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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.
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 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!
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 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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
This has really become as distorted as the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit. Please read this for the lowdown behind the wisecracks.
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
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.
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."
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.
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
Dude...this is slashdot we're talking about...they still think First Post is funny.
Headline ala Fark?
*blinks*
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
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.
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...
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."
Modus Ponens has the following form:
P
If P then Q
Therefore Q.
Your argument did not contain a conditional (an "If P the Q" statement) so it cannot be an instance of Modus Ponens.
In fact your argument is an instance of the fallacy of composition (mistakenly transfering a property of a part to the whole).
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.
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
..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
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.
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.
It's not just that.
If a few companies control access, then it means that the ISPs are not free as well.
So you can go and write anything you want, because the ISP may pull it because they may be "legally liable" or "against their terms of service".
Let's say you are against the war, and you set up a web site about that. What if the big media corporation shuts it down because it was "bad for their business" or whatever. So you host your own web site on your home computer via DSL, and then the phone company shuts you down, because they could be legally liable for whatever is on their networks or you had broken their terms of service. Where do you go next? Probably no where.
Without competition, without choice, we are all controlled. The Internet will be the watered-down reflection of what the media companies want it to be, not what we want it to be.
It's the difference between pirate radio and regular radio, or someone with their own printing press.
Someone who just sets up a pirate radio station can transmit whatever they feel like saying (despite the legalities of this). Someone who has their own printing press can write whatever they want and distribute it.
But if we don't control the actual physical layer, or if the physical layer is owned by a oligopoly of media companies, they can squish us like an insignificant bug.
This is what Lessig is talking about.
The "death" that he describes is not the fact that the Internet will get disconnected. This death is the death of the virtual freedom we have enjoyed for almost 10 years in terms of the nerds and techies doing whatever we wanted because we were one step ahead of everyone.
We could build our own web sites and make billions of dollars. We could write our own blogs telling whoever wanted to read it if we wanted. We could set up a web site that blasted a corporation that we hated or warning people of the problems with certain products. We were able to help the little guys such as the protesters organize against government oppressions by having centralized web sites that the government couldn't hack into.
The death that Lessig fears is this death. I'm quite confident that we will always have an Internet that will give us the latest stock quotes, the movie times, tv schedules, weather, etc. Losing the new freedom we have acquired over the past 10 years is something far more precious.
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.
"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.
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"
"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!!