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Hannu H. Kari Gives The Internet 2 More Years

erick99 writes "Dr. Hannu Kari says the Internet will will collapse in 2006 as reported in an article on ARS Technica. Yes, this is the same Dr. Kari who has predicted doom before, but it is still an entertaining read and there is more than a grain of truth in his reasoning." Reader Titney writes adds a couple of excerpts from an article on NewsRoom Finland: "The entire system will crumble to bits as the sheer bulk of rubbish circling around in the net exceeds the public pain threshold. ... When the internet is no longer operational for business purposes, one has to time warp back 10 to 20 years and make do without information networks"

19 of 465 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong by NardofDoom · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When the internet is no longer operational for business purposes, one has to time warp back 10 to 20 years and make do without information networks

    No, one has to create VPNs and block all access that doesn't come from the inside.

    Or you could use dedicated lines that have no connection to the Internet.

    --
    You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
  2. Re:And for anyone who believes this... by garcia · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...I have a bridge for sale.

    Well it may not die as in coffin dead but it may certainly morph into something completely different.

    With the onset of so many worms, trojans, and other miscellaneous exploits people are finally going to get fed up. They aren't going to switch away from Microsoft products to eliviate their problems though. Nope... What they're going to do is they're going to switch to Bill's latest and greatest achievement...

    Trusted Computing. This will be a BIOS, OS, and network interface that will be 100% secure. It will be running only "trusted" applications because Bill has certified them all. Remember those cute Windows on the corner of all pieces of hardware and software? Designed for MS Windows98? Well, this is going to be the same thing only not even the worms can run!

    See, safe, right? Well, you won't be able to be on the same Internet we have now because that's not trusted. Soon you'll be connecting to port 3128 of the trusted.proxy.microsoft.com to get your Internet.

    The "other Internet" (the one that the rest of us will be using) won't be protected, won't be trusted, and won't be supported by the Windows people.

    You draw your own conclusions as to what that will mean.

  3. Sealab 2021 by j0nb0y · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Can anyone tell me what the Internet was and how it almost destroyed humankind in the year 2007?" - school teacher Debbie

    --
    If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
  4. internet survived major san francisco earthquake by peter303 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Some of us were remembering the the M7 Loma Prieta quake exactly 15 years ago Monday. 10% of Stanford buildings were condemned, several freeways collapsed, but the InterNet went humming along. People used it send email when the phones were dead and exchange earthquake data. At that time the net was more concentrated in the US with root servers in D.C. and Silicon Valley.

  5. Sealab 2021 was right! by anakin876 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    From Sealab 2021 Debbie: Now who can tell me what the internet was and how it almost destroyed the world in 2006?

  6. Re:He's not too terribly inconsistent though... by micromoog · · Score: 2, Interesting
    there is such a huge boatload of crap out here that I hope that it get's to a point that the average human runs away from it.

    How does this affect you at all? Presumably, you know where to find the stuff you like, so why does it matter that there are tons of highly commercial, fluff-filled sites out there?

  7. Not gonna happen by DeepDarkSky · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Obviously, the internet is made up of not only the hardware and the software and the data - it is also the people, and people are ultimately flexible and capable of adaptation to the situations that may arise. Just as the internet allows routing around failed nodes, so will people route around the noise.

    If you talk about pain, consider the withdrawal pain all of us will have to go through if the internet just wasn't available for all of our daily things anymore.

    An example of adaptability of things relating to human-ness influence - languages have generally changed over the ages, and has withstood the assault of abuse and misuse more or less intact. People are always worried that new coinage and usage of the language will corrupt the language to the point where it is no longer useful - this is far from the truth, and so it will be for the internet.

  8. Bollocks by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Internet will collapse, because there's too much crap floating around? I think there's a lot of crap floating around, but I don't get to notice much of it due to my software and usage patterns. I think this technique will continue to work for years to come.

    Ok, so maybe email is suffering from a spam overdose. This can be countered by fixing the protocols. It won't be RFC 821, but it will still be there in some form.

    As for www, as long as I don't go to crap sites, I don't see crap. Simple as such. Just because there are lots of crap sites doesn't mean there won't be any good ones. And frankly, I don't think the percentage of crap sites is that high (unless you're talking code quality).

    Argh, I'm not going to think up any more examples. It's a ridiculous claim, why am I even responding.

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  9. Re:Already happened on a limited scale. by jfengel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While I lament the death of Usenet as a tool, many of its purposes have been subsumed by the Web. Slashdot itself is a key example. For various software products company web boards have replaced the Usenet group.

    That's not just due to the the flamers there are also technological reasons. Usenet is a store-and-forward system; it's replicated all over the place (usually at your ISP). That was crucial when even the high-speed lines between service providers were 56kbps, but today you can go to a single site from anywhere and get decent response time. The distributed system made it slow and unreliable.

    Web sites also have the advantage over Usenet in that you can use a single tool that you already have to access it. You don't need to install special software. It's true that most Windows users already have Outlook, but wouldn't know how to configure it.

    I do lament the death of Usenet. There are many things it does better than the web sites do. Back in the day I could go to comp.lang.apl and confer with reliable experts on APL. And actually that's still true for some newsgroups, the obscurer the better. But at this point the death of Usenet is recursive: I don't go there because nobody else goes there. I'll sometimes use Google Groups to search it for answers to a question, but since I'm not posting to it nobody else gets to converse with me, and so they too gradually drop out.

    And it's too bad that I have to learn hundreds of different web-based message systems (with the corresponding array of logins to maintain) rather than the single point of entry to Usenet.

    Slashdot, and most other bulletin-board type systems, doesn't do the sort of long-term conversations that Usenet was good for. But people now go to other places for entertainment; conversation is out. It's much more passive and that's too bad. So it makes me sad that I don't even have a newsreader any more.

  10. Spam, Spyware etc.. by gilesjuk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Well if Spam and Spyware continue to increase then the net experience will be affected for some.

    Thing is spyware can be avoided by ditching Windows and Spam is starting to being tackled with email system changes such as the one proposed by Yahoo.

  11. Re:Already happened on a limited scale. by gowen · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Once back around 1992 they were practically a gathering of experts all around the world (and the occasional fringe wacko); now they're nothing but spam and all discussion is by fringe wackos
    That's just crap. Very few of the groups I read are full of spam (the few that are are gatewayed mailing lists). And the technical ones are full of knowledgeable people: ask an F95 question on comp.lang.fortran if you don't believe me. They were really bad in the mid-90s, but now they're much, much better. I'd bet the average comp.os.unix contributor is way smarter than the average /.er.
    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  12. Re:And for anyone who believes this... by neoform · · Score: 2, Interesting

    you forgot domain campers.

    --
    MABASPLOOM!
  13. Re:He's not too terribly inconsistent though... by dubl-u · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Because the Average Human is the cause of the problems of the Internet.

    The way I look at it, if the rest of us were really so superior, we would have build in advance technologies that an average human could use well.

  14. The good doctor is wrong by TiggertheMad · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The entire system will crumble to bits as the sheer bulk of rubbish circling around in the net exceeds the public pain threshold.

    The doctor is wrong for several reasons.

    First off, his premise is based off of nothing changing. The Internet behaves like an evolutionary biological system. Spammers send out spam, people build spam filters to lock out spam, and then the spammers improve spam to beat the filters. It mirrors a biological eveloutionary race. Unless one group eliminates the other entirely by an new improvement in strategy, this will go back and forth for a long time.

    Furhtermore, there is also a predator-prey model at work. As the predators(spam,viruses,spyware) become more prevalent, the 'weak' users will be weeded out. Actually, they will get fed up and abandon the meidum. The 'stronger' prey are more impervious to such nusances, and will just ignore them. As the easy prey decreeses, so does the profitiability of spammers, spyware, and vectors for virri. This will cause their numbers to drop, and allow a new batch of weak prey to enter the model.

    The netw will never 'crash' due to issues such as this, but it may experience rises and falls in popularity among the masses. The sky is not falling.

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
  15. Re:Kari's prediction on Television in the 60's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The sad thing is, I really doubt we've scraped the bottom yet with TV.

    Even with crap shows like "Wife Swap."

    In 2006, they change to digital signals here in the US. Old TVs won't work. Might be a good time to get rid of the damned thing before I have to see just how much lower they can sink with those shows.

  16. Re:Already happened on a limited scale. by merikari · · Score: 3, Interesting
    That's just crap. Very few of the groups I read are full of spam (the few that are are gatewayed mailing lists). And the technical ones are full of knowledgeable people: ask an F95 question on comp.lang.fortran if you don't believe me. They were really bad in the mid-90s, but now they're much, much better.

    I agree. There are a lot more wackos on the lose, but most of them are happily trolling on millions of web-forums, chats, and whatnot. The average net user is less likely to find the Usenet nowadays and in most cases this is a very good thing.

    Usenet will not die away (just look at the statistics). There is spam, but it's a very small annoyance compared to e-mail spam.

    --
    My other SIG is a Sauer.
  17. Re:If Hannu H. Kari dosn't work for... by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Usenet didn't go away. For a time it exceeded the public pain threshold and almost died. But then something amazing happened. All the spammers and trolls noticed that everyone left, so they left too. Today I can actually peruse newsgroups that have less than a 1% troll/spam ratio.

    p.s. Don't tell anyone about this though! I don't want the bastards coming back!

    --
    Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
  18. Re:Kari's prediction on Television in the 60's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Kari's prediction on telegrammophone in the early 20th century:
    Egads, but I do not know a single educated man of my acquaintence that can much longer tolerate the current drought of cultivated material aimed at that besmircher of all that is noble in thought, the telegrammophone, therefore I say without hesitation that within the utmost of one decade that instrument will have been discarded by our civilization and we will have returned to the more sound methods of communication as exemplified by the pony express rider.

  19. IPv? by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Ah, but will it die before or after implementing IPv6?

    If it's after, I think we can relax a bit longer. Hell, I'm sure Duke Nukem Forever is currently aimed at IPv6 networked play...