13 ms·

The End of the Internet Dream

356 points by phantom_oracle 11y ago

dang 11y ago
Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dream.html http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dre..., which points to this, which is technically a dupe (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Internet%20Dream&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Interne...) but didn't have much discussion.
sosuke 11y ago
Are there any solutions? Is it possible to create a new network? How do you champion free speech and then try to control the ugly side? I'd love to read more I guess.
- wcummings 11y ago
  Use fewer networked applications :)
- giaour 11y ago
  Encrypting everything -- HTTP traffic, email, streaming media -- is a good start.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    We need to compensate that with having accessible endpoints - otherwise it means that things like[0] won't be possible. Security can be one of the most effective enemies of the Freedom to Tinker. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165
    - knieveltech 11y ago
      Accessibility doesn't necessarily have to be the highest priority. BITD folks would jump through ludicrous numbers of hoops just to gain access to the network. Whether or not this limiting factor improved the quality of interactions online is an open question.
  - zobzu 11y ago
    When all your encrypted traffic goes through Google and Facebook, it doesn't matter. None of that encryption is end-to-end. It's all you to them. and they, have the control over it, not you.
- CookieMon 11y ago
  Perhaps such networks already exist? Should I be checking out I2P? I can't be the only one hating how our Internet "town squares" and public spaces have all become commercially owned, centralized, sanitized and surveilled, but where did the old‐guard go? SMTP mailing lists, IRC and Usenet have the decentralization down, but are beyond dated, and not a good way to interact. Anyone know where cypherpunks hang out now? Perhaps they found a place, or made one.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Mailing lists and IRC are still in good shape. I don't know about hardcore cypherpunks, but Hackerspaces tend to use both. It's not that they're not a good way to interact, it's more that the clients didn't follow with the times and didn't get all flashy and streamlined. You can use mailing lists fine even from GMail (as I do, still haven't figured out how to make it work with Emacs), but it's not so convenient as Basecamp. You can use IRC in pretty much whatever, but it's not as flashy as Slack. It used to be that you could find mailing groups and even IRC in the internal networks of companies. But sadly, there are now SaaS products targeting those, and companies are switching because get one piece of infrastructure less to maintain. Also, I think Skype and similar is what really killed IRC at work. Companies use a lot of voice communications - what used to be phone teleconferences is now VOIP - and since everyone has to have a VOIP app installed, it's easier to just use its internal group chat for communication.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Let me ask, why try to control the ugly side? Let it run just as free as the good stuff, and allow people to select what they want.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    You don't get to opt out of people falsely calling SWAT teams to your house.
    - mdpopescu 11y ago
      Maybe the problem is the existence of SWAT teams?
      - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        Seriously?
      - pjc50 11y ago
        That was an example; the general problem of people whipping up a mob, hate campaign, harrasment or slander against someone remains as something the victim cannot easily opt out of. Even if they try to go off-net completely. (Trigger-happy policing is certainly its own problem)
        mdpopescu 11y ago
        Yes; the mob mentality is unfortunately something much harder to fix than even trigger-happy governments. (I am thinking about the recent hoopla about Trump's remarks. For me, the problem isn't what HE is saying - the problem is the fact that he finds people who agree with him.)
wcummings 11y ago
I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists, and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his absence.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mhurron 11y ago
  For the government surveillance parts of the article perhaps, though lets be honest, people were saying TLA's had been watching everything you've been doing for a while before that. Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet was what people put up and more what was curated for you. The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the other monster on the wires was doing.
  - escherize 11y ago
    The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary." Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards. * One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.
  - escherize 11y ago
    The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary." Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards. * One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Great talk. I just posted the link to people who follow me on T and G+ As sosuke mentions in another comment, possible alternative mesh networks might regain some freedom and flexibility but we will all be vulnerable to embedded IoT technology that tracks us and because of laws prohibiting looking at embedded code (assuming this happens) it will be difficult for white hat privacy advocates to check the information shared out by these devices. Cars, home appliances, electronic gadgets - a lot of areas that might leak privacy.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users. And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of techies who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset and skills to pull it off.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zipwitch 11y ago
  A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
  - askafriend 11y ago
    What makes you say that the profit driven world is ending?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.
      - adventured 11y ago
        Capitalism optimizes people into the loop in fact. It pulls more people into higher standards of living, and produces more jobs for people. We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has been drastically reduced, and the global life expectancy keeps rising, and a hundred other things that prove you wrong.
obrero 11y ago
Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of Internet Service Providers, and each large (and most medium) one gave access to Usenet discussions. Then with increased monopoly and commercialization, the ISP's shut down, and Verizon and AT&T gained a duopoly over the majority of the US's wired and wireless last mile. With this accomplished, they shut down their Usenet feeds. A programmer I know calls it digging ditches with air conditioning. Programmers are wage slaves, just a slightly more exalted position than the people who come in at night to empty the waste baskets.
- afarrell 11y ago
  > programmers are wage slaves What pieces of the concept of slavery are you referring to here?
  - integraton 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
    - afarrell 11y ago
      Yes, I am familiar with the general concept of wage slavery. How does it apply to software engineers without applying to...basically anyone whose main income is not investment?
      - LesZedCB 11y ago
        Well, the honest answer is that it does apply to everybody whose main income is not investment or anybody who must remain employed in order to survive. We live in relative luxury and privilege, but many of us certainly might not work for their current company or as many hours as they do if they had the freedom not to.
      - NoGravitas 11y ago
        As LesZedCB points out, it does apply to everyone whose main income is the sale of their labor. Software engineers could be considered part of the [aristocracy of labor][0], but still part of the working class. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy
afarrell 11y ago
> • You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why. This isn't a change from the current state of things. For a hundred years, each of these decisions have been made by neural networks which we scarcely understand.
- admax88q 11y ago
  At least these are neural networks that we can hold accountable for their actions. Networks that exist in a single physical space easily detained when need be. Not to mention that they can usually explain their reasoning and behind a decision. Machine learning algorithms can't do that.
  - afarrell 11y ago
    1) Holding someone accountable isn't actually useful unless it changes behavior. 2) They can come up with an explanation, but not usually an accurate one. We are used to giving offhand answers to neurology questions because parents angrily ask them of their children all the time. But the answers we give aren't truth-seeking they are punishment-avoiding.
- kijin 11y ago
  Sure, but each of those neural networks has a face and (hopefully) a conscience. If we want to understand them better, we can ask them, sue them, pay them, shoot them, or do any of the thousands of other things we normally do with other people. Good luck doing that with the algorithm used by a Google car to determine which pedestrian to hit.
Animats 11y ago
As long as you can read ISIS's Dabiq on line [1], censorship isn't working. As long as you can read Stormfront's White Pride World Wide [2], censorship isn't working. Facebook is not the Internet, even if Zuckerberg would like it to be. [1] http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-dabiq-magazine-issue-12-just-terror.pdf http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-d... [2] https://www.stormfront.org https://www.stormfront.org
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences[0]. "The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website." As long as media won't talk about the topic, and the main avenues of discovery - Google, Facebook - won't show it to you, censorship works as intended: it removes a topic from the social conversation. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/
  - im2w1l 11y ago
    >Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences. That's because we have won a partial victory. They would very much like a total, fool-proof access limit.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      They don't care, because there's little marginal gain from improving on the results they already have. Even better, having holes in their wall helps relieve pressure. It's just like the old Sun Tzu adage about the line of retreat - you should leave one for enemy soldiers because if you encircle them completely, they'll realize they have nothing to lose and fight fiercely until they die.
loginusername 11y ago
"People are sick and tired of crappy software." Hallelujah.
- cageface 11y ago
  But they also complain about paying a dollar for an app. They get exactly what they are willing to pay for.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    But also, there aren't many 30 dollars apps worth buying! It's a weird deadlock. Most app are either crap and free with ads, crap and "free" w/ in-app payments, crap and for $1 or crap and terribly overpriced. For some weird reason, there's little of good development going on.
    - ryandrake 11y ago
      The weird reason is that customers are totally fine with buying and using crap. Until that changes, there will be no incentive for doing good development.
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Customers are buying what's available. It's a feedback loop, but one that's sadly hard to break on the buyer side.
      - loginusername 11y ago
        Yes.
  - zobzu 11y ago
    What's a, say, 200 USD app or OS that isn't pretty shitty? There aren't many. In fact, I can't mention one on the post. I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you, show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.
natrius 11y ago
This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things. To fight this, we tried federation. We tried building social systems that allowed people to choose their own provider but participate in the same network, but federation hasn't worked since email. If you take a long look at email, you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems. The design-test-iterate loop that design thinkers use to build products people want doesn't work when the rest of the federated providers don't keep up, and they never do. Where federation failed, I believe decentralization will succeed. There is an honest-to-god renaissance happening right now in decentralized systems, and the tools to continue the internet dream are reaching maturity. Core to this renaissance is our new ability to use blockchains to establish universal cryptographic identities with no intermediary—no federated server to hold back the tide of progress. When you want new features, you don't switch servers, you switch clients. They all speak the same peer-to-peer protocol using the same portable, blockchain-based identities. This has a very useful side-effect: systems that don't rely on servers never shut down as long as people keep using them. Decentralized systems are forces of nature. This combination makes network effects a public good. Second place companies in network effect industries today have their own private networks that just aren't as useful. It is in their best interest to make their networks as large as possible, and treating the decentralized network as part or all of their network achieves that. It creates a network used by all the competitors who aren't in first place, even as those competitors die off. I think the immortal network used by competitors will over time become as large as the front-runner's. At equal size, the open network is more valuable than the closed one—the open one can be built wholesale into any other product that benefits from it. If you want, you can use a ride-hailing app that uses your social network connections to share rides with friends of friends instead of complete strangers, and anyone can build that app when the ride-hailing and social networks are decentralized. When our industry gets great at creating decentralized application protocols, it will no longer be feasible to build a business on privately controlled network effects. It's not a defensible business anymore. Users will be able to choose which clients they use instead of being forced to sacrifice their data to a company to benefit from its network. The internet dream is back, y'all. If you want to help rebuild it, come join the folks using Ethereum, IPFS, and related protocols to build networks we can't control.
beatpanda 11y ago
You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers already have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control over what we are building.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad? And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers' union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since it employs thousands of people.
  - beatpanda 11y ago
    Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to begin with. But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services for free to people who need it but can't pay?
    - Margh 11y ago
      I really like this idea. Without knowing too much about bar associations I feel like a programmer association with a code of ethics similar to the ABA model rules (perhaps including the Six Fixes[0]) would be a great start to reining in privacy violations. I immediately see that it would need to be government mandated for it to have any effect, and given that many governments routinely violate these terms I don't know how it could be enforced. [0] - http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html
austerity 11y ago
Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems even the present day primitive AI would be much smarter and more flexible. The reason of course is not that people are dumb or mean, but that they are driven by incentives and incentives in these positions are never right. Machines on the other hand are not afraid to lose their job and are (potentially) capable of much deeper and broader analysis of any situation than humans while simultaneously being less prone to error.
- kijin 11y ago
  It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either. With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks. With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design. The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases. Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that underlie its design. Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away, and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst, with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.
  - qznc 11y ago
necessity 11y ago
Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience. Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business? We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others! This is ridiculous. Relevant: https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm this time and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it: "Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum." She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of "being statistically underrepresented".
  - kristofferR 11y ago
    Yeah, that the patriachy keeps women from being properly socially inept is basically what the author is implying.
  - tzs 11y ago
    Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population. I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic? Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are disproportionate among security experts when compared to their prevalence in a group drawn from the general population with the same gender statistics as security experts, then a possibility to consider is that whatever it is about males that makes them more likely to be autistic might also be something that makes males more likely to be interested in hacking. That would fit with Asperger's view that autism was at the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness".
Decade 11y ago
As a lawyer, I don't think Granick appreciates just how the Internet has become a realm of haves and have-nots. She talks about right to tinker and end-to-end communications. Back in the 90s, I played with HTTP and SMTP services on my Mac. It was just install a program and go. No root permissions for special ports. No configuring port forwarding, because even on dial-up I had a global IP address. And HTTP was a simple text protocol. Network protocols these days are so complex, I don't know how kids learn how they work. One essential component is IPv6. I perceived that centralized control would be a problem as soon as I heard about how NAT works, but short-term costs have kept IPv6 inaccessible. This is an immense frustration.
- parasubvert 11y ago
  I grew up through the 80s and 90s too and I'm not sure why you're that concerned: - we mainly all still have global IP access on our broadband - HTTP and SMTP are still fundamentally text even if you need TLS (just need the key to be able to read it) - HTTP/2 has clear semantics that can make it look like text with a simple script - NAT is annoying and yet essential ; it will be in an IPv6 world too. the dream of everything having a public IPv6 address was always unlikely precisely because people want privacy for their devices, a (misplaced?) belief they're one step off the grid. I suspect the work we are seeing with cloud technology around automated dynamic provisioning of firewall & routing will make its way into consumer edge routers and ISPs some day when the right app is there. Tinkerers always find a way.
pspace 11y ago
The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in. Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented. Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.
- eggie 11y ago
  > Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. If you want to work for an open internet, this is the key thing. For open to be the default, it should be dramatically easier to implement a new thing using p2p or on a blockchain than with centralized services.
  - mtgx 11y ago
    Not just easier, but preferable. When big companies (or rather new companies that can get big, as the old ones probably won't change anyway) start preferring P2P infrastructure to conduct their business and offer their services, we'll know there's no going back from a decentralized Internet.
- k__ 11y ago
  If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web". But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance behind them.
pspace 11y ago
The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in. Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented. Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.
tajen 11y ago
"At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs" Hence what? In France prison population is 96.5% male. Does it prove sexism? That's it, I quit reading women, they can't write without pulling the cover to themselves.
- chippy 11y ago
  You know I read that paragraph expect to cringe at any implied reasons, but there were none. In fact, if you read the previous paragraphs, the author states that the tech community is very inclusive of difference - it's really not an issue. To me these paragraphs together indicate that it's not a tech problem that there are less women in the industry, but rather a wider societal issue. The tech community is welcoming and inclusive and tolerant of diversity. Any supposed lack in numbers of women in tech does not prove the opposite.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
I don't buy it. First off, there's always a tendency to overplay the negative aspects of the present while dismissing the positive aspects and to treat the past with excess nostalgia. Moreover, it's very difficult for most people to grasp the significance and degree of major changes in society, culture, and the economy on short time scales while immersed in it. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and while there are certainly many negative developments that have happened along the way there have also been many positive ones. I would not at all characterize the modern internet as heading toward less freedom, not at all. My impression is that far more people are far more aware of issues of injustice and oppression today than was previously the case. It used to be that only a tiny sliver of "radicals" were really clued into those issues, and many of them also adhered to one or another nonsensical conspiracy theory to boot, which weakened their cases when it came to appealing to the modern world. Today I see growing kernels of increasingly less marginalized and increasingly more powerful people who have been educating themselves, participating in the conversation, and speaking out. No it's not perfect, and it's not happening absent a lot of the revelation of lots of repugnant behavior. And it's also happening seemingly very, very slowly. But my perception is that the trend is for the most part in the right direction and strong. Giving up is the only sure way to lose at this point. The bulk of this article seems to be completely out of touch with the way people have been using the internet, especially younger people. It's not becoming more TV-like, it's becoming more interactive and participatory. It's not retaining existing power structures. That only appears to be the case when you look at bullshit measurements based on bogus statistics like paper valuations and user counts. The reality is that the real power is in the people. In the content creators, in the groups, in the social networks themselves. The value layered on top of that or spread in-between to facilitate it is fragile and small by comparison. It's the same as in Silicon Valley. Having a billion dollar valuation doesn't mean your company is powerful or secure any more than having a billion users does. And it doesn't. I predict that within the next 5 or perhaps 10 years there will be another great shift and "implosion" of one of the current major "internet powers". Perhaps facebook, or youtube, perhaps even google or amazon. I don't think people understand the mobility of the modern technological market. You do not own users or customers, you retain them through superior service. It will probably shock people who vulnerable these mega-corps are to disruption, and once one of these big shifts happens once you are going to see a crapton of bloviation from the chattering classes about how absolutely unpredictable and ground-breaking the whole thing is, but it means nothing more than that they haven't been paying attention.
ivanca 11y ago
Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the "internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of lonely male teenager messing with computers is silly but it IS based on real life mostly because men are more likely to be loners who seek refuegee in things like tech, D&D and such "hobbies". And nobody would care for diversity if this particula hobby (tech) weren't the one shaping the world.
- ivanca 11y ago
  related: https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754 https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754
randomname2 11y ago
Are any politicians explicitly defending the kind of Internet/technology-related civil liberties mentioned in the article? The ones that are often written about are Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), Amash (R), Massie (R), any others?
- zby 11y ago
  Look up Pirate Party.
Paul_S 11y ago
Back in the 80s on BBSes and 90s on usergroups and finally the Internet a bunch of techies did whatever they wanted and normal people didn't get anything. Now they're getting more than any of us got back then and we're not standing still either, it's just moved on from the web. The Internet dream is alive and is evolving and whilst the original manifesto sounds a bit childish to me nowadays it's still part of what drives us. Wherever the mainstream catches up so do the old hierarchies and we move on.
rayiner 11y ago
The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other facets of life in order to meet social priorities.
danr4 11y ago
The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and encryption. When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like. The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible until someone forms a "Digital Country" - a territory with 'open source' government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow the above to really happen.
oneJob 11y ago
During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non-paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point. In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says, "It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics. Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it, makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become foundational. Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches. Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product, and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is libertarian or not participating in politics. We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic. Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.
Loic 11y ago
The best example that the Internet Dream as she sees it is near the end, she published her essay on medium.com instead of using her own system.
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
Sadly, we can't go back. But we can go a different route. Would love to see mesh technologies get dirt cheep so we could stick nodes everywhere. Develop a new internet such that nobody would be in control.
surge 11y ago
Right now the biggest threat I find is the lack of options in terms of ISP for most people, and somewhat mass surveillance which will likely be used for profit rather than prevention of illegal activity. ISP's that are creating arbitrary data caps, filtering/throttling or modifying content as it comes in, and little is being done by the FCC to stop it, these are the most dangerous trends. Beyond that encryption, etc has allowed us more freedom.
zby 11y ago
http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt - some more technical analysis on what can be done Another interesting site here is http://citizenlab.org/ http://citizenlab.org/ and the idea of 'distributed security' they champion.
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EvanPlaice 11y ago
Yay! More click bait-y doom-and-gloom nonsense from Medium.com. /s Seriously, what's the deal with these poor quality posts and why do they float so high in the Hacker News rankings? Aside: The same can be said for posts linking to theguardian lately. The internet dream is far from dead. Despite numerous setbacks surrounding lack of security/privacy, new standards/practices are being introduced to fix the issues. The whole personal computer ecosystem that used to be dominated by vendor-monopolized platforms have continually become more open and flexible over time. The flexibility to share data and services across the web in a standardized manner has never been better. 10 years ago, tools like Zapier that thrive in the ecosystem of openness never would have been possible. There are public APIs and microservices for anything and everything nowadays. The developer tools and platforms are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Data silos are crumbling. Patent/copyright trolls are getting paid their due. Sources of very high quality educational materials are abundant and free. etc... We live in truly exceptional times.

356 points by phantom_oracle 11y ago

dang 11y ago

Url changed from http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dream.html http://boingboing.net/2015/08/18/the-end-of-the-internet-dre..., which points to this, which is technically a dupe (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Internet%20Dream&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20End%20of%20the%20Interne...) but didn't have much discussion.

sosuke 11y ago

Are there any solutions? Is it possible to create a new network? How do you champion free speech and then try to control the ugly side? I'd love to read more I guess.

wcummings 11y ago
Use fewer networked applications :)
giaour 11y ago
Encrypting everything -- HTTP traffic, email, streaming media -- is a good start.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  We need to compensate that with having accessible endpoints - otherwise it means that things like[0] won't be possible. Security can be one of the most effective enemies of the Freedom to Tinker. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10609165
  - knieveltech 11y ago
    Accessibility doesn't necessarily have to be the highest priority. BITD folks would jump through ludicrous numbers of hoops just to gain access to the network. Whether or not this limiting factor improved the quality of interactions online is an open question.
- zobzu 11y ago
  When all your encrypted traffic goes through Google and Facebook, it doesn't matter. None of that encryption is end-to-end. It's all you to them. and they, have the control over it, not you.
CookieMon 11y ago
Perhaps such networks already exist? Should I be checking out I2P? I can't be the only one hating how our Internet "town squares" and public spaces have all become commercially owned, centralized, sanitized and surveilled, but where did the old‐guard go? SMTP mailing lists, IRC and Usenet have the decentralization down, but are beyond dated, and not a good way to interact. Anyone know where cypherpunks hang out now? Perhaps they found a place, or made one.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Mailing lists and IRC are still in good shape. I don't know about hardcore cypherpunks, but Hackerspaces tend to use both. It's not that they're not a good way to interact, it's more that the clients didn't follow with the times and didn't get all flashy and streamlined. You can use mailing lists fine even from GMail (as I do, still haven't figured out how to make it work with Emacs), but it's not so convenient as Basecamp. You can use IRC in pretty much whatever, but it's not as flashy as Slack. It used to be that you could find mailing groups and even IRC in the internal networks of companies. But sadly, there are now SaaS products targeting those, and companies are switching because get one piece of infrastructure less to maintain. Also, I think Skype and similar is what really killed IRC at work. Companies use a lot of voice communications - what used to be phone teleconferences is now VOIP - and since everyone has to have a VOIP app installed, it's easier to just use its internal group chat for communication.
scurvy 11y ago
Let me ask, why try to control the ugly side? Let it run just as free as the good stuff, and allow people to select what they want.
- pjc50 11y ago
  You don't get to opt out of people falsely calling SWAT teams to your house.
  - mdpopescu 11y ago
    Maybe the problem is the existence of SWAT teams?
    - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
      Seriously?
    - pjc50 11y ago
      That was an example; the general problem of people whipping up a mob, hate campaign, harrasment or slander against someone remains as something the victim cannot easily opt out of. Even if they try to go off-net completely. (Trigger-happy policing is certainly its own problem)
      - mdpopescu 11y ago
        Yes; the mob mentality is unfortunately something much harder to fix than even trigger-happy governments. (I am thinking about the recent hoopla about Trump's remarks. For me, the problem isn't what HE is saying - the problem is the fact that he finds people who agree with him.)

wcummings 11y ago

I think Snowden's disclosures were a loss of innocence for many technologists, and this reflects that. I can't imagine this would have been written in his absence.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mhurron 11y ago
For the government surveillance parts of the article perhaps, though lets be honest, people were saying TLA's had been watching everything you've been doing for a while before that. Another large part of the article is corporate control of the internet and that was a problem long before Snowden. That corporations would control the world and use the internet to create a Shadowrun type world was again something people had been warning about as less of the content on the internet was what people put up and more what was curated for you. The end of the internet as a place for free expression is being driven in large part by the type of people that frequent this site. They're here to make money, a lot of it. And they're going to do what they can to lock you into their way of presenting things to make it very difficult for you to use another basically identical service. They're going to lock you in with your own data, sell it back to you and package you up to sell to others. The death of the internet began long before Edward Snowden showed the world what the other monster on the wires was doing.
- escherize 11y ago
  The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary." Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards. * One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.
- escherize 11y ago
  The point about many people's knowledge of the surveillance is not a good one. It's a different situation when the details are known. The battle ground in the war of ideas shifts from "that doesn't really exist" to "here's why it's nessicary." Again, these evil corporations can only exist when they serve a need. If normal people actually cared about an open internet, they could (usually)* switch service providers to one that is more amenable to open standards. * One example where people can't switch is in the US, Comcast bribes the government to enforce its monopoly.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Great talk. I just posted the link to people who follow me on T and G+ As sosuke mentions in another comment, possible alternative mesh networks might regain some freedom and flexibility but we will all be vulnerable to embedded IoT technology that tracks us and because of laws prohibiting looking at embedded code (assuming this happens) it will be difficult for white hat privacy advocates to check the information shared out by these devices. Cars, home appliances, electronic gadgets - a lot of areas that might leak privacy.

TeMPOraL 11y ago

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods by torpedoing the insane ideas our managers and bosses have. I tried, and it's hard, and unless it's a collective action your boss won't listen to a lone techie telling him that this business idea of his is actually socially destructive and is abusing the users. And that even doesn't begin to solve the problems of techies who went over to the dark side, who have both the profit-at-all-costs mindset and skills to pull it off.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
zipwitch 11y ago
A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
- askafriend 11y ago
  What makes you say that the profit driven world is ending?
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I'd say it's collapsing on itself. It's trying to optimize people out of the loop, but is not yet able to sustain itself without humans. Nor will the humans lay down and die without giving a fight.
    - adventured 11y ago
      Capitalism optimizes people into the loop in fact. It pulls more people into higher standards of living, and produces more jobs for people. We have four billion more people than 50 years ago, and more people have jobs today globally than at any other time in history, and less people are in poverty, and there's more food available for everyone, and famines are almost non-existent, and the infant mortality rate has been drastically reduced, and the global life expectancy keeps rising, and a hundred other things that prove you wrong.

obrero 11y ago

Twenty years ago, there were hundreds of Internet Service Providers, and each large (and most medium) one gave access to Usenet discussions. Then with increased monopoly and commercialization, the ISP's shut down, and Verizon and AT&T gained a duopoly over the majority of the US's wired and wireless last mile. With this accomplished, they shut down their Usenet feeds. A programmer I know calls it digging ditches with air conditioning. Programmers are wage slaves, just a slightly more exalted position than the people who come in at night to empty the waste baskets.

afarrell 11y ago
> programmers are wage slaves What pieces of the concept of slavery are you referring to here?
- integraton 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
  - afarrell 11y ago
    Yes, I am familiar with the general concept of wage slavery. How does it apply to software engineers without applying to...basically anyone whose main income is not investment?
    - LesZedCB 11y ago
      Well, the honest answer is that it does apply to everybody whose main income is not investment or anybody who must remain employed in order to survive. We live in relative luxury and privilege, but many of us certainly might not work for their current company or as many hours as they do if they had the freedom not to.
    - NoGravitas 11y ago
      As LesZedCB points out, it does apply to everyone whose main income is the sale of their labor. Software engineers could be considered part of the [aristocracy of labor][0], but still part of the working class. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_aristocracy

afarrell 11y ago

> • You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you. Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no human will really be able to understand why. This isn't a change from the current state of things. For a hundred years, each of these decisions have been made by neural networks which we scarcely understand.

admax88q 11y ago
At least these are neural networks that we can hold accountable for their actions. Networks that exist in a single physical space easily detained when need be. Not to mention that they can usually explain their reasoning and behind a decision. Machine learning algorithms can't do that.
- afarrell 11y ago
  1) Holding someone accountable isn't actually useful unless it changes behavior. 2) They can come up with an explanation, but not usually an accurate one. We are used to giving offhand answers to neurology questions because parents angrily ask them of their children all the time. But the answers we give aren't truth-seeking they are punishment-avoiding.
kijin 11y ago
Sure, but each of those neural networks has a face and (hopefully) a conscience. If we want to understand them better, we can ask them, sue them, pay them, shoot them, or do any of the thousands of other things we normally do with other people. Good luck doing that with the algorithm used by a Google car to determine which pedestrian to hit.

Animats 11y ago

As long as you can read ISIS's Dabiq on line [1], censorship isn't working. As long as you can read Stormfront's White Pride World Wide [2], censorship isn't working. Facebook is not the Internet, even if Zuckerberg would like it to be. [1] http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-dabiq-magazine-issue-12-just-terror.pdf http://www.clarionproject.org/docs/islamic-state-isis-isil-d... [2] https://www.stormfront.org https://www.stormfront.org

TeMPOraL 11y ago
Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences[0]. "The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website." As long as media won't talk about the topic, and the main avenues of discovery - Google, Facebook - won't show it to you, censorship works as intended: it removes a topic from the social conversation. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/
- im2w1l 11y ago
  >Censorship isn't about total, fool-proof access limits. It's about trivial inconveniences. That's because we have won a partial victory. They would very much like a total, fool-proof access limit.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    They don't care, because there's little marginal gain from improving on the results they already have. Even better, having holes in their wall helps relieve pressure. It's just like the old Sun Tzu adage about the line of retreat - you should leave one for enemy soldiers because if you encircle them completely, they'll realize they have nothing to lose and fight fiercely until they die.

loginusername 11y ago

"People are sick and tired of crappy software." Hallelujah.

cageface 11y ago
But they also complain about paying a dollar for an app. They get exactly what they are willing to pay for.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  But also, there aren't many 30 dollars apps worth buying! It's a weird deadlock. Most app are either crap and free with ads, crap and "free" w/ in-app payments, crap and for $1 or crap and terribly overpriced. For some weird reason, there's little of good development going on.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    The weird reason is that customers are totally fine with buying and using crap. Until that changes, there will be no incentive for doing good development.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Customers are buying what's available. It's a feedback loop, but one that's sadly hard to break on the buyer side.
    - loginusername 11y ago
      Yes.
- zobzu 11y ago
  What's a, say, 200 USD app or OS that isn't pretty shitty? There aren't many. In fact, I can't mention one on the post. I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you, show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.

natrius 11y ago

This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things. To fight this, we tried federation. We tried building social systems that allowed people to choose their own provider but participate in the same network, but federation hasn't worked since email. If you take a long look at email, you'll see why: federated systems can't keep up with the pace of evolution that we see in successful social systems. The design-test-iterate loop that design thinkers use to build products people want doesn't work when the rest of the federated providers don't keep up, and they never do. Where federation failed, I believe decentralization will succeed. There is an honest-to-god renaissance happening right now in decentralized systems, and the tools to continue the internet dream are reaching maturity. Core to this renaissance is our new ability to use blockchains to establish universal cryptographic identities with no intermediary—no federated server to hold back the tide of progress. When you want new features, you don't switch servers, you switch clients. They all speak the same peer-to-peer protocol using the same portable, blockchain-based identities. This has a very useful side-effect: systems that don't rely on servers never shut down as long as people keep using them. Decentralized systems are forces of nature. This combination makes network effects a public good. Second place companies in network effect industries today have their own private networks that just aren't as useful. It is in their best interest to make their networks as large as possible, and treating the decentralized network as part or all of their network achieves that. It creates a network used by all the competitors who aren't in first place, even as those competitors die off. I think the immortal network used by competitors will over time become as large as the front-runner's. At equal size, the open network is more valuable than the closed one—the open one can be built wholesale into any other product that benefits from it. If you want, you can use a ride-hailing app that uses your social network connections to share rides with friends of friends instead of complete strangers, and anyone can build that app when the ride-hailing and social networks are decentralized. When our industry gets great at creating decentralized application protocols, it will no longer be feasible to build a business on privately controlled network effects. It's not a defensible business anymore. Users will be able to choose which clients they use instead of being forced to sacrifice their data to a company to benefit from its network. The internet dream is back, y'all. If you want to help rebuild it, come join the folks using Ethereum, IPFS, and related protocols to build networks we can't control.

beatpanda 11y ago

You know, one way out of building an internet none of us actually wants just because the people with the money tell us to is to organize as a union. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of leverage software engineers already have, as evidenced by the wages and benefits that are standard in this industry, that we nevertheless refuse to use to try to exert some control over what we are building.

mbrock 11y ago
Wouldn't "we" be more likely to unionize if our wages were bad? And are unions good at this stuff? Here in Sweden, they seem to be mostly aligned with the industrial profit motive. For example, the big metal workers' union supported extending our large arms export deal with Saudi Arabia, since it employs thousands of people.
- beatpanda 11y ago
  Yes, historically unions don't get organuzed unless conditions are bad to begin with. But look, what if we just didn't use the word "union"? What if we were talking about a professional organization like the bar association that set standards of what its members can and can't do, what is and is not ethical work? That set certain expectations of providing your otherwise very expensive services for free to people who need it but can't pay?
  - Margh 11y ago
    I really like this idea. Without knowing too much about bar associations I feel like a programmer association with a code of ethics similar to the ABA model rules (perhaps including the Six Fixes[0]) would be a great start to reining in privacy violations. I immediately see that it would need to be government mandated for it to have any effect, and given that many governments routinely violate these terms I don't know how it could be enforced. [0] - http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html http://idlewords.com/six_fixes.html

austerity 11y ago

Good article. However I don't understand why so many smart people fear decision-making machines. In my experience the decision makers in bureaucracies, government and private alike, never ever show the "humanity" ascribed to them in arguments about this issue. Instead they follow their instruction (which is actually a program written in human language) to the letter and are usually so obtuse and unempathetic it seems even the present day primitive AI would be much smarter and more flexible. The reason of course is not that people are dumb or mean, but that they are driven by incentives and incentives in these positions are never right. Machines on the other hand are not afraid to lose their job and are (potentially) capable of much deeper and broader analysis of any situation than humans while simultaneously being less prone to error.

kijin 11y ago
It is difficult for a machine to be accountable for its decisions. It's not as simple as holding the manufacturer responsible, either. With human decision-makers, at least you have a bunch of douchebags that you can point your fingers at and attach epithets like "obtuse and unempathetic". And we can hope that if we collectively do something, we'll be able to replace them with less dysfunctional folks. With complex decision-making machines, it's not even clear whether a subtle bias it exhibits in its decisions is a sign of a bug or intentional design. The machine, of course, is capable of deep and broad analysis, but only of data that some group of engineers decided would be appropriate for it to analyze, using algorithms that were probably hand-tweaked by another group of engineers with their own individual quirks and unconscious biases. Even the idea that a machine can be "smart" or "flexible" is based on a particular definition of "smart" and "flexible" that other people might strongly disagree with. And yet the machine presents an image of perfect objectivity, and its complexity makes it nearly impossible for outsiders to figure out exactly who or what is responsible for the many assumptions that underlie its design. Moreover, the possibility of losing one's job is prettty much the only thing that keeps human decision-makers accountable in this world. Take that away, and we've got a benevolent dictator at best and a mechanical tyrant at worst, with the exact same quirks and biases, only hidden better.
- qznc 11y ago

necessity 11y ago

Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience. Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business? We MUST to do something about this! People of a certain gender cannot prefer some activities over others! This is ridiculous. Relevant: https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s https://youtu.be/ENL-Jv8GVkk#t=29m15s

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm this time and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it: "Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum." She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of "being statistically underrepresented".
- kristofferR 11y ago
  Yeah, that the patriachy keeps women from being properly socially inept is basically what the author is implying.
- tzs 11y ago
  Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population. I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic? Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are disproportionate among security experts when compared to their prevalence in a group drawn from the general population with the same gender statistics as security experts, then a possibility to consider is that whatever it is about males that makes them more likely to be autistic might also be something that makes males more likely to be interested in hacking. That would fit with Asperger's view that autism was at the extreme end of a spectrum of behaviors normally associated with "maleness".

Decade 11y ago

As a lawyer, I don't think Granick appreciates just how the Internet has become a realm of haves and have-nots. She talks about right to tinker and end-to-end communications. Back in the 90s, I played with HTTP and SMTP services on my Mac. It was just install a program and go. No root permissions for special ports. No configuring port forwarding, because even on dial-up I had a global IP address. And HTTP was a simple text protocol. Network protocols these days are so complex, I don't know how kids learn how they work. One essential component is IPv6. I perceived that centralized control would be a problem as soon as I heard about how NAT works, but short-term costs have kept IPv6 inaccessible. This is an immense frustration.

parasubvert 11y ago
I grew up through the 80s and 90s too and I'm not sure why you're that concerned: - we mainly all still have global IP access on our broadband - HTTP and SMTP are still fundamentally text even if you need TLS (just need the key to be able to read it) - HTTP/2 has clear semantics that can make it look like text with a simple script - NAT is annoying and yet essential ; it will be in an IPv6 world too. the dream of everything having a public IPv6 address was always unlikely precisely because people want privacy for their devices, a (misplaced?) belief they're one step off the grid. I suspect the work we are seeing with cloud technology around automated dynamic provisioning of firewall & routing will make its way into consumer edge routers and ISPs some day when the right app is there. Tinkerers always find a way.

pspace 11y ago

The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing. In fact, this is a problem because the quality of participation is diminishing as EVERYONE jumps in. Existing power structures are not being retained. As the internet enters the equation new laws are being put into place. Look at Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The only difference in how they are regulated is basically because they are internet oriented. Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. We got this ;) Stay vigilant friends.

eggie 11y ago
> Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. If you want to work for an open internet, this is the key thing. For open to be the default, it should be dramatically easier to implement a new thing using p2p or on a blockchain than with centralized services.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Not just easier, but preferable. When big companies (or rather new companies that can get big, as the old ones probably won't change anyway) start preferring P2P infrastructure to conduct their business and offer their services, we'll know there's no going back from a decentralized Internet.
k__ 11y ago
If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web". But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance behind them.

pspace 11y ago

tajen 11y ago

"At Google, women make up 30 percent of the company’s overall workforce, but hold only 17 percent of the company’s tech jobs" Hence what? In France prison population is 96.5% male. Does it prove sexism? That's it, I quit reading women, they can't write without pulling the cover to themselves.

chippy 11y ago
You know I read that paragraph expect to cringe at any implied reasons, but there were none. In fact, if you read the previous paragraphs, the author states that the tech community is very inclusive of difference - it's really not an issue. To me these paragraphs together indicate that it's not a tech problem that there are less women in the industry, but rather a wider societal issue. The tech community is welcoming and inclusive and tolerant of diversity. Any supposed lack in numbers of women in tech does not prove the opposite.

InclinedPlane 11y ago

I don't buy it. First off, there's always a tendency to overplay the negative aspects of the present while dismissing the positive aspects and to treat the past with excess nostalgia. Moreover, it's very difficult for most people to grasp the significance and degree of major changes in society, culture, and the economy on short time scales while immersed in it. I've been using the internet for more than 20 years and while there are certainly many negative developments that have happened along the way there have also been many positive ones. I would not at all characterize the modern internet as heading toward less freedom, not at all. My impression is that far more people are far more aware of issues of injustice and oppression today than was previously the case. It used to be that only a tiny sliver of "radicals" were really clued into those issues, and many of them also adhered to one or another nonsensical conspiracy theory to boot, which weakened their cases when it came to appealing to the modern world. Today I see growing kernels of increasingly less marginalized and increasingly more powerful people who have been educating themselves, participating in the conversation, and speaking out. No it's not perfect, and it's not happening absent a lot of the revelation of lots of repugnant behavior. And it's also happening seemingly very, very slowly. But my perception is that the trend is for the most part in the right direction and strong. Giving up is the only sure way to lose at this point. The bulk of this article seems to be completely out of touch with the way people have been using the internet, especially younger people. It's not becoming more TV-like, it's becoming more interactive and participatory. It's not retaining existing power structures. That only appears to be the case when you look at bullshit measurements based on bogus statistics like paper valuations and user counts. The reality is that the real power is in the people. In the content creators, in the groups, in the social networks themselves. The value layered on top of that or spread in-between to facilitate it is fragile and small by comparison. It's the same as in Silicon Valley. Having a billion dollar valuation doesn't mean your company is powerful or secure any more than having a billion users does. And it doesn't. I predict that within the next 5 or perhaps 10 years there will be another great shift and "implosion" of one of the current major "internet powers". Perhaps facebook, or youtube, perhaps even google or amazon. I don't think people understand the mobility of the modern technological market. You do not own users or customers, you retain them through superior service. It will probably shock people who vulnerable these mega-corps are to disruption, and once one of these big shifts happens once you are going to see a crapton of bloviation from the chattering classes about how absolutely unpredictable and ground-breaking the whole thing is, but it means nothing more than that they haven't been paying attention.

ivanca 11y ago

Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the "internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of lonely male teenager messing with computers is silly but it IS based on real life mostly because men are more likely to be loners who seek refuegee in things like tech, D&D and such "hobbies". And nobody would care for diversity if this particula hobby (tech) weren't the one shaping the world.

ivanca 11y ago
related: https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754 https://twitter.com/NinjaEconomics/status/662419805509578754

randomname2 11y ago

Are any politicians explicitly defending the kind of Internet/technology-related civil liberties mentioned in the article? The ones that are often written about are Wyden (D), Rand Paul (R), Amash (R), Massie (R), any others?

zby 11y ago
Look up Pirate Party.

Paul_S 11y ago

Back in the 80s on BBSes and 90s on usergroups and finally the Internet a bunch of techies did whatever they wanted and normal people didn't get anything. Now they're getting more than any of us got back then and we're not standing still either, it's just moved on from the web. The Internet dream is alive and is evolving and whilst the original manifesto sounds a bit childish to me nowadays it's still part of what drives us. Wherever the mainstream catches up so do the old hierarchies and we move on.

rayiner 11y ago

The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other facets of life in order to meet social priorities.

danr4 11y ago

The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and encryption. When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like. The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible until someone forms a "Digital Country" - a territory with 'open source' government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow the above to really happen.

oneJob 11y ago

During the period being discussed, the constituency of the communities participating in the Internet has completely changed. The percentage of non-paid contributors has drastically declined; the percentage of professional contributors has drastically increased. The percentage of active or contributing participants has greatly declined; the percentage of passive or consumer participants has greatly increased. The norms, laws, and conventions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats and less and less by community members. The majority of interaction and activity on the Internet is now mediated and tracked by commercial interests. Even if you disagree with one or two of my points, I think you'll grant me the general point. In a strange twist on things, where in the traditional body-politic one says, "It's the economy stupid", in Internet-politics it's actually the politics. Who participates. What are the power relations. Who makes the laws or enforces the norms. I think this is because, where as in traditional economies money and goods are scarce and so we must have a healthy economy to eat and have shelter, in the information economy scarcity is fast becoming a thing of the past and so a democracy is being replaced by a do-ocracy. Whoever builds it, makes the rules. The law is always two steps behind. So as corporations and governments increasingly hire and direct all the professionals and bureaucrats that produce the Internet, it is created in their likeness or in their interest. So participation, power dynamics, and participant empowerment become foundational. Unfortunately, the tech industry often superficially dismisses traditional politics. When it does engage it often claims the ideology of libertarian or plays the part of technocrat, seeking purely utilitarian approaches. Libertarianism, you'll please forgive me for phrasing it this way, is rather sophomoric. It's rather like that guy in college that had the Che Guevara t-shirt, but really didn't know what it was all about. Like it or not, we're in a highly coordinated, interconnected, interdependent society, and just as fully realized communism was a very romantic notion but would never get the job done, libertarianism just won't get the job done. We need each other, and we need participation from each other. And this is, in a nutshell, a political issue. Technological, disruptive, efficient "solutions" will not solve this problem. Or worse, the tech industry might engage purely to satisfy its commercial interests. Think about the idea that, a start-up creates a product, and then hires lawyers to "legalize it". Then the start-up claims that it is libertarian or not participating in politics. We need the equivalent of "The Federalist Papers" for our time. Something contemporary, but grounded in history. Something academic, but pragmatic. Something plain spoken, but inspiring. Instead, we've created the TPP.

Loic 11y ago

The best example that the Internet Dream as she sees it is near the end, she published her essay on medium.com instead of using her own system.

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

Sadly, we can't go back. But we can go a different route. Would love to see mesh technologies get dirt cheep so we could stick nodes everywhere. Develop a new internet such that nobody would be in control.

surge 11y ago

Right now the biggest threat I find is the lack of options in terms of ISP for most people, and somewhat mass surveillance which will likely be used for profit rather than prevention of illegal activity. ISP's that are creating arbitrary data caps, filtering/throttling or modifying content as it comes in, and little is being done by the FCC to stop it, these are the most dangerous trends. Beyond that encryption, etc has allowed us more freedom.

zby 11y ago

http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt - some more technical analysis on what can be done Another interesting site here is http://citizenlab.org/ http://citizenlab.org/ and the idea of 'distributed security' they champion.

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EvanPlaice 11y ago

Yay! More click bait-y doom-and-gloom nonsense from Medium.com. /s Seriously, what's the deal with these poor quality posts and why do they float so high in the Hacker News rankings? Aside: The same can be said for posts linking to theguardian lately. The internet dream is far from dead. Despite numerous setbacks surrounding lack of security/privacy, new standards/practices are being introduced to fix the issues. The whole personal computer ecosystem that used to be dominated by vendor-monopolized platforms have continually become more open and flexible over time. The flexibility to share data and services across the web in a standardized manner has never been better. 10 years ago, tools like Zapier that thrive in the ecosystem of openness never would have been possible. There are public APIs and microservices for anything and everything nowadays. The developer tools and platforms are evolving at an ever-increasing rate. Data silos are crumbling. Patent/copyright trolls are getting paid their due. Sources of very high quality educational materials are abundant and free. etc... We live in truly exceptional times.