Slashdot Mirror
How the Internet Became a Closed Shop
AcidAUS sends this quote from the Sydney Morning Herald:
"A little over a decade ago, just before the masses discovered the digital universe, the internet was a borderless new frontier: a terra nullius to be populated by individuals, groups and programmers as they saw fit. There were few rules and no boundaries. Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos. Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft. A billion-dollar battle conducted in walled cities where companies try to lock our consumption into their vision of the internet. It has left some lamenting the 'web we lost.'"
The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ... which was discussed on /. last week.
... HO-HO-HO! ;-)
Anil also wrote a followup titled "Rebuilding the Web We Lost" that may be worth reading.
Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
I miss you Geocities!
Freedom and open standards, sharing information for the greater good was the ethos.
No it wasn't. This is someone inventing a nostalgic version of the Internet that didn't exist. Prior to Facebook, etc. there was AOL and Compuserve which had their own "walled gardens" and gated versions of the Internet. Throughout the 90s it was a fight of both Netscape and Microsoft pushing proprietary HTML elements and the "Best viewed in Netscape" or "Best viewed in IE" nonsense.
Computer hobbyists in the '80s complained that IBM and Microsoft had taken over "their" world. Car enthusiasts in the '20s probably complained about Ford and GM. When an industry becomes mature there are relatively few market leaders, practically by definition, and those leaders generally don't innovate more than they have to. Why? Network effects is one reason. Economies of scale is another. There's the good ol' monopolistic practices of the robber barons. And a couple gentlemen on Mad. Avenue explained another reason: our brains only have room for two or three entrants for most market categories that we don't happen to be fanatical or professionally involved with.
As Scott McNealy would have said, "Get over it."
Times change. You can never go home. Things were always better in the past. I can remember when all of this was farmland. Now get off my lawn.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I lived through the open web, even before that, in the days of dial-up BBS services. And you know what? It sucked compared to the web we have today. Aside from speed issues, which our irrelevant in this conversation, the quality, variety, and value of available content was crap compared today. These walled gardens have motivated and allowed all sorts of great content, inventions, and application.
Furthermore, the open web hasn't gone away. Its still there and there are several other 'communities' that are essentially open webs unto themselves. We just don't think about them or use them much (for some) because there are better things to do online (e.g. cat photos and stumbleupon).
Drop the nostalgic nonsense.
Most of what you think has been lost is still there.
The only difference is: now you reach it through Google, Facebook, Apple, Bing, alpha, etc... in stead of through Alta Vista, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Geocities and the "What's New?"/"What's cool?" buttons on the Netscape Browser.
Maybe they should change the site to
slashandparrydot
ye Olde Slashdoth
Walled Home and Garden
Internostalgia
Get Thee Oft My Lawn
Its been almost 12 hours since the latest Windows 8 sucks submission.
Captcha: Terrors
The author of the article looks too young to be acting like such a grumpy old man.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Ok, can we just stop paying attention to traditional media until it all dies? I don't think I've read an article in the last year that wasn't trying to provoke outrage, fear or hatred through selective reporting, manipulation of data, and gross simplification.
Today, the open internet we once knew is fracturing into a series of gated communities or fiefdoms controlled by giants like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and to a lesser extent Microsoft.
What, so now it's impossible to start your own website? To run your own services? That's news to me. Just because there are now large, popular sites doesn't mean small, unpopular sites are now non-existent. The internet that we had 30 years ago is still there, it's just nobody uses it. But it's not like, say, the presence of Facebook means IIRC has suddenly been uninvented.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
For all the whining, the Internet is really more open these days than ever. If nothing else, there's a lot more world-wide participation. For a good part of the Internet's history, it was nearly all in the US with only token amounts outside. Now it really is a world-wide network.
Also some of the companies mentioned really aren't doing much in the way of any sort of lock-in. Yes Amazon has about 1% of the Internet in its data centers, which is pretty impressive, but it is just hosting. You buy the virtual servers to do as you please (within the ToS of course). You can even compete with Amazon using Amazon. Netflix hosts a lot of their videos on Amazon EC2.
The Internet may not be the anarchist-geek dreamworld, but it is more open than anything else I can think of in human history, and more open than it was in the past.
The only thing that's changed is that hot internet startups tend to get bought up pretty quickly and rolled into whichever walled garden their new Mega-Sized Overlord happens to own.
If it were a walled grden, you'd have to "pay to play" just to have the opportunity to launch your online startup -- e.g: the iTunes App Store.
Today we see Instagram making a Billion off a couple weeks of effort for an app that would have netted hardly enough to pay the developers rent back in 2000.
Times are actually pretty good and in fact easier for small startups to realize a handsome profit.
This is how I see it. Age 34
Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites like this one ... HO-HO-HO! ;-)
My eyes...ze goggles, zey do nothing!!!!
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
The "web we lost" is all still there, more or less, in that nothing about the underlying technology of the web has changed. But no-one is interested in the old ways of doing things, and 'modern' services like Facebook are what people obviously want. In other words, like government, we get the web we deserve.
... the internet sucked back then. Websites and web interfaces were crappy, and while many modern websites are bloated and have usability issues there has been a huge improvement.
Also the emergence of easy to use blogging software has been probably one of the most important developments on the internet IMHO. The problem with nostalgic views of the internet is that the internet 'back then' was highly fragmented and often disorganized. Often times sites would have broken links or not be updated properly because the sites owner was not technically literate or committed any time to his or her site because of barriers to entry (tweaking web pages in html manually, or using cumbersome html software).
While the internet has "narrowed". I think what people really morn is the stupid masses getting online. This is really about "I wish the internet populated by intelligent/nerdy tech minded people and not the stupid hacks and poseurs we find today". To some extent this is true but it has also brought in a lot of smart non-technical people posting interesting stuff online because software/blog-packages/whatever have become easy enough to use without having to know much about computers.
As much as people might want to morn 4chan and reddit for the stupid people they attract, having such a wide range of people accessing a single site means important issues can be discovered and disseminated quickly because there are more people online.
Yeah, there totally isn't any way to do anything on the internet without Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.
Except for:
- Discussion forums, which exist for pretty much every single interest group imaginable
- Places to post images
- A whole spectrum of places to buy stuff, most of which AREN'T Amazon
- Millions of blogs about every conceivable topic and viewpoint
- Websites by companies providing information about what they sell
- A way to interact with the government
- Online banking
- Research
- A whole lot of stuff neither I, nor anybody else, has even thought up yet
And you can do all of those things without touching a single service or product sold by one of the big giants.
In conclusion... what on earth is he talking about?
You forgot AOL's walled garden of the 90's
Speaking of the "lost web", we no longer see as many offbeat websites
I dunno, we haven't lost Zombo.Com, there's even a HTML5 Zombo.com
Goatsects is still around in various forms. What's primarily happened is that hosting your persona stuff has been subsidized by advertising and data aggregation instead of being a bit more private (if you use a proxy registrar contact) and hosting your own servers. That's still possible, but there's less demand for it now.
I think it's a shame really, because we do need our own publicly/privately accessible servers to stream "our" stuff (music, video, pics, ramblings, etc) to us. With the rise of consumption centric devices I think we might see a rise in both online hosting services for more of your stuff at the cost of more privacy (social graph sites), and home-server and paid hosting solutions for the more privacy conscious. It's kind of silly that Facebook, G+, etc. don't have an API for adding a remote friend -- Where the social site would scrape my private server that implements a public API (RSS anyone?) so that users of their services can get updates from folks outside the service. You can sort of cobble together something with G+ & Google Reader, but it's not nearly as integrated with the social stuff, and RSS has no "bueno" button.
"The web we lost" Bah, Humbug. What about the Internet we lost? Everything's caught up in the "web", which would be fine if it wasn't an overly complicated inefficient document rendering markup and stateless protocol, that people try to cobble into stateful online applications with a horribly inefficient scripting langauge... It's so bad that we're still waiting for HTML5 to be formalized, it's been over 12 years since HTML4.01 -- About half the age of the damn web. If we were serious about this thing, We'd be making a lower level glyph & vector graphics display system with a more efficient general purpose VM language (for great sandboxing justice) as the primary target. Every damn site is an application now, which means a kludge ridden mess. Simple Primitives, then work your way up, HTML + CSS + Active Code could compile down to lower level primitives such that we could innovate in the higher level stuff, or even scrap it while remaining compatible with old sites. Take a page from the CPU architectures. How many coding languages are there? They don't require a new platform each time. Starting off at the markup level and building such a platform there is kind of silly if you ask me. Java tried to save us, but they became too bloated and interested in Enterprise instead of a lean mean client side system -- Sun dropped the ball w/ Applets instead of splitting them out like they did J2ME stuff. Here we are, same damn web, hacking together features we want that it was never designed to support, then crying like babby who can't frigth back when it's more full of exploits than an AOL Punt tool.
What exactly is Apple doing evil,again in the internet? ...
Hosting their own web site?
Or do you count an App Store and a Music Store and a Book Store as evil now?
Apple is the *one company* that is using open standards, does not pollute them, uses open source and gives all additions it does to the open source software back to the community.
And looking at that braindead article, what exactly is google doing wrong? They also only adhere to open standards
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
... is the animated gif pornography and scanned images from magazines ;) Now with their copyright-laws-this and paywall-that... sheesh. Is there nothing big companies won't ruin???
(Hold on, I want to watch this hot video on Youtube)
Seriously - there is a lot more content now. Create a dummy account if you don't want to share your information. Don't let yourself get tagged on photos. Give a false name and location. It isn't too hard to access 99% of the content with just a few keystrokes with little risk to privacy.
Complaining about sharing? What was the equivalent of Wikipedia or Sourceforge? Search algorithms weren't as good then. Even forgetting the social networking stuff - a lot more open and free pages exist today to provide you with information.
Yes, there IS a problem. No, nobody is forcing you to use FaceBook, not in so many words, but...
When you have Interest A, and the largest group of people discussing it is on FaceBook and you are "out of the loop" if you don't see the discussion then this IS a problem.
You could explain to people you know with Interest A that it's rude to build in a need for something like FaceBook, but it's an uphill battle.
At least you can still whine on Slashdot without a login, so no, the Internet is not totally dead. There are "Interest B" interests, where people actually care about access that doesn't require you to tell your life story to the whole world; but it's becoming the exception. It IS a problem.
The solution is to stop taxing economic activity (capital gains, income, sales, value added, etc) and instead tax market-assessed liquid value of assets.
Of course, not many people are going to really understand this idea so it must be demonstrated by those who do get it.
That's why we need Sortocracy.
Seastead this.
There are still plenty of other places you can go.
Especially if you're one of us ASD "not the club joining type" types.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I have found that each breakthrough boom time lasts about 10 years.
I started noticing this coincidence working in the early days of digital audio for the music and film industry. Synthesisers had their peak 1975-1985, disk recorders 1990-2000, digital mixing desks 1995-2005. These are approximately the times where all the groundbreaking stuff happened, then it becomes commoditised and no real advances happen. In the internet case, becomes walled.
The internet boom time was probably about 1995-2005. Now it is just using what is already there in different ways.
Based on this, I would guess tablets have another (say) 7 years. Smart phones probably 5.
Although I have used this to guess when to change fields; it unfortunately does not tell you what comes next. That's the fun bit.
Considering Anil is part of the crowd responsible for destroying the internet, do we really need to credit him with discovering that there's a problem? It's kinda ridiculous to give him credit for a sentiment many people have felt for years now.
Captcha: despise
(Grumpy)
Once again we get an article on how the Web has changed. They list 5 companies in the summary... and Facebook gets the Graphic on the article?!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... of the internet were wonderful if you were a ham radio operator, scientist, programmer, network engineer, fan of roguelike RPGs or Star Trek.
Other than that there wasn't a huge amount of content out there.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
I, too, yearn for what was lost.
I was on the net since 1983, long before the days of AOHell, long before the the web existed.
At the time, there was no astroturfing, no paid shills, no corporate influence to speak of. If you read someone's opinion, you could trust it was from a real person. It might or might not be soemething you agreed with, and in the worst case it was just a troll, but critical reviews and such tended to be non-troll real opinions, not a legion of paid shills to give positive reviews.
The S/N was FAR higher then. There's more signal now, without any doubt at all, but there's so much more noise that the S/N has plummeted, which is a loss of its own type.
And I think TFA has a point. Back in say the mid 80's, you could email anyone. There was no "Oh, sorry, I don't use email, only this walled-garden thing and you can't contact me unless you also use Facebook/whatever is trendy now". Open standards mattered a lot more.
GOML.
It is essential to differentiate between voluntary and involuntary "closedness". No one has ever forced me to use Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or any other product or service. People choose to get involved with those services because they value openness less than other perceived benefits that those services provide. I disagree, but I have no right to force them to do otherwise. "Live and let live."
The great threat to internet freedom comes not from corporations operating in a free market, but from the overgrown mafia gangs that call themselves your governments. It is governments and only governments that have the power to censor the net! It is the "useful idiots" who strengthen government power under the unexamined slogan of "freedom" (copyleft, "net neutrality", etc) that are the real enemy!
--libman
That is what he is talking about. He looks back on the beginning of the internet, and with naive 20/20 hindsight, sees the potential for possibilities, the great unknown, to boldly go where no man has gone before. The conquest. The pillage. The IPO's, The Dot Coms. They hear the legends of the hacking gods. They see the mythical rags to riches stories of the Gates, the Sergeys and the Gates'es'. Jimmy Page. Jimi Hendrix. Viking Ships and Muscle Cars. Dragons and Fair Maidens. I feel like raising the pirate flag and howling at the moon just thinking about it.
Poor kids. The last decade has been nothing but a financial scam and a ponzi scheme. Since the 2007 crash, it has gotten worse, the world is on life support, kept together only by printing money.
There is no wilderness, no exploration, no exciting new fields, no uncharted lawless territory where every man has the opportunity to strike it rich.
There is not even a real economy.
They rewrite the 'good old days' as a nostalgic version of the internet that did not exist, because deep within, these young men instinctually crave the adventure, the exploration, the conquest. They create, dreams, visions, fantasies and myths.
Companies want you to friend/fan their facebook because it's a way of continually feeding you information. Before facebook this would have been done through an e-mail list signup on the website... Instead of spamming you in one place, you get spammed in another; it's a distinction without a difference.
But that doesn't mean that companies do not also use their websites extensively and certainly facebook is no replacement at all for a dedicated company website, and they serve totally different purposes.
And, given how useful and accurate Google (or Bing, if that's your thing) is, there's no need to bother telling people what your website address is; Google knows it already and can tell anybody that wants it.
You are so right. The net used to be a mile wide and an inch deep. But there are now some pretty deep places.And a lot of shallow places. It seems to me that a lot of the early promise has been met and exceeded. I do miss SUCK.COM, though. It was good in the beginning. It sort of went corporate and died. Sad. Very very sad.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Those companies have a big share of responsability on that process, but probably what made walled garden to look like a good idea was mainly spam. You couldnt give access to everyone because some of those everyone would be spambots.
So there, you may not put in jail them as may not be laws against unsolicited mail, but you can process them for murdering (or at least, badly poisoning) the open internet.
....it was certainly much more fun, innovative, imaginative, and technological advances were made in leaps and bounds back then. The internet is far more useful nowadays, but it's like the magic and excitement is gone. It's become toned-down, it's become a utility,and utilities are boring.
Remember when:
-the first time you heard about a new application called RealAudio that would allow you to stream audio from a remote server, even over a dialup connection? No more waiting to download the entire clip. This new streaming thing was frikking amazing!
-the first time you went to 'The William Shatner sing-along page'?
-you heard about an audio file format called mp3 that could hold an entire song in in a few MB's instead of a few dozen? 3MB per file vs 20 or 30MB and still have the same quality! That was amazing!
-WinNuke was the worst thing someone could do to your computer, and you weren't sent to jail for using it. There was no constant threat about getting malware, trojans, or viruses from websites.
-Doubleclick did not exist? Sites did not collect and retain and sell your browsing habits.
-the term 'hacker' did not hold any negative connotation?
-Flash sites were new, amazing, and didn't use 100% of your CPU?
-chat rooms and web forums were TROLL-FREE? People were actually nice and considerate to each other!
-one of the first online multiplayer game you played was Descent thru KALI?
-you could actually get a refund for software?
-you regularly browsed Rotten.com?
People are choosing to be "confined" by these companies and their services. No one is forcing you to use them. One might argue that ISP censorship is different, and one in which is forced upon us. However the rulers of that "small free internet" that once was, well they are doing the same thing now, that they were doing then. They are not using the services by which strip the individual of their rights, they are using alternatives. Their data is not being filtered by Verizon/Comcast/etc, because they are using a VPN. The issue is that people who weren't on the Internet now, are on it now. Those people probably liked shopping at Walmart, and now they like shopping through Google, and that's fine. The alternative does exist, and those people who care, utilize it. This sounds like someone is just sad that sites aren't using scrolling marquees anymore.
Its been almost 12 hours since the latest Windows 8 sucks submission.
But my God, it sucks.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"The Web We Lost", which I indeed missed, required effort. You had to build your own presence on the web.
When the effort was taken away, with the added bonus of being linked directly with your friends, the old ways were unsurprisingly dropped.
So yes, the hobbyist web went away, as it was bound to. No one should be shocked or surprised by this.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Don't forget Khaan. http://khaaan.com/ Khaaaaaaaaan!
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
SKREEEE SCUUSHHHHHHHHHH....
:(
And then corporations moved in and fucked things up
My main email address is 16 years old and still going.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
For evolving into a monster that actually provides better than average paying jobs for a brand new industry!!!
I have celiac and am all for research, but this site is like an example of ALL the bad practices for coding a site. Is the whole this written in deprecated HTML 3 or something? Flashing text even!!!
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
Considering Anil is part of the crowd responsible for destroying the internet
How is creating software to enable non-technical people to create their own blogs "destroying the Internet"? IMO software to promote the Internet as an equal access utility for everyone rather than a tool for corporations to profit or elitists to rant (I assume you are the latter) is a good thing.
A central authority vulnerable to pressure.
Headquartered in a country where having money is just as good as having muscle.
Why the fuck am I not surprised?
In the frontier days of the internet there were fewer ads but the quality of the content was a fair bit lower. I'm not even talking about the technology here, I'm talking about eyesore websites where someone wrote a bunch of inane details about themselves and their interests, websites that were indefinitely Under Construction. Back then one could run searches on particular topics and not get back any results, or at least any results of value. Certainly UseNet is looked back upon fondly by this group, but even then there was always some troublemaker that insisted on crossposting something controversial between two conflicted groups (i.e. asking a question and crossposting between an atheist and christian group so that the replies show up on both groups), never mind the more conventional trolls. Anyone looking back on AOL ought to remember that they censored the hell out of your environment there-- you got kicked off for swearing and naughty content was carefully sanitized from their download archives. Before I got on the internet, I remember a friend telling me a number of stories of how he got kicked off different BBSes for swearing and fighting with admins.
The present internet is a lot more crowded but with it there is a lot more content. More of it is crap, and more of it is precious, because there is a lot more content. It is more commercialized and there are a lot more ads, but it is a lot bigger and more sophisticated. Yes, more sophisticated. The hacker types that use math references for user names are still out there, and alongside them we have specialists and connoisseurs of every kind weighing in on every topic one can possibly think of. Without getting into the downsides and problems still faced, could you have ever imagined something quite as extensive as Wikipedia back then? Let alone all the smaller wikis created for greater detail into countless subjects?
As long as the internet thrives, it will continue to get just a little more amazing. And a little more awful.
Some things are better left unsaid, and just known in silence...
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
I'm as nostalgic as the next guy, but everybody getting the warm fuzzies for the dark ages are conveniently only remembering the good things about them. There were plenty of crappy things that we've moved on from too... You wanna talk walled gardens? How about AOL's version of the Internet anyone? It's great to remember the good ole' days, but let's be thankful for where we are now, regardless of how we got here. Sure _some_ things are worse now, but the vast majority of the online experience is better. This is progress, and progress is good.
I knew this would happen when Google bought DejaNews, and turned usenet into "Google Groups".
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
"Speaking of the 'lost web'..."
Except we never lost it. All those "gated communities" and "walled gardens" they talk about require you to opt in!
If you don't like it, don't opt in.
Yes, I know, they give you an either / or choice: "Buy an iOS device? Live with our rules." But they have only been able to because people let them. You still have the choice. If you don't like the way they do things, don't participate. Get something else.
Both of these seem lost to me, by failing to even display a page at all on a browser a little more than a year old that supports ratified standards. They haven't even heard of graceful degrade? I sure would not put my stuff there.
Yeah, I keep this old browser to test sites and see just how useless they are. But 99% of sites still work fine.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
> We'd be making a lower level glyph & vector graphics display system with a more efficient general purpose VM language
Some people really is... just look to the Squeak Smalltalk powered Open Cobalt project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cobalt
This development is a consequence of opening the net to the masses. The net and its contents 10 or more years ago were a product of the fact that it was dominated by ICT enthusiasts. The masses don't care about the net itself, only its contents. Internet is also unregulated. Any market with little control or regulation converge towards dominance by a few large players, or even defacto monopolies. Thus, the dominance of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and their likes should come as no surprise to anybody.
What is "to a lesser extent" about a closed source OS with 92% market share?
I don't think his OS is his problem.
Which smartphone (that is still available) is not tied to either of Apple, Google or Microsoft?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You can get just about any Motorola model, unlocked.
Many other brands, as well.
> important issues can be discovered and disseminated quickly because there are more people online
I think there are two characteristics that need to be maximized in order to improve the net:
Differentiation
- we need a diversity of opinion; memes, lolcats and the like are a cancer to interesting, thoughtful, long form discussion
- we should encourage people to build personalized feeds; it's already happening with social sites collating together friend feeds and reddit having thousands of subreddits where a member can subscribe voluntarily, if he/she so wishes
- TV and printed press are enemies of differentiation - the same headlines for everyone? makes for a shitty monoculture
- if we empower people with creative tools, like - cameras, photo editors, open source software, wikis, forums, etc they will create more original content and that would make them differentiate more; nothing differentiates people like creativity
Integration
- basically the integrating power is the radical connectivity that we have today
- we need to keep things connected - open standards, no geo walls, net neutrality
- here comes in the problem in this headline - silos of content, gated communities - they are good in essence but they cut or severely limit the connectivity with the rest of the world which is bad for integration
- Google translate and the promise of accessing content in any language
- opening up of copyright restrictions would allow us to access more works, mix and match, review, curate and discuss
So in essence integration and differentiation should be the two rules by which we could judge if something is useful or harmful for the net.
The concept is derived from Tononi's Integrated Information Theory.
"Try finding a job these days without having a FB account past the level of flipping burgers."
I have, and I do. In fact, if a prospective client of mine insisted that I participate in FB at all, I'd tell them "No, thanks" and go elsewhere.
"Employers require people to play the social media game."
Then -- and I'm not being snide or sarcastic here -- you are talking to the wrong employers. Seriously.
I don't have a Myspace account. I have have had a Facebook account for years, but I used it maybe twice, then never touched it again. And I have no desire to. Same with Google+.
I do have a Twitter account, and use it to chat with friends and associates. I also do IM, and Skype, and some other things. But Facebook? No.
If Facebook and Google+ ever change their tunes, and start being honest and non-intrusive, I might consider them. But not until.
I should add: I had one client who went out of his way to find me on Twitter and follow me. I blocked him. Then Twitter changed their service to show when you have been blocked. So I unblocked him. But I periodically block him (which forces his account to un-follow me) then immediately remove the block. It serves the same purpose. I just have to remember to do it once in a while.
Twitter is a social space for me. It isn't for bosses or clients to be checking up on me. And if I had no way to prevent them, I simply would not work for them.
And if your employer asks you for passwords, you are DEFINITELY talking to the wrong people. I'd get up and walk out right then. And tell them them why. By the way: it is illegal for them to do that now, in some states.
Motorola now sells smartphones without Android? As far as I know you cannot use Android without a Google account (well, I guess formally you can if you forego using any advanced features; but then, why buy a smartphone at all?)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Amazingly, the *internet* is still the same. ISPs have left almost all IP functionality intact, despite the fact that many people only use Facebook and the web. The thing that has changed is that many new users come and don't care about open/closed. As a user, there is no need to use closed systems.
The article talks about mobile OSes, but those were even more closed and limited before. I really do wish that there was a phone OS that could do more locally, but that's a bad business model
Because the masses went to facebook or google, didnt made the hacker spaces go extinct. ... are now gone.
Those that did it for money are now gone, as the good old web was not meant for money, therefore geocities, tripod,
Also those that grew tired of their own stuff, and moved on.
But many "good old sites" are still there, many nntp groups are still there, ... ...
The problem is, that they do not care about seo (seo is retarded to begin with), so they cant be found via google.
Facebook users do not know better, therefore do not care about the pre facebook-internet, hell to some of them there is no other communication but facebook chat, facebook massage, facebook status, facebook
so just lets move on, the old folks staying on pre http stuff, the younger on http/irc/nntp, the even younger on facebook and the kiddies of now wont even know/care what facebook has been about.
I've been lurking on Slashdot for years, and I admit, this is actually my first post (as an Anonymous Coward too, I might add) but I just wanted to say that I fail to see how the addition of large entities such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, etc. takes away anything from the web that existed beforehand. That web is still here- it's just had more stuff added to it by the addition of these new giants. If you don't want to play in the walled-gardens then don't- that's what an open web is all about in the first place...
Plus, it should be clear to anyone with any common sense that as long as www.zombo.com is still around, we'll always know the web is still open and free.
"You can do anything at Zombo.com, anything at all...the only limit, is yourself!"
I have celiac and am all for research, but this site is like an example of ALL the bad practices for coding a site. Is the whole this written in deprecated HTML 3 or something? Flashing text even!!!
I refer you to the upper right corner where a banner states that the website in question is W3C validated HTML 4.0.1 (i haven't checked it, but that is what the site owner claims).
However your question is irrelevant because none of the W3C standards that i know of, addresses eyesoreness.
Perfectly wrong. Not only do you not need a google account, you also don't need any of their software that hasn't been released as Open Source.
Start by installing CyanogenMod. This will give you a fully functional base system, without any google applications. You do get a fully functional web browser, which still puts you well ahead of feature phones; no appstore, though. To fix that part, you can then add F-Droid, an alternative Android appstore focused on free software programs, given you a convenient way to install various mapping applications, more web browsers, pdf readers, games, or what-have-you.
The selection isn't anything close to what you get on Google Play, of course. So there's a price.
But you can do it. And you do end up with something that's still a lot more useful than a feature phone.
The internet is still just as open as it was 10 years ago. It is still possible to do what ever you like as a coder. The only difference is that all your little actions are overshadowed by the actions of the few big ones. But in essence this is just a state of mind. In reality your actions are still just as meaningless as they where 10 years ago. You only think that they had more meaning then.
We lost the blink tag! That is truely the sign of the demise of the 'old web'.
And marquee. OH MARQUEE
I still run my own site, like I did 10 years ago. People visit it. FB isn't a threat to me any more than GeoCities used to be. And I'd rather have people post their "woke up today" bullshit to FB than to grisly GeoCities or MySpace pages with blink blink colour scream hurt my eyes all over it.
The Internet just resembles real life - what a surprise. It turns out that WalMart crowds out Mum&Pap shops, but if you have something of your own to offer that can not be easily copied, you still can run a viable business (or hobby).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I don't personally worry too much about companies like Facebook or Twitter replacing websites. There's nothing stopping me from creating my own website. I can even link to it from Facebook, and link to Facebook from it. There's nothing to stop another company from creating a better Facebook, except in the problem of luring users away from Facebook.
Nope, that's not the real problem. Let's keep our eyes on the ball, here. The real threat to our freedom are the ISPs and the media companies. The there's so much lock-in and DRM is because the media companies want to restrict when and how you can access their content. The real threat to "Well I can always set up my own website on my own web server" is ISPs that provide crappy speeds and exorbitant price, who block port 80, and who refuse to provide static IP addresses. ISPs and media companies conspire to control the Internet, to prevent sharing, and to force you to come to them for content. They lobby to have laws that would potentially make it a crime to run your own website without their permission.
Don't get me wrong-- I don't think this is an imminent danger, or that all the employees of Verizon are currently rubbing their hands together, cackling. They're just some businesses pursing their own best interests. However, with the way things are currently set up, our freedom to communicate as we please and share things in private run contrary to their interests. They're the danger, not Facebook. If I don't like Facebook, I can cancel my account.
Those of the users who used to be true about free information sharing, code, open source, irc, ssh, gaming etc. etc. etc., will most likely remain the same. Those who are relatively new to the net, and those who only seek business or their unilateral advantage on there, will presumably remain the same. Keep it simple. The net's structure is growing every day. And most know their space and place, spared from the commercial system which is currently being set up. None the less, an infrastructure must be maintained, paid, built and so on. It may very well be that it is just about that sensible balance. Everyone does what he does. And what everyone contributes to the net is entirely up to the individual in question. To get caught up in generalization usually isn't my cup of tea either. But I don't see it that judgemental. I watched the development of the net closely since the early days, and times do change. I attempt to take a moderate line and stance (sometimes more, sometimes less), when it comes to evaluating "technological progress". What many participants may need is a tiny bit more resolution about handle. The internet offers such great possibilities for all of mankind. So much to this daily rant. Have a good day.
The VM you're describing IS java or silverlight (ie: msjava) or flash.
The problem always seems to go back to deep linking and scraping. So what if your VM runs wonderfully and displays everything perfectly to the user on a quad core processor with a dual slot GPU. If the search engine can't work out where you should be in a search list you'll never get any visitors. And search engines are dumb, small and dumb, no GPU either. Then if you have only one 'link' to your site, even if the search engine were able to index everything you'd get a vague list of things that are sort of near to the url the search engine can give. Even if you have a person creating a reference, without a deep link, direct to the interesting bit, nobody would bother.
HTML is an ugly overstressed framework, javascript is brutalised by the libraries and CSS is just crap. But even if the combined language were made perfect it wouldn't last. The current web is the bastard crossbreed that's needed to serve conflicting masters, the masters would still be there trying to rip your 'language' apart, make it perfect for just one tiny slice of the problem.
I don't know what the solution is; hopefully HTML5 will help more than it hurts.
I don't have a Myspace account.
Does even Myspace require you to have a myspace account to work for them? If I were applying for a job and they asked what my myspace account was, I'd assume they were weeding out people who did have one. "I regret to say that yes, I do have one. I was young and dumb. I don't remember what the account name was, or the password to my hotmail account, so I can't delete it. My references will verify that I have since learned the error in my ways and no longer have anything to do with myspace."
You don't actually need to do a custom firmware install.
Just go into the Application section of the system settings and disable the apps you don't want running. You can disable Google's own apps just like any others.
I'm a fairly well paid Test Engineer at an international conglomerate and no one at work talks about or uses Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Myspace, etc...They may use it outside of work, but really no one gives a shit.
People have a choice not to pay for services they don't want or need. If anything, the Internet has more consumer options for services than ever.
That's a nice empty black page you got there.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
When I got on the net in 1992 the average IQ of the users was probably between 110 and 120, today? An average of the populous with a bias toward the 6-40 year group. (all the young kids bringing it down further) This make any discussion outside of a "walled" community futile.
And why is there just crap on the net now? Its harder and harder for every day that passes to find good information. You get ads and "harvest sites" that fill up pages with crap to get hits and ad-money. "Back in the day" there were no way to make money of ads! Easy as that! It was good because assholes had no way to make money from it! (I'm looking at you google)
The only thing good on the net now is wikipedia and that is slowly getting hollowed out too.
Google and Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft, are all evil!
I have celiac and am all for research, but this site is like an example of ALL the bad practices for coding a site. Is the whole this written in deprecated HTML 3 or something? Flashing text even!!!
I refer you to the upper right corner where a banner states that the website in question is W3C validated HTML 4.0.1 (i haven't checked it, but that is what the site owner claims). However your question is irrelevant because none of the W3C standards that i know of, addresses eyesoreness.
Touche! It was a mere dry humor jest. And indeed, W3C does NOT address bad coding design practices. Perhaps it would be a good example to HTML students of how NOT to code a page. Ha Ha!
Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. -- Robert A. Heinlein
It's a joke site from 10 years ago that probably took about 5 mins to make. Get a browser with Flash and you will see it fine. Or bitch about standards, whatever.
works for me, pebkac
Oh... that's lovely. But I think you forgot a /sarc tag? But, that is truly lovely for those who yearn for early 90's (or even late 80's telnet) sites...
The Sydney Morning Herald article may have been sparked by Anil Dash's recent Blog Post - The Web We Lost ...
I believe you are correct, the story states, 'In a post earlier this month, popular tech blogger Anil Dash lamented ''the web we lost''.'
Mentioning Australia or Australians is a sure-fire guaranteed way of getting your submission accepted, no matter how fucking lame it is.
Another Angelfire classic: The World's Worst Website
This is not true. This has never been true. It will never be true. You're an idiot for trying to sell this prattle in the first place, and it's the fourth such article to appear on Slashdot in so many months. If you believe this, it's fine. You're entitled to live in your own delusional little world. Leave us out of this. This is not news because it's not based in fact.
The community sites are great for the average user. Everyone still knows to search Google for things, and they do. Social media has not killed the internet. It's simply added another popular facet to it. Nor has it done anything to open standards. In fact, if you were paying attention (you're not) you would notice that open standards are more important than ever.
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Nope, PEBOFF.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I have been using the Internet over 25 years now. It is certainly better today than it ever was. Even the title "The Web We Lost" tells us we should simply ignore the story. Nothing has been lost. I can still put up a server in my house to host whatever. Maybe it won't get ranked by Google, but so what. That is clearly not important to what the author is talking about. People who claim some functionality of the Internet has been lost are a strange group. It is pretty clear they are wannabe techies. They heard there was some cool stuff but they don't know how to find or do it now, therefore the cool stuff must have been lost.
These people would have been the ones who were lost back in the day.
Actually it is a huge difference....