Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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
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
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