Slashdot Mirror
Auerbach on Internet Cruft
Captain Beefheart writes "Karl Auerbach has a story on CircleID in which he declares '...Between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected.' The Balkanization of the 'Net appears to be upon us."
Right after Usenet, *BSD, Stephen King, etc.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
It makes my skin crawl just thinking about it. I feel that the Internet is our last source of un-censored and un-biased information.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
In case the site is slow, here is a mirror.
Martin Studio Slashdot Policy.
for Balkanizing the Internet.
- George W. Bush
What?
Hate me!
Every few months some elitist prick looks around at all the idiots on the net, and declares that "The Internet is Dying". Don't believe it. People have been predicting this ever since AOL began allowing Usenet traffic, and it hasn't happened yet.
...so here's the Google cache.
All ready dead. Will look forward to reading when their machine comes back to life.
stuff
It's not dying. It just wants to be patched.
What is slashdot?
When I first got on the internet, early 90's there was this asian magazine called shrimp something or another, nowadays you can't find it anywhere.
All the porn is locked up!
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
If their site is any indication of how long the internet will last... I'm afraid I'll have to agree, it's already got one foot in the grave.
It's not 11 yet.
As if you needed to prove that this guy is just another doomsaying blowhard trying to get people to read his article.
Hooray the internets ending. I for one welcome our new outernet overlords.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=balkaniza tion
"Sorry Im not more user-friendly."
Do they count slashdottings as 'cruft'? Either way, this isn't going to increase their opinion of the internet now, is it?
Google cached copy of article.
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
Email is not the Internet. The web is not the Internet. Usenet is not the Internet. The Internet is no danger of balkanization.
The Internet is no longer the simple playground it was in the late 80s! Waah, no fair! I have to learn something new and deal with a giant, heterogeneous mass of losers, hackers, cluebies and porn stars instead of a half-dozen geeks futzing with the rack of 3 dusty 3B2s in the basement running on AUX ethernet taps.
Geesh, get over it pal, nothing is static.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It looks like the Google Cache has made subtle changes to the document! Please RTFGC before posting!
His main argument seems to be that there's a lot of crap on the Internet, and because of this it will eventually become useless. But where's the supporting argument?
Junk mail hasn't brought the postal service to its knees. Telemarketers are a pain, but people still use phones and even find new ways to travel with them. Every communication medium lends itself to abuse, but that has never eliminated the medium itself. Only a superior, easier, more widespread technology has ever done that (telegraphs giving way to telephones, for instance).
It's just another guy claiming the end of the 'Net is nigh, people. Move along.
Quite the contrary, I find more reason to be pessimistic and believe that this background noise will become a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet.
... whatever, but as long as there's money in out and around it, it's here to stay. No worries ...
Between viruses and spammers and just plain old bad code, the net is now subject to a heavy, and increasing level of background packet radiation.
Okay, so unlike the universe's background radiation which tends to get more and more diluted, does this mean the innurnet is in a big crunch phase? that it'll collapse back to a infinitely massive singularity located in the DARPA building it was born in? My God it's TERRIFYING !!!
Oh and by the way, the innurnet won't die as long as there's vested interests in it. It'll evolve, governments will step in to stop the crap, a new protocol will appear with signed packets
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Slashdotted.. here's the text..
There are indications that the Internet, at least the Internet as we know it today, is dying.
I am always amazed, and appalled, when I fire up a packet monitor and watch the continuous flow of useless junk that arrives at my demarcation routers' interfaces.
That background traffic has increased to the point where it makes noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs. And I have little reason for optimism that this increase will cease. Quite the contrary, I find more reason to be pessimistic and believe that this background noise will become a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet.
Between viruses and spammers and just plain old bad code, the net is now subject to a heavy, and increasing level of background packet radiation. And the net has very long memory - I still get DNS queries sent to IP addresses that haven't hosted a DNS server - or even an active computer - in nearly a decade. Search engines still come around sniffing for web sites that disappeared (along with the computer that hosted them, and the IP address on which that computer was found) long ago.
Sure, most of this stuff never makes it past the filters in my demarcation routers, much less past my inner firewalls. But it does burn a lot of resources. Not only do those useless packets burn bits on my access links, but they also waste bits, routing cycles, and buffers on every hop that those useless packets traverse.
It will not take long before the cumulative weight of this garbage traffic starts to poison the net. Already it is quite common for individual IP addresses to be contaminated from prior use. I am aware of people who are continuously bombarded by file access queries because a prior user of that address shared files from that address. Entire blocks of IP addresses are also contaminated, perhaps permanently, because they once hosted spammers thus causing those address blocks to be entombed into the memories of an unknown number of anti-spam filters not merely at the end user level but also deep in the routing infrastructure of the net. And a denial-of-service virus, once out on the net, can only be quieted, not eliminated; such viruses remain virulent and ready to spring back to life.
The net does not have infinite resources - even if IPv6 is deployed the contamination of IP address space will merely be slowed, not stopped.
Better security measures, particularly on the sources of traffic, will help, but again, unless something radical happens, the contamination will merely be slowed, not stopped.
I believe that something radical will happen: We may see the rapid end to the "end-to-end" principle on the Internet.
We are already observing the balkanization of the net for political and commercial reasons. Self-defense against the rising tide of the net's background packet radiation may be another compelling reason (or excuse) for net communities to isolate themselves and permit traffic to enter (and exit) only through a few well-protected portals.
This balkanization may be given additional impetus by a desire to escape from the ill effects of poorly designed regulatory systems, such as ICANN.
So, between spam, anti-spam blacklists, rogue packets, never-forgetting search engines, viruses, old machines, bad regulatory bodies, and bad implementations, I fear that the open Internet is going to die sooner than I would have expected. In its place I expect to see a more fragmented network - one in which only "approved" end-to-end communications will be permitted.
The loss of open end-to-end communications will, in itself, be a great loss.
But of even more concern will be the fact that these portals, or gates, will require gatekeepers, which is merely a polite word for censors. Our experience with ICANN has shown us how easily it is for focused and well-financed interests to capture a gatekeeper. In the present political climate in which government powers are conferred, without a counterbalancing obligation of accountability, onto private bodies, the loss will be much greater.
My sig can beat up your sig.
I think this level of Doomsaying is unwarrented. Yes, the internet is getting more and more crowded with extraneous information.
But that's merely an impetus to develope more intelligent and autonomous personal filtering software and other such "evolving" technologies.
If you view the internet in an organic fashion, as a gorwing network with nodes added everyday, you can easily see predators "evolving". That simply means we need more adpative techniques to deal with them.
I don't see the "free" internet vanishing anytime soon.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
Lets see:
>Between spam,: Yeah, that came from Balkan
>anti-spam blacklists,: Definetly more Balkan
>rogue packets,: Ok, maybe some Balkan here
>never-forgetting search engines,: Balkans fault
>viruses, Balkan is evil
>old machines,: Ok, some Balkan
>bad regulatory bodies,: Everything is Balkan's fault
>and bad implementations: Blame Balkan
So please give the peaceful people at Balkan a break!
Blame the those who tries to regulate Internet instead. And blame those that makes tools that makes it posible to do all above. Hey, accidentaly that would mean some of all those Open Source tools..
Uhh, but that can't be right, blame the evil corporations
Proud patriot and republican voter.
Don't let Balkanization ruin YOUR net. Buy your SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux today.
Anyone manage to get the text of the article before the server died? It would be nice to say something insightful, instead of just saying that I don't know what he's talking about. The Internet isn't a network, it's a network of networks. In other words, it's balkanized by definition.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
You either deal with the online idiots, or abandon the internet. The pros of the internet FAR outweigh the cons, IMO.
Frankly I dont see the spams and ddos attacks and blah blah that you all get so worked up over as much of a big deal. I get little spam, on the order of a couple dozen a year. Big ddos attacks on commercial sites have never really bothered me. Whoopty do.
There are jerks at the mall, but its still the best place in town to buy a new pair of pants.
"Elitist jackass thinks we need to abandon internet because he's offended by penis-enlarging spam". Big boo-hoo deal. You run off and start your own internet then. Those of us with balls (or a reasonable equivalent) will stick around here, thanks. Because it really isnt that bad.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Conspiracy to support the tax theorists in Florida?
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
His server certainly died sooner that I expected.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
What the internet really needs is a good 5 cent asshole detector.
`which fortune`
See also Jargon File: Imminent Death of the Net Predicted! and Brad Templeton's classic timeline.
Yes, that was 1989. Same old same old...
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
subject says it all
http://www.cavebear.com/cbblog/
It originally posted here and reprinted on the slashdotted site.
He have some increase in "background traffic" on his net, and therefore the internet is dying. That's it? No research, no breakdown of packet/traffic type?
That background traffic has increased to the point where it makes noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs
And what is that? 1 packet/hour? 100 packets/minut?
Even though he is right about the internet having some, as of now, unsolved problems. This "article" smells like doom saying and FUD.
Nothing to read here people, move along
Carbon based humanoid in training.
As long as I can read SlashDot, you can cut off the rest of the net.
Things change. There is no static "open internet" that is going to 'end' abruptly one day. All social and technological systems are in a constant state of flux. Maybe the internet looks less open now than it was 'then' and maybe it looks to be trending away from the great utopia it never was, But the system is above all of this ultimately. Maybe for most people the techno-utopia will cease, but that is because that is what most people wanted.
All societies, including the 'internet society' are emergent phenomena. One thinks the 'network' is dying because they idealized it in another form, not in a 'better' form or a 'worse' form just their form. Simply put it is a case of the "good old days" syndrome, people constantly complain about society pointing out how great it once was, and they will continue to do so. If we let the internet die it is because collectively we didn't care to have it live. Sure there will always be complainers with valid points because it is very easy in hindsight to pick out what was better than you have now, while glossing over what was worse.
Sure I'd like to see Usenet and IRC be as good as I remember them, and I'd like everyone to pretned Flash was never invented and stop using it, but am I willing to give up on all the things (graphics, non-console interfaces, high-speed, mass access, etc) that both killed Usenet and brought about Flash? NO.
Is is perfect, seamless, elegant, etc? Maybe not. But it will remain "open."
Cry me a river. It's going to die in 1995
DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM 12:01 AM GMT ON APR. 1 TO 12:01 AM GMT, APR. 2 !!
*** Attention ***
It's that time again!
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email, inactive ftp and www sites, and empty USENET groups, allows for a better working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Kim Dereksen
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff,
Main branch,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on to other sysops and Internet users as well.
Thank you.
Is anyone seriously worried about the Internet dying? Of course the "Internet as we know it" will die or at least evolve to something a little different; I don't think that will surprise anyone.
Packet radiation and spam are very minor obstacles to the Internets as a whole. We are a very inventive resourceful people.
The articles here seem to get more and more pointless. I just want an entertaining three minute break from my work day...
It has been speculated by business experts such as Jon Stewart that people need to "forget about" the internet and then re-invent it in order to get the stock market swell that the internet brought during the '90s. If the internet dies, some nerds will start again with the same spirit of those who started the original one. End result: we get a big economy boost again. Woohoo!
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Here.
I feel like this story would've been better left sitting on his obscure blog than on the /. frontpage where it'll be routinely ripped to pieces. ____ is dying is like so totally over. ;)
Yes robbIE, the cruft has been removed from yOUR postblock(tm) device, the corpirate markup FraUDs will slowly destroy the world in the search for crudeness. A babIE is kill -9 ed everIE time a barrol is consulted with yOUR creator.
The payper LIEcenses will not keep the corpirate SCOck Markup FraUDs up for long, as the eye be em forgerIE has made it slip BElow the $14 mark. No DOWts who is responsible for the mess.
RobbIE, please consult with the GNAA about yOUR anus cheeses, we wILL need to eat them if the FraUDuleNT corpirates are caught!
mail didn't die when advertisements started being mailed, the internet won't die because spam gets mailed.
What is slashdot?
This dude must be new to the whole concept of the Internet. Either that or a woefully pessimistic bastard. Maybe he's connected to angry Prodigy clones that never got over their banishment from the market. Nobody is going back to proprietary online services ever.
Laws are for people with no friends.
This guy thought about writing an article on the great Internet, stopped xmule for a moment to do a tcpdump and discovered with horror that hundreds of unknown machines are trying to connect to his on unknown ports ? Oh the humanity!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Computing survived 8088 processors running at 4.77 MHz, with only 5 1/4 inch floppy disks for storage. If computing can survive that, the Internet can survive anything.
... film at 11.
:wq
So far I only know that this guy doesn't have a very good bandwidth as his server went down within 60 comments on the story. It would be nice if story authors would throw in at least a one-liner explaining why should I care that some guy thinks internet is going to die.
I passed the Turing test.
I agree with it... shut the whole internet down for a determined period of time. people don't miss things until they're gone. maybe after it comes back on they'll take more care of it so it improves, instead of deteriorates.
Which, I think is precisely the problem. We don't get an uncensored Net, we only get to choose the censors. In the U.S., the Net isn't censored by the government simply because allowing people to visit "questionable" sites gives the government the ability to compile a list of terrorism suspects.
Really, the problem is much more insidious than that - how many people know that AOL filters their content? When it comes down to it, while we decry other countries for their draconian censorship, we ourselves have merely moved the censorship from the government (who are 'accountable' to the public at large) to American corporations (who are accountable to no one, as Enron has shown). I fear the latter more than the former, because unlike governmental oppression, corporate suppression of free speech is not covered by the constitution!
Really, the Net is no longer a geek's toy. It is now the Net of the masses, and we can expect that things will get worse. The average person has no use for Linux kernals or for distributing free software, so you can expect these to go first. Indeed, as the SCO case has shown, Corporate America can effectively outlaw the distribution of anything that infringes on their income model by doing little more than filing a lawsuit.
Yeah, it's changing. The Internet is only as free as its users, and slaves are signing up in droves.
With IPv6 we may simply use an IP number only once (for one machine, one service, even one connection if this is desirable). As the topmost poster points, when we run out of IPv6 numbers we may well start over, since most old numbers will have been used in another Galaxy, in planetary systems whose stars had long gone Nova, so whatever contamination they suffered probably died too.
1) (*)BSD is dying.
2) The Internet was built on BSD.
3) The Internet is dying.
...is defined here.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Come on...
....
We live with space that's running out. Limited planet resources. There are problems with cars and roads and doctors and economics and societies and political systems and
The internet is going no where it is firmly entrenched in business and in personal life. The sky's not falling chicken little.
"The Balkanization of the 'Net appears to be upon us."
So we are going to split up an arbitrarily formed body into several pieces based on some imagined construct of difference, which masks the true rejection of totalitarianism and structual violence?
How is disciplining the Internet the same as the tragedy of Southeastern Europe? Did you know that the Balkans are actually a small mountain range in Bulgarian. Most places in the "Balkans" are far from what you think are the "Balkans", physically, mentally, culturally, emotionally. Even those places Christiane Amanpour and dumb books (by a smart person who knows better) like "Balkan Ghosts" told you about during the war are nothing like what we think they are like. Making a verb out of that foreign policy mess is sickening.
Do not conflate human suffering with this foolish little thing called the Internet. This is akin to people, sitting meters from a fully stocked fridge, saying "I am starving." Think about it, but remember thinking is hard...
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
i can't believe they're ./ed already.
(sob)
Death of the internet predicted! Details at 11.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
He hangs out with John Galt a lot.
i think, that the internet is not about to die but that it is the future of computation. just looking at the market today can support this. look at things like .NET, the popularity of *nixes (systems designed from the groud up for multiuser networked environments), and upcoming web services. all of these things show that the internet is only bound to grow and become more powerful in its future rather than die.
SIGFAULT
I never much paid attention to editors. But you might consider it after looking at this story. Really, this is inane.
Just in case anyone else was wondering what the hell balkanization was?
/"bol-k&-n&-'zA-sh&n/ noun, often capitalized
Main Entry: balkanize
Pronunciation: 'bol-k&-"nIz
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -ized; -izing
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Balkan Peninsula
Date: 1919
: to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units
- balkanization
I think what I'd like to see one of these columnists talk about is the state of the advertising industry today. Why is it that some companies feel the need to advertise is such obviously offensive manners such as spam, junk mail or telemarketing? Whatever happened to producing a quality product, advertising in responsible ways and having sales generated based on a great idea or product? Is this kind of "traditional" advertising not working any more?
I think in some ways, the old ways aren't working as well as they used to. People already feel like they're being over advertised to and we tend to tune out tv ads, just flip over magazine ads, ignore banners. But that's not our fault, it's the fault of the industry for shoving it down our throats at every turn.
But at the same time if the ads are for a product that people generally like we do notice the ads, like say for the Lord of the Rings movie or Apple. Too many companies seem to not understand that advertising a product very few people want is going to make your product better. Not every product is worthy of advertising.
So it seems to me that companies with shitty products look at their crappy sales and think they need to go ballistic with Spam, and just through basic odds they'll get some responses and people buying their products. But do they not realize they may be getting a small amount of sales and a much larger amount of customers never to buy their product because they pissed them off with their spam?
My goodness, is he saying there's useless crap flying around the internet! My goodness what ever will we do !?
In all seriousness, the internet, like all things, will reach a balance. To give and exapmple, if everyone's email is to full of spam, people will stop using email, the spammers won't reach anyone, and it will no longer be profitable to send spam. People will utilize a new form of comunication, similar to email but more controled.
We, esspeicaly Americans, are so used to balances being forced on us, though government regulation, that we're not willing to wait for natural processes to work.
The internet is the internet and will always be the internet. That what people want. The protocols may change but the idea will stay the same.
(yes, I can't spell, get over it)
"Failure is not an option, it's part of the standard package"
I remember that movie where the Enterprise goes to Balkan to revive Spock. It was pretty cool. Balkans are all really logical so I'm assuming that the Balkanization of the internet just means it will be made more logical. Sounds good to me.
links are good
I was hoping, by posting this, that I could point out the complete lack of originality in Slashdot posts that get moderated funny. You see, I wrote a step-by-step plan to create one of these overly abused posts, which cleverly resembled a different overly abused post.
Lo and behold, I got moderated funny! Who woulda guessed. I am tired of seeing crap like this and I'm glad to see there are others as well, judging from the response I received.
Moderators on Slashdot encourage these "me too, me too" posts by constantly rewarding them with +1, Funny points. Pavlov would have a field day with this.
Read my other posts regarding the abysmal quality of Slashdot moderation, ranked in order of my favorites: 1, 2, 3, and 4.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Imminent Death of The Net Predicted!!!
Imagine it all in caps, as the lameness filter won't allow it in its true, sexy ascii glory...
do() || do_not();
I think you've missed some of the point. He's not referring to the web, or email, or any other particular part of the internet, but about junk traffic in general.
Regardless of the cause, junk traffic might at some point push administrators to restrict traffic more than they currently do. Sort of a white list for all traffic, not just of one type.
Now, that said, this certainly could be more "chicken little" than anything else, but I think his point is valid that more crap traffic could lead to splitting off parts of the internet.
This would be something like having your border router drop all traffic from chinese or russian networks, on the theory that more crap comes from there.
The concept of the open, free, wonderful Internet is a concept that disappeared the instant the .com TLD was created and the gates restricting users from AOL and other fast-food watching, prime-time television viewing hangouts were removed.
Freedom is a responsibility, not a right. It's been that way for centuries in all reality. Any time you have a huge land-grab with no real regulation or accountability, you eventually have the idiot masses come through and turn it into a grabage heap. Empires grow, empires fall. People start to realise that if everybody can talk at once, very few really listen, and when you bother to listen, most thoughts aren't very well thought-out.
In some ways, for those who don't read about history, politics, and economics, it's a lot like the dating scene. When you start out it's great meeting lots of new people, and you're thrilled. But eventually you get tired of hearing the same stupid, vapid stories from lots of supposedly different people. You select a few to hang out with, even fewer to really confide in and listen to, and that's your life.
I've spent plenty of time online, and a lot of it on the web, or using gopher, or IRC, or Usenet, and I'm simply bored with most of the drivel. It used to be cool to see new homepages. Now it's just dumb. I prefer to connect with my peers, get my information, and then go out in the real world and have a life.
I'm sorry Mr. Auerbach, but while your logic was good, your principles were flawed, much like Marx. Marx's ideas were great, but he foolishly believed people were inherently good. That's where his ideas all went wrong. I think you may have made many of the same assumptions.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
ya dig?
What the hell does he know? The Celtics have sucked ever since they lost Larry Bird.
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
The physical internet is not dying, of course. That's just silly. But some internet services--especially email and the web--have been abused to the point where the benefits are cloudy.
Imagine a random person who buys a computer and gets connected to the internet. Within a few months she gets more spam and virus emails than regular mail. Some of them contain pornographic images, many appear to be from people she knows, because their PCs are infected. Some are just plain misleading, such as a message from someone who says he has the information she requested. One is a message that appears to be from eBay, asking to confirm her userid and password. Sometimes she emails friends, but they are incorrectly deleted because her friends get so much spam too. She clicks on the wrong link in a Google search and gets a site that opens 20+ full screen windows and has to kill the browser to get rid of them. Sites contain misleading popups and ads about security vulnerabilities and potential viruses and system updates. Instant messaging windows with ads pop up every fifteen minutes or so. Clicking on the wrong button is a dialog--or misunderstanding what is being asked--results in some spyware being installed that pops up messages even when off-line.
You can fix all of these things. You can learn what to avoid. You can become horribly paranoid about everything. But most people don't want to be a system administrator that has to keep up with all of this nonsense.
Where are the dancing babies and the Turkish singles for this generation? Where are the outrageously good deals on DVDs and electronics? Where are the fan sites that could fearlessly post MP3s? Where are the independent sites of interest? ESPN was swallowed, Slashdot was swallowed, Suck.com died, etc.
Forbidden
/article/215_0_1_0_C/ on this server.
You don't have permission to access
Remember 9-10 years ago when the good 'ole research-oriented Internet was first defiled by the masses? This article may have actually mattered then. Now, who bloody cares? Yes, the amount of crap on the Internet is increasing but so what? Strip malls and outlet shopping are where farms used to be. And before that, there were those who lamented farms that replaced the wilderness. If you don't like the strip malls, don't go there.
If the level of background traffic ever nearly approached the danger levels he's spouting about, then the big backbone providers will correct the situation.
They can do a lot to stop spam and ddos attacks the like, but the problem is they get paid for bandwidth - so they arent inclined to care where the traffic comes from.
But if it gets to the point that its going to erode their customer base, they'll start dropping bad traffic, adding more pipes, whatever it takes to keep the system rolling.
I'm not worried.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
All your tired meme repetition are belong to trashcan. And mine too.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Film at 11
1. We keep 75% of the IPv4 address space while actually having 0.04% of the world's population. And use them "wisely".
2. We first accepted software patents and then lured some real democracies to fall in this trap, too.
3. We let Microsoft do whatever they want despite of our own laws and thus threatened the entire software industry.
4. We never contributed to open source projects. No need for examples, we didn't participate in any.
5. We hinted some previously-mentioned real democracies about stuff like Echelon and some previously-mentioned corporations about DRM.
6. Whatever you think is bad for the Internet. And the world at all.
Yeah... Sorry about that.
My kneejerk reaction was, "yeah right." But after doing a teensy weensy bit of skimming at his site, he has a very good point. As major points of access are bought by large corporations, control becomes easier and easier. Perhaps in ways that savvy users can circumvent, but one would bet that for example, most Chinese internet users don't have any idea how to circumvent the great firewall.
Also, spam really does prevent email from getting through. I know that nearly anyone actually trying to email me at nutate at hotmail isn't going to get through to me unless I know them already... (and in which case they wouldn't be using that email address to contact me.)
The man's been looking at the internet since 1974, so he seen what's happened firsthand. But here's an analogy (of sorts) that just popped into my head. Last week I saw the documentary film Catching Out and the filmmaker did a Q&A about it afterward. One of the audience members asked her whether she thought that freight train hopping (the centerpiece to the film) was dying. She said that there are two schools of thought. One is from the old folks, who say "It's just too hard these days. Security's too tight, so I quit" But the young kids, she said, who'd grown up with this higher security think it's still a thriving enterprise.
Personally, I'm young enough to think the internet is going to be used and free for me for as long as I can concieve of. But for those who don't care to fight the restrictions (or don't notice them), they'll be, for lack of a better word, stuck (w/ msnbc as their homepage?...).
But nothing's as crufty as Cham-cham!
^_____________^ kekekeke
You anal-retentive European moderators are too hypersensitive for slashdot. Most Americans wouldn't give that comment a second thought. Go make your own site where you can happily create your ideal world without dissent.
Moreover, tax on alcohol affects only those who (ab)use it. The tax on LANs ass the asholes in Florida propose would affect legitimate users as well as spammers, and other abusers. Why should people who use the resources wisely be taxed because of abusing actions of others.
Just my $0.02 worth in LAN taxes.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I think that for people with the pioneer spirit, like the folks who were building webpages back in 1994, the internet as we knew has been dead for a while. Much of what made it interesting was the fact that it was new and mostly undiscovered, and there was a lot of anticipation and excitement about its potential.
Now that it's gone mainstream and its direction has gone into the hands of large corporations, it just isn't that interesting anymore. It's kind of like the western half of the United States -- now that everybody lives there, it's just another place. Sad to think that the most interesting days are well behind us, but honestly, when was the last time you were really excited about anything internet-related?
Isn't this exactly what he means by "Balkanization"?
1. ???
2. *this
3. ??????
I have no idea what he means by "Balkanization", my buzzword dictionary is out of date. I'd assumed he meant the internet will fragment back into aol, compuserve and fidonet.
I dont think that blocking ddos attacks on the big pipes is going to harm the internet. If thats his big fear, then I hope it comes true.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not having read the article.....Sites that filter the internet will just become more valuable. For instance news articles off of slashdot.. It will be harder to find useful stuff from search engines.
http://threetechguys.info Come, discuss Technology. Got a technology question? Come ask!
You were e-mailed. Maybe you missed it. It was in the news digest of "Really Important Stuff You Need to Know" that you signed up for at one of our associate sights. The article about the end of the world was right after the article about the "New Revolutionary Breakthrough All-Natural Member Growth Formula" (so you can make her happy before the world ends) and before the one about the "Totally Free Government Grant and Mortgage Refinancing Options" now available exclusively to you if you respond in the next two weeks (so that, if the world doesn't end after all, you can buy a new house to make her happy in).
Search engines will improve. Right now every search I do on google results in hundreds of phony pages that redirect to eBay.
They (google) need to fix their engine to stop letting asshats pollute it like that. It's an ever-evolving thing, like the rest of the net.
Or it will die off and be replaced like countless other search engines.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Actually, the internet will continue to evolve and grow, but the tendancy of information wanting to be everywhere will, like newton's law of cooling, eventually smear everything into equallibrium, with a few large masses pinning up some of the information. But in time even these to will be worn away. At some point, there will be enough sameness, that a spontanious phase transition of the internet will occur around an abnormal bandwidth fluctuation. This will expand outword at a speed proportional to alpha (or worldcom constant) times the venture capital density, litterally paving over what remained creating a new virgin network for people who have sex with double dong donkeys who were molested as children, and that strippers with Dr. Frankenstien brand cosmetic surgery can use to catapult themselves from total obscurity to relative obscurity. Simultaniously providing an avenue for a new american dream, and bringing mexico straight into your home. Al Gore will say, "Let their be packets!" and it shall be called Internet 2.0.
BUT, anyone's who's worked on ISP conected full BGP peers has known this for a while. I configured the BGP ISP boxes for the one of the top ten largest ecomm site on the planet (no, really), and we finally just quit logging this shit. It was pointless, the volume was so high. So, we dropped what we could at the edge with static packet filtering (you be surprised how much RFC reserved space we'd see, why are people even ROUTING that shit!?!?), and do layered firewalls the deeper in you went.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
Internet is dying! In other news, Moore's Law will soon be invalid. Please tune to our news at 10 to watch the broadcast of the impending doom.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Huh? Do you know anyone who thinks an end to end internet is a bad thing once they understand the concept? I don't. If it dies, it's through ignorance.
[blither] ... One thinks the 'network' is dying because they idealized it in another form, not in a 'better' form or a 'worse' form just their form. Simply put it is a case of the "good old days" syndrome, ... [blather] ...there will always be complainers with valid points because it is very easy in hindsight to pick out what was better than you have now, while glossing over what was worse.
Three years ago, I had a cable modem with a fixed IP address and no blocked ports. It was offered by an independent company through my cable company and there was competition for the business. I also had my pick of DSL service on similar terms from many competitors. It looked like a true end to end high speed network was right around the corner. There is nothing to gloss over, it was simply better than the high priced DHCP emulate a dialup modem crap offered by one or no companies everywhere today.
The squeze is on and mostly complete, though not for traffic and bandwith concerns.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...just as soon as we have our next Internet Cleaning Day. So relax, and make sure you're unplugged for the duration.
of slashdot space. Open internet is dying?
How many people here even know what the term "open internet" means?
Its more like doomsday philosophy.
Since humans are going to die anyways, why should they eat? Why reproduce? Just kill yourselves and all will be fine.
Bush is on fire and its not good for my lungs.
How is it that people seem to think that the resources available stagnate?
This sig no verb.
There are those who believe that if the true meaning and intent of the Internet is ever discovered, it will immediately cease to exist and be replaced with something far more bizzare and convoluted.
There are some that believe this has already happened.
(sorry, Douglas, where ever you are!)
Where has he been in the past 5 to 10 years?!? This article should have been written then.
Also, there isn't anything new in this article that we don't hear everyday. "Spam is killing us, hackers are disabling our sytems, wah, wah, wah."
As far as the Balkanization is concerned, haven't you noticed that MCI has owned the Internet backbone for years and NFS hasn't had any control over it? That should be enough to tell you what's going on.
err... nevermind...
Join Tor today!
"Disconnect the network Scotty, there's no intelligent life here."
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
My mistake, that was meant as a reply to a different comment on how insensitive we are to use the word "balkanize". Sorry...
0 1 - just my two bits
"getting fucked up"
Probably not the direct translation though (below):
Balkanize or balkanize ( P ) Pronunciation Key (bolk-nz)
tr.v. Balkanized, Balkanizing, Balkanizes
To divide (a region or territory) into small, often hostile units.
[From the political division of the Balkans in the early 20th century.]Balkanization n.
He's predicted the death of the internet?
All I have to ask is, will there be a film about it? And if so, at what hour?
-Denor
Error. Although this may be the full text of the FUD (er... I mean "article") this is most emphatically not informative. People have been predicting the imminent death of the 'net since before it went commercial. Now there was an event sure to kill the 'net--how could we ever possibly get by with all that commerical junk? Surely that would kill the 'net. Right? Right?
Yes, there will likely be many problems with the Internet in the future--just as there have already been many problems with it in the past. I anticipate at some point people will undergo "clean up efforts". Various groups going around and convincing private bodies to move away from this or that broken/outmoted protocol onto the new, shiny, more robust protocol. This sort of thing has already been going on for some time now.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
It's not polite to call people "retard"s, dummy. :-P One man's junk traffic is another man's "important info". Just look at slashdot--it's nothing but a bunch of geeks ('self included) sending random insults to each other in the guise of intelligent discussion while occasionally DDoSing some poor sap. E.g. this thread and this article.
Yeah, you and the original article author have a point that the Internet does face some big troubles. But I'm not so sure we're in a boat that's bound to sink into the sea. Instead, I see a bunch of people diligintly bailing water out of a leaky boat. Then, every now and then, someone plugs some holes. Have more faith in the resilience of the Internet overall.
Furry cows moo and decompress.
I remember when the Internet was mostly Universities (and some military sites). The Internet as I knew it died to a great extent then. It used to be where it seemed virtually everyone on the Internet was fairly intelligent, which is not the case now.
What the net will be like depends on you. If no one had ever written GPL'd software, or put up home pages, or mailing lists, or blogs, the Internet would look very different now. It is also affected by the larger society as well, and positive and negative developments in that effect it, and vice versa.
I think it refers to fragmentation by social groups; alluding to the collapse of yugoslavia (in the balkan peninsula) into a bunch of little racially-divided countries (bosnia etc) from google, it apparantly is an antonym of globalization oh, by the way... RTFD[ictionary] : )
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Freenet doesn't offer very strong guarantees of anonymity. See the FAQ for details. Maybe you're thinking of GNUnet.
dumb pedestrians, drunken drivers, pesky cyclists , people playing loud music on the cars, traffic signals, underage drivers , billboards with pesky advertising , cars with black smoke belching out of them, car theives etc. the roads suck!
first there were no roads. wherever we went they had these roads. now they have concrete roads. whats the point ? they still skid in rain and snow. the cars still run on gasoline. the roads suck
also doesn't matter how wide this roads get. you should get people and stuff i dont like out from the road. my 3 yr old kid should be able to use the road.the roads suck!
No, no, no, Fox prvides "fair and balanced" news, not "un-censored and un-biased information."
"Junk mail hasn't brought the postal service to its knees."
have you bought a stamp lately? it's not exactly "free" to send out a million leaflets advertising penis extension. this is a form of information control.
"Telemarketers are a pain, but people still use phones and even find new ways to travel with them."
but they just passed a law to essentially stop telemarketers. telemarketers can't FREELY call you... it's not an open system anymore. that's part of the guy's point.
i agree it's a little alarmist, but there are still serious issues at hand and when joe schmoe consumer who doesn't care about "the open internet" (cause he's convinced that our media is "fair and balanced") got 150 email viruses last week and IS gonna bitch and WILL gladly support tightly controlled data exchange.
people are so ready to debunk this guy, but we forget, the slashdot population is a little different than barely computer literate middle america. these are the people that think ashcroft has good intentions.
m.
What you are talking about is FULL freedom of speech (or any freedom in general) vs limited freedoms. I think you are simply referring to distribution on the interent but it is similar to freedoms in the non-wired world too. Roughly you can say that USA tries to grant full freeomds while, say, Canada grants limited freedoms.
At one time, I used to think that limited freedom was best. I used the same argument as you. I mean, if someone is carrying out something undesirable to society what's the point? In real world, an undesirable action might be some neo-Nazi claiming that Jews are inferior; in the interent case, an undesirable action might be someone spamming something. In both cases, the vast majority of society would be better off without either. The only people who would be hurt by censorship are the neo-Nazis and the spammers. Seems like a good idea right? Well many people thought so (this is why most of Europe and Canada grants limited freedoms).
As I grew older, I realized that the full freedom approach is FAR BETTER. Why? Well there are many reasons but one key reason is as follows. Whenever you censor something, some entity (could be a corporation, person, government, faction, religious body, etc) has power to decide the outcome. This isn't bad in and of itself. In fact, during "good times" there is no problem whatsoever. BUT such a system leaves the possibility of mass exploitation during "bad times". For instance, some dictator can take over a country and easily start censoring stuff. In fact, I claim that some dictator can take over Canada and start censoring me (you can argue that laws mean nothing under a dictatorship, since the ruler controls the courts but I'm not going to go into that). In the case of the internet, some corporate body (for example) can take over the system and start exploiting it (again, you can argue that under capitalism, wealthy bodies will control the system anyway but I"m not going to go into that). Without censorship, it will be hard to take over the internet.
It is far more desirable to have a free internet than to have a SANITIZED internet...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
The same countries, in fact, that they were a hundred years ago before they were artificially united. Looks like some things are doomed from the start.
I vote fool and thus nominate him for an entry at:
http://www.phrenicea.com/oops.htm
Auerbach is lucky he didn't have to type his musings while snuggling under 6 feet of horse manure.
When I first saw this topic I chuckled -- yes the Internet is declining in quality, but it does not seem so bad. Then I went to do a quick search for what I partially remember about an old toy from my youth. A nice specific 6-term search on Google yielded a manageable 238 hits. So then I started looking at the hits.
GRRR! 80-90% of the hits where those odious faked search hit pages that spew a bunch of popular words on a page while trying to get you to come to some e-commerce site. They claim to be "Product Comparison" sites. But its gets worse than that. They all had names with 3 patterns: a fruit theme (e.g. cherryblossom, plumwind, etc.) a street/weather theme (e.g, foggyavenue, windyexpressway, etc.); or a named couple theme (samanddiane, jenniferandvictor, etc.) all prefixed with a variety subdomains like "www" "info" etc. But its gets worse than that. I visited one of the pages and found a long list of links that simply crosslink to other sites in this little corner of e-commerce hell.
So, we have an entire corner of the internet that was probably generated in software -- a cute little combinatorial program that generates a bunch of domain names and a set of heavily cross-linked webpages that are assured of getting a high rank in Google. If someone ever shuts it down, the owner only need hit the "run" button to recreate the entire web of sites.
The real problem with the Internet is that everything is too cheap and easy. It is too cheap and easy for spammers to churn out e-mail messages, too cheap and easy for e-commerce sites to combinatorially generate a thousand domain names and cross-linked site pages. When the cost of creating and distributing information is zero, the bulk of that information is worth zero. Meanwhile the cost to the recipient climbs without bounds. So paradoxically, the low cost of the internet will mean the death of the internet.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
plumb `{ echo ' http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=balkaniza tion ' | tr -d '\040' }
keeps out the riff raff
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I know this is going to get a lot of responses with lame attempts at humor, but I intend this to be a serious question: How much of the Internet load, overall, is porn? I've asked people I know at various companies, but no one would venture a guess, and I've never been able to find an estimate online.
you're biased. Nobody exists on the planet who isn't biased unless they have no opinion of anything.
"bias" is just a buzzword to excuse your brain from the conversation.
As for being censored, that's not an internet phenomenon. Every form of media has been, will be or is being censored somewhere in the world.
Don't like it? Revolt, circumvent or move. Welcome to the human race where assholes exist that would like to label people as being and then censor people for being "biased" (e.g. presenting information) in a way they doen't happen to like.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
From a rant posted at my site:
The idiocy of spammers. SPEWS has been knocked off line because of lawsuits and DDoSes against their servers. Apparently spammers (and companies that feel they've been blacklisted wrongly) feel they have some kind of right to utilize other people's resources. Um. Excuse me, assholes?
The blacklist is the same thing as a restraining order. The people on the list have been deemed "trespassers." Last I checked I'm perfectly free to "blacklist" people from my property for any reason I deem appropriate. I could put up a sign "Beanie Hats Not Allowed on Property" and if some beanie wearing person walked onto my property I can call the cops to have them removed and they have zero legal recourse. If I don't want salesmen comming to my door I am perfectly able to LEGALLY block them from talking to guests at my house. I don't want to hear about how you like to suck on a horse and I don't care if a guest would like to hear it (I certainly hope I'm better at choosing my friends) THEY HAVE NO LEGAL RIGHT TO OVERRIDE MY RIGHT TO PREVENT SUCH A PERSON FROM COMMING ONTO MY PROPERTY. If they really want to hear the person tell their story about sucking on a horse they can use their OWN PROPERTY. And I have NO LEGAL OBLIGATION to get ANY information from the salesman or the guest so that they can talk later. I don't even have a legal obligation to let the guest know the salesman even came to the door.
If I'm having a party to which you were invited and your friend comes by and I don't like your friend, I can send your friend away without letting you know they even stopped by. Even if I charge you a cover to help pay for the beer. You paying me money in no way grants you ANY right to tell me who is and isn't allowed on my property.
If you beat your wife and she gets a restraining order you DO NOT HAVE A FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO TALK TO HER. It's the same with a blacklist. If I blacklist you, you have NO FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT TO TALK TO ME. I told you NO and I mean NO.
The First Amendment DOES NOT aliviate MY RIGHT to block whomever I want from using MY PROPERTY. If I allow a person to utilize my property they are subject to MY RULES. I am under NO OBLIGATION to do a per user blacklist. I DEEM who is allowed to use MY PROPERTY and if a person who is allowed to use MY PROPERTY doesn't like who I prevent from using MY PROPERTY, they can leave.
Spammers and other idiots need to get it through their thick retarded skulls that ISPs and other servers are PRIVATE PROPERTY. YOU DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO UTILIZE PRIVATE PROPERTY. It is a PRIVILAGE that the owner grants to you at their discretion. Apparently some people are too stupid to comprehend the fact that this whole blacklist thing falls under the laws of private ownership. Being "on the internet" makes it no less property. It costs me money for transfering your crap. It costs me money to store you crap. I have NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO USE MY PRIVATE RESOURCES FOR YOUR CRAP.
End of discussion. There's no First Amendment about it.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
As a student of language, I've always found it interesting that "F-word" doesn't cause the problems that "fuck" causes. Same goes for "N-word." Consider that when someone say "F-word" anyone who hears it knows what you're saying, yet somehow it passes. Now that I think about it, "shite" is a good one too. I can say "shite" on the radio, but somehow "shit" is so much worse that it simply cannot be allowed. The government is run by morons.
I wrote a paper for an undergraduate english course stipulating (using that argument) that it is foolish to continue bleeping out a word which is understood anyway, unambigously, as 'fuck', 'shit', etc.
It actually harms people because they have the word kept from them, and when they come of age, they feel it is lent some special power because of it's reserved-ness in childhood, and then they use it altogether too fucking much, cuntwhacks. All of them little bastards.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Can anybody verify this story? There is a Cruft Hall at Harvard, and someone (not me) claims that:
"I was a Harvard engineering student once upon a
time (early '60s) and took classes and worked in the Cruft laboratory. A
few years later, I heard an MIT person saying, "What's all that cruft?"
I later discovered the story. The Harvard guys found out the IF frequency
the MIT radar folks were using and beamed a little modulated RF energy
their way. MIT got pretty good at building shielded IF strips, yessir. The
name of the interfering signal? You guessed it, Cruft, named for the place
it originated."
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
And the Internet as I knew it is already dead.
Usenet isn't very useful. I can't hunt down good FTP sites. Web site authors no longer support text based browsers let alone the W3 standards. There is no "standard" internet browser (unless you count MS-IE) e-mail viruses were a myth.. You'd be a fool to make e-mail clients that execute binarys or any sort of code. Windows didn't support networking yet. IRC and talk were the mainstream chat systems of the day with ICB for those who don't want to deal with the influx of newbies. Linux users still had a lot to learn and my 3B2/300 was still working.
Oh yeah and older computers (like the 3B2) weren't considered "obsolete" as much as "cute".
And breaking the socal laws of the internet meant losing your ISP account, getting your IP blocked or getting your computer hacked. All fail by the Internet rules.
Sense then we've had Spammer lawsutes, FUD, revised patent laws and software makers who break standards.
And let us not forget the CDA.
If the Internet as we know it dyes it will be as it evolves. E-mail is all but useless but hasn't been replaced yet. Eather we fix it or replace it.
IRC, talk and FTP has been replaced by Instant Messangers and p2p file shairing.
The two things I miss the most are the ISP sign up fee and no dynamic IPs.
Some jerk is being a jerk block the IP.
With ISP sign up fees you have to pay for your net abuse. My first ISP actually did kick me off becouse I responded to a crossposting trool on Usenet. I was a newbie. The Sysadm was really sweet about it. She called me up on the phone and said "I'm very sorry we have to remove your account becouse you massively crossposted. But we can reactivate your account next month."
There was a technicality in that she was canciing my trial account and I had already paid the full sign up and next month in advance.
She explainned.. very nicely.. that if I did that again I'd have to wait a month and pay the sign up fee again.
I understood. I made an honnest mistake but she dosen't know that and some people refuse to take responsability.
Back in the day people could lose jobs for pulling stunts such as spamming.
Today we have ISPs with sysadmin who aren't in charge of system policy. Managers who don't care about Internet culture (byond marketting). Etc
I don't actually exist.
File this under Chicken Little.
The author concludes, mistakenly IMHO, that an increase in noise from undetectable to "noticeable lines on my MRTG graphs" will inevitably lead to "a Niagara-like roar that drowns the usability of the Internet". I don't think so. Noise is a by-product of life, it is unavoidable, and not an indication of impending system failure. The author is another victim of that classic mistake, linearly extrapolating a relation from a small domain to a much larger scale.
The author mentions three main sources of noise
- Stale IP addresses, such as defunct Name Servers.
- DOS Viruses
- Spam
(1) will not scale with the growth of valid traffic, and thus should be ignored. (2) will go away over time as security holes are patched and MS learns how to avoid the buffer overrun mistakes that have created their stunning vulnerabilities. (3), I believe, depend on the same MS security holes, and thus will decrease as MS security holes decrease. The net result is that over time (say 1 to 5 years) the current noise to signal ratio will decrease. I'll check back in 2008.Congratulations soldier. You've lost, and now we're all going to pay.
IT was ten miles to the nearest internet... uphill both ways.. we had it tough.
I can't get a decent internet connection for less than $300 a month at my house right outside Dulles airport.
What about the internet is cheap, again?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Me-too post get moderated well becaues there is no "more like this" button when you are moderating/meta-moderating. Moderators have no clue who many people have made THE EXACT SAME COMMENT. So they can't account for redundancy.
__
IMHO
Ernest Dambach
Ernie Dambach
"It is no small thing to celebrate a simple life -Tolkien
I suggest. #4 Make using Outlook a capitol crime.
My family to a person uses some other mail client.
Guess what we have never had a virus yet. Go figure. This includes my 85 year old mother "who forgets to double click sometimes."
Yes the internet can suck but I don't think I would want to go back to 300 baud dial up either.
As you can see I don't care about my karma.
(The issue is not about use of address space (the number of available addresses) but about bandwidth space!!!)
If it is ever going to run out of hand, I don't know. In a sense the problem is similar to the problem of space derbish. It has been suggested that space derbish in the future will make space travel impossible. At the moment collisions between pieces of space derbish are rare, but each collision is producing more pieces and thus increasing the change for a collision. It is predicted that there will be a time, that each space shuttle going up will be hit by a large enough particle to cause enough damage to let it brake up during reentry. We have seen how little material at a relatively low speed could cause so much damage to the Columbia.
Of course, you could select an new IP address everytime when you connect to the internet, but the IP addresses of ISP have to remain the same. But the more IP addresses are used, the more pollution occurs in with respect to which IP addresses are valid and which are not.
It's official, guys, the Internet is dying. Don't you pay attention to Netcraft? Or at least read Usenet... the number of posts to usenet about the internet has decreased! I can't believe you can't read the handwriting on the wall. You're no Kreskin, that's for sure.
It's not a buzzword or even a new term. It's been around for a while. You do seem to have understood what he meant, since your guess is spot on.
I'ved usenet for almost as long as my career. I've used it for just about any topic: coding, politics, science, etc...I've noticed that I do not get the replies to my questions or comments that I use to get. Many now go with no responses.
I blame part of this on the changes in the work environment. So many places now have restrictions on what web sites one can visit.
Also blame those who exploited the system. It used to be that usenet was publically assesible and you could use any tool for reading the groups. These days you can only access usenet through your ISP, anyone else rejects you (except google via the web browser). And the ISP many times restricts which groups are available.
4) short the internet
5) ????
6) PROFIT!!!
I have plenty of common sense, I just choose to ignore it. -- Calvin
Moderators, by definition, have been around Slashdot for a certain period of time and have made a certain contribution with the quality level of their comments.
It stands to reason that in satisfying the requirements to gain the mod points, they should have been exposed to all these reduntant comments made on prior articles. If the moderators "have no clue" about these comments, then the moderation system is more seriously flawed than I initially speculated.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
This article is old enough that I am probably just replying to Jared, but I thought it worth a follow up. Moderators do well, I think the flaw is probably in the meta-moderator system. When you meta moderate you do not have access (without serious effort) to all the redundancies, or the ability to sort out which ones were "first" or "best". My personal Moderation style leads me to giving out Mod points to redundant posters, because my habit is to change my viewing preferences to: newest first, and view all. I do this to see the posts good posts that have not been moderated yet. ...but it leads to errors of points given to redundant posters. In theory, I could off set this by modding down redundant posts but, I don't like to "waste" points that way. I feel like it is more important to bring good information to the surface. So IMHO, the best place to solve this would be with a subtle modification of the Meta-Mod system.
"Human nature is usually positive, but only so far as not too much effort is required." - unknown
Ernie Dambach
"It is no small thing to celebrate a simple life -Tolkien
I don't have a problem with the occasional redundant comment getting mod points, as may happen with how you moderate.
...", "I, for one, welcome our new ___ overlords", etc. comments. Even if a comment is the first one of this style to appear in a post, it is still redundant because the comment has been seriously overused. I hope you're not rewarding these posts with points.
My issue is with the "In Soviet Russia,
If someone repeated something that has been previously stated, but still said something meaningful, by all means, mod the post up. I'd rather read something interesting twice than some lame joke for the 100th time.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.