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In a way, I miss the days where there was kind of a "gentlemen's agreement" not to abuse vulnerabilities with antisocial behaviour. The Morris worm changed tha

In a way, I miss the days where there was kind of a "gentlemen's agreement" not to abuse vulnerabilities with antisocial behaviour. The Morris worm changed that for networked Unix machines. The Canter & Siegel spam changed that for Usenet. And the beautiful open architecture of everything has devolved into heavily armed conflict where antispam measures mean you can't send email from "interesting" sources, you can be blocked by Cloudflare if they deem your internet behaviour suspicious, where you can be banned for life from important platforms because an algorithm thinks you might cause trouble, etc. As with so many other things "we can't have nice things" because there are always bad apples, and everything devolves into a standoff between them and everyone else, with lots of collateral damage.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
thrtythreeforty 3y ago
The Morris worm wasn't the first example of what we now call malware. Take this highly amusing war story: https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/xerox.txt https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/xerox.txt
thwarted 3y ago
Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.
- medo-bear 3y ago
  This is a tangent, but I wonder if tragedy of the commons refers more to the general state consciousness at a time when people first get exposed to common property. My hypothesis is that in the beggining they have a diminished sense of shared ownership, value, and responsibility. For example, when we look at our changing attitude toward the environment, I think people have experienced a drastic increase in their sense of common responsibility.
anthk 3y ago
OTOH there was the PDP10, the ITS and Emacs with the policy of keeping everyting open and readable from anyone to anyone, the ultimate hacker's machine so everyone could contribute with cool things. The lack of "mistery" kept potential crackers away because when you are a teen there's no pride on entering an already open system. On Usenet, adding googlegrups to a killfile blocks the 90% of the pests out there. SLRN will happily purge all the SPAM before entering the thread list.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

thrtythreeforty 3y ago

The Morris worm wasn't the first example of what we now call malware. Take this highly amusing war story: https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/xerox.txt https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/xerox.txt

thwarted 3y ago

Tragedy of the Commons Ruins Everything Around Me.

medo-bear 3y ago
This is a tangent, but I wonder if tragedy of the commons refers more to the general state consciousness at a time when people first get exposed to common property. My hypothesis is that in the beggining they have a diminished sense of shared ownership, value, and responsibility. For example, when we look at our changing attitude toward the environment, I think people have experienced a drastic increase in their sense of common responsibility.

anthk 3y ago

OTOH there was the PDP10, the ITS and Emacs with the policy of keeping everyting open and readable from anyone to anyone, the ultimate hacker's machine so everyone could contribute with cool things. The lack of "mistery" kept potential crackers away because when you are a teen there's no pride on entering an already open system. On Usenet, adding googlegrups to a killfile blocks the 90% of the pests out there. SLRN will happily purge all the SPAM before entering the thread list.