazine), and no more. Not everyone will read The Economist or Scientific American. Not everyone has O'Reilly books at their desk or Shakespeare's works on their shelves. But no one will challenge the fact that the advent of the press revolutionized the world and still has a very visible role in the shaping of ideas and people. Would anyone really take Egon Spengler's statement "the Print is dead" as anything more than the throwaway joke it was? I don't think so.
Claiming to have forseen "the end of the internet" is nothing more than cheap sensationalism to raise his hit rates (oh how ironic). I think Lessig will, in time, grow to wish that statement not be attributed to him, simply because he can't stand the notion of people smirking at something he says.
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
You mean Hari Seldon? He'd probably predict a schism in the Internet, splitting into RealNet (for people who know what the fuck they're doing) and LuserNet (for mere humans).
Just out of curiosity- what is the benefit for McDonalds to serve the coffee so hot anyway? Isn't that just asking for a lawsuit and wasting energy/money at the same time?
I'm not a complete idiot who gives out his email address like there's no tomorrow!
If you don't use you address for really dumb things, like sending people email postcards, signing up for XYZ service, posting to newsgroups, etc, etc THEN YOU WILL NOT GET SPAM!
How hard is that? It's really simple to test. Set up a Hotmail account. Let it sit dormant. You will not get spam (emails from Hotmail Customer Service don't count...). Now, use that address for that "Win a free holiday" contest you've been eyeing out. HELLO SPAM!
Sorry for the flame, but getting spam is as much your fault as it is the spammer's. Be more prudent with your personal information. It's just good practice.
Corporations 1, 2 and 3 buy all the supporting connecting links (the wires or fiber or whatever). They only allow connections from sites or ISP's that go along with their terms of service. Persons putting up web pages on those ISP's must also (by the transitivity property in theorem three) go along with their terms of service. Those terms of service allow only advertising for products they approve of, no critical content whatever, even email is scanned - encrypted content is dropped as is any content that does not pass their acceptance tests (applied automatically by filters of their devising).
Far fetched? Look at what clear channel has done to radio.
Another scenario.
The government passes a law (hmmm, lets call it something silly like the "Communications Decency Act") that forbids web content that might offend anyone. Watch as people get offended at almost everything but the most neutral of pablum and watch personal sites (including blogs), humor sites, sites from foreign countries (after all the French are now by official shrubbish definition offensive) and so on get shut down one by one. Watch the Supremes ("Stop! In the Name of Decency") determine that the web is not print nor speech and thus subject to no constitutional protections.
They're called freedom fries nowadays, how dare you call them french fries? You must be an anti-american terrorist, run away now, before Aschcroft's team get you and lock you up in Guantanamo Bay and revoke your citizenship!
You bunghole
mod this Fuckwad down
p.s. I have nothing but love for my fellow man, but I need to take out my bad day one someone....
Okay, as a resident of Europe, I understand why you might not be up on the situation here.
As part of the AT&T breakup waaaaay back in the '80s, phone companies had to become "equal access carriers." That is, they couldn't discriminate between traffic. That fact is what allowed ISPs to start using local dialups to provide Internet access. Believe me, they would have made calls to ISPs more expensive than a call to your neighbor, if they'd been given the chance. Government regulation really promoted the Internet for the masses.
Cable Internet companies are under a totally different set of regulations than phone companies. To promote the building of expensive infrastructure, cable companies are given a monopoly on that infrastructure. They don't have to open their lines to third parties as the phone companies do.
Because cable companies have more control over the traffic on their lines, any cable company that gets bought up by a major provider suddenly becomes the tool of that provider.
When that connectivity provider also happens to be a major content provider, it's in that company's interests to mess with the traffic to promote their own content. It does happen, and cable providers are always looking for regulation that will allow them to do it more. Government, for its part, seems to be increasingly stepping aside.
Smaller ISPs have difficulty competing with cable. The best they can provide is DSL, which also uses the phone lines. But they are totally locked out of the cable market, and will remain so forever unless the regulatory climate changes.
Kazaa is not a perfect safeguard of our freedoms, nor is any other distributed system. The reason is, the freedom inherent in the original vision of the Internet is increasingly under attack. Though the original TCP/IP protocol made no distinction between types of traffic, that was a design decision, nothing more. If The Powers that Be decide that we should replace TCP/IP with a wholly new protocol, where only authorized applications could communicate over it, it could be done.
It needn't go that far, though. There are always less drastic measures that can--and most likely will--be taken against such distributed networks. They all share the same weakness in that they rely on the underlying network (the Internet).
Sure, people "in the know," will always know where to get their crappy bootlegs of first-run movies. I don't care. But there could come a day when only those "in the know" will know where to get "unauthorized" news and alternative viewpoints.
We can't just be fighting for those in the know. We have to fight for everyone. But most of all, we have to believe that there's something that needs to be fought.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
As for usenet, what, are you surprised? Who the hell in the general public would have any conceivable use for usenet? For christ's sake, slashdot is Usenet squared! And the web controlled by big money? Newsflash: the people who use the corporate sites wouldn't have (and didn't) go to the old web anyway.
The beauty of the internet is that it is not controlled. It was designed to be flexible, and continues to do so. I mean, look at stealing music. The big guns shoot down one service, another crops up. At no point in the last few years have I been unable to find a song I want, despite the RIAA's efforts. The internet, like much in the world, is what you make of it, whether you're a grouchy slashdot user, or Walmart. So instead of the lament, how about making it something better?
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to do it by not dying." -Woody Allen
The Internet, Is that still around?
Don't feel this troll, no matter how retarded he is
Anyone actually read it? It's pretty good:
Some garbage about Stephen King.
I stayed up until 11 and look through the channel listings, but I guess I somehow missed the film. Could somone post it onto Kazaa for me?
The postal service, essentially died in
1790.
It was nice for about 15 years, but then
got wrecked.
Internet will do the same.
Telephones became useless around 1900.
I won't even talk about baked bread.
-snowmman
Cars move fast.
Cars should be driven by people who have their attention on driving, not stuffing their faces.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Am I naive in expecting that an architect would undertand the concept of using the right tool for the job?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They go through ensim. Plans are cheaper now than when I signed up:
Plan Schedule
They have been a reasonable host. With a little begging, they provide ssh access. They lost my data once and my root password was changed on me due to lack of ssh before I begged hard enough. No big deal though, it was not my machine and fixing it was as easy of putting a tar file back up.
Still, I miss being able to host on my own system. My little 486 never saw much traffic, even after posting it in +5 moderated Slashdot posts. Even when the cable people crimped the speed down to 31K/second on the upload, the response was reasonable. I liked having my information available without space considerations and it's been difficult for me to trim down what I once offered the world to fit into my new confines. I would only want to use a hosting solution like powerhoster for a large organization or comercial site. Everyone paying $45/month for cable internet should have a static IP and be alowed to run personal and small organization pages. There's no technical reasons for it to be any other way and it's so much easier for all parties involved.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'd agree if I didn't ultimately find what I'm looking for - it's just that it takes a hell of a lot longer now.
Man, what I wouldn't have given for a decent search engine back when Alta Vista was the best that we could scrape up!
I'll definitely grant that, as AV was, for the time before google, the best out there. But I swear, maybe I'm all rose-colored-glasses, but it takes the full power of google's boolean search with carefully-chosen keywords to find what I used to could with a half-assed AV search.
To me, the pinnacle of the internet was the day google was invented, before people learned to manipulate it, and before every toothless moron in Arkansas had a web page. Or worse yet, before every half-wit college freshman but up a blog giving his vacant opinion abut something, confounding my efforts to find actual information on the topic.
I know I sound like an old fogy yelling at passersby about the good-old-days, but that's not what I'm trying to say.
No, that's what I'm trying to say. ;) I guess the best way I can say it is that I liked the internet better when it felt like a big, huge BBS - a great blend of community with resources. Now, the internet is mostly a sterile high-tech phone book, and that doesn't seem as cool to me.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The internet must die, now that BSD is dead.
:)
Yeah, if I'd seen this one live, someone would have found it amusing.
...which you would know if you had read the referenced article:
1.) McDonalds corporate rules, at the time the lady was burned, said that coffee should be served 180-190 degrees. 3rd degree burns take 3 seconds at 190 degrees. Anything over 130 degrees is unnecessary.
2.) McDonalds had received over 700 written complaints about bad burns from their coffee.
3.) McDonalds was given several chances to settle the case before trial, originally for only $11,000 (the cost of her medical bills). They responded with an offer of $800. They ended up paying almost $3 million.
Given these facts, I think it can safely be said that McDonalds management are also idiots (that lady was indeed an idiot for putting hot coffee between her legs and removing the lid, even if it had been 'only' 130 degrees). They were punished because they had been given multiple opportunities to avoid this sort of thing, but didn't. While she shouldn't have put the coffee between her legs, neither should she have received extensive 3rd degree burns for doing so.
Culpability on both sides, my man. And when a large, rich corporation is given many multiple opportunites to fix something and they never do, they'll always get slapped down by a jury.
Please read the article, it's very informative.