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How the Internet Turned Bad
- Sam_Harris 8y agoThe irony of this being on hackernoon, which hates mobile users.
- missingPieces 8y agoThere are many more facets to the internet now, than there were in 1999, prior to the dotcom boom and subsequent crash, when visions of a future with no downsides prevailed. The only real problem the internet had to deal with at the time was spam and indexing. Broadband didn't exist, so video didn't exist, high resolution touchscreens didn't exist, so smartphones didn't exist, and most importantly nothing was secured, and almost everyone (in the civilian, commercial sectors (†) was (often, willfully) naive to the cold hard facts which outlined why security is important. Security, of course, has been the real cross-cutting driver of change. It took about a decade for serious malicious behavior to materialize in full, but it really ramped up after file sharing threatened old media, and was retaliated against, in the form of spiking peer-to-peer file shares with poisoned files. Then other actors appeared, and branched into spyware and identity theft, and more. Security is hard, and people have pretty much been herded into the handful of large walled gardens, because no one has the energy to fight a fight that can kill industrialized nations. After all, information security is what killed the Axis powers, with the compromise of Enigma and Purple during World War II. [0,1] Are regular people supposed to succeed where armies have failed? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_code (†) We know that non-civilian actors knew better all along. This is why Pretty Good Privacy had been banned as a munition even in 1993. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History