17 ms·

Vint Cerf sees his invention reflected on Black Mirror

111 points by evo_9 9y ago

lucideer 9y ago
Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: > ... in retrospect, some of the decisions his team made seem hopelessly naive, especially for a bunch of geniuses. > They made it possible to surf the Internet anonymously — unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are. We know how that turned out. People with less lofty ambitions than Cerf used that loophole for cybercrime, international espionage and online harassment. The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity.
- lucideer 9y ago
  More minor nitpick... the telephone analogy is a bit silly. You can get a burner phone, and networked computers are identifiable by a number: it's called an IP. It could even be persistently identifiable if it weren't for IPv4 address space exhaustion.
  - tritium 9y ago
    Yeah, I have to scratch my head about the whole anonymous lack of a unique number. Were IP addresses not part of early packet switched networks like ARPA net? Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.
    - swiley 9y ago
      Furthermore, changing IMEI numbers is some kind of terrible federal crime.
  - pmlnr 9y ago
    He was talking about landline numbers.
    - joe_the_user 9y ago
      Back in the day, there were a variety of ways to enter the landline network anonymously, from phone booths to whistling the right tones for call routing. For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.
    - rb808 9y ago
      Given the amount of spam calls I get now, landlines are pretty much anonymous too.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      Even so - if 'cybercrime' and 'industrial espionage' are made possible by the lack of personal identifiers online, how are we supposed to understand telephone scams and pre-digital espionage? Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.
- adventured 9y ago
  Three or four years ago, no. NPR is a left leaning media outlet. All left leaning media outlets are now on a crusade against the evil anonymous hordes that stole the election. They're not being subtle about it. Anonomity has increasingly been declared a public enemy over the last year. Most likely it's going to lead the Democrats to support some form of a required online identification system (in the vein of what eg Eric Schmidt has pushed at various times). edit: downvoters, give it some time, you'll see. It won't be long now. There's nowhere else to go politically from where we're at now. To push further, they're going to have to start isolating people by identification online, tying behavior to a known ID, to restrict & control political influence online. There is no possible alternative, based on where they're pushing, and given the US Govt always seeks greater control. This will be overwhelmingly supported by Congress, it won't be a left / right issue, they'll work together to screw the US public as they always do on privacy.
  - dang 9y ago
    This comment breaks the HN guidelines, this one in particular: Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Could you please not do that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- gowld 9y ago
  > Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: Yes. It's embarrassing. NPR favors that gonzo folksy editorial style over attempting to appear impartial. > The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity. "international espionage" are not 'individuals'.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    > "international espionage" are not 'individuals'. Exactly, but that example still shows up as part of "people abusing anonymity". After all, the article gives us "unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are" - judging by that line and the chosen examples of online misbehavior, shouldn't we expect telephone scams to be nonexistent?
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think it's somewhat of a subjective question. I'm curious to who you think are the primary bad actors on the internet. I can imagine, if someone is primarily concerned with the free expression of ideas, then individuals exploiting anonymity to harass people are actually pretty bad. There are huge swaths of public opinion that simply don't show up on the internet because they're the kinds of opinions internet bullies tend not to like. That's a big loss to free speech.
  - TangoTrotFox 9y ago
    I look at things the other way. Imagine we were living in times when we were still legally segregating people by race. Speaking against this was like to raise the ire of many individuals and groups. People could, and did, lose their livelihoods and even their lives as a result of these interactions. I don't really think the civil rights movement changed things as much as it worked as a protective anonymizing mechanism by aggregating people. For those that remained with the message more directly connected to themselves, such as Martin Luther King, their fates were still what we see in times when you state unpopular things without the protection of anonymity. As a thought experiment, imagine the internet and complete anonymization of speech was available from 1776 onward. It certainly would have a massive effect on things like slavery, and segregation. Would positive change have come about sooner, or later? Anonymity enables people to speak without fear of repercussion. Possibly having an anonymous account being called some names by other anonymous individuals does not really compare to the possible consequences of making unpopular statements when your traceable identity is connected to what is said. So on the same note if somebody is concerned enough to decide to not speak, even anonymously, for fear of anonymous messages from others - would they really be confident enough to then state such things with their name and identity attached to them? Ultimately I think the positive value gained by people being able express themselves positively and anonymously far outweighs the negative cost of people stating intentionally malicious things under the same guise of anonymity.
  - syshum 9y ago
    It always amazes me how people can look at the same set of data and come away with completely opposite views.. You see anonymous speech as a hindrance to the free exchange of idea's, where from my view of the world where you have people in many nations persecuted for their speech, where you have outrage mobs that use their collective outrage to get people fired or removed from organizations, employment, events over their "controversial" speech, where you have protests over "wrong think" speakers... in this world I see anonymous speech is required for the free exchange of idea's I wonder how the founding of the United States would have changed if the Authors of some of the most important papers and commentaries where disallowed from using pseudonyms when their letters where published in the popular press. Would they have self censored or been less than forthcoming with their thoughts...
- headmelted 9y ago
  The reason the Internet has become so successful is in large part due to optional anonymity. Clearly NPR and myself have very different views on what makes the Internet what it is. Also, I love me some Vint Cerf - and his contributions have unquestionably been massive - but no one person invented the Internet. Please let's leave the cult of personality for the "unwashed masses" as NPR calls them.
  - wjoe 9y ago
    I've noticed that American articles cite Vint Cerf as the "father/inventor of the internet", while British press give the same titles to Tim Berners-Lee. Of course both were instrumental, but as you say, many people and teams were involved in the creation of what we know as the Internet today.
    - headmelted 9y ago
      Being in the UK I don't see a valid claim to TBL's involvement in the creation of the Internet. I see it more as Vint Cerf being instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and Tim-Berners Lee of the world-wide web. Now, if any one person were to be credited for the creation of the Internet as a whole, that honour would undoubtedly go to Al Gore. Exhibit A: https://goo.gl/X8D3yb https://goo.gl/X8D3yb
      - wickawic 9y ago
        It is funny in a sense because TBL really invented the 'internet' as people know it, Vint Cerf just created that pesky TCP/IP thing nerds talk about.
      - michrassena 9y ago
        It's such a great piece of political rhetoric that pushed the false idea of Al Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet". If you accept that Vint Cerf was a key person in the creation of the Internet as we know it, you'll probably be interested in his opinion of Al Gore's actual role. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Here's an excerpt from the first paragraphs: Al Gore and the Internet By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development. No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
- acdha 9y ago
  That doesn’t seem biased as much as something you’re uncomfortable hearing. Your last sentence in particular is simply wrong - from spam emails to phishing, the internet’s lack of strong client IDs has made a lot of attacks possible or cheaper. You didn’t have spam, gamergate-style hate mobs, etc. on the conventional phone system where the police could show up at the caller’s door 20 minutes later. The fact that it’s also lead to a bunch of good things shouldn’t mean that we ignore the negative outcomes. Something as simple as mandated egress filtering would make life harder for a lot of abusers but a bunch of companies want to shirk even that low cost.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- sanderjd 9y ago
  I heard this report in the car yesterday. My impression was not that it was biased, but that it was embarrassingly out of touch. It sort of reminded me of Brendan Fraser's character in Blast From the Past where he grew up in a bunker stuck in the 50s and was discovering life in the 90s with wide-eyed wonderment. At one point, the reporter realizes that science fiction might have interesting things to say about society. Vint Cerf and the guy from Black Mirror were super interesting though! It would have been a better report with more direct audio from their interviews.
  - croon 9y ago
    Bit of a side-track on the last point: Brooker ("the guy from Black Mirror") is kind of a cynical jerk, but he's always been really prescient as well as super funny. Watch Nathan Barley some time if you get the chance, and keep in mind that it's 13 years old at this point. (Don't know how other stuff like Dead Set or Brass Eye holds up). He also used to do a weekly wipe show (sort of a Last Week Tonight before Last Week Tonight), and later a yearly wipe, but he seems to have abandoned those after 2016. I also always read any op-ed he writes in the Guardian as they're generally insightful (and funny).
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  That's unusual for NPR, and Laura Sydell is usually quite good at what she does. But yes - it's an unsupported and alarming transition, and it's what brought me to the comments here. It's not exactly novel, though. Since online harassment on message boards and games started, people have been calling for an end to anonymity as a cure. Either a total end, meaning real names everywhere, or partial, meaning providing real names to sites that can be looked up if you behave badly. Wil Wheaton called for it loudly a few years back, and a string of other generally-progressive, internet-savvy voices have done so before and since. (Along with a lot of raving loons who know nothing about the internet, like Jack Thompson.) There seems to be a pattern in these calls that I think explains it: they all come from people whose identities are already public and controversial online. Laura Sydell and Wil Wheaton spend lots of time being non-anonymous on the internet, and so their experience would probably improve if everyone else was 'onymized'. Meanwhile an awful lot of anonymous private individuals, especially from groups that get targeted for harassment, would suffer far more online.
  - Xeoncross 9y ago
    Especially since these western people you mention aren't in danger of being jailed or executed for expressing the wrong views online.
  - Pokepokalypse 9y ago
    End-to-online-anonymity has been floated as a cure to many things for a long time. However: we still have anonymity in the form of; - abusive telemarketers/harassers who spoof caller id. And get away with it. - criminal organizations who use LLC's and shell corporations to illegally launder money, hide wealth, peddle influence, sell drugs, sell weapons, bribe congressmen.. . etc. (LLC's are the "sock puppet" accounts of the business world - let that sink in). - Facebook: you have to use your real name (even if you're Trans, right?) but Ivan can pose as "Bob Jimbob" and get you riled up about them libruls coming to take your guns. It's all bullshit, and giving up our anonymity and privacy amounts to unilateral disarmament while our enemies are holding us hostage at gunpoint.
    - pixl97 9y ago
- kbenson 9y ago
  > Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: I think it usually depends on how far they step outside their area of expertise. I've always gotten an Ivy league liberal arts vibe from NPR correspondents. In some of their side shows you can hear them expound on some great classics author or another. My perception has always been that many people with that background tend to discount the usefulness of science fiction.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased? Depends on the author, sometimes definitely yes. The primary bad actors though, are certainly anonymous. IMO the worst of the internet are child abusers, who have absolutely thrived on anonymity.
rhizome 9y ago
This is an odd title for the piece, which is essentially three puffy descriptions of three unrelated peoples' relationship to the internet's potential.
camillomiller 9y ago
Just to distract you all from the very bad reporting... Have you ever noticed that cerf looks uncannily like ecorp’s CEO in Mr Robot (phillip price, played by michael cristopher)?
- MAGZine 9y ago
  The coincidence is not a surprise. Vint Cerf was also the "prototype" for The Architect in Matrix, and probably it wouldn't shock me if he played another very similar role in other movies, too.
- skocznymroczny 9y ago
  I think it's a common thing in TV/cinema. The villain in Skyfall looked similar to Julian Assange. The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was pretty much Steve Jobs.
  - andruby 9y ago
    Jonathan Pryce looks similar to Steve Jobs? Sorry, I don't buy it.
- throw7 9y ago
  Also the Architect in Matrix
wcarss 9y ago
How did all three of these people end up being interviewed for this, and why would so little of what they actually say and think make it in here? The story about the artist and the scientist, the wise visionary and the foolish tinkerer, is a tired and unrealistic trope being forced onto events that have nothing to do with those themes. The internet was not "designed without unique identifying numbers", and no lack of such facility is what has led to or what would lead to "all this dark stuff" -- everything about that construction is wrong. It's nonsense. It's most upsetting to hear that wrongness presented as fact via a nearly-all-context-cut discussion clip with Vint goshdarned Cerf, because if you said it this way right to him he'd be like, "well, whoa, wait hold on". It's also absurd to imply that the internet was designed in a vacuum, or without thought to its implications, or by just one or a few people, in any short span of time. Beyond that, the things the design of the internet may have been hopelessly naive about are far more complex than and different from "it could allow Bad People to operate anonymously". Some may be directly the opposite! Gibson did have a remarkable vision in Neuromancer, but that absolutely did not have to do with imagining Russia vs the US at its time of release in _1984_. Warring meganational companies had been featured in many earlier dystopian novels: Bester did it in Tiger, Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination) in _1956_, Brunner did it repeatedly in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up from the start of the 70s. These were not the new ideas! In Neuromancer the world was different, the space, the mood, the means, the words. These were cool and unique and new -- the combination of all of this in a pretty package is what made it predictive and powerful and popular. Why is Black Mirror even involved here? Because it's dark? I love the show, but it has come to have very little to do with taking our nature 10 minutes into the future and a lot more to do with "spooky SciFi", and it's never been a far-out predictive powerhouse. Maybe Gibson's name just wasn't enough for the editor? Black Mirror does add that click juice. Maybe it's thematic. Is the piece going to challenge us to think through consequences of decisions deeply and have higher standards for ourselves and society, the way the show once did? No, instead, we get a whole 7 minute audio narrative that will play as a timefiller between segments, with the trite payoff that "only artists know human nature never really changes, even with some new toys." mixed in with just a sprinkle of "it takes all stripes". Did it actually take talking to all of Vint Cerf and William Gibson and Charlie Brooker to get there? Did presumably several minutes (I hope not hours) of their much more interesting words and thoughts get cut so we could hear the journalist's baseless or cliché ideas instead? Just for more woo-woo pessimism? It's like asking Elon Musk to comment on a local science fair rocket and concluding that the next generation holds promise. Imagine the possibilities we _had_ here: hearing Vint Cerf and William Gibson actually reflect meaningfully on what Black Mirror means to people today in the context of their works, and what it suggests for the futures of literature and technology. Imagine if all three people interviewed had a real discussion together! That could be a real and lasting contribution to the human canon. But we got this instead. Maybe these guys had nothing better to be doing. Maybe this tech writer and their editors just don't know about IP addresses, or at least think that no one listening does or should, that it's too complicated for regular people and correspondence with reality doesn't even matter. Maybe no one is even listening. But people are listening. Someone who isn't steeped in the technical world may hear this piece and from its total lack of depth or nuance assume it is obviously-true. They may take away that "the internet's creator didn't even think about its consequences! Tech people are so clueless. Just shows you that Black Mirror is true. The future sounds bad." Something this banal and stupid presented by NPR, and making direct use of the time of these amazing people for it, is a sign (among so many others) that we're setting the bar far too low on intellectual curiosity, on journalistic character, on technical literacy, on societal introspection, and hell, on basic imagination.
nukeop 9y ago
I stopped reading when I got to the bit presenting possible anonymity as something bad that is only exploited by criminals and government spies. We should be thankful they allowed that (and it's not a "loophole") as it allows us to avoid countless ways in which giant corporations are attempting to undermine our freedom by tracking our every move on the internet. Luckily thanks to this design feature, it's easy to throw off their trackers, even though they work tirelessly day and night to invent new ways in which to spy on us.
- vitorfblima 9y ago
  Big tech is more concerned in how to make the most out of all the data we give them willingly.
DyslexicAtheist 9y ago
Ethics scholars: "The artists are the ones who recognize the fundamental truth that human nature hasn't changed much since Shakespeare's time, no matter what fancy new tools you give us." Tech: "we can solve all problems with blockchains and an ICO / token sale!"
austincheney 9y ago
The Black Mirror episode they are talking about certainly exists in various forms. I recently deleted my Reddit account out of similar aggravation. Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Stupid popular things aren't necessarily less stupid out of popularity by a similarly uninformed collective.
- donkeyd 9y ago
  > Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Whenever a new iOS was announced I'd search the docs to find out whether it allowed Pebble to get more interesting functionality on the OS. Usually the result would be that no interesting API's were added. People would downvote my summaries because they didn't want to know the truth...
sexy_seedbox 9y ago
> First is the man... Trying to find "second" in the article, nothing found. Is this bad writing?
drake01 9y ago
Vague article, clickbait: Vint Cerf, Black Mirror. The article is vague. Avoid if you can.
Vaskivo 9y ago
[OFF TOPIC] Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good? I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good was the very first one. 1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's impact besides what the writer explicitly shows. 2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other side, the good side of that concept. 3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel. 4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did! 5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that, coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1]. (I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was) /rant [1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy paranoia". But that should come from reason.
- Raphmedia 9y ago
  > Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good? I see it as a collection of short movies and not like a series. With that mindset, I only watch a few of "episodes" each season. Since I only watch the movies that interest me, I really like Black Mirror. Seen that way, it makes sense. I wouldn't watch a lot of those episodes if they were feature lentgh movies, so I don't watch them as short movies. Every episode that interested me at first glance did not disappoint.
- ghaff 9y ago
  My biggest overall knock is that I often found that there really wasn't a payoff for unrelenting grimness. Which I guess gets to your point #2. Although I'd say 1.) The series is called Black Mirror after all and 2.) There are exceptions like "San Junipero," which was probably my favorite episode. (think, in part, the unrelenting grimness may actually help set the stage for episodes that were a bit more hopeful.) Overall, like a lot of anthology series, you could probably pick the best N (where, for me in this case, N is probably somewhere between 5 and 10) and easily skip the rest.
apo 9y ago
Black Mirror takes Frederik Pohl's advice in directions I've never seen it taken before in a series: A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.
jbmccready 9y ago
The mindset I believe we should have when trying to answer a question like "is anonymity on the internet a good thing for society?" should not just be thinking up situations where it might empower people but also to consider "how well is society equipped to deal with this kind of change?" does humanity have a lot of cultural experience dealing with technology that enables this type of situation? I think the answer in this case is no. There is not a lot of historical or cultural precedent for how we interact with each other anonymously. New systems with new rules enabled by new technologies take time for culture to incorporate in good ways. Therefore it would have been better imo to separate the introduction of being able to communicate digitally from the introduction of being able to communicate anonymously. Conflating the two makes the situation more complicated and harder for us as a society to ensure these technologies are being used in beneficial ways.

111 points by evo_9 9y ago

Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: > ... in retrospect, some of the decisions his team made seem hopelessly naive, especially for a bunch of geniuses. > They made it possible to surf the Internet anonymously — unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are. We know how that turned out. People with less lofty ambitions than Cerf used that loophole for cybercrime, international espionage and online harassment. The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity.

lucideer 9y ago
More minor nitpick... the telephone analogy is a bit silly. You can get a burner phone, and networked computers are identifiable by a number: it's called an IP. It could even be persistently identifiable if it weren't for IPv4 address space exhaustion.
- tritium 9y ago
  Yeah, I have to scratch my head about the whole anonymous lack of a unique number. Were IP addresses not part of early packet switched networks like ARPA net? Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.
  - swiley 9y ago
    Furthermore, changing IMEI numbers is some kind of terrible federal crime.
- pmlnr 9y ago
  He was talking about landline numbers.
  - joe_the_user 9y ago
    Back in the day, there were a variety of ways to enter the landline network anonymously, from phone booths to whistling the right tones for call routing. For quite a while, there was a race between those seeking free long distance and companies trying to stop them.
  - rb808 9y ago
    Given the amount of spam calls I get now, landlines are pretty much anonymous too.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Even so - if 'cybercrime' and 'industrial espionage' are made possible by the lack of personal identifiers online, how are we supposed to understand telephone scams and pre-digital espionage? Landlines may have been unique identifiers in common usage, but they weren't identifiable when someone was seeking to misbehave. Which is exactly the problem with the metaphor.
adventured 9y ago
Three or four years ago, no. NPR is a left leaning media outlet. All left leaning media outlets are now on a crusade against the evil anonymous hordes that stole the election. They're not being subtle about it. Anonomity has increasingly been declared a public enemy over the last year. Most likely it's going to lead the Democrats to support some form of a required online identification system (in the vein of what eg Eric Schmidt has pushed at various times). edit: downvoters, give it some time, you'll see. It won't be long now. There's nowhere else to go politically from where we're at now. To push further, they're going to have to start isolating people by identification online, tying behavior to a known ID, to restrict & control political influence online. There is no possible alternative, based on where they're pushing, and given the US Govt always seeks greater control. This will be overwhelmingly supported by Congress, it won't be a left / right issue, they'll work together to screw the US public as they always do on privacy.
- dang 9y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines, this one in particular: Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. Could you please not do that? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
gowld 9y ago
> Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: Yes. It's embarrassing. NPR favors that gonzo folksy editorial style over attempting to appear impartial. > The primary bad actors on the internet are not individuals exploiting anonymity. "international espionage" are not 'individuals'.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > "international espionage" are not 'individuals'. Exactly, but that example still shows up as part of "people abusing anonymity". After all, the article gives us "unlike a telephone, you don't have a unique number that announces who you are" - judging by that line and the chosen examples of online misbehavior, shouldn't we expect telephone scams to be nonexistent?
erikpukinskis 9y ago
I think it's somewhat of a subjective question. I'm curious to who you think are the primary bad actors on the internet. I can imagine, if someone is primarily concerned with the free expression of ideas, then individuals exploiting anonymity to harass people are actually pretty bad. There are huge swaths of public opinion that simply don't show up on the internet because they're the kinds of opinions internet bullies tend not to like. That's a big loss to free speech.
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  I look at things the other way. Imagine we were living in times when we were still legally segregating people by race. Speaking against this was like to raise the ire of many individuals and groups. People could, and did, lose their livelihoods and even their lives as a result of these interactions. I don't really think the civil rights movement changed things as much as it worked as a protective anonymizing mechanism by aggregating people. For those that remained with the message more directly connected to themselves, such as Martin Luther King, their fates were still what we see in times when you state unpopular things without the protection of anonymity. As a thought experiment, imagine the internet and complete anonymization of speech was available from 1776 onward. It certainly would have a massive effect on things like slavery, and segregation. Would positive change have come about sooner, or later? Anonymity enables people to speak without fear of repercussion. Possibly having an anonymous account being called some names by other anonymous individuals does not really compare to the possible consequences of making unpopular statements when your traceable identity is connected to what is said. So on the same note if somebody is concerned enough to decide to not speak, even anonymously, for fear of anonymous messages from others - would they really be confident enough to then state such things with their name and identity attached to them? Ultimately I think the positive value gained by people being able express themselves positively and anonymously far outweighs the negative cost of people stating intentionally malicious things under the same guise of anonymity.
- syshum 9y ago
  It always amazes me how people can look at the same set of data and come away with completely opposite views.. You see anonymous speech as a hindrance to the free exchange of idea's, where from my view of the world where you have people in many nations persecuted for their speech, where you have outrage mobs that use their collective outrage to get people fired or removed from organizations, employment, events over their "controversial" speech, where you have protests over "wrong think" speakers... in this world I see anonymous speech is required for the free exchange of idea's I wonder how the founding of the United States would have changed if the Authors of some of the most important papers and commentaries where disallowed from using pseudonyms when their letters where published in the popular press. Would they have self censored or been less than forthcoming with their thoughts...
headmelted 9y ago
The reason the Internet has become so successful is in large part due to optional anonymity. Clearly NPR and myself have very different views on what makes the Internet what it is. Also, I love me some Vint Cerf - and his contributions have unquestionably been massive - but no one person invented the Internet. Please let's leave the cult of personality for the "unwashed masses" as NPR calls them.
- wjoe 9y ago
  I've noticed that American articles cite Vint Cerf as the "father/inventor of the internet", while British press give the same titles to Tim Berners-Lee. Of course both were instrumental, but as you say, many people and teams were involved in the creation of what we know as the Internet today.
  - headmelted 9y ago
    Being in the UK I don't see a valid claim to TBL's involvement in the creation of the Internet. I see it more as Vint Cerf being instrumental in the creation of the Internet, and Tim-Berners Lee of the world-wide web. Now, if any one person were to be credited for the creation of the Internet as a whole, that honour would undoubtedly go to Al Gore. Exhibit A: https://goo.gl/X8D3yb https://goo.gl/X8D3yb
    - wickawic 9y ago
      It is funny in a sense because TBL really invented the 'internet' as people know it, Vint Cerf just created that pesky TCP/IP thing nerds talk about.
    - michrassena 9y ago
      It's such a great piece of political rhetoric that pushed the false idea of Al Gore claiming to have "invented the Internet". If you accept that Vint Cerf was a key person in the creation of the Internet as we know it, you'll probably be interested in his opinion of Al Gore's actual role. https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler/misc/funny/gore,net.txt Here's an excerpt from the first paragraphs: Al Gore and the Internet By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development. No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
acdha 9y ago
That doesn’t seem biased as much as something you’re uncomfortable hearing. Your last sentence in particular is simply wrong - from spam emails to phishing, the internet’s lack of strong client IDs has made a lot of attacks possible or cheaper. You didn’t have spam, gamergate-style hate mobs, etc. on the conventional phone system where the police could show up at the caller’s door 20 minutes later. The fact that it’s also lead to a bunch of good things shouldn’t mean that we ignore the negative outcomes. Something as simple as mandated egress filtering would make life harder for a lot of abusers but a bunch of companies want to shirk even that low cost.
deleted 9y ago
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sanderjd 9y ago
I heard this report in the car yesterday. My impression was not that it was biased, but that it was embarrassingly out of touch. It sort of reminded me of Brendan Fraser's character in Blast From the Past where he grew up in a bunker stuck in the 50s and was discovering life in the 90s with wide-eyed wonderment. At one point, the reporter realizes that science fiction might have interesting things to say about society. Vint Cerf and the guy from Black Mirror were super interesting though! It would have been a better report with more direct audio from their interviews.
- croon 9y ago
  Bit of a side-track on the last point: Brooker ("the guy from Black Mirror") is kind of a cynical jerk, but he's always been really prescient as well as super funny. Watch Nathan Barley some time if you get the chance, and keep in mind that it's 13 years old at this point. (Don't know how other stuff like Dead Set or Brass Eye holds up). He also used to do a weekly wipe show (sort of a Last Week Tonight before Last Week Tonight), and later a yearly wipe, but he seems to have abandoned those after 2016. I also always read any op-ed he writes in the Guardian as they're generally insightful (and funny).
Bartweiss 9y ago
That's unusual for NPR, and Laura Sydell is usually quite good at what she does. But yes - it's an unsupported and alarming transition, and it's what brought me to the comments here. It's not exactly novel, though. Since online harassment on message boards and games started, people have been calling for an end to anonymity as a cure. Either a total end, meaning real names everywhere, or partial, meaning providing real names to sites that can be looked up if you behave badly. Wil Wheaton called for it loudly a few years back, and a string of other generally-progressive, internet-savvy voices have done so before and since. (Along with a lot of raving loons who know nothing about the internet, like Jack Thompson.) There seems to be a pattern in these calls that I think explains it: they all come from people whose identities are already public and controversial online. Laura Sydell and Wil Wheaton spend lots of time being non-anonymous on the internet, and so their experience would probably improve if everyone else was 'onymized'. Meanwhile an awful lot of anonymous private individuals, especially from groups that get targeted for harassment, would suffer far more online.
- Xeoncross 9y ago
  Especially since these western people you mention aren't in danger of being jailed or executed for expressing the wrong views online.
- Pokepokalypse 9y ago
  End-to-online-anonymity has been floated as a cure to many things for a long time. However: we still have anonymity in the form of; - abusive telemarketers/harassers who spoof caller id. And get away with it. - criminal organizations who use LLC's and shell corporations to illegally launder money, hide wealth, peddle influence, sell drugs, sell weapons, bribe congressmen.. . etc. (LLC's are the "sock puppet" accounts of the business world - let that sink in). - Facebook: you have to use your real name (even if you're Trans, right?) but Ivan can pose as "Bob Jimbob" and get you riled up about them libruls coming to take your guns. It's all bullshit, and giving up our anonymity and privacy amounts to unilateral disarmament while our enemies are holding us hostage at gunpoint.
  - pixl97 9y ago
kbenson 9y ago
> Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased?: I think it usually depends on how far they step outside their area of expertise. I've always gotten an Ivy league liberal arts vibe from NPR correspondents. In some of their side shows you can hear them expound on some great classics author or another. My perception has always been that many people with that background tend to discount the usefulness of science fiction.
IntronExon 9y ago
Is it usual for the perspective of NPR articles to be this bizarrely biased? Depends on the author, sometimes definitely yes. The primary bad actors though, are certainly anonymous. IMO the worst of the internet are child abusers, who have absolutely thrived on anonymity.

rhizome 9y ago

This is an odd title for the piece, which is essentially three puffy descriptions of three unrelated peoples' relationship to the internet's potential.

camillomiller 9y ago

Just to distract you all from the very bad reporting... Have you ever noticed that cerf looks uncannily like ecorp’s CEO in Mr Robot (phillip price, played by michael cristopher)?

MAGZine 9y ago
The coincidence is not a surprise. Vint Cerf was also the "prototype" for The Architect in Matrix, and probably it wouldn't shock me if he played another very similar role in other movies, too.
skocznymroczny 9y ago
I think it's a common thing in TV/cinema. The villain in Skyfall looked similar to Julian Assange. The villain in Tomorrow Never Dies was pretty much Steve Jobs.
- andruby 9y ago
  Jonathan Pryce looks similar to Steve Jobs? Sorry, I don't buy it.
throw7 9y ago
Also the Architect in Matrix

wcarss 9y ago

How did all three of these people end up being interviewed for this, and why would so little of what they actually say and think make it in here? The story about the artist and the scientist, the wise visionary and the foolish tinkerer, is a tired and unrealistic trope being forced onto events that have nothing to do with those themes. The internet was not "designed without unique identifying numbers", and no lack of such facility is what has led to or what would lead to "all this dark stuff" -- everything about that construction is wrong. It's nonsense. It's most upsetting to hear that wrongness presented as fact via a nearly-all-context-cut discussion clip with Vint goshdarned Cerf, because if you said it this way right to him he'd be like, "well, whoa, wait hold on". It's also absurd to imply that the internet was designed in a vacuum, or without thought to its implications, or by just one or a few people, in any short span of time. Beyond that, the things the design of the internet may have been hopelessly naive about are far more complex than and different from "it could allow Bad People to operate anonymously". Some may be directly the opposite! Gibson did have a remarkable vision in Neuromancer, but that absolutely did not have to do with imagining Russia vs the US at its time of release in _1984_. Warring meganational companies had been featured in many earlier dystopian novels: Bester did it in Tiger, Tiger! (aka The Stars My Destination) in _1956_, Brunner did it repeatedly in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up from the start of the 70s. These were not the new ideas! In Neuromancer the world was different, the space, the mood, the means, the words. These were cool and unique and new -- the combination of all of this in a pretty package is what made it predictive and powerful and popular. Why is Black Mirror even involved here? Because it's dark? I love the show, but it has come to have very little to do with taking our nature 10 minutes into the future and a lot more to do with "spooky SciFi", and it's never been a far-out predictive powerhouse. Maybe Gibson's name just wasn't enough for the editor? Black Mirror does add that click juice. Maybe it's thematic. Is the piece going to challenge us to think through consequences of decisions deeply and have higher standards for ourselves and society, the way the show once did? No, instead, we get a whole 7 minute audio narrative that will play as a timefiller between segments, with the trite payoff that "only artists know human nature never really changes, even with some new toys." mixed in with just a sprinkle of "it takes all stripes". Did it actually take talking to all of Vint Cerf and William Gibson and Charlie Brooker to get there? Did presumably several minutes (I hope not hours) of their much more interesting words and thoughts get cut so we could hear the journalist's baseless or cliché ideas instead? Just for more woo-woo pessimism? It's like asking Elon Musk to comment on a local science fair rocket and concluding that the next generation holds promise. Imagine the possibilities we _had_ here: hearing Vint Cerf and William Gibson actually reflect meaningfully on what Black Mirror means to people today in the context of their works, and what it suggests for the futures of literature and technology. Imagine if all three people interviewed had a real discussion together! That could be a real and lasting contribution to the human canon. But we got this instead. Maybe these guys had nothing better to be doing. Maybe this tech writer and their editors just don't know about IP addresses, or at least think that no one listening does or should, that it's too complicated for regular people and correspondence with reality doesn't even matter. Maybe no one is even listening. But people are listening. Someone who isn't steeped in the technical world may hear this piece and from its total lack of depth or nuance assume it is obviously-true. They may take away that "the internet's creator didn't even think about its consequences! Tech people are so clueless. Just shows you that Black Mirror is true. The future sounds bad." Something this banal and stupid presented by NPR, and making direct use of the time of these amazing people for it, is a sign (among so many others) that we're setting the bar far too low on intellectual curiosity, on journalistic character, on technical literacy, on societal introspection, and hell, on basic imagination.

nukeop 9y ago

I stopped reading when I got to the bit presenting possible anonymity as something bad that is only exploited by criminals and government spies. We should be thankful they allowed that (and it's not a "loophole") as it allows us to avoid countless ways in which giant corporations are attempting to undermine our freedom by tracking our every move on the internet. Luckily thanks to this design feature, it's easy to throw off their trackers, even though they work tirelessly day and night to invent new ways in which to spy on us.

vitorfblima 9y ago
Big tech is more concerned in how to make the most out of all the data we give them willingly.

DyslexicAtheist 9y ago

Ethics scholars: "The artists are the ones who recognize the fundamental truth that human nature hasn't changed much since Shakespeare's time, no matter what fancy new tools you give us." Tech: "we can solve all problems with blockchains and an ICO / token sale!"

austincheney 9y ago

The Black Mirror episode they are talking about certainly exists in various forms. I recently deleted my Reddit account out of similar aggravation. Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Stupid popular things aren't necessarily less stupid out of popularity by a similarly uninformed collective.

donkeyd 9y ago
> Ideas aren't more valid due to votes in a millenial's echo chamber. Whenever a new iOS was announced I'd search the docs to find out whether it allowed Pebble to get more interesting functionality on the OS. Usually the result would be that no interesting API's were added. People would downvote my summaries because they didn't want to know the truth...

sexy_seedbox 9y ago

> First is the man... Trying to find "second" in the article, nothing found. Is this bad writing?

drake01 9y ago

Vague article, clickbait: Vint Cerf, Black Mirror. The article is vague. Avoid if you can.

Vaskivo 9y ago

[OFF TOPIC] Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good? I've seen around five episodes and the only one I genuinely thought to be good was the very first one. 1 - The technology is extremely vague. There is no way to really gauge it's impact besides what the writer explicitly shows. 2 - The episodes are extremely moralist. They usually take a stance of "Look How Bad This Is", usually using appeals to emotion. They don't show the other side, the good side of that concept. 3 - In my opinion, the story of most of them is uninteresting. The most egregious is the "eye camera" one. The whole episode drops you hints of how that technology affects society, but we are focused on a lovers quarrel. 4 - None of those show anything really new. If you removed the new concept, it would be _really_ easy to replace it with known stuff. In a world with a new disruptive technology they write people acting like they always did! 5 - This is mostly my elitism, but I hate most people's reaction to it. They see the episode, adore it, and just take it at face value. I watch it, think it's crap, and spend the next hour discussing it and thinking about it. Most people don't think beyond what is shown on the episode. I fear that that, coupled with (1) and (2), is making people fear technology [1]. (I have to add that the last minute of the "robot boyfriend" episode are so nuanced, subtle and insidious that I'm amazed the writers managed to slip that through. Especially how dumbed down the whole episode was) /rant [1] I think people should be careful with technology. I have a bit of "privacy paranoia". But that should come from reason.

Raphmedia 9y ago
> Am I the only one who thinks Black Mirror is not that good? I see it as a collection of short movies and not like a series. With that mindset, I only watch a few of "episodes" each season. Since I only watch the movies that interest me, I really like Black Mirror. Seen that way, it makes sense. I wouldn't watch a lot of those episodes if they were feature lentgh movies, so I don't watch them as short movies. Every episode that interested me at first glance did not disappoint.
ghaff 9y ago
My biggest overall knock is that I often found that there really wasn't a payoff for unrelenting grimness. Which I guess gets to your point #2. Although I'd say 1.) The series is called Black Mirror after all and 2.) There are exceptions like "San Junipero," which was probably my favorite episode. (think, in part, the unrelenting grimness may actually help set the stage for episodes that were a bit more hopeful.) Overall, like a lot of anthology series, you could probably pick the best N (where, for me in this case, N is probably somewhere between 5 and 10) and easily skip the rest.

apo 9y ago

Black Mirror takes Frederik Pohl's advice in directions I've never seen it taken before in a series: A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

jbmccready 9y ago

The mindset I believe we should have when trying to answer a question like "is anonymity on the internet a good thing for society?" should not just be thinking up situations where it might empower people but also to consider "how well is society equipped to deal with this kind of change?" does humanity have a lot of cultural experience dealing with technology that enables this type of situation? I think the answer in this case is no. There is not a lot of historical or cultural precedent for how we interact with each other anonymously. New systems with new rules enabled by new technologies take time for culture to incorporate in good ways. Therefore it would have been better imo to separate the introduction of being able to communicate digitally from the introduction of being able to communicate anonymously. Conflating the two makes the situation more complicated and harder for us as a society to ensure these technologies are being used in beneficial ways.