Slashdot Mirror
Could an Erasable Internet Kill Google?
zacharye writes "As Google's share price soars beyond $1,100, it seems like nothing can stop the Internet juggernaut as its land grab strategies continue to win over the eyes of its users and the wallets of its advertising clients. But an analysis published over this past weekend raises an interesting question surrounding a new business model that could someday lead to Google's downfall. Do we want an erasable Internet?"
Because the odds of me getting super powers and destroying Google are the same as companies choosing not to store data. They will either openly admit to it like Facebook and Google, or they'll just lie and do it anyway.
See subject.
Expanding though. Erasable internet is a very very small segment of internet data traffic. The whole point of something being erasable is that is only to be seen by one particular recipient. Given we are here on Slashdot, while logged into facebook, reading our email demonstrates pretty easily that ephemeral internet activities only make a tiny percentage of the total data.
We are still going to shop, browse, email, and post. Erasable internet is irrelevant to this.
This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
With absolutely nothing pushing the pendulum in the direction of increased privacy, I'm for an erasable Internet, just because nothing else is there to push in that direction. Governments love the info. Companies love it. People don't have the power or voice to state anything. So, it is obvious when someone comes along that sort of guarantees [1] a picture will disappear, people will flock to that service en masse since they are so tired of a large, WORM database. Post a pic on FB, it is there forever. Post it on a website, reputable search engines will slurp it up. Use robots.txt and a hidden URL, it gets slurped up anyway unless there is some type of active authentication.
A company that makes a peer to peer protocol to send encrypted messages where the key comes from multiple clients (and each client will not send the piece after the expiration date) is going to make money. People do want privacy, but it so incredibly hard to get that. If I wanted to send a photo to someone, and physically travelling is out of the picture, I'd have to get with them, set up gpg, then send it via that. Or, copy it onto offline media and snail mail it. Some firm that uses decent cryptography will make a mint just assuring people that a conversation has a high chance of staying stays private and vanishing after it was done.
[1]: How long the pic really remains on the company's server is a question, but to people, it is off the record.
Honestly, I think the impact on society of governments and organizations to rewrite history or remove history from the internet is a much more frightening concept than people being able to google your name and find out you were a twerp in your younger years.
I don't think you can ask that question at all without first discussing if an "erasable internet" is even possible.
You know how data likes to be free? Well, it turns out it really enjoys being stored also.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article doesn't mention any downfall of Google. The whole idea is a false dichotomy. Why can't both types of content exists. Oh, wait, they already do.
Just because something is erasable doesn't mean it has to be erased. Most useful content wants to be found. Erasing that content would be stupid.
Google's job is to help people find that content. There is a lot of competition to be found by google. I don't see the ABILITY to erase content an issue for Google.
Just because there are types of content like snapchat that are not meant to be searchable doesn't mean the downfall of Google.
Nice idea but flawed...
Until we outlaw the NSA-Military-Corporate-Industrial Government's ability to do their "Big Data Spying" in the name of "security" no application / service will elude the rooms where they scrape your data & mail before it hits your application.
No mention of that in the article... but then you would not expect real reporting from a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch
Not true at all! Very often I'm looking for the answer to something and it was discussed in a forum back in 2007 or 2000 even... and now that human knowledge is forever passable to whoever needs it, when they need it. Humanities greatest achievement is inventing something that remembers for us. We're terrible at it.
Sure.
Can we have it?
No.
Wisdom goes that there are no stupid questions. This, however, is as close as you can get.
The horse has to actually want that themselves.
No... you can lead them to privacy; no problem.
The trouble is; Facebook built a cage around privacy, all except a small sample jar, so even if the horse wants some, (s)he's going to have great trouble contorting around the bars of the cage, just to successfully get a small sip at most.
internet is already erasable..
but what _could_ kill google would be some law that stated that you couldn't make use of caches of sites... since , uhm, that's what it would take to change the current erasable internet into even more erasable, by somehow forcing people to not keep copies.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you dry up the source of information that has allowed Google to dominate Internet search then it would hurt them financially. The biggest fear for them would be tougher privacy laws. Right now the Class Action E-Mail/Wiretapping case doesn't look too good for them so there may be some changes in the future for gmail users. The NSA fiasco with Snowden means that more people are asking pointed questions and Google and all the others who make money off of your personal data have to do a little walk on the tightrope. On one side they've pushed legislators away from enacting tougher privacy laws but now they're information has been hacked by the NSA yet they condemn that. The only reason Google exists is that it can mine information efficiently. Throw a few lawsuits and some new legislation into that mix and it suddenly gets very cloudy for them. Take a look at Google Glass for example, right now the thought of millions of people with always on cameras can become quite disturbing especially since you don't know where those images are going or what they may be used for. Sure there's the augmented reality take on it, but how will society take to it in the long run?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Google already provides this service, to the appropriate clients.
Just serach for Soros and ###ACK ###80x805 Disconnect
No brain, no pain.
If it's publicly viewable, it's archivable, which means someone will archive it, particularly if no one else is, so it's not erasable.
FB doesn't force horses into the slaughterhouse, they go willingly. That's the whole point. Privacy is available - horses are easily misled.
I don't understand all the bitchin about facebook privacy when USA still has pretty much no laws at all on personal databases and sales of them.
you want the real privacy problem? that you can't ask in usa what data a company has on you. that they don't need to publish what they do with the data. that they can sell your SSN.
yet people bitch about one single company that only has data you wanted to post for other people to see...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'.
Bullshit assumptions about "old information" being anything 3 years or older.
Exactly correct gl4ss. The only reason FB is "bad" is because of the deception around what they DO with that data people sent to it thinking ONLY THEY AND THEIR FRIENDS were getting the benefit of that information. FB wasn't forthcoming about that initially. They were deceptive slightly, mostly by omission.
But now that people KNOW about it, it's STILL HUGE. People still by the millions to billions upload their lives knowing FB uses and keeps that information forever and still "vaguely" expect privacy? It's a farce.
Yeah only 5% of people ever need to get info on stuff more than 3 years old. Most have upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 already and have left Windows Server 2008 R2. And the rest of us are using the latest Linux kernels or *BSD installs.
Seriously if Google does their job right old stuff won't appear in your results if you are searching for new stuff unless the new stuff is using the same names (in which case the person who came up with the new stuff is being stupid).
The real noise is the link spam crap. When I search for stuff I get pages with my search terms but nothing else but ads or nothing related. Or worse I get unrelated pages without my search terms at all.
Google getting unusable is because of crap like this, not because of old stuff.
Apparently you've never had to work with anything but the most recent releases of software.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Apparently you are so young you were never forced to do research for a high school or College paper without the internet. You know those books and Encyclopedias 'older than 3 years are noise and rot that nobody has any use for' yet they were available and useful for a century before the internet appeared.
What we need is Google health care. This tonsillectomy sponsored by advil.
Zoid.com
> I bet more than 95% of everything older than 3 years is noise and rot that nobody has any use for.
...
Sounds plausible. Still -- one man's junk is another man's treasure
Archive.org is invaluable for this reason alone.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
http://xkcd.com/979/ :)
Google is close to unusable unless you manually set it to show recent results. Old stuff on the internet is mostly noise and rot.
I bet more than 95% of everything older than 3 years is noise and rot that nobody has any use for.
obvious troll is obvious
"have left Windows Server 2008 R2"
Are you having a larf? Most of our systems have only just left Server 2003. At least 2008 has a functioning GUI wheras with S2012 MS wants you to manage everything remotely. A lot of our Server apps will never ever support MS Remote App managment and use a local gui to setup their config and operations. For some apps we deliberately disable remote access because of security concerns. Yeah I know that this sounds silly but these systems are used by people who are not users but abusers.
It will be 2015/16 before we go to 2012Rx if ever because of the latest MS price hike hase made us seriously consider going to RHEL. We don't use any Sharepoint, lookout or BizTalk crap on these systems.
The House Ways and Means Committee is considering making advertising non-deductable as a business expense. That would take a bite out of Google.
There are good arguments for a tax on advertising. Most Americans are "spent out"; they're spending almost everything they earn. The US personal savings rate is near an all-time low of 2%. In that situation, advertising can't create new demand. It's just a war between advertisers. So that's a good place to tax.
Get rid of Google's 20 year Usenet archive and half of their data mine is gone.
It would be an unbelievably terrible plan; but We Have The Technology to implement a fairly robust 'trusted computing' dystopian system. Contemporary consoles are already edging close to the point where you need a hardware attack to get in (which makes mass-compromises slower, more expensive, and more time consuming, unlike software hacks) and a bit of origin metadata and a default-deny policy would make 'depublishing' all material originating from traitor systems on all compliant systems quite doable.
That wouldn't prevent the existence of darknets; but it would push them well beyond the reach of Ma and Pa iPad(speaking of lockdown appliances..)
There will never be an erasable internet.
You are confusing "mostly unusable" with "mostly unusable by you. The rest of us use it every day with great success.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
"Memory" is critical to the operations of NSA in their war against United States Citizens.
Lies. They don't limit themselves to United States Citizens.
It's the free/stored dual nature of data; which can be easily proven by passing data through a very narrow slit.
Real time dynamically changing content. What I see on website X at 1:38:25 pm, is 100% differet from what you see at 1:39:25 pm
That is not realistically going to happen of course. In reality most things change on a more life-like pace that is easily archivable for anyone that cares, or even those that just collect for the sake of collection.
But even in your presented case, you don't have to archive every iteration. Just snapshots, or trends, or some kind of summary about what was and how it shifted. There is always the possibility of storing some permeable shadow of a thing, no matter how often you try to change it.
One last thought; the saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same" exists for a very valid reason...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
will there be a functioning erasable internet. At the moment, 99% - probably more - of the population do not care what data is collected about them or even that data is collected about them. Those who do care, opt out in whatever way they can. Google = internet or IE = internet are dominant thought patterns and will continue to be. Edward who? .......
If I may be so bold as to state this, calling social sciences books information is a bit of a joke in my opinion. I generally consider such books a good way to start a barbecue in fact. And actually, a lot of engineering related information on the internet is incorrect due to Arduino users making uninformed statements about mass production consumer electronics.
you can't ask in usa what data a company has on you
Of course not, that would be a breach of corporate privacy. The real privacy problem is that people are attempting to define things as private that they have already made public, also the fact that it would be difficult to function in the modern world without giving certain information to corporations and the government, eg: try buying a house or an expensive car in cash and see what happens.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
That would be right if Google was how it was at the start. However Google is not how it once was as it is no more just a search engine. However, sure the laws in a country can change. That does not stop Google from moving its will-be-"illegal" server in a country where there will be no problem.
Well I sure wouldn't mind it if Google would stop bugging me about using my real name... And no I do not want to be part of Google+ for the 10,000th time. I've already stopped using YouTube after it twice cleverly forced all of my comments to use my real name.
Stop being evil, Google.
Could a chair fucking kill Google?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
The answer: Yes, an erasable internet would kill the whole internet, of which Goolge is a part.
As it stands, the human race is the accumulation of human experiences (from our inherent interest in exploration, all the way down to what we put in our food and why). This information is integrated into the fabric of our consciousness, and when looked at from a global perspective, shows that evolution is actually going on. It's a bio-logic sense-making intelligence that needs nothing other than the human cortex (for "storage"). This kind of "memory" cannot happen in anything other than the fabric of the natural universe, AKA bio-logical beings.
But the tools of humanity, as they are, require their own "shelf" to reside. For the internet, the 'storage of data' is the very fabric of it's existence, it's "shelf" on which it resides. Like someone pointed out, looking at a forum from 13 years ago for information is the very reason for the internet. It was what everyone was excited about back in the late 80's-early 90's when we talked about what the internet is. However now since things like Facebook and twitter (or as the article talks about, Snapchat) have exposed the ridiculousness of humanity's ego, then that same ego wishes to remove the past, in order to preserve itself. This would be like removing roads because cars emit carbon that's causing global warming. Use the internet as it was originally designed or, like using any other tool incorrectly, you may break the tool, or whatever you're using the tool incorrectly on.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
This may make me sound old but before Google was around the Internet was much much smaller and search engines pretty much SUCKED. Searching was (and sometimes still is) a skill/art. Sure search engines and directories got incrementally better at first and then Google blew them all out of the water.
Feel free to use another search site. Nobody is forcing you to use Google.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Both questions are useful. The question of whether an erasable internet is desirable is a separate one. Only a complete fucking idiot, asshole, or evil fuck would think so, however. Victors already write the history books, you want them to erase history as well?
There are two positive effects which come from the internet never forgetting. One, we will learn (eventually) that things are never forgotten, and learn to act accordingly. Two, we will learn (also eventually) that we are more the same than different, and hopefully learn to act accordingly.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, because equipment you bought a year ago is garbage and needs to be thrown away and destroyed so that others do not have to suffer with it.
MOST results I am looking for are 3-5 years old, Just Tuesday I was searching and found information to make a very old USB framegrabber work under linux. I know heresy making old things work again, how dare I steal money from the corporate overlords like that....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The day browsers start bundling Ad Block by default.
OB xkcd!
There is no such thing as DRM, and apps to save "unsaveable" Snapchat images are legion.
This is a fool's quest, and whoever wrote this WSJ piece is woefully ignorant of their subject.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wrong.
Without the "old internet " hanging around, we'd all have forgotten Chris Burke's wonderful Bobcat Ranching advert.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1280423&cid=28457651
Google just puts you inside a bubble. That effectively erases the rest of the internet.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Not true at all! Very often I'm looking for the answer to something and it was discussed in a forum back in 2007 or 2000 even... and now that human knowledge is forever passable to whoever needs it, when they need it. Humanities greatest achievement is inventing something that remembers for us. We're terrible at it.
But more commonly you end up wasting an hour trying to follow some outdated or obsolete advice.
I thought most data was streamed encrypted video by now. But anyway, IRC is erasable, and I don't see IRC killing Google.
Apparently you are so young you were never forced to do research for a high school or College paper without the internet. You know those books and Encyclopedias 'older than 3 years are noise and rot that nobody has any use for' yet they were available and useful for a century before the internet appeared.
This does not address anything I wrote. Work on your reading comprehension!
Actually, back in the days that Google started, I never opted-in for any automated service to crawl and cache my site's data.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
The Recording and movie industries have spent decades trying to make an erasable Internet. In their fruitless endeavor they have been joined by countless embarrassed companies, politicians and countries. There is no such thing as an erasable Internet, and there never will be. The Internet isn't a single entity, it is an ecosystem made up of billions of parts with vastly different political, religious and personal views. None of which takes into account the crazy people, the Internet is full of crazy people, and you can't reason with them.
The article might as well be titled, Could we get rid of the tides if we didn't have a moon?
Yes, you did. You publicly posted your stuff on the internet. You opted in to EVERYONE crawling and caching your site's data. (Yes, every browser caches your site in local memory in order to render it). Google takes the high road and obeys robots.txt in case you change your mind and don't want automated crawlers to read your site. Not everyone gives you that option.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I have to agree with this poorly moderated parent.
The problem we have on the internet isn't privacy, but data longevity. It isn't that you tweeted or had an unfortunate picture posted on face book. But the fact that it just goes around and lasts forever which causes the damage.
Searching on Google for the most part you are looking for updated information about something... While there is some historical stuff for the most part you are trying to find the newest information.
Do you really need to search for setting up WinSock on windows 3.1
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The ~20% price hike did put a damper on things, but at least it is up front.
I'd definitely move any servers to RHEL [1] if given the option, but be aware it will cost about the same amount as Windows server software, especially if you use xfs in a supported manner, and you will need to pay yearly.
I agree about the remote access. The fewer ways a box can be hit by untrusted parties, the better.
Of course, W2012 and W2012R2 do bring some nice features (better filesystem and LVM replacement, deduplication, autotiering), but for an existing app server, it is highly likely it may not be worth the time to upgrade to it [2].
[1]: I'm assuming you need commercial production Linux with a support contract which makes auditors happy, and certified FIPS/Common Criteria compliance.
[2]: IMHO, "upgrading" Windows from any major rev consists of a complete box rebuild. Trying to go from W2008 to W2012 may mean leaving too much OS cruft behind which can cause issues later.
The real noise is the link spam crap. When I search for stuff I get pages with my search terms but nothing else but ads or nothing related. Or worse I get unrelated pages without my search terms at all.
It used to be you could require that results contain a term by using +"term", but it doesn't work any more.
Basically, Google is now being more "helpful" in returning results that seem to match, but don't really.
You hit the nail on the head. Where this comes into play is the criminal justice "system". Someone arrested, as soon as they are booked, the info goes into hundreds, if not thousands of separate, public databases. Even if it is a case of someone using an alias or mistaken identity, those hundreds of databases now have that info in them, and just one being wrong can hose up someone's future chances at a job forever (good luck finding which one too.)
I'm not interested in an erasable Internet. The beauty of the Internet is how it saves data, conversation, ideas across time and makes them accessible to people now and in the future. The Internet is a repository of knowledge. Sure you have to filter out garbage, but that has always been the case since we first evolved memories.
The future of the internet is everything being safely and securely stored and accessible.
It may not be pretty but the older stuff is often where the solid information is - a lot of the new stuff is noise with little long term value.
All I know is I want to leave Google as soon as possible. Bing is not an alternative and no other players seem to have the ability to compete. It's getting harder and harder to find stuff with Google search, it makes way way too many assumptions about my searches. Terms with multiple meanings are all but useless if you're not looking for the "popular" term. Image search got a lot better, then they forced people into conservative by default search. Commercial/"pretty" sites seem to have been pushed to the top instead of ones with solid information. Gmail they screwed the interface up in a big way and then added moronic features like "recent images" [faceplam]. Add to their backwards momentum on search they've been sacrificing goodwill on just about every property they have trying to push people into other crap like Google+.
Android? Forced apps like Facebook which drain the battery, lack of what I wanted from Android: openness. I don't want to have to choose between rooting my phone and keeping the warranty with my carrier.
I honestly can't think of a single Google product that I want to use or recommend to someone else - the only reason I stick with them is because there's no better alternative yet.
Is Unix Dead?
Will Martians Invade?
Is Pope Catholic?
Will Made-Ya-Look News Ever Cease
Google did not copy millions of books with little regard for the law. They were found by a court of law to have fully complied with the law. They copied millions of books *LEGALLY*. They followed copyright law. They may have gone right up to the edge of the law, but they respected it and did not cross it.
To be fair, he did say anything on the internet older than 3 years. He made no reference to printed materials.
Google is close to unusable unless you manually set it to show recent results. Old stuff on the internet is mostly noise and rot.
I bet more than 95% of everything older than 3 years is noise and rot that nobody has any use for.
Good troll there guy. It is completely fitting that anyone who is older than about 40, does not view the world through redneck sun glasses and knows their shit, can rebuke your little bit of bullshit with one fact. Kristallnacht would have needed to be postponed by Himmler and Goebbels if their little book burning experiments were not a success starting back in 1933under a thinly disguised guise of an educational undertaking. Had the peoples complacency not proved to them that the people were asleep to the real purpose of the removal and control of information by the Nazis then the NSDAP might not have even achieved complete power. Hitler would not have been successful without the manipulation of history and it might have become completely transparent to those who stopped to read some non-state approved books the real intent in controlling information before almost an entire generation of Germans joined in with the SS on a crusade to commit genocide.
AM I PISSED that people today especially in the United States are starting to fall into the same trap and think that state security can be compromised by freedom of information...YOU SHOULD BE, Snowden is correct there needs to be a separation of information and state PERIOD. If this means that some are sued or even prosecuted for hate speech or the falsification of information to manipulate the public for political gains, then this is the price we must pay for DEMOCRACY. It is a price many of our fathers and mothers paid for with their very lives, to erase the archives within the net is akin to burning books and it must be prevented.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
I don't think you can ask that question at all without first discussing if an "erasable internet" is even possible.
Snapchat proves that it's not only possible, but that it's also a rather popular idea.
Use quotes around words, or enable "verbatim results" in the options. The + thing was misunderstood and misused by most users, and they figured experts could RTFM.
Snapchat proves that it's not only possible,
You mean the one that various apps and workaround exist for to keep the supposedly deleted content?
Yeah, bonehead.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Robots.txt file does this already? Or am I mistaken?
Quotes around words doesn't guarantee you get that exact string. For example "LGA 2011" and "LGA2011" sometimes return results with the other version as the only one on the page. I think it's a "synonym" for Google, so they return both. Granted, with quotes, you get the version you type much more often than the other.
I hadn't known about "Verbatim", but it's a still a pain to have to change the results after you see them. It would be nice to have something I could type in the search box. I might be able to add "&tbs=li:1" (which enables "verbatim") to my default Firefox Google search, though.
How about starting by defining what you mean by the term "erasable internet"? It could mean LOTS of different things.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If Internet Relay Chat hasn't killed Google, how will Snapchat kill Google?
Actually, at least 99% of everything after 2000 is noise or sounds of the brain farting.
Most of the good information on the web was created prior to that time.
Many IRC channels - especially those supporting open source - are logged, published, and distributed; again not erasable there.
And many IRC channels ban publication of logs. For example, #wikipedia on Freenode has had a policy in the topic line: "public logging -> public flogging".
but you still have no guarantee that no one in the middle is not logging the data
Some chat clients support "off-the-record" messaging, which sets up a key exchange.
or that the party on the other side is not logging the (unencrypted for them) data.
Nor does Snapchat guarantee that the party on the other side hasn't wiped, unlocked, and rooted his device and isn't using a second device as a camera.
It's still scary how many of them want to use several large breadboards filled with expensive components to do things that you can do with a single operational amplifier. Also annoying is their hate for SMD components, considering those are actually easier to solder...
How do you manage to do things where the advice has mostly become outdated or obsolete in 3 years? Have you considered that maybe you focus way too much on ephemeral crap?
Welcome to the world of technology. That's how it works.
I'm not searching for how to shoe a horse. I'm looking for the best way to fix the broken glass on my phone, product reviews for holidays gifts, etc.
Have you seriously posted 6 times in this thread to say the same thing?
There are some sites that have vanished from the Internet entirely already. If way back machine didn't know about them and they're offline, it's a bitch to find any trace of them at all.
I use DuckDuckGo and Startpage mostly now for search. When I need to map directions I jump directly to google maps.