51–60 of 212 posts
Are there any solutions? Is it possible to create a new network? How do you champion free speech and then try to control the ugly side? I'd love to read more I guess.
Encrypting everything -- HTTP traffic, email, streaming media -- is a good start.
None of that encryption is end-to-end. It's all you to them. and they, have the control over it, not you.
Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience. Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business? We…
"Many of the most successful security experts never went to college, or even finished high school. A statistically disproportionate number of you are on the autism spectrum."
She says there are more people on the autism spectrum in the hacker crowd than expected. Also (I believe is implied) college dropouts, apparently. And it's ok. So if there are more males in the field, why is it not ok? Shouldn't we be fighting against the autism-bias and dropout-bias? Surely neurotypical people and college graduates are underrepresented in tech, by the very definition of "being statistically underrepresented".
The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…
A decent future for humanity is not compatible with a profit-driven world. The solution is to end the profit driven world in a way that will lead to a better future, because like it or not, the profit driven world IS ending.
"People are sick and tired of crappy software." Hallelujah.
But they also complain about paying a dollar for an app. They get exactly what they are willing to pay for.
I know of a few OSes and app that are decent (at least don't try to track you, show ads to your face, do weird stuff in the name of making profits for a company). These all cost 0 and are open-source. Weird uhm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.
I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it. > You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict wit…
Again with this "there aren't as many women in computing/politics/NASCAR/mining industry as there should be" bullshit. I'll just paste previous comments because it's always the same irrational shit people like to vomit to get an audience. Why are there so few male manicures? Why so few male babysitters? Why so few female NASCAR drivers? Why so few female in the army? Why so few male in the wedding dress business? We…
She lost me there too, my ethnicity is NOTHING to do with my hackerness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.
I think it's an often forgotten (perhaps purposefully to push an agenda in some circles?) part of these discussions about corporations and business models. They're just driven by demand. It's not some shady nebulous force at work trying to screw everything and everyone. Another problem, idealists often ignore the practical realities of a society when dreaming of their idealist visions for the future. Could the intern…
Oh it's not shady in the sense that it has agency and decides to screw everything up. But it's very powerful and increasingly misaligned with the interest of humans. Being driven by demand does not map well to the shared wishes and morals of humanity, only if because of coordination problems.
I agree with your other points. And I didn't mean to point out that if Internet stayed non-profit, we'd have a perfect communication platform by now. For instance I think that if it became powerful, it'd still have problems with power and influence being a similar incentive to money. I only wanted to highlight the source of the problems we now have, which are those demand-satisfying, profit-driven actions. And that to make the Internet a better place, we would need to refuse doing things that seem optimal from business point of view but are detrimental to the Internet itself.
A pessimist in me says: this isn't likely to happen, because coordination is hard. So tragedy of commons here, no way to make a bottom-up group opposition there; we're screwed by coordination problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not trying to demonize for-profit work (at least not in this comment). My point is, there's money to be made off breaking the Internet, and there's little money to be made off fixing it. > You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict wit…
YES thanks for this! I've seen too many people justify something that could be considered immoral by invoking this "but it satisfies user needs" pseudo-argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
YES thanks for this! I've seen too many people justify something that could be considered immoral by invoking this "but it satisfies user needs" pseudo-argument.
I've seen a heck of a lot more people justify things by claiming to have objective moral knowledge. Throughout history, the most atrocious acts imaginable have been justified this way. I am much less worried about invoking the satisfaction of people's needs.
This is one of my favorite topics because I have cause for hope. The story of internet centralization is one of network effects. Even though the internet connects every computer on the planet directly, finding people to interact in the ways we want is difficult. We post things to Facebook and Twitter because that's where our friends and like-minded strangers are actually looking for things. To fight this, we tried fe…
I'm confused. What are the most significant distinctions between a federated network and a decentralized network? Is one of those distinctions that the latter has a distributed filesystem/datastore shared amongst most-to-all of its nodes?