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What The Internet Isn't
looseBits writes "Doc Searls and David Weinberger, co-authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, have put together a 10-part guide for how to stop mistaking the Internet for something it isn't. It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics of the 'world of ends' we call the Internet."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/153223 3
Indeed, and this is exactly what FreeNet is designed to do:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Perhaps the fear of every government everywhere, FreeNet allows for secure and anonymous communication.
You clearly didn't read the article.
He goes on to explain what he means by those statements, and nothing in your comment has any relevance to what he wrote.
"The first correlation is with the unbalance between technological acceleration and political retrogression, which has proceeded earth-wide at ever widening danger levels since 1914 and especially since 1964. The breaking apart is fundamentally the schizoid and schismatic mental fugue of lawyer-politicians attempting to administrate a worldwide technology whose mechanisms they lack the education to comprehend and whose gestalt trend they frustrate by breaking apart into obsolete Renaissance nation-states." - The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The Freenet Project - index
The Freenet Project - faq
I agree with you on all points except the accuracy of filtering systems.
I use pithhelmet on safari to filter ads, and i find few if any that get by. Not only that, but it runs a javascript routine to adjust the layout so that you don't even know that they were there. This, combined with Safari's popup blocker mean that I see almost no advertisments online, EVER.
I use a baysian email filter on all my computers, and would estimate that they filter close to 90% of spam with essentially no false positives.
From where I stand, ad and spam filters work fine for me.
Let's make a difference
I find it hard to believe you even attempted to read the article when you complain about no links to the authors, yet the sidebar contains both links to the authors and mailto:s pointing to each of them.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
For a more detailed look at these issues check out Andrew Odlyzko's work, particularly "The economics of the Internet: Utility, utilization, pricing, and Quality of Service" and "Paris Metro Pricing: The minimalist differentiated services solution".
The parent is a very accurate description of why the internet is still not viewed correctly by /. techies.
The problem is that the internet is exactly as the parent describes it, nothing more than a medium for comunication (end points be damned!), just like the air we breathe is a natural medium for voice, light, tv & radio waves.
the average human cares very little about the medium when it comes down to technical details (other than the extreme desire to breathe it when it is not present!)
And here in lies the problem, the content, just like t.v., is in fact all the average user cares about. This is why the average IT person is not alowed to run-the-world!!! People do not give a shit about the techie stuff.
The content is the only thing of importance once the medium becomes stable infrastructure which simply fades into the background. (think air, and perhaps more literally postal service or road , telephone or electricity networks)
And don't forget that unlike air, which is nearly impossible to regulate and yet the FCC seems to have regulated it quite nicely, the average owner of the large backbone pipes can easily and heavily regulate the "internet". So can the average isp, because most cannot afford to setup their own isp, unlike the ability to setup a t.v. / radio or ham receiver or even just simply talk to someone.
All this freedom-of-information crap is bollocks.
The internet will not remain "free" for much longer, mark my words. Where there is an opportunity to make money, greed will appear, followed shortly by "government". Otherwise anyone could set up a t.v. or radio station.
Prediction: in less than ten years we will see the internet as we know it now to become a heavily regulated medium having two or more major appearances (i) corporate owned and sponsered content, and (ii) ham radio / comunity owned and heavily regulated free but esentially crap.
jech
Hi, Republican spin machine!
She wasn't quite as stupid as you might think: back in the day (late 80s/early 90s for you whippersnappers) campuses did have Ethernet networks which were NOT internet connected. To get to the Internet, you had to basically open a session to a bastion host which WAS connected. The networks were used for distribution of files inside the campus.
I distinctly remember this being the setup at the University of Utah in 90/91...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
They are saying (section 8.c):
Their point is that for IM to have the same global impact like email and WWW they need to use the same protocol independent on how the device connects to the internet. That way can use any IM program on any OS on any type of device (be it computer or mobile phone) to communicate with any other IM client.
Similarly they don't claim that the internet will actively prohibit censorship. The internet is so basic that you can't really stop information. It's like trying to make an island in the middle of the ocean by building a wall and shoveling out the water.
Youre confusing value with revenue. Which is wrong. Value is nothing you can hold in your hands like money. The internets value araises from its possibilities. The more possibilities you have to use it, the more valuable it is. Its so simple.
If you take IM as an example, the possibility to not communicate with people using other IM systems than you, is a loss of value... because there is something you can not do.
If you can reverse that situation, you actually build value. See above. No talk of revenue.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.