The Internet is not a place apart from society. It exists within society. And society will exert the same amount of control over it as it asserts on other facets of life in order to meet social priorities.
The End of the Internet Dream
141–150 of 212 posts
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#142The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creati…
If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web".
But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better performance and usability of apps, they also got real substance behind them.
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#143The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creati…
> Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever.
How do you figure? There are probably more money lost from patent lawsuits or extortion than even before now. Also, didn't software patents only become a thing in the 90's? And soon we're going to have to deal with gene patents and all sort of things like that, as the gene editing revolution begins.
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#144The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creati…
> Yes we still have work. Infrastructure is still a big issue. If we want to reduce centralization, we need better infrastructure and equal access to it. That one is very political. If you want to work for an open internet, this is the key thing. For open to be the default, it should be dramatically easier to implement a new thing using p2p or on a blockchain than with centralized services.
Not just easier, but preferable. When big companies (or rather new companies that can get big, as the old ones probably won't change anyway) start preferring P2P infrastructure to conduct their business and offer their services, we'll know there's no going back from a decentralized Internet.
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#145Is unfortunate how she mixes racism and sexism in this essay, which makes the subject too broad, specially when bringing things like "only 30% of google is female", firstly because such companies are the ones making the "internet dream" die, so you are asking diversity by the "enemy", also when the "internet dream started" it was a lot less diverse than now, the steryotype of lonely male teenager messing with compute…
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#146The way I see it, there's 2 main hurdles for truly free internet: hardware and encryption.
When normal folks start having personal servers at their home, and have all their traffic and data fully encrypted on their personal server which is in their turf, they will have the freedom to act as they like.
The problem with these two hurdles is infrastructure (being ISP dependent) and regulation (Government can make up rules for personal servers) - if we can get past those, oh my it will be wonderful. But I don't think it will be possible until someone forms a "Digital Country" - a territory with 'open source' government with some sort of 'digital rights constitution' that would allow the above to really happen.
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm this time and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it: "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 m…
Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population. I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic? Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are d…
I don't believe she has real numbers on whether security people, in particular, are neurotypical. I'm guessing she's invoking studies of technologists in general (which would make sense in the context of a talk).
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I decided to ignore that angle in order to not start a gender shitstorm this time and detract from a lot of interesting points made in that talk, but I believe the author basically answers herself but doesn't even notice it: "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 m…
Boys are approximately four times as likely as girls to be autistic. That would tend to make a group that is disproportionately male automatically be disproportionately autistic compared to the general population. I wonder if that was taken into account when determining that security experts are disproportionately autistic? Assuming that this is based on a proper base population for comparison, and so autistics are d…
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Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#149The 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…
I don't think it's nearly as grim as you make it out to be... it's just as easy to deploy a personal not-profit driven application/bulletin-board or whatever on Amazon, Linode, DigitalOcean, Azure and many others as it has EVER been to start a project and deploy it online. People are choosing to use Facebook, Twitter and other sites... that doesn't stop anyone from doing other things. That said, I think some governme…
People were choosing to drink heavily radioactive water in the early 20th century.
People are choosing to take drugs that destroy their lives.
When people chose something it doesn't mean they understand all the consequences. Especially since all the bad sides are conveniently hidden away in some tech, nerd stuff.
People use Facebook because other people use Facebook. Simple as that. People haven't assessed all the facts about Facebook and decided they are ok with them. They just use Facebook because their friends use Facebook.
Pretending people are rational and have perfect information considered harmful, etc.
Re: The End of the Internet Dream
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities. What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they…
First of all, the consumer and the supplier do not form a closed system (regardless of what some ideologies would want one to believe). You have to account for the effects supplying a customer with something has on the third parties. Those are the externalities I've mentioned, and even Wikipedia has a lot of examples. Secondly, you have to take a look at the aggregate effects. So for instance I may need a new, shitti…
> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.
These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.
PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.