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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"
...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.
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.
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.
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!