6 ms·

I think I give up on the Internet that we know today. I'm too tired to fight anymore. Monopoly ISPs with data caps, DNS rent seeking, the walled gardens, the in

by foxhop 7y ago

I think I give up on the Internet that we know today. I'm too tired to fight anymore. Monopoly ISPs with data caps, DNS rent seeking, the walled gardens, the internet of shit where I cannot walk down my street without getting recorded by every house with a "ring". I'm done with it. I don't want to partake anymore, I don't want to fight it anymore, I don't want to care anymore. Let the Google's and Facebook's have the old Internet. I'm done with it. The dream is over. The magic is gone for me. The old Internet is gone. Let them have the rest. Maybe then, and only then we will rise up like a Phoenix, with a solution that cannot be stolen out from under us.

kotrunga 7y ago
Ah man.... the exhaustion I feel... is summed up so well by this comment.
askafriend 7y ago
> stolen out from under us. Who is "us"? The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There's more content on the internet than ever before. It's a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world. That's what's happening to the internet. It's no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it. And the promise of the internet was never to be just that. It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it's warts). That's what you're seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line. The attitude of "this isn't what it was meant to be" presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.
- foxhop 7y ago
  They can have my last two Legos, these blocks are no longer useful to me. They already have most of the blocks under their control anyways.
- brianshaler 7y ago
  I think the sentiment was regarding the democratization of knowledge and access, which is shifting more toward an oligarchy. True, more of humanity is coming online. However, they can only participate if they can be monetized and controlled by those with all the wealth and power.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    The internet was and remains the most democratic knowledge dissemination engine in several thousand years of recorded history. It is substantially more democratic than it was in the 90s and 2000s because there are more people accessing it now. It isn't shifting towards an oligopoly unless you count things like Wikipedia as a monopoly. Which it isn't, Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - brianshaler 7y ago
      Wikipedia is a great example of a web site that has resisted the trend! It is a pretty ideal democracy for those of us whose ISP or nation-state[0] doesn't prohibit us from viewing it. There was a project similar to Wikipedia, but for semantic data. It lasted for a little while before being swallowed up by Google and shut down[1]. Granted there are some alternatives, but after investing some time working with freebase data, I should be allowed to hold a grudge. Google played a key role in muzzling more widespread usage of RSS[2], along with Twitter and Facebook discontinuing support for it. Similarly, jabber[3], XMPP[4]. These days it's risky to even host your own mail server, since most people you correspond with are likely to use one particular email service that may arbitrarily block messages from lesser-known mail services[5]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/WEnyO8f7xOQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/WEn... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3013890/reader-may-have-died-to-feed-googles-apis https://www.fastcompany.com/3013890/reader-may-have-died-to-... [3] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2006/use-twitter-by-instant-message.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2006/use-twitter-by-instant... (couldn't easily find press of the discontinuation of this service) [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 [5] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_i...
      - 7y ago
- edoceo 7y ago
  I'm not sure about the internet but...one MUST share Lego with any and all who want to play.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago
  > Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class. You're being disingenuous and needlessly insulting. We wanted to bring the freedom and egalitarianism of the early internet to everyone. Instead we got the jaded, corporate internet, but at least it's available to everyone. The GP is obviously mourning the quality, not the exclusivity.
  - foxhop 7y ago
    Thank you for this comment.
sieabahlpark 7y ago
How about we just use different domains? .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Difficult to do for a nonprofit with a history. This is extortion.
- BEEdwards 7y ago
  As the article points out, .org is the for non profits like .gov is for governments. It adds legitimacy.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Thorrez 7y ago
  When you have a site you want to keep it at that same domain, otherwise all the links to your site around the internet will break.
- vageli 7y ago
  > How about we just use different domains? > .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains. What about all the broken MX records?
- jlokier 7y ago
  Any worthy .org's name will be domain-squatted on the other good TLDs, so they couldn't move it over. Changing the domain of a site is very effective at killing a site, and a business or organisation, because all existing links to it break, emails to it break. And if you give up the domain, it will usually get squatted quickly, so the links and emails carry on working - they just go to the squatter's site instead. There is no way to update the majority of links to your site, if it's been around for a while. You can search for links and ask other site operaters to update, but it just doesn't happen much, and it's also extremely expensive to do when measured in time to write to thousands of site operators individually. And when you have to change the name at the same time (because your name is squatted on other TLDs), you're effectively deleting the name recognition, literature, old podcasts, matching name you already have on Twitter, etc. If you had a good name for a long time, chances are you will struggle to find another one like it, and even if you do, most people will think the new name is something else. On top of that, your email is probably linked to your .org, and people aren't going to stop sending to that for years, no matter how much you tell people to via other channels. You can't know everywhere your email address and main web address are being kept by someone to use later. And wherever there is a long-standing email domain, there are probably thousands of internet accounts that have that email as their primary or backup/recovery, which you will need to keep if you don't want to start losing access to other accounts. Updating those is very difficult unless you have been extremely diligent at keeping a database of every account you ever created. In practice, even very diligent organisations who attempt to do this don't succeed because accounts tend to be created bydifferent people. Perhaps in extreme startup land where people start a new business from scratch every couple of years, and pay a lot in SaaS costs so hiked domain fees may sseem relatively cheap, this might not seem to matter. But many .orgs have been around for decades, and are low budget but very well esablished. Any many other .orgs are individuals, with email and thousands of online accounts linked to their domain. There is no "just" to a domain name change.
glup 7y ago
Same. Time for a completely different stack / protocol? Like a cloud that is actually a cloud rather than corporate centralization with a side order of surveillance?
- zadler 7y ago
  More likely, time to move to governed cyber communities, where taxes will go towards providing infrastructure and maintaining rights.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Asking for more government (analog in this case) is just kicking the can down the road. Your tiny cool self-regulating community, will either die, be eaten by Facebook or become Facebook.
    - taeric 7y ago
      I think the point was that there basically is no fully technical solution. Regulation has to come from the society in question. Granted, I'm holding out hope that someone surprises us with a technical solution. I just don't have high hopes there.
    - zadler 7y ago
      It’s not about about being cool or making a hip new website. The point is that people won’t choose to pay for services when free ones exist. It requires a monetary obligation in the form of taxes. Countries don’t function because everyone decides they’d like to pay for the infrastructure that benefits everyone. They function because that money is collected in the form of taxes.
- jijji 7y ago
  x.25 was my favorite
  - jcims 7y ago
    Haven’t seen that in awhile. Used to help run some EDI and PPP services hung off an x.25 node right down the road from CompuServe in Ohio. The PPP router didn’t even authenticate the user lol, just welcome to the network! I bitched about it for a long time before a demo changed minds.
Forge36 7y ago
Host your own website? I have a web server, I manage a VPN for myself (good for traveling and questionable wifi points). Much of the joy of the early internet came from the small groups and light website's. Website's at scale gave a want hard time being small. Share what you care about on your own platform. Ignore everyone's ring. If you aren't hosting a part of the internet you want. Why would you expect others to?
- foxhop 7y ago
  I host various things at my house even though my ISP prohibits it... We lost that battle a long time ago too.
exikyut 7y ago
Sorry, you're not allowed to leave. Earlier today I was trying to Google a website I found on my PC a while back. (Backing up its disk atm, and don't use Chrome sync.) Clicked on an unrelated link, and was already in the process of reaching for the Back button when I realized I was looking at a cert failure (wrong domain in certificate). Heh. Idly curious I hit Continue... And was presented with my first > Content Denied > Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of copyright. > 1800 086 346 for information. https://i.imgur.com/fwXRlTN.png https://i.imgur.com/fwXRlTN.png After recovering from the shock - this sort of thing only happens in 3rd world repressive countries, right??? - I went back and tried the domain referenced in the cert. Haha I've probably lit a billion lists up like Christmas trees now... I got this: https://i.imgur.com/w37jfFt.png https://i.imgur.com/w37jfFt.png Here's the cert error, for reference: https://i.imgur.com/dZmEcnd.png https://i.imgur.com/dZmEcnd.png
- kragen 7y ago
  What website?
  - exikyut 7y ago
    The initial one I was visiting purported to host various cartoons (and probably other TV shows). I have no idea what the second site was.
- Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  Australia implemented anti piracy dns blacklisting in 2016, and had an additional dns filter for highly illegal content significantly before that. I’ve never heard of anyone get arrested for low level piracy here, so I wouldn’t be all that concerned with requests that hit the piracy filters.
rambojazz 7y ago
> DNS rent seeking Domains registrars?
jancsika 7y ago
> Monopoly ISPs with data caps The fact that data caps ever gained traction doesn't reflect well on the old timers ability to explain and protect the true value of their creations for the wider public. Which is weird because they were obviously able to do that with cryptographic algorithms which are way more esoteric. It's like teaching a generation of craftspeople to build all the intricate parts of a piano but never noticing nor caring that for some reason they're all selling pianos that have a single key.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  What? Data caps had a very good reason to exist. Back in the 3G days if everybody would be online all the time the whole machine would just grind to halt. Nowadays the data caps are (in Europe at least) only a formality.
ehonda 7y ago
Some of us are trying to keep it alive.
Waterluvian 7y ago
You mean the death of the nerds-only Internet (a different kind of walled garden). There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn't have been possible via the "old Internet". There's certainly many problems with something this gargantuan, but I get very skeptical when people nostalgize and eulogize "the good old days" of anything. I'll add, I say this with empathy to your feelings. I regularly feel a very strong nostalgia for those late nights of discovery on the Internet. But I do recognize that Internet involved a fraction of a fraction of the people using it today who are discovering and creating and sharing all kinds of stuff with greater ease than ever before.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Is what they are sharing worth anything or is it just crap?
  - SamPatt 7y ago
    That is entirely subjective.
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    I can't even imagine being small-minded enough to think that only tech-savvy people have anything interesting to express (and I say that as someone who thinks pretty highly of internet culture prior to its mainstreaming)
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
  > There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn't have been possible via the "old Internet". Could you explain how you got to that conclusion? It would be impossible for non-tech-savvy people to share things on the internet if there were no omni-present surveillance, manipulation, and centralization, because ... ?
  - necovek 7y ago
    I think their point was that "old internet" was harder to use as a publishing platform than the new one, not necessarily that what we got was the best evolution, but that it has enabled non-techies to publish more.
ActorNightly 7y ago
Can we not do this sensationalist rhetoric on this forum? If you feel like you got a bone yo pick with a current state of internet, post about a technology that addresses the problem so that people can become aware of it. And save the virtue signaling for reddit/facebook.

by foxhop 7y ago

kotrunga 7y ago

Ah man.... the exhaustion I feel... is summed up so well by this comment.

askafriend 7y ago

> stolen out from under us. Who is "us"? The internet is available to more people in more countries than ever before. There's more content on the internet than ever before. It's a part of every day life for nearly everyone in the world. That's what's happening to the internet. It's no longer a corner where quirky tinkerers were the only ones who could access it. And the promise of the internet was never to be just that. It was meant to be a vehicle for humanity (along with all it's warts). That's what you're seeing. The rest of humanity coming on-line. The attitude of "this isn't what it was meant to be" presumes that it was meant to be anything at all. Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class.

foxhop 7y ago
They can have my last two Legos, these blocks are no longer useful to me. They already have most of the blocks under their control anyways.
brianshaler 7y ago
I think the sentiment was regarding the democratization of knowledge and access, which is shifting more toward an oligarchy. True, more of humanity is coming online. However, they can only participate if they can be monetized and controlled by those with all the wealth and power.
- roenxi 7y ago
  The internet was and remains the most democratic knowledge dissemination engine in several thousand years of recorded history. It is substantially more democratic than it was in the 90s and 2000s because there are more people accessing it now. It isn't shifting towards an oligopoly unless you count things like Wikipedia as a monopoly. Which it isn't, Wikipedia is probably about as close to an ideal democracy as any human project ever attempted.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - brianshaler 7y ago
    Wikipedia is a great example of a web site that has resisted the trend! It is a pretty ideal democracy for those of us whose ISP or nation-state[0] doesn't prohibit us from viewing it. There was a project similar to Wikipedia, but for semantic data. It lasted for a little while before being swallowed up by Google and shut down[1]. Granted there are some alternatives, but after investing some time working with freebase data, I should be allowed to hold a grudge. Google played a key role in muzzling more widespread usage of RSS[2], along with Twitter and Facebook discontinuing support for it. Similarly, jabber[3], XMPP[4]. These days it's risky to even host your own mail server, since most people you correspond with are likely to use one particular email service that may arbitrarily block messages from lesser-known mail services[5]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/WEnyO8f7xOQ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/freebase-discuss/WEn... [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/3013890/reader-may-have-died-to-feed-googles-apis https://www.fastcompany.com/3013890/reader-may-have-died-to-... [3] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2006/use-twitter-by-instant-message.html https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2006/use-twitter-by-instant... (couldn't easily find press of the discontinuation of this service) [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769 [5] https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/ https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_i...
    - 7y ago
edoceo 7y ago
I'm not sure about the internet but...one MUST share Lego with any and all who want to play.
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
> Similar to a kid that doesn't want to share their legos with the rest of the class. You're being disingenuous and needlessly insulting. We wanted to bring the freedom and egalitarianism of the early internet to everyone. Instead we got the jaded, corporate internet, but at least it's available to everyone. The GP is obviously mourning the quality, not the exclusivity.
- foxhop 7y ago
  Thank you for this comment.

sieabahlpark 7y ago

How about we just use different domains? .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains.

cannonedhamster 7y ago
Difficult to do for a nonprofit with a history. This is extortion.
BEEdwards 7y ago
As the article points out, .org is the for non profits like .gov is for governments. It adds legitimacy.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Thorrez 7y ago
When you have a site you want to keep it at that same domain, otherwise all the links to your site around the internet will break.
vageli 7y ago
> How about we just use different domains? > .org is gone, use .com or .net or any of the other hundred of domains. What about all the broken MX records?
jlokier 7y ago
Any worthy .org's name will be domain-squatted on the other good TLDs, so they couldn't move it over. Changing the domain of a site is very effective at killing a site, and a business or organisation, because all existing links to it break, emails to it break. And if you give up the domain, it will usually get squatted quickly, so the links and emails carry on working - they just go to the squatter's site instead. There is no way to update the majority of links to your site, if it's been around for a while. You can search for links and ask other site operaters to update, but it just doesn't happen much, and it's also extremely expensive to do when measured in time to write to thousands of site operators individually. And when you have to change the name at the same time (because your name is squatted on other TLDs), you're effectively deleting the name recognition, literature, old podcasts, matching name you already have on Twitter, etc. If you had a good name for a long time, chances are you will struggle to find another one like it, and even if you do, most people will think the new name is something else. On top of that, your email is probably linked to your .org, and people aren't going to stop sending to that for years, no matter how much you tell people to via other channels. You can't know everywhere your email address and main web address are being kept by someone to use later. And wherever there is a long-standing email domain, there are probably thousands of internet accounts that have that email as their primary or backup/recovery, which you will need to keep if you don't want to start losing access to other accounts. Updating those is very difficult unless you have been extremely diligent at keeping a database of every account you ever created. In practice, even very diligent organisations who attempt to do this don't succeed because accounts tend to be created bydifferent people. Perhaps in extreme startup land where people start a new business from scratch every couple of years, and pay a lot in SaaS costs so hiked domain fees may sseem relatively cheap, this might not seem to matter. But many .orgs have been around for decades, and are low budget but very well esablished. Any many other .orgs are individuals, with email and thousands of online accounts linked to their domain. There is no "just" to a domain name change.

glup 7y ago

Same. Time for a completely different stack / protocol? Like a cloud that is actually a cloud rather than corporate centralization with a side order of surveillance?

zadler 7y ago
More likely, time to move to governed cyber communities, where taxes will go towards providing infrastructure and maintaining rights.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Asking for more government (analog in this case) is just kicking the can down the road. Your tiny cool self-regulating community, will either die, be eaten by Facebook or become Facebook.
  - taeric 7y ago
    I think the point was that there basically is no fully technical solution. Regulation has to come from the society in question. Granted, I'm holding out hope that someone surprises us with a technical solution. I just don't have high hopes there.
  - zadler 7y ago
    It’s not about about being cool or making a hip new website. The point is that people won’t choose to pay for services when free ones exist. It requires a monetary obligation in the form of taxes. Countries don’t function because everyone decides they’d like to pay for the infrastructure that benefits everyone. They function because that money is collected in the form of taxes.
jijji 7y ago
x.25 was my favorite
- jcims 7y ago
  Haven’t seen that in awhile. Used to help run some EDI and PPP services hung off an x.25 node right down the road from CompuServe in Ohio. The PPP router didn’t even authenticate the user lol, just welcome to the network! I bitched about it for a long time before a demo changed minds.

Forge36 7y ago

Host your own website? I have a web server, I manage a VPN for myself (good for traveling and questionable wifi points). Much of the joy of the early internet came from the small groups and light website's. Website's at scale gave a want hard time being small. Share what you care about on your own platform. Ignore everyone's ring. If you aren't hosting a part of the internet you want. Why would you expect others to?

foxhop 7y ago
I host various things at my house even though my ISP prohibits it... We lost that battle a long time ago too.

exikyut 7y ago

Sorry, you're not allowed to leave. Earlier today I was trying to Google a website I found on my PC a while back. (Backing up its disk atm, and don't use Chrome sync.) Clicked on an unrelated link, and was already in the process of reaching for the Back button when I realized I was looking at a cert failure (wrong domain in certificate). Heh. Idly curious I hit Continue... And was presented with my first > Content Denied > Access to this website has been disabled by an order of the Federal Court of Australia because it infringes or facilitates the infringement of copyright. > 1800 086 346 for information. https://i.imgur.com/fwXRlTN.png https://i.imgur.com/fwXRlTN.png After recovering from the shock - this sort of thing only happens in 3rd world repressive countries, right??? - I went back and tried the domain referenced in the cert. Haha I've probably lit a billion lists up like Christmas trees now... I got this: https://i.imgur.com/w37jfFt.png https://i.imgur.com/w37jfFt.png Here's the cert error, for reference: https://i.imgur.com/dZmEcnd.png https://i.imgur.com/dZmEcnd.png

kragen 7y ago
What website?
- exikyut 7y ago
  The initial one I was visiting purported to host various cartoons (and probably other TV shows). I have no idea what the second site was.
Bnshsysjab 7y ago
Australia implemented anti piracy dns blacklisting in 2016, and had an additional dns filter for highly illegal content significantly before that. I’ve never heard of anyone get arrested for low level piracy here, so I wouldn’t be all that concerned with requests that hit the piracy filters.

rambojazz 7y ago

> DNS rent seeking Domains registrars?

jancsika 7y ago

> Monopoly ISPs with data caps The fact that data caps ever gained traction doesn't reflect well on the old timers ability to explain and protect the true value of their creations for the wider public. Which is weird because they were obviously able to do that with cryptographic algorithms which are way more esoteric. It's like teaching a generation of craftspeople to build all the intricate parts of a piano but never noticing nor caring that for some reason they're all selling pianos that have a single key.

yoz-y 7y ago
What? Data caps had a very good reason to exist. Back in the 3G days if everybody would be online all the time the whole machine would just grind to halt. Nowadays the data caps are (in Europe at least) only a formality.

ehonda 7y ago

Some of us are trying to keep it alive.

Waterluvian 7y ago

You mean the death of the nerds-only Internet (a different kind of walled garden). There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn't have been possible via the "old Internet". There's certainly many problems with something this gargantuan, but I get very skeptical when people nostalgize and eulogize "the good old days" of anything. I'll add, I say this with empathy to your feelings. I regularly feel a very strong nostalgia for those late nights of discovery on the Internet. But I do recognize that Internet involved a fraction of a fraction of the people using it today who are discovering and creating and sharing all kinds of stuff with greater ease than ever before.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Is what they are sharing worth anything or is it just crap?
- SamPatt 7y ago
  That is entirely subjective.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  I can't even imagine being small-minded enough to think that only tech-savvy people have anything interesting to express (and I say that as someone who thinks pretty highly of internet culture prior to its mainstreaming)
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 7y ago
> There is so much creativity shared via the Internet by non-tech-savvy people that just wouldn't have been possible via the "old Internet". Could you explain how you got to that conclusion? It would be impossible for non-tech-savvy people to share things on the internet if there were no omni-present surveillance, manipulation, and centralization, because ... ?
- necovek 7y ago
  I think their point was that "old internet" was harder to use as a publishing platform than the new one, not necessarily that what we got was the best evolution, but that it has enabled non-techies to publish more.

ActorNightly 7y ago

Can we not do this sensationalist rhetoric on this forum? If you feel like you got a bone yo pick with a current state of internet, post about a technology that addresses the problem so that people can become aware of it. And save the virtue signaling for reddit/facebook.