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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
- auiya 7y agoCapitalism, got it.
- 1024core 7y agoHe doesn't mention the Worm of 1988[1]. The only reason it spread was because sendmail(1) would allow any remote sender to spawn a shell on your system. This was by design, and left in place because these researchers were naive and utopian. Then Robert Morris Jr came along and abused it. To me, that was the inflection point of the nascent Internet: the naivete of these researchers met the harsh reality of real human behavior and lost. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
- _se 7y agoFour popups and overlays in 15 seconds. What a trash website.
- efa 7y agoIronic, given the subject of the article.
- izzydata 7y agoIt further helps demonstrate the point even if unintentional.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- daedalus_j 7y agoAt least you could see the popups. I default open things in an incognito window, and it won't even load if you're in incognito, just shows you a big banner shaming you for using incognito mode and asking you to log in. It'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoJust disable javascript. Media sites are too broken these days to take a risk on their code any way. The LA Times devs have done a good job keeping the fallback readable.
- daedalus_j 7y agoReally good hint, didn't think to try that. Toggling javascript off for that site in uBlock Origin should make future clicking on links to it a much happier experience, thanks!
- bArray 7y agoSite appears to work perfectly with JS disabled entirely (IMO, as the web should be).
- auiya 7y agoReader mode is perfect for sites such as this.
- whamlastxmas 7y agoMy preferred solution is just closing the tab and moving on.
- frereubu 7y ago"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.
- bilbo0s 7y agoNot exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit." Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be like in a parallel timeline where that happened?
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoThis is effectively what we should be doing: Either accept what the site is offering (content monetized by ads and data collection) or don't. But what happened instead is entitlement: People decided they had the right to view that content without paying it's cost, and went for ad blockers instead. As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly more websites haven't simply made it impossible to view them without either seeing the ads or paying money/subscribing.
- matheusmoreira 7y agoWhat cost? Web sites don't charge anyone for the HTTP response. They distribute their pages free of charge.
- ocdtrekkie 7y agoCreating content has an inherent cost.
- Accujack 7y agoIt didn't go wrong. It went very well. It didn't turn into the idealized vision that the author apparently had for it, but that's not unusual.
- workthrowaway 7y agosomething definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.
- masswerk 7y ago> we don't even link to other websites anymore. Meaning, there is no WWW anymore. (Just a bunch of isolated load-on-demand apps distributed by a network.) Edit: Is this why Google Chrome is hiding the "www." sub-domain prefix, because it doesn't apply anymore? ;-)
- jacquesm 7y agoGoogle is a driving force behind the destruction of the web. They like the content they do not like the links. The best way for the web to develop from Googles point of view is if we all consume just the content that Google forwards us to without horizontal bridges between pages. So that's why you will see Google push to reduce the importance of URLs and why Google will - shamelessly - lift content of other websites and display it as their own as the result of a query on the results page rather than to link to the site that they took the content from to begin with.
- detritus 7y ago> They like the content they do not like the links. I'm not disagreeing with your appraisal - in fact I probably agree with it - but I do find it deeply and painfully ironic to read, given the entire foundation of Google's being - PageRank - is based on analyses of the web of other people's links. It seems like the parasite doesn't realise the damage it's causing the host.
- rinchik 7y agoIt feels like author is depressed. It's a bit sad to read. He manages to pull so much negativity out of the things that are generally have a net-positive impact, things that drive the progress, that are progress. Disappointing article. I don't need this negativity in my life.
- pron 7y agoAlmost every big positive change in society is a result of people feeling negative about the status quo. This reminds me of Steven Pinker who goes around saying, please stop whining; some/many/most/all things are better than they used to be! while somehow neglecting the fact that to the degree things are better, they usually are because people didn't stop whining.
- eej2ya1K 7y agoWhining doesn't help. Steven Pinker is not telling people not to do what they can to make the world a better place. Your resentment is showing.
- rinchik 7y agoWell, yeah I agree that makes sense. I misspoke. Only idiots are always happy and this endless treadmill, our ability to see possible improvements in systems that were already perceived as decent, drives the progress.
- schnable 7y agoI think Pinker's point is that many of the people whining are trying to "fix" things by changing the very things that got us here in the first place -- much of which was luck, or success after many failures, not just people whining.
- situational87 7y agoProgress for a select few, for everyone else things are going backwards. Life expectancy and quality of life is doing nothing but going down year after year in the United States. If you're one of the few privileged elites who benefited from the internet, congrats! You're a very small minority.
- yetihehe 7y agoHow did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others. > We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone. That "everyone" also includes bad actors.
- shadowgovt 7y agoExactly. The "ethical" roots people imagine weren't actually the roots of the Internet; they were an ideal that was hypothetically possible (but in hindsight, probably assumed too much human virtue atop an infrastructure built around assumed trustable nodes). The actual roots of the Internet would be to kick most users off and keep individual nodes behind locked doors controlled by a joint military-industrial-education confederation of separate institutions with overlapping goals. Privacy was assumed close to nil at several of those institutions. That's a non-starter for building a system that can serve all people on the planet, so it's not the right approach. There is no way back; the only way is forward, informed by the past, but recognizing the weaknesses of its origins as well as its strengths.
- tinus_hn 7y agoThe problem is that ‘everyone’ also includes the general public which mostly consists of consumers that don’t care.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago> ethical roots weren't they all working for the .mil?
- dleslie 7y agoSome with more degrees of separation than others, yes. Yasha Levine's "Surveillance Valley" is a satisfactory history of that era, up to the near-present, albeit with a clear political perspective.
- jslabovitz 7y ago
- lazyjones 7y agoThis is another good example for a broader issue we're noticing lately: we've been creating enabling technology and liberal laws, supporting migration, tolerating religions as well as various modern ideologies and (late) in the process we suddenly realized that our central assumption, that all people are sufficiently smart, educated, willing to participate in our society as positive forces, was completely wrong. So we're now beginning to shut down liberal policies, least harmful ones first - but it's a) wrong and b) too late anyway. We need closed, selective communities rather than inclusive, totalitarian ones - online and "offline".
- Ygg2 7y agoI'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- nothrabannosir 7y agoFormatted for mobile: > Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
- thinkingemote 7y agoThank you. I'd imagine a bot that does the same wouldn't be popult with the mods?
- nvr219 7y agoWould sooner recommend adjusting the CSS
- thinkingemote 7y agoThe huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which got up to haughty stuff)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- unityByFreedom 7y agoSo, he was poking fun at the notion of a common language causing chaos (as in the Tower of Babel), right?
- notacoward 7y ago
- CrackerNews 7y agoYasha Levine's Surveillance Valley is a good read on this topic.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- acoye 7y agoIf you consider the internet as a reflection of mankind, then maybe seen it as wrong and broken is only a measure of your belief system against what is society in its crudest form? Also I disagree on the "create a new crypto system" to solve our issues trope. When talking about stolen databases I would argue it is a problem of not using state of the art to protect privacy as there is realistically no incentive to do so.
- loraa 7y agoI actually miss the old internet. All the politicking is what messed it up.
- droithomme 7y ago> websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see. Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses of privacy that result from their services These sorts of policies will completely annihilate small sites. Only large corporations and institutions with their own legal teams will have websites.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoWhy? Isn't it easier to not use someone's PII?
- foolfoolz 7y agoI don’t agree the internet had “ethical roots.” Drugs were sold on the internet since the 80s. And the whole thing was funded in the name of warfare. Also the idealized notion that the internet allows for more extremism, as if the thoughts people express online would not be possible in the brains of these people had they stayed offline, make no sense. I think the article is correct to assume the internet will become more balkanized and countries once they gain the ability to will control their internet very tightly
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago>once they gain the ability to will control their internet very tightly // Did you have some particular ability in mind here that countries don't already have? Countries sensor the web, turn off access to services (social media), and such, already. I can imagine on-the-fly editing might help countries, but can't really see what else you might have in mind?
- Merrill 7y agoA difference is that the "unacceptable" opinions people once expressed to their friends in the neighborhood bar can now be broadcast over the internet to a wider audience. The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted web services break the monopoly on distribution.
- angel_j 7y agoNobody invented the internet. It was only a matter of time before computers sent messages over far distances, like phones had already done. The internet isn't broken. There are millions of Internets just like the one the author laments losing, only they are for other people. The mainstream web is what has people down, because it's a reflection of the mainstream, which has long been foul. The problem there is using mainstream internet instead of using 50 year old technology to create your own networks.
- new_here 7y agoIs it just me or does this page not scroll in Firefox?
- _Microft 7y agoCan confirm, does not scroll with Firefox 70 (it has add-ons like uBlock Origin and Ghostery). Reader mode works fine.
- seanalltogether 7y agosame, thanks for the tip about reader mode, i always forget about that.
- _Microft 7y agoIn case that Firefox does not offer the icon to open reader mode for a page, you can visit it in reader mode by manually prepending about:reader?url= to the URL.
- Starwatcher2001 7y agoScrolls fine for me. Firefox 7.0, uBlock origin.
- mcv 7y ago> "Citizen-users need to hold websites more accountable. When was the last time a website asked what privacy policy you would like applied to you? My guess is never." Wrong guess. This happens multiple times per day, thanks to the GDPR legislation in the EU. Annoying, but also correct. I take great effort to disable everything I don't like (ad tracking in particular), and like the article says I should: > "You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." There are increasingly websites I refuse to use because they don't work in a way I consider acceptable. Some major websites are surprisingly broken. Twitter on Firefox on Android, for example, is notoriously bad.
- masswerk 7y agoRegarding GDPR, this is true for the EU, but the article was published in the LA Times, though… It would be nice, if those properties, which can be applied globally, were already integrated in the browser as a preferences setting (and enforced by law). Meaning, privacy concerns must become part of the protocol. (What about some kind of 451 response by the browser?)
- mcv 7y agoI would certainly prefer to have my browser handle my GDPR preferences and not have to worry about all these popups.
- chronotis 7y agoI still remember the moment I hit the Yahoo! home page and saw a banner ad for the first time, and said to myself, "here they come." I didn't project out to surveillance capitalism though, was still a bit too young for such thoughts.
- alex_young 7y agoI like the idea of improving the technology side, but another thing we should try to bring back is Netiquette - basically civility all users of this global network used to be expected to agree to. I think YC is a good example of this working in practice, so why not expose more of the world to the idea again? Endless September [0], when AOL connected to the Internet, should be waining soon since their subscriber base is finally disappearing right? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- youdontknowtho 7y ago"Hey, a long time ago, when the only people that used it were just like me, things were really pleasant." There is a lot of conflict in the world. As the pool of people on the network grows and changes they will bring conflict with them into this arena. It's a kind of naivete that sees the homogenous origin of the network as a better time.
- codegeek 7y agoPersonally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone over the internet and make money for myself and my family. I can communicate with family members and friends across continents. With all the hate social media gets for example, imagine a life without them again. I say this as someone who hardly uses it but knows that it is there if I want to communicate with someone I care about. Do you really want to send physical letters again ? Yes they have their charm and nostalgia but I am not willing to trade the convenience of internet for something worse or outdated. So Thank you for creating the internet all you tremendous people. I personally wouldn't trade it. Can we fix a few things ? Sure we can. But it has not gone wrong. It has changed lives, mine included for the better.
- agumonkey 7y agoI won't go too heretic on internet, but I think it kicked the old structure too hard and too early.
- Swizec 7y agoIf it weren’t for the internet I’d be back home making an average $20,000/year. Instead I’m in SF on an SF salary. Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset. qed
- andrew_ 7y agoOne of many great takeaways from this article, a great new word to add to my vocabulary: Balkanization, or Balkanisation, is a derogatory geopolitical term for the process of fragmentation or division of a region or state into smaller regions or states that are often hostile or uncooperative with one another.
- tnolet 7y ago“Nostalgia ain’t the way it used to be”
- louwrentius 7y agoI'm currently listening to "When the wizards stay up late" by Katie Hafner en Matthew Lyon. It's about the origins of the internet, starting with the birth of arpanet and going from there. I like it, it's interesting to know how it came to be.
- myth_buster 7y ago> With the profit motive taking over the internet, the very nature of innovation changed. Averting risk dominated the direction of technical progress. We no longer pursued “moonshots.” Instead advancement came via baby steps — “design me a 5% faster Bluetooth connection” as opposed to “build me an internet.” An online community that had once been convivial transformed into one of competition, antagonism and extremism. This cycle is perhaps fundamental to all __human__ inventions and core to the theory of disruption. This played out out the same way with Bitcoin. Ethereum had to step in to disrupt that cycle and as ETH grows to that size, some thing else needs to come in and disrupt. Same holds true for IBM > Google > Facebook > ...
- jv22222 7y agoI met my wife on the internet, on a chat site I created back in 1995, we have a beautiful son, I’ve made countless friends through the internet, had a fantastic 25+ year career. I guess I’m saying that the internet has been awesome for this family. That said, I do agree that it has been co-opted in ways that are not good by a few nefarious players. Still, it’s not all bad.
- mentos 7y agoWhat do you guys think about a kickstarter to raise enough money to buy Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc and shut it down for everyone's benefit?
- nscalf 7y agoI think I would probably be making a Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc competitor that night. They exist because people want them to exist, even though they have some bad parts. It's much more effective to work to make them better than to just throw them out.
- tremon 7y agoI would open up their APIs instead. Allow everyone to write their own interoperable frontend or backend. That levels the playing field, allows everyone to compete on the strength of their interface instead of the size of their captive audience. As you say, the service fills a need (perceived or otherwise). It's the size of the network, not necessarily the service itself, that causes the problem. Make the service a protocol, and move it back into the (web 1.0) fold.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoOr, run it for everyone's benefit? Surely is not mass communication that's the problem but the way that is leveraged and users are productised? Facebook would probably be a net benefit for me if it weren't for the political manipulation it has enabled.
- tiborsaas 7y agoIt's a great idea, but I suggest using IndieGoGo and set up the campaign to keep the money for the unlikely event if the campaign fails. Alternatively as a stretch goal add Medium to the bucket too.
- nanna 7y agoWe're marking the 50th anniversary at King's College London with an evening of critical reflections by the Department of Digital Humanities, next Wednesday 6 November. Open to all! https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-tickets-77325266955 https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/happy-packet-switching-ticket...
- The_Androctonus 7y agoCompleted my MSc at KCL in August and my topic had to do with coming up with a solution for the issues being discussed here. I think I'll be attending this!
- falcolas 7y agoI think it can be boiled down to an even simpler statement. The internet got big enough to matter. As with all things that matter, people will try to monetize them, disrupt them, destroy them, and abuse them. Even with all that, it still matters, we just have to really watch where we step.
- shpongled 7y agoIf anything, the presence of the "dark side" is proof that their creation is a massive success. Without it, we would not have truly free and anonymous exchange of information, which is what qualifies the internet as the greatest invention of mankind. I can carry a device around that had the ability to access the sum total of human knowledge
- deskamess 7y agoThe very nature of networks and the internet has resulted in the concentration of "information flow" in a few 1000 (10,000?) nodes globally. These key nodes which act as transit points in the network have become monitoring points for many agents. In essence, the internet, in an effort to liberalize and disseminate information easily, has sufficiently centralized information flow into a few nodes. Encryption can help in this scenario, and hopefully gets stronger. Prior to this, the means of monitoring were varied and took effort, often human. This meant it had to be selectively applied since there was a burden/cost to all out monitoring; as a result you had to know the task/persons you were to observer (and get a warrant). Now, capture can be all encompassing and automated; "searching for issues" is done later. Monitor everything, ask questions later. Now this in itself is troubling but another side effect is that these transit nodes can be disabled by agents to suppress the dissemination of information from troubled areas. In this scenario, cryptography cannot help as the wire to the outside has been cut. As traditional dissemination methods disappear or go online, and our information consumption is primarily online, these nodes can become very effective 'information suppression' points.
- derpherpsson 7y agoPower hierarchies are part of human nature. We always create them, the super-nodes. This is not limited to computer networks. We do it with relationships as well, how many does not know of Madonna and Justin Bieber, compared to random Joe? Our very ideas and thoughts are subject to it as well. There already exist meshing technology that counter our human nature and does not produce power hierarchies. Decentralized hashtables for example. Maybe if we hand over the control to the machines, we could solve this problem. Pretty much noone wants that though... It's limited to some fringes of our society. The darknets (i2p more than Tor) it, and BitTorrent swarms. It works here, because the programmers never gave the users a choice.
- etxm 7y agoI’m pretty sure the Internet is The Great Filter.
- elwell 7y agoIronically can't read the article because of the paywall.
- Legogris 7y ago> Blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other digital currencies, also offers the promise of irrefutable, indisputable data ledgers. I see a recurring pattern here. While we have huge potential here, there's a significant danger that the same kind of centralized control emerges out of decentralized structure just as with the Internet. I hope enough people working on and using blockchain technology in the early stages learn of past lessons.
- Sargos 7y agoI think it will be different based on the economics of the two systems. On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your own computer or something like geocities and thus an explosion of content was created in a decentralized manner. Then the internet grew in popularity and it began to cost a lot of money to maintain all of the servers and bandwidth needed which cut off all of the smaller groups and consolidated power to a few corporations who could fund such an enterprise. With blockchains we are also currently in the amateur stage where anyone can build something and put it out there but the difference is that dapps cost nothing to run and anyone can publish one. The cost to the developer of Uniswap is the same for 10 people and 10 million. The cost is just the development of the initial dapp. A small group of open source developers could create the new Facebook without needing millions of dollars to pay for hardware and buildings. This low barrier to entry and maintenance removes the centralization point that corporations rely on. This is to say nothing of DAOs like Moloch and other novel funding methods that allow non-corporate projects to compete on the same level as anyone else. It's quite possible that the blockchain space will have a much longer and possibly lifelong period of true decentralized content and network creation the likes of which we had on the early non-corporate internet.
- segmondy 7y agoThe internet never "went wrong". Nor did it go right. If we want to talk about the internet going wrong, we can talk about running out of IPV4 addresses, the garbage that DNS/BGP can be. The insecureness of SMTP etc. Yet from a technical standpoint, it has gotten amazing. There was a time https/ssl was not a thing, when everyone shuffled data via FTP, when telnet ruled, when NFS was world rw and rlogin/rhost was the way of things. So the net as a tool has gotten better to address it's weakness in relation to privacy(crypto), spam (captcha/ML), fakes news (ML) Spam, Fake News, Trolls, Privacy Abuse etc is all about people. We can ask, how did the world/people get so wrong? But then, when we sit back and think about it, this is the world that brought us a few world wars and tons of other wars. All that crap going on over the net is annoying but nothing. I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture my data than live through a war.
- DataWorker 7y ago“So the net as a tool has gotten better to address it's weakness in relation to privacy(crypto), spam (captcha/ML), fakes news (ML)” I think that’s a debatable point. I don’t feel safer and I preferred simple tools like ftp, telnet, Usenet over Facebook, Dropbox, google cloud or whatever app is the focus of the current tech hype cycle. “I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture my data than live through a war.” That seems like an odd nonsequitur. Surely you don’t think there’s a dichotomy between war and Facebook? We have both now, and will have both in the future. Zuckerburg ain’t Jesus, apps are just widgets.
- cntlzw 7y agoThanks. I wanted to write something similar, but you said it way better than I ever could. It is always about how we use technology, not the technology per se. For the good, for the bad, for making money. Whatever.
- Shivetya 7y agoRight. The technical issues are what went wrong, how to protect the net itself from those who would damage and abuse it. Those we seek to improve. The people side will come with time. If anything perhaps it opens people eyes to just how many people who do not fit within the idealized society many expect or want to be part of. People will learn limits, learn about others, and eventually it will even out. What it did right is free people from most every government out there and now those governments are fighting back. When you can now see for your self what conditions are elsewhere you are much harder to manipulate which means loss of control. It also shows that no matter how good you thought your government is/was there is room for improvement and their is a dark side. They will seek to divide us, make us fear others all with the promise that if we just let them take control of information again all will be right. Some do it at the point of a gun while others use a TV ad. Simply put, mommy and daddy were wrong, that were no monsters, not real ones, but there are, they are us.
- austincheney 7y agoAll the problems mentioned in that article can be distilled down to two words: * anonymous * broadcast If either of those words is eliminated from the technology all of the spoken problems immediately die, and thus new never imagined problems will take their place.
- raxxorrax 7y agoWhy would you think that?
- austincheney 7y agoI think that because I read the article. Secondly, I have worked as a software developer, security analyst, and network operations chief.
- Merrill 7y agoUse of telecom networks for criminal activities predates the Internet, and the use of computer networking for fraud and abuse was recognized long before the Internet was opened for commercial use. The movie War Games was released in '83 around the already popular meme of computer hacking. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was passed in '86. The Morris Worm occurred in '88. Usenet started in '80 and soon had all sorts of sketchy activity going on. Corporate email systems in the mid-80s were being used for flame wars over internal disputes. It was clear by then that computer networking allowed all the good and bad human interactions that were possible.
- adim86 7y agoI find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed people in New York to learn and communicate with people in Egypt. Share stories, cultures, solve problems. A person in Nigeria can teach themselves Hindu, just from pure curiosity and no budget. No publisher needs to approve a book to be published or where it will be sold. We can make phone calls for free at any point in the day. We have Wikipedia, which for free provides more information than any human can process in their lifetime. For everyone who has access to the internet, the bulk of the world knowledge has been democratized and made accessible and something went wrong? Do terrorists use the internet? sure! Has consumerism hijacked parts of the internet? Sure! but these things are only symptoms of how powerful this tool is. Should we try to control and fix these problems of course! But for someone who created something so powerful, I am a bit disappointed at the negative tone of this post on the 50th anniversary of the first message.
- _jgdh 7y agoSmall nit - a person can learn Hindi (the language) or Hinduism (the religion) but not Hindu.
- ianhawes 7y agoAnd there’s our smudgeness.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y agoIs it smug? I didn’t know that. I have spent enough time in Hindu places that I think that’s good to know.
- celticmusic 7y agoIt's not clear to me how the correction of a cultural nature is being smug. The poster in question even admitted it was a "small nit", but it's still useful information for both the poster, and other readers.
- Grumbledour 7y agoI wonder if it is the internet that has changed or the world around it. No doubt this is hard to entangle, because in the last decades one begat the other. Sure, today large corporations rule the net and build silos and politicians try to silence free discourse, often at the formers behest, but this is also happening outside of the net and especially we, the technical elite who create software for the net seem to have shifted from "Here is my page about stuff I like" to "Here is my portfolio which I hope to monetize somehow soon". So has capitalism just eaten the net, or is it eating the world? But at the same time, isn't it up to us, to change the net to what we want it to be? Sure, our parents will stay on Facebook, but that doesn't mean we can not have quirky websites, distributed systems and interlinked webs of discussions and pages on specific topics. And while one might argue, that the net is now bigger than us and this will change nothing, we have traditionally been the driver for innovation and trends in this space. Facebook and Google are what they are, because we evangelized them for years to all our non techy friends. So could this not happen again over time when we tell people how easy it is to setup your own webpage or why it's a good idea to join a federated service? I think we need to be the change we want to see.
- hsnewman 7y agoRather than commenting on my experience with the internet, shouldn't the discussion be about one of the inventors of it stating that it's gone "so wrong"?
- newsgremlin 7y agoThe internet came at us too hard and too fast. We have not had time to determine what are the pitfalls we've already falling into and how to get out of them, to name a few; addiction, anxiety, FOMO, jobs market, specialist skills, internet personalities, fake news, data gathering, manipulation, privacy, security, peoples rights, ownership.
- aiyodev 7y ago> You've reached your monthly free article limit. Ironic.
- beat 7y agoSomeone should tell the author of this article about Alfred Nobel.
- brodouevencode 7y agoI heard Vint Cerf say similar things at a talk at Georgia Tech many years ago. Basically it was "we made this decision because of this reason, but had we known this thing now we would have done it yet another way." Those points were largely technical in the beginning of his talk, but then he started talking about it in terms of the philosophical implications which were largely not realized at the time. It was clear that he (and assuming his team) were in it as much if not more for the technical challenge than anything else. Its utility was just as clear, but long term implications were (seemingly) not considered. It was both funny and a little disheartening.
- paulpauper 7y agoarpanet was not really the precursor to the internet, rather the precursor to email. Big distinction. Because the www is graphic rather than text based.
- duke360 7y agoStrongly agree with the idea that nowadays internet is become very bad. But i strongly disagree with the idea that governments should do something. Politicians usually doesn't have enough technical background to do anything useful here. They do very little in the "real" world to make it a better place to live, why they should succeed in the "virtual" one? Internet user should take care of internet with new trust mechanisms, Operative systems should help users taking care of their data. People should return nice and polite. Netiquette (the hard one of the early '90) should be applied and respected.
- ltbarcly3 7y ago> Scientists need to create more advanced methods of encryption to protect individual privacy by preventing perpetrators from using stolen databases. It would be wonderful if this came about, but this isn't exactly a plan either. Current technologies almost all require you to work against decrypted data. For example, if I encrypt my laptop, and I use column level encryption on my database, and use ssl to connect to that database, and use certificates and two factor authentication and so on, in the end my application can read decrypted data. All the encryption prevents access to the data through many mechanisms, but rooting any of the machines involved still gives an attacker a path to much or all of the data (eventually all the data). What is necessary isn't more advanced methods of encryption, what we need is less painful methods of encryption. Encryption should be supported at the hardware level (ssd's can move data faster than even the most modern cpu's can comfortably decrypt it, memory is rarely encrypted), and applied everywhere all the time.
- SamPatt 7y ago"We should pressure government officials and entities to more zealously monitor and adjudicate such internet abuses as cyberattacks, data breaches and piracy." Considering governments are the main perpetrators of internet abuses, this does not seem like a good idea.
- ycombonator 7y agoInternet is the plumbing that powers everything from www, telecommunications etc. I think he is throwing the baby with the bath water.
- strictfp 7y agoInternet only allowed us to witness another iteration of implemention of the nasty methods already employed by nations, corporations and other entities to assert their power over the general population; information hiding, secrecy, isolationism, monopolies, weaponization of information, denial of anonymity etc. The original intent of internet was to establish a honest and open platform for information sharing, and for me (personally at least) the development so far has only convinced me that most establishments out there are utterly incompatible with those values.
- GnarfGnarf 7y ago"All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." (Thoreau)
- riazrizvi 7y agoIn summary, the internet initially reflected the values of its socially conscientious creators, but as the community diversified it was used for business (making money, marketing, spam), it suffered cyber attacks, nations are balkanizing regions of it with censorship firewalls, and businesses are exploiting our privacy. Users need to spend more time reviewing privacy agreements. Scientists need to work harder on encryption. Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used it. Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think this is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds social problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I reject the author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us acknowledge we are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old problems with a new lens.
- carapace 7y agoConway's Law on the global scale? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law > "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." The Internet as image? - - - - I like it, but then there's the problem of too much, too little, and differential transparency, eh?
- yawz 7y ago> ethical, open, trusted, free, shared Yes, but these concepts were not nearly as overloaded as now. I wasn't around for the 60s or 70s, but I know the days where the only browser was Mosaic (early-to-mid 90s). Even at that time, nobody used the term "ethical" or "open" the way that we use it now. It would be a mistake (and hindsight bias) to look back and draw strong parallels.
- trumbitta2 7y ago"This means websites should provide a privacy policy customized to you, something they should be able to do since they already customize the ads you see." No, thanks, I just want it to work. "Websites should also be required to take responsibility for any violations and abuses of privacy that result from their services." Yes, please.
- moron4hire 7y ago"We were nerds in our element, busily answering the challenge to create new technology that would benefit the world." I think this is the problem. "Nerds" (only to reuse the term Kleinrock chose) like to think that we are above politics, that all that matters is the purity of the science of whatever we're creating. But "politics" is just another word for "the interaction of people at scale". We are people who are building technology for people. We cannot forget that, without all these people in the mix, there is no point. I will reiterate that to make myself clear: science with no regard for people is useless. Masturbation at best. I think this one failure of thinking is what is responsible for a lot of the ills in our industry today. We have companies that exploit workers because workers are only thinking of the tech. We have products and services that exploit users because the people in the act of building them are only thinking about the tech. I'm working in a field that has a similar blindness right now. In VR and AR, we recognize that there is a huge potential for good from our tech. And it's amazing tech to be working on. But only a few people are talking seriously about the potential for abuse. Combine the dream of AR tech with deep fakes and you've got a huge propaganda tool of the like we've never seen before. Even simple issues of making sure our tech doesn't physically harm people gets sloughed off as "oh, we'll figure that out later." NO! We need to figure these things out now, before we lose the keys to the castle to the MBAs of the world. Right now, the industry isn't taken very seriously, it's mostly viewed as just a toy, or as only a tool for industrial process training and automation. It's basically the Internet all over again. We have a professional responsibility to get this right. I don't agree with Kleinrock's intimation that competition is a bad thing. I think he isn't thinking clearly on just how competitive the academic environment can be, how competition is a redundancy that ensures robustness and drives innovation forward. The Space Race didn't advance for academics playing nicely together, it advanced for US academics trying to best USSR academics, and vice versa. Given that Facebook is one of the biggest players in the field right now, we may have already lost. We should be treating the Facebooks of the world as our generation's USSR. We should be competing against them in the most vigorous way possible. And we should be doing that not just with tech, but with politics. Educating people on the dangers of misused technology. Pushing forward safety regulation--both physical and information safety--just like the FAA requires safe designs before allowing mass production of any aircraft. We have to get this right.
- dingo_bat 7y ago> We should pressure government officials and entities to more zealously monitor and adjudicate such internet abuses as cyberattacks, data breaches and piracy. Yeah, that's gonna be a nope for me, dawg.
- atemerev 7y agoWe have built the Internet open, neutral and free for all. Governments all over the world are now censoring and abusing it. Out solution? Let’s give even more power to governments! What a politically motivated piece of writing.
- crappy-doo 7y agoit was born of the cold war military-industrial complex to solve for distributed command and control in the event of nuclear war... it was us nerds that were mistaken when we thought it could be changed into anything different.
- carapace 7y agoJust for perspective: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu > Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents." (Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article proceeds to reference a Wired magazine "hit piece" in the next paragraph. Ignore that, read this:) Here's an interview with Nelson: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html https://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/csr/nelson_pg.html
- neonate 7y agohttp://archive.is/qpLlf http://archive.is/qpLlf
- 6510 7y agoOk, fine, ill go there, eventho you will hate me for it... hah.... Everyone should be able to publish and it should enjoy readership depending on its quality alone. Platforms like HN and all the others offer guaranteed readership. For example: If you are to write something about the current subject it would be a terrible write up if it talked about the Hindi vs Hindu typo. Horses vs cars would only be slightly less terrible. My hand picked collection of "articles you should read" about the topic should not include such works. It just cant. The difference is like that between getting on stage and sharing some insights or blabbering some raw thoughts over drinks with friends. We all have both qualities, which one should we use to write for the world?
- marknadal 7y agoThe internet went wrong when Big Corp stepped in and Bribed the Government with the DMCA, Killing off the community powered & hosted internet (Napster, BitTorrent). Then further, mobile (which is great) made the Server/Client relationship polarizing & prone to spying on your location. To fix this, we need lite P2P protocols that can run embedded or directly on any webpage inside the browser. Then maybe, we can finally dig ourselves out of this grave. That's what we're building, and we already have 8M monthly active users running this network! Come join the fun!
- zackmorris 7y agoNice headline, not sure about its conclusions. What went wrong (among many things) IMHO: * IP->UDP+TCP->HTTP->HTTPS should have been IP->UDP->TCP->HTTP->Skype/Tor/IPFS/Universal-performant-P2P-encryption->HTTPS * NAT, UPNP and other informal/non-scalable enterprise solutions had no place on the web because they made low-latency P2P communication nearly impossible to implement, so relegated most users to being second-class netizens * Software patents ruined JPEG, GIF, streaming, file compression and so many other ubiquitous technologies by contaminating protocols with restrictive licensing or DRM, which severely limited use cases and tended towards consumption rather than production, which also relegated most users to being second-class netizens and set us up for: * Declarative and data-driven innovations like HTTP and HTML regressing back to hand-rolled imperative solutions running natively on mobile devices, which opened the door to: * Private companies being the gate keepers of which applications and online tools are allowed in app stores * Free and open online communities funded by advertising being marginalized by greed from ad agencies (including Google) to the point where customer acquisition costs usually exceeded their lifetime value, which prevented most web businesses from being scalable. Which led us to: * Walled gardens which use surveillance (rather than ads) to extract value from users and sell it, which led us to: * Extreme wealth inequality where a select few individuals and organizations picked winners and losers by deciding which startup ideas got funding (arguably the majority of startup IPOs today revolve around zero sum games, disrupting key infrastructure companies that employ millions of people, and providing services or service industries which solve pain points instead of providing real innovations in sustenance/basic needs/standard of living) * Entrenchment of internet service provider duopolies in almost all cities while simultaneously banning municipal wifi via bribery/lobbying * Filtering of the service/gig economy through unelected referees like Yelp and ad/payment processors like Google/PayPal being able to starve income streams arbitrarily * Monopolization of almost all publishing/broadcasting, starting with the AOL-Time Warner merger, creeping slowly through canned radio/the loss of DJs/nearly all radio subsidiaries being owned by a single broadcaster like Cumulous, while simultaneously eliminating most independent newspaper journalism by consolidating papers under umbrellas like News Corp/Fox, and culminating with expensive a la carte streaming services grabbing any remaining eyeballs so that travesties like Sesame Street moving from PBS to HBO Max are unsurprising anymore * Monopolization of almost all online commerce under single entities like Amazon so that if products aren’t blessed by a prime designation, sales fall by orders of magnitude, which led us to: * Wall street taking priority over main street, rainmakers picking our elected officials and populism being coopted by Stockholm syndrome so the masses clamor for it I added that last one to illustrate why the loss of the free and open internet can be detrimental to society.
- denton-scratch 7y agoThe number of people here who dislike the post surprised me. Maybe it's a generational thing - people who've grown-up with a commercial internet probably think of it as a huge benefit; people who started using it before that are more sensitive to the way it has been warped. I encountered the internet in about 1985, while I was working for Olivetti, who had a batch feed from the UK AT&T headquarters, across the Thames. I connected from home in my spare time via a UK geek forum called CIX. I connected using a 1,400 baud acoustic coupler (they still have some in museums). It was necessarily text-only, and was populated mainly by programmers (back then we didn't call ourselves "systems engineers"), pilots, D&D enthusiasts, and a mishmash of non-normies, e.g. furries, whom appreciated anonymity. I could have used it to send email to relatives, but my relatives didn't have a connection. There were no browsers - there was gopher. It was largely person-to-person; I got involved in Usenet, which used servers, but importantly they were highly distributed, and mostly run from bedrooms. When browsers finally arrived there was no <img> tag. The <img> tag, combined with the ending of the ban on commercial use of the network, changed everything. Spam arrived, and never went away. Now most traffic is to or from a server (back in the day we called them "mainframes", and they were huge, and incredibly expensive to buy and run). Nobody put a mainframe on the internet, because you'd never recoup the outlay. I can certainly see how the internet conferred great benefits; here I sit, after all, posting a message to a website called Hacker News. It has brought democratisation, in the sense that you no longer have to belong to a clique of tech nerds to use it. But widespread network abuse has brought a wave of balkanisation that is still growing; that threatens the very principles on which the internet was built (anyone can communicate with anyone, no "special" hosts, etc.) I don't really see the benefits of being able to order stuff from a website and have it delivered to your door; sure, it's quicker than sending a messenger-boy to the merchant, but that quickness is just an encouragement to impulsive purchases, which is really just a benefit to the merchant. (Of course, only today I took delivery of an online order). For most needs, it not unreasonable to take your time or plan ahead. With respect to the "cars" analogy (which I choose to twist into "trucks"), the weight of traffic has now become just too great. Set aside arguments about global warming; I have a common lung condition (COPD). I notice the stink of a diesel vehicle that drove down the street I'm standing on a full 2 minutes after it passed (i.e. it's an almost continuous problem for me). I am considering moving home (which I don't want to do), but where would I move? Even small villages around here are no more than 500yds from some 6-lane bypass. The top of a mountain in some place like Switzerland? Full decarbonisation of road traffic is at least 20 years away. And even then, they have to be charged somehow - um, power stations also run on carbon. Fusion is still at least 2 decades away. OK, so with much fewer cars and trucks, we'd have to find another way to move stuff around; gee-gees seems a solution. Of course horses belch methane and cover the roads in shit; but at least you can compost the shit, to get "good stuff". And we'd need lots more of them than we needed in 1900; there are a lot more people. I part-own a car, with my wife; I hardly ever drive, I'm a cyclist. I don't travel much. Being much more local - shop locally, live near your work, that kind of thing - might help a bit. But really I don't have solutions to either the internet's problems or the traffic problems. Having less people is really my best shot.