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https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > Visionaries see a futu

by _zagj 3y ago

https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... > Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. > Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works. Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mendelab 3y ago
Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores? For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.
- _zagj 3y ago
  Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written: > Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
  - vintagedave 3y ago
    We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read. What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024. We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.
  - mendelab 3y ago
    I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism). But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).
mayd 3y ago
I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude. Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers. Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers. Computers have still not changed the way government works. Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse. We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it. Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology. Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much. What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.
- graemep 3y ago
  > Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers. I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines. > Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful. It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor. My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though). > Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse. I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated. > We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it. That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries. Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant. > Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly. > Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.
vintagedave 3y ago
From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_. My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet. There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played. As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.
- vintagedave 3y ago
  > What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. ... Computers and networks isolate us from one another. Look at Instagram and its effects on teens. Look how smartphones have increased depression. Man oh man was he right.
  - jll29 3y ago
    Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games. What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".
    - asimovfan 3y ago
      This is literally one of the best upsides and not even on the list of bad things about computers and networks. Id put trying to get likes from unknown people all day every day to the top.
justin66 3y ago
> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it. I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way. > he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.

by _zagj 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mendelab 3y ago

Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores? For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.

_zagj 3y ago
Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written: > Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure. He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
- vintagedave 3y ago
  We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read. What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024. We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.
- mendelab 3y ago
  I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism). But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).

mayd 3y ago

I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude. Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers. Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers. Computers have still not changed the way government works. Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse. We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it. Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology. Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much. What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.

graemep 3y ago
> Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers. I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines. > Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful. It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor. My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though). > Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse. I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated. > We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it. That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries. Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant. > Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly. > Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.

vintagedave 3y ago

From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_. My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet. There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played. As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.

vintagedave 3y ago
> What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. ... Computers and networks isolate us from one another. Look at Instagram and its effects on teens. Look how smartphones have increased depression. Man oh man was he right.
- jll29 3y ago
  Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games. What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".
  - asimovfan 3y ago
    This is literally one of the best upsides and not even on the list of bad things about computers and networks. Id put trying to get likes from unknown people all day every day to the top.

justin66 3y ago

> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it. I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way. > he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.