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.
In case the site is slow, here is a mirror.
Martin Studio Slashdot Policy.
You're half right...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
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.
"I feel that the Internet is our last source of un-censored and un-biased information."
I think you're forgetting about Fox News...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
you misspelled 'faux' there. common mistake.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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
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
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.
:)
Hope lies in the blogs.
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."
Anyone manage to get the text of the article before the server died?
Read other comments much?
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.
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.
24 hours in order to allow us to clean it
Only 24 hours to clean the net ?? Man you're fast, or you have a million monkeys at your disposal.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Death of the internet predicted! Details at 11.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
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
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 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.
Are you sure, you want it un-censored? Before answering with the enthusiastic: "Yes, I am!" however, consider that anti-spamming is censorship, for example. Also, I would not want Jerry Falwell to be able to reach my children any more, than Jerry would not want his children to be reachable by pornographers (or so he says).
In other words, beware of what you wish for. Internet used to be the hangout of the few, who did not need many rules and understood each other. It is now the place for everyone -- like a nice park frequented by picnickers. At some point you have to start fining people for leaving garbage on the grass and for playing their stereos too loud -- something, that, of course, violates their freedom.
Once you accept the need to control people's behaviour, you have to accept the need for some authority to do that. ICANN or SPEWS or anything in between :-)
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Anti-spam lists are no more censorship than changing a radio dial. Just because someone want's to say it in no way obligates another to listen.
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.
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!!!!
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?...).
I'm really surprised to see Karl write such an article --- he's been around longer than I have, and *I* remember the continual cries "death of USENET!" whenever it filled the last generation of modems' capacity, starting with 1200 baud. It now takes a T3 to handle a full feed, and it's still alive and kicking 20-25 years later. The Internet is far more useful, and it will survive too. It will evolve ways to cope, but that's life. Literally.
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?
Wow, karma-whoring on the karma whores! Nice! ;)
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
The 'Open' Internet was never unbiased or ucensored. It sure seemed that way, until you remember that a handful of sysadmins controlled which groups got created on usenet and which groups were censored. Those with more networking hardware got to make more of the decisions because more of the traffic passed through their equipment. You blocked 'alt.borkborkbork' in one key place and it got blocked to a great deal of the people who could keep it alive today.
'Unbiased' will never enter into the equation. Sorry.
'Uncensored', however, describes the vast number of people who can and do use the Internet and any other communication outlet they can in a myriad of ways to spread their own ideologies, their own software, their own news coverage, and their own gossip. As soon as one avenue for this kind of information is blocked, another springs up.
As soon as Napster was shut down, Kazaa and Gnutella became more popular. With Kazaa and Gnutella's decline in popularity due to the rabid, power-mongering influence of copyright interests (RIAA Lawsuits), other, more immune file sharing apps are gaining acceptance.
Think of the net as a huge, self-regenerating organism. Its cells are not computers, but people who want to spread information via whatever method possible.
At first it's simple and dedicated solely to its own task. As it's attacked and parisited, it begins to develop defenses and immunities to those attacks. Unlike natural selection, which required brute-force trial and error combinations to build those defenses, the Internet has thinking logical minds building its defenses, which include spam filters, intelligent routing, firewall, mail, and other message protocols, data encryption, steganography, high-bandwidth transmission pipes, error correction, and other tools to control the 'background radiation'.
I, for one, use data encryption in almost every kind of computer-to-computer file transmission I make, just out of habit. Do you?
If you don't beleive that the net is building its own defenses, note the truly desperate measures the aforementioned copyright interests are going to now in order to try to stop the evolutionary tide. The RIAA knows it can't keep up technologically with the HUGE number of people people sharing files, so it's attempting to change they way they behave with organized legislation and 'public education' drives.
The Internet, the people who write software and share data of any kind, is disorganized and seems unable to act in response fast enough. The million monkeys on a million typewriters eventually spouts software like Freenet. Freenet, while hard to use when compared to Kazaa or Napster, is almost completely immune from RIAA, MPAA, or publishing industry attacks, and may even be immune from the best efforts of law enforcement and repressive governments.
Just today, the RIAA leaked that it can track files by their MD5 sums. How long will it be (later this evening) before someone writes code that will pad MP3s in a way that skews their MD5 sums but leaves the music listenable? How long will it be before that code or something very much like it makes its way into WASTE or Gnutella? Even if this code is made illegal and the writer/perpetrator goes to jail, how will the media industry stop it when it's already in the hands of the public?
We're not just developing technological defenses either, but mental and social defenses. The EFF makes it possible for anyone to fax their senator and other legislators for free. (http://action.eff.org/) Various internet websites publish details about public figures and public officials, especially those with the clout to make change.
Remember who originally reported on Monica Lewinsky? Matt Drudge. Who all will report on the fact that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld more or less set up undercover CIA agents to take the fall for the Iraq-Nigeria scandal?
The Internet is under attack, but without attack, it will never become stronger and immune to those attacks.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Are you sure he's even half right? If you get unlucky and use a particular ISP (library computers, AOL, etc.) or live in a particular country (China and Saudi Arabia are good examples), the former is no longer true. If you read any Microsoft story here on Slashdot, you know the latter can't possibly be true.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Help me build a new one. If balkanization is inevitable, at least have your own balkan city-state when the mess begins...
Note, that although the two sample specialists above are appointed in a totally different manner, they both act as censors (an honorable and coveted position in ancient Rome, BTW).
The discussion in this forum is somewhat distorted, because most of the participants are their own sysadmins, while FCC is a remote entity. But the point is, censorship can be good -- as long as you control the censors...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
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
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
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.(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.
It's just one of those social mores things. My favorite example is "shit" vs "poop". Both are words for the same thing, but it's perfectly okay for a 4 year old to say "poop" but if he says "shit" it's bad.
My son is 7 now. He doesn't say "poop" and his mother won't like it if he says "shit", but he has found out it's okay for him to say "crap."
It's all a bunch of guano if you ask me.
Igor