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."
For sale Dell Computer Pentium II with the Internet
I was shocked... First thing I thought was where the hell can I fit the entire Internet on my machine.
MoFscker
"It contains some painfully obvious and often overlooked characteristics"
Yes, we already know - porn...
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/153223 3
This describes what they want the Internet to be, not what it is or what it will be. The characteristics of the Internet they describe will change based on who uses it, as it molds itself to suit the people to use it as a TOOL.
Anyone can make the Internet a better place to live, work and raise up kids. It takes a real blockhead with a will of iron to make it worse.
So Bill Gates is a blockhead with a will of iron now?
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.
AOL is not the internet.
Neither is that "IE" icon on your windows desktop.
The internet is also not just for pornography anymore.
OK, everyone hold hands. Yes, that means you, 63.47.108.33. Connect to 23.126.156.3. Good. Now, let's all sing/IM/VOIP call/FTP/HTTP:
We are the world
We are the Internet
We are the ones who make a better place
We are the bloggers.
(Take it away, Bob Metcalfe!)
It's a choice we're making,
We're changing our own lives...
Moe: "Well, if you're so sure what it ain't, why don't you tell us what it am."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
"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
> It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive
> symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP
> packet from". --Seth Breidbart
I think I got that from the nanog list a few years ago.
a device to prevent four Palestinians from committing suicide by talking them dowjn realtime
a device to conduct career counseling of disadvantaged global youth in europe, africa and the middle east
a device to teach myself html, php and css
a device to advance my career through spontaneous, informal networking
in fact, i basically live my business life and more and more of my personal life on the internet. and this is not a bad thing, in fact it has maximized my power and leveraged globalization for myself and millions of other members of the brown horde.
That's an opinion. Considering more and more people are logging on, and I just read an article about older people turning to the Internet, consider the following... Just because to the author, the Internet, and using it is easy, does not mean it is not complicated for a new user
They don't mean the protocols or the software, or anything like what you're suggesting. They are simply saying that the internet is something that carries information from one point to another. That's pretty simple.
No people are stupid. Personally (this is my opinion) I believe the next generation is going to be hellishly smarter than the one I grew up (growing up) with (in). Where else can you learn so many things from without leaving your home. Encyclopedia? They're limited.
Well, if by "smart" you mean "tech savvy" I might agree with you. People are still as dumb as always when you get down to it. But, again, you're missing the point, because the internet has data available (much of it false or incomplete, I might add), that doesn't refute their claim that the internet is stupid. A library is stupid, yet it is full of information.
There is no true 'value' per se as one cannot grasp anything physical. But where else can you find mega bargains, mega information...
They mean, the internet is just a mechanism for transferring information. Trying to layer something else on top of it, like "pay per view" or "content protection", runs counter to the basic principle of transferring information.
Finding "mega bargains" is in fact a transfer of information, which is what the internet is all about. Charging you $1.50 for that information? No, that's not what the internet is about.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
"Adding value to the Internet lowers its value
Sounds screwy, but it's true. If you optimize a network for one type of application, you de-optimize it for others. For example, if you let the network give priority to voice or video data on the grounds that they need to arrive faster, you are telling other applications that they will have to wait. And as soon as you do that, you have turned the Net from something simple for everybody into something complicated for just one purpose. It isn't the Internet anymore."
The way I see this, prioritizing packets also ensures that a minority of users can't abuse the network ressources the everybody else want to use.
Right in my home network I had to prioritze RTP packets (VoIP) so that other people in the house couldn't screw up my phone conversations when saturating my uplink or downlink. The same can be true on a national backbone, especially in failure conditions where you will get links that saturate.
We can't stop the Internet from evolving either, it has probably turned out to be very different than what it's creators had envisioned...
Homer: Ahh, so the internet is on computers now...
- A
This and things like the today's 'worst security flaw ever' from MS, are all topics bubbling up prior to a security conference next week in SF, where pundits are surely to roast BG, one of the speakers, to a char.
The internet isn't better off because of slackard MS. They were late to the party (just like today's patch took 200 days), and they use it for their gain, with lack of concern, as usual, for the 'customer'.
Remember, a 'headline' here is what you find yourself in when you have to take a leak at a basketball game. Just because a topic is raised, doesn't mean squat that it has value to anyone.
Their point seems to be that the Internet, so far as it exists, is a shared idea of how to transport things from point A to point B. And it has a Protocol that you may have heard of somewhere. Remember this - they're talking about things on a IP level.
Now then:
The idea behind the internet isn't complicated, which is what they are trying to say. See, the idea is that you hook end points together. Gee, doesn't sound too complicated to me. I thought they wrote about this well, if a bit simplisticly from a technical perspective.
The seem to mean that the internet (IP) is stupid because it doesn't know about what is going on above it. That's just the point that leads to the others. It doesn't know what it is transporting. It just moves it from point A to point B. So while the internet is enabling many smart people (this generation and next), it in itself doesn't know more than "this thingy goes from here to there".
Here's where things get kind of complicated, I'll admit. The values talked about are two different kinds of values. I won't go through this, but advise people to RTFA. In summary, this point says that anything that makes the IP less stupid (so that it knows more about what it is transferring) results in some sort of restriction or impairment to transporting other things, which lowers the overall value.
So, The Real Nutshell: The internet (protocol) doesn't know what it is transporting, but just transports it. This is a good thing, but many people fail to grasp that this is the reality of the situation, which leads to many headaches. Especially for those of us who do grasp the idea, and happen to like it.
He's completely wrong about advertising on the internet. Once advertisers treat it as a medium similar to television, that is exactly what it will become. The process has already started, and a majority of sites have flagrant advertising. The recent idea of television commercials displayed fullscreen between pages is yet another example.
Junkbuster is a joke, like spam filters, most advertisements easily slip by. Want to subscribe to a site? How about a couple dozen. The small $5 - $15 fees can add up to well over $800 per month for an average internet user.
I didn't bother to read the rest of the article, but this guy is clearly living in a fantasy world. A world with cave trolls, elves, magic goblins, and internet users with a clue.
The only alternative at this point is to start a new internet, completely seperate from the existing network. Maybe the spammers and advertisers could be kept at bay for another decade or so.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
I worked for the computing center when I was in college. When the school was first being connected to the internet, and many people were having their desktops networked for the first time, one of the really common questions from non-technical types was "Where is the Internet?"
A careful summary of world wide networking (this was before web browsers) would be met with a blank stare and "Yes, but where is it?"
We finally decided to tell them it was at a secret location in a closet in Idaho. This seemed to make people feel better.
I never really understood why the most confusing thing was.... "Where is it?"
These people had already learned how to use their email programs and 3270 emulator (virtual mainframe terminal) with no problem.
Thinking back on this.... it makes more sense that AOL had so much success. If AOL was installed you could tell the user that the internet in that little friendly icon right there on the desktop.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Perhaps companies that think they can force us to listen to their messages -- their banners, their interruptive graphic crawls over the pages we're trying to read -- will realize that our ability to flit from site to site is built into the Web's architecture. They might as well just put up banners that say "Hi! We don't understand the Internet. Oh, and, by the way, we hate you."
I'm no fan of popups or banner-ads, but if that pays for content
that I otherwise would not be seeing, then so be it. I think
commercials have made for a rather successful business model
for television, which is as pervasive as ever, even after more
than 50 years.
I also think the slew of dot-bombs from the past few years
proves that you can't give away something for free forever.
I would much rather put up with ads than have to open an
account with every website that provides quality content.
(subjective, I know)
I use the internet very very frequently to find information that
I need. Outside of my monthly charge for internet access, this
information is all free. It's free to me for one reason alone:
Internet Advertising.
The only thing people seem to be giving away for free on the
internet is their opinions, which I'm up to my neck in!
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
These 10 points may sound obvious to the slashdot crowd, but to many people they are not. Unfortunately, the content owners are trying their best to turn the Internet into another channel on your television set. And the national governments do not have a reason to prevent it. And since many people are blissful in their ignorance of this issue, they will not even complain if the underlying freedom of the Internet is slowly taken away.
The part about the Internet "routing around damage" is an important feature that will be central to the battle over the future of the Net. It has taken the content owners and the government awhile to realize this property of the Net. That's the reason for the increased push for DRM and tightening copyright laws. I believe it is also the reason for the increased push for governments to directly "govern" the Internet. The fact is that the Internet makes many governments uneasy. It's a very large, uncontrolled system.
But the most important thing for us to fight to protect is the end to end connectivity. As long as I can connect to the person to which I want to communicate without going through an "approved" centralized server, the basic features of the Net will stay intact. It will be hard for the government to change this without completely destroying the value of the Internet. But I don't think that will prevent them from trying.
My prediction is that we will see increasing talk about changing the Internet to "protect the children" and "stop the terrorist from using the Net" as entry points for stricter authentication, auditing, and control, as well as increased centralization of the structure of the Internet. As much as I hate the thought, I think it's inevitable. Now that I've depressed myself, I'll take off my tin foiled hat.
You confusing the web with the internet.
The internet itself is made up of many parts: email, usenet, IRC, world wide web, ftp, telnet the only thing they really have in common is that all of those work on top of IP (internet protocol).
The internet itself works fine on just about every platform. The services provided on top of that may be hit or miss depending on how and who impliments them.
Of course, you knew that, but a surprising number of people think that the web is all there is to the internet. I've met CS majors who still don't quiet get that AIM is part of the internet. They'll send me a message and say "my internet is down".
"...how did you send me this message?"
really they're just having some site not resolving.
the internet isn't fun now that goatse's gone...
hate titty pee colon slash slash
Oh, they have the internet on computers now?
a dnow.ht ml
Also look at this:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~neteagle/oops/downlo
I sent that link to a friend and she thought something was actually downloading. Just perfect.
From the article:
The federal agency responsible for allocating spectrum might notice that the value of open spectrum is the same as the true value of the Internet.
I hope to god he isn't refering to the electro-magnetic spectrum.
"Yeah, we used to brodcast on 109.5 FM, but then viacom put in a transmitter with twice the power of our station."
I do take issue with that particular writeup, although it is true in many senses.
Today, many so-called internet users have their access mediated by firewalls and NAT. This reduces the set of internet services available to them.
(I'd even say, as a slight exaggeration, that their ISPs had engaged in false advertising by calling it "Internet Access")
By the original definition of the internet, anyone with access (control of one host) could send packets to any address:port combination, and open any port to inbound connections.
This means that everyone with internet access should be able to run an HTTP, FTP, or UT server. But many people are prevented by their ISP's routing policies.
Firewalls and NATs supposedly "add value" to the internet by making it safer for some users. But it's not made a lot safer (worms get through even today), and it has "lowered value", because creating new applications is more difficult. For example, today there is a movement towards SOAP; XML-RPC. Unfortunately, one of the motivations to promote it is to allow arbitrary, application-specific traffic to travel over port 80. To work around firewalls which only permit HTTP, we're starting to see a legitimization of tunneling commands over HTTP.
(I'm not saying that was the original goal of SOAP- but sneaking around firewalls is one reason that some developers are eager to try it)
So there's an example of why "adding value to the Internet" is generally bad.
However, there are cases where it may be good. We all know that IPv6 will be a postive (someday). Multicast extensions to the internet were developed well after it was first created, and are generally accepted as a good thing, although their deployment so far is well short of universal. Multicasting is a superset of existing internet functionality (assigning a single packet to be destined to multiple recipients).
Multicasting may turn out to have downsides, depending on how it's implemented (and I haven't followed development closely enough to be sure what the direction is). If it creates an unfair environment, where large corporations (CBS, MTV, RIAA) can create multicast streams, but individual users cannot, then it will cement inequality and make internet use move closer to resembling traditional television viewing. I feel justified in hoping this won't happen, however.
And QoS (quality of service) is a debatable issue, not a flat-out bad one like the article suggests. IP, the existing internet protocol (not to be confused with Intellectual Property), makes no guarantee that packets will arrive quickly or in order. It doesn't state that packets will travel at the same speed as each other. It doesn't even state that a packet which is sent will ever arrive, only that the network make a "best effort" at getting it through someday.
Since IP makes no guarantees of transmission speed, adding an optional mechanism to request QoS efforts won't break the existing protocol definitions. Yes, it may disturb some people to consider that internet packets, which used to be fair and unbiased, may someday have preference given to them based on the sender's bank account- but look at the alternative:
I find it ironic that the "Choose a style" menu at the top-right doesn't work in Safari, but works fine in Mac IE, despite the fact that: "We don't have to worry that its basic functions are only going to work with Microsoft's, Apple's or AOL's "platform""
Go to a command prompt.
Type "ping 66.35.250.151" (slashdot, as of an nslookup just a few seconds ago). Do you get a response?
Congratulations, the internet works for you, regardless of platform.
The internet does not give a damn if your favorite web-browser style works or not. It doesn't care if you use a broken MS Samba implementation. It doesn't care if AIM works with MSIM. It doesn't care if you can't make a passive connection to an FTP site through your firewall (although that does actually get a lot closer to the nature of the internet than the previous examples).
It doesn't care if you live in China and research Falun Gong, whatever the hell that means (they certainly make a big fuss about it, though). It doesn't care if you look at kiddie porn. It doesn't care if you troll slashdot (no, I don't mean this as a troll, just giving an example).
The Internet routes packets from point A to point B. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'm an 18-year old kid and 13-year computer nerd. While I have had access to the internet for only 8 of those years, I slowly become increasingly disillusioned with my inital view of the internet now.
Granted I was young, but when I first dialed with my 14.4, I was enamored by the sensible and meaningful content that dominated the internet. It was intelligent. As the internet has trickled down to the masses, we are now plagued by commercialism, ignorance and stupid people, spam, congestion, and far too much subscription-based content. The internet, IMHO, is now another outlet for the media and people who take advantage of the anonymity. Granted there are still hundreds of sites such as this and others that still offer that of value, but they are easily overwhelmed by the other garbage that's out there now. I used to come home from school every day and dial up. Now, with a few exceptions, I sit down and use the internet only when I have to, because it's just not worth it.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
Oh come on now. The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle. For one thing, people are using the internet to find information about products and services. Feeding the right information to them is very worthwhile and will be as important in the future as standard marketting. Already music labels (large and small) are employing digital street teams to seed positive feedback about their movies over the net. And it's not always as obnoxious and obvious as you might think...I was on the street team for the last Queens of the Stone Age album and think I drummed up quite a bit of support for the record on forums and such I was already a part of.
Then there's the other business uses of the internet...we use it to telesupport our software. Install PCAnywhere along with the software, give people a five minute introduction on how to start the host when we need them to, and viola! We no longer have to drive to client sites to perform support, and we can have multiple levels of support working simultaneously at the office. Then there's the company groupware server, the Citrix server which allows our remote staff to connect from home, and the massive online knowledge bases we can use to help troubleshoot problems.
Oh, and our provider makes PLENTY of money off of us using the internet for these purposes. So do the companies that made the software we use. In fact, there is so much money being made off these relatively mundane uses of the internet that I bet the "content" side can be made basically free...so long as nobody expects to be paid to generate it.
Even then, there are plenty of folks who will generate content for "free," or through pledges. Shit, I'm one of them. Shit, I've even been known to give away bandwidth to worthy causes.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Holy cow, there are rules here? For the love of God, tell me where to find them!
http://milkshake.dexy.org
The internet isn't a lot of things, so I purpose that we improve it.
Let's make a website where people can gather together, and quote (or misquote) various famous television shows. Such as The Simpsons, or South Park.
We can also allow a certain sense of humor, and we'll offer news along with the humor. Everything will center around a penguin that has more power than the richest person on the planet.
What? Slashdot.org, huh? Well, I for one welcome our new slashdot overlords.
Learn something new.
The problem with the Internet as an advertising medium is that it works backwards from the mass media. We're used to having ads thrown in our face, and that's the only paradigm that MegaCorps are capable of dealing with right now. Fortunately, there are many tech savvy thinking individuals who are more than happy to build ad blocking infrastructures that render bulk advertising moot.
Right now an internet presence is not necessarily a profit center, but a lack of one can certainly cost you money - more and more middle class (and up) people are turning to the internet first for information about what product they will buy or service they will use.
In the end, the internet presents the nightmare of true value comparison; the advertising that it's ideal for is comparison research; backwards from the current model which resembles a firehose, this becomes "on demand" advertising.
I research nearly every major purchase on the internet prior to spending money. It has saved me a lot of money, in the long run; whatever product I am considering, I can usually find posts somewhere on the web from someone who has one, and is either really happy, or really unhappy about that fact.
Someone mentioned QOS and bandwidth hogs vs backbone bandwidth - network bandwidth will increase until there are essentially no bottlenecks. It's a fact. Eventually, our network connection will exceed our local bus speed now. QOS is a stopgap measure to shoehorn technologies onto the 'Net before it's grown to accomodate them.
Thinking outside my Head
I'm having trouble getting the internet working under MacOS 9.
;-)
Well, the internet does have some standards, you know...
Sounds like some damn rant. The bloody FCC never did nothing right. Their cahooting diffusion with ICANN and the registrars, and phone companies . . . Then the audio/video hogs woke up and attacked . . . Soon a bunch of outta-loops was doing File->Save As->Web site. Heck I got some shovels to sell any prospector foolish enough to philosophize about protocol awareness.
It's really all about the breaks. The break between content provider and audience. The wireless and wired networks. When the right people or products coalesce - will it be a monopoly? Open-Source wireless networks deployedtoday are the only way to ensure bandwidth for open-minded transmissions later. As TimeWarner if the offer Movies, VoIP and Broadband in uncompetitive markets . . . Who can stop them? Congress? Ha! Al Gore they ain't and that fool backed Howard Dean!
I did not get much from the article at all - and think it was an esoteric sailing trip. But I too wrote a rant, so there was some stimulus. Like the style of Kurt Vonnegut my satire aims to ape: [Context] x [Subject] x [Amplitude] x [Frequency] x [Time]
Stuff that matters.
...of the Internet
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
I was talking to a lady once who told me that "the owner of the internet is in town". Turns out she meant Stephen Case, CEO? of AOL. It blew my mind that anyone could think that one guy owns the entire internet.
This is clearly a reference to Pets.com, and he got it wrong. Their mistake wasn't that they were trying to sell high margin, high markup, cheap to ship toys on the Internet. Their problem was that they were trying to sell low margin, low markup, expensive to ship dog food. It's easy to make money selling cheap to ship high margin items on the Internet - look at Amazon, or (more relavently) PETsMART.com.