Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in college right now and oscillate between having one and not having one, but most of the social life is organized through Facebook and I end up looking very odd for ritualistically avoiding it (well and Google Docs but that's a different kettle of fish).
Could you elaborate on avoiding Google Docs?
We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
151–160 of 185 posts
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
This quote is going to be immortalized. It is succinct, and perfectly reflects a real problem with the human condition. Thank-you.
The problem with succinct and clever phrases is that they can be used to shut down discussion of important issues. It's such a great reply that people may, not wishing to appear to be one of these naive souls who romanticize a past that never existed, refrain from pointing out that it is possible to lose things from the past that did exist and were exceptionally valuable. It's even possible to have these things stole…
Of course it's a shady corp run by a shady guy using pretty much all the dirty tricks and techniques in the book. But the only thing that facebook had for itself was the use of actual names instead of pseudonyms even on previous similar websites such as myspace or friendster.
By the time zuckerberg launched the facemash website using people pictures without permission, google had been pioneering surveillance and centralizing for a long time (and getting a copy of the human genome among many many other very creepy things).
Google turned into an enemy of the internet when it became an ad network, but google had to balance things out as it needed the web and to appear friendly to web users.
But the story starts before google came into existence, there's the internet's original sin[1]. There was also this giant corporation trying to kill and replace the web with its own network called MSN, the microsoft network, supposed to be the "internet killer" which came preinstalled in windows 95. Let's not forget this pioneer in tracking users also launched in 1995 to sell books online under the name amazon.
The turning point starting the path leading to nowadays surveillance capitalism was may 1995 when the ban on commercial activities was lifted.
I do agree that facebook is a major offender and plays a role, but this is the case because the roots of surveillance as a business model were established and a large portion of the population who doesn't know better had now internet access.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/adver...
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
By using either you disclose your network of friends, location, the content of your communication, and -- if you didn't take steps to counter it, essentially the majority of web pages you visit. All voluntarily. Stasi would be jealous.
Well, to some extent they could get a good deal of this information from being in bed with the phone company and the mail service. The difference nowadays is that making things digital has drastically reduced the cost of operating a surveillance dragnet (e.g. cost of copying / storage).
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like Slack, our team communication has never been better, I like Facebook (messenger) because it's a common platform for all my acquaintances. Are we forced to share anything (really) personal though?
The fact is merely using these services is enough to grant them a wealth of information that would have required stasi-like organisation not 30years back.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my opinion, Google stopped being a "search engine" roughly 10 years ago. These days I'd call it a "recommendation engine" and it seems to primarily work by giving you results that people similar to your profile (according to the tracking surveillance data they have) have clicked with keywords similar to your query. Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with somethi…
Do you need the results to be personified? I use DDG / startpage to avoid it.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with succinct and clever phrases is that they can be used to shut down discussion of important issues. It's such a great reply that people may, not wishing to appear to be one of these naive souls who romanticize a past that never existed, refrain from pointing out that it is possible to lose things from the past that did exist and were exceptionally valuable. It's even possible to have these things stole…
The web is less open than it used to be, for some definitions of open. The barriers to entry to the web nowadays are virtually zero. Anyone can get a free Wix or free WordPress site going in minutes. From their pocket computer no less! Back when I was a lad, and access to the web was via a modem, the barriers were at least: have some technical knowledge and the right equipment.
So no the barriers to entry still exist and the worst actors of the online surveillance capitalism are there.
Then again wix or wordpress are part of the very issue (centralization, giving away control of your data, etc.) the way to do it right is self hosting which is not that hard with things such as yunohost, cozy or sandstorm. The difficulty is having a symmetric bandwidth and reliable connection to the internet. Now we're dealing with another part of the issue: tier 1 operators and the cost of bandwidth.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#157The worst part is that if you're employed, it's probably a job requirement to use at least one of these surveillance capitalism platforms. Most people I know in tech have to be on Slack. Most people I know in advertising and PR have to be on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. For some jobs, like journalism, even the "troops on the ground" are required to post and tweet. Even for jobs without the social media taint, a…
I like Slack, our team communication has never been better, I like Facebook (messenger) because it's a common platform for all my acquaintances. Are we forced to share anything (really) personal though?
You don't like facebook messenger, you like having all your acquaintances in one place (same could be done with federated xmpp).
You don't have to share anything personal to be profiled with a stockpile of data (see metadata), actually you have to take active counter measures to limit that. But even though you are not forced at gunpoint you are manipulated into being part of the mess (be part of the walled garden or be separated from your acquaintances, be online or lose some of your social interactions).
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#158It all went wrong at the firewall. As soon as peer-to-peer was over and NAT became a security layer as well as a technological construct to put more than one host behind one public IP it was essentially game-over. If you want to reboot the web then you need to reboot the internet first, solve the insecurity of privately hosted servers first and convince ISPs that symmetric connectivity should be the rule. After that…
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Operating some server software on the wimpy VPS is very different different from having everybody's daily-use computers be fully networked with other computers. Also, you likely already have an Internet connection so the marginal cost is zero. And you don't need a credit card to do it. To get network effects, it's all about low friction and low barriers to entry.
I agree with you and the grandparent to this (my) post. So: I think the way to go is in some server-side OS suitable for daily-use by ordinary folk.
Re: We didn’t lose control of the Web – it was stolen
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The consequences of that asymmetry go much further than just a price difference. It's about a whole raft of applications that are simply impossible or at best extremely hard. The internet was meant to be peer-to-peer not server-to-consumer. Adding more servers, even at $5 won't change that.
But it can never be truly peer-to-peer or decentralized due to the economics of last-mile connectivity. Connecting machines in a neighborhood is more expensive and difficult from an infrastructure perspective than hooking up a computer in a server farm. This in of itself changes the costs and expectations of the parties involved which means things will likely slump back to a permutation of this status quo even with a…
The server farm is part of the periphery of the network and has a last mile connectivity same a residential home connection. It is really expensive and only makes senses if you stockpile machines to have economies of scale.