Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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
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 internet is dying in America. Luckily the internet is a global affair.
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!!!
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 second the motion - if anything, the recent attention given to blogs has legitimized a thoroughly uncommercial and decentralized news gathering force. Think of the Baghdad blogger, for example, who by himself provided a viewpoint on the war in Iraq that no monolithic news source could.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
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.
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
As long as there are opponents to DRM and commercialization, the internet will never die.
.com's. Why the hell do companies have a right to a .org? A .net if they aren't a Network Service Provider. This is what is wrong with the internet.
I'm not opposed to DRM. I think it's a perfectly reasonable tool that can be used to promote good things. For example, signing an applications source and allowing free distribution. It's what media companies want to do with DRM that's horrible. DRM can be PGP signatures or md5sums on source, to prevent trojans and "evil code" on the kernel level. DRM can also kill your rights. Until DRM is extensively used to excercise fair use, I will avoid ever supporting it. I see it as a tool.
Commercialization is fine on the internet. Just stick to your
I hope that with IPv6, it is possible to setup an alternate internet. Managing our own DNS systems, that hold strict rules for what exactly can be under each domain and get an automated script to find possible offenses.
The internet isn't dying, innovation on the internet is. People stopped doing innovative things with the internet since TCP/IP gaming and Flash became "cool"
There are a few projects that make it different, like FreeNet and P2P applications, but those are going to become endangered. If the geeks unite, we can contribute to lobbyists (EFF, et al) and "campaign contributions" and hopefully keep these projects alive and promote proper innovation and the next step in networking.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
The war is over. Find another joke. They're much funnier when they're original.
All this works fine. Where's the problem?
The Internet isn't about shopping.
I think you miss the point. People are getting sued for putting up websites that say bad things about other companies. They're getting sued for writing search engine software. They're getting sued for, as he pointed out, registering domains for their own personal family names.
;) ).
Email is nearly worthless for most people - I'm at about 1:50::real email:spam. We're to the point that people are running software to filter mail for them, software which can tag non-spam as spam - a worse problem than getting the spam itself. But, people are desperate enough to restore email's worth that they'll put up with that sort of thing.
You don't get any spam - I hope you realize that you're a part of a very small minority (you may also want to contact your MX admin, the mail server could just be down
20 to 1? I don't know what you are talking about. Perhaps you post your address everywhere you go. My spam/mail ration is exactly the opposite and I achieve that by registering to unimportant internet services with fake accounts or alternative accounts. The rest is handled by mozilla mailnews bayesian spam filtering. Popups are handled by mozilla just as well. Sure one popup occasionally gets through but it's no biggie.
/. model? Perhaps because the need is not there yet. I find and obtain plenty of sources, most importantly I can find primary sources (judges' opinions, congressional debates, and what not), stuff that was unthinkable 10 years ago. And guess what I a use a browser to read them. Alternative means are welcome but I don't see any reason for pessimism here.
Is it harder to get independent news sources? Judging from slashdot's sources, it seems rather the opposite. Most of the stuff I read here would have been impossible to report/know/learn without the internet. I realize you are not talking about tech news, so why isn't there a successful general interest news site using the
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. --
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.
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.
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."
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.
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 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.
-- $G
To make it even worse, the legislation he was involved in was the legislation that led to the commercialization of the internet and hence the popups we all loath. Not something I would be bragging about.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
It's a well known fact about online communities that anonymity encourages abuse. If in doubt, try reading the comments on this story with your moderation threshold set at -1. Why do people post AC on Slashdot?
;-)
Originally I was planning on abusing you, that's why I posting as an Anonymous Coward.
But seriously, presuming the anonymity=abuse seems a little naive.
I mean its easy to point fingers, but the truth is there is always a small group of people who will act badly and this isn't unique to the internet anymore then it is the anonymity. You see it standing in line at the grocery store, during you commute to work. People express themselves and not always in a way we like or can easily understand.
The difference is no ones ever been killed by an anonymous post, at least not here on Slashdot (if it was going to happen it would be here!).
Telecomunication companies, of course, want to extend their pay per minute rape.
Software companies have proved themselves unable to compete with free software which depends on a free internet.
Who else? You mentioned government?
Oh well, there you have it. If we give into these forces we will be slaves. Remember that you own the land the wires run on and should demand your right to lay more if the incumbents fail you. The incumbents will fail us, of course, as they seek to impose limits of obsolete technology to and make us pay for their existance.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.