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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

latimes.com

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Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#81

Post by Swizec »

codegeek wrote: post #41

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone ov…

If it weren’t for the internet I’d be back home making an average $20,000/year. Instead I’m in SF on an SF salary.

Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset.

qed

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#82

Post by thinkingemote »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

The huge ironic joke that made Adams a good writer was that the legend of the Tower of Babel was about nations coming together with a common language (which got up to haughty stuff)

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#83

Post by faizshah »

efdee wrote: post #39
workthrowaway wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…

Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies. I think it went /okay/.

HN is pretty niche. In some countries like the phillipines, most internet users stay on Facebook for almost their entire session. Even so their internet is filtered through Facebook Basics (and one could make the argument our internet is filtered through google).

Even when looking at reddit in the western world, most people don't click the links, they stay on reddit.

I would say we did get something wrong by not regulating enough and allowing companies to monopolize the internet and further to act as private intelligence agencies with no legal liability for the data stored.

I take issue with the author mentioning blockchain though. Im not going to derail the thread but everyone should look into datproject as the future: https://blog.datproject.org/2018/01/16/dat-privacy-models/

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#84

Post by Toine »

Swizec wrote: post #81
codegeek wrote: post #41

Personally, I think the internet has changed millions if not billions of lives for the better. Yes, it has introduced quite a few bad things like spam, malware, surveillance etc. but with most good things, comes a few bad things. Overall though, Internet has been tremendous in lifting so many people out of poverty AND creating jobs that otherwise people could not dream of before the internet. I can work for anyone ov…

If it weren’t for the internet I’d be back home making an average $20,000/year. Instead I’m in SF on an SF salary. Hell, without the internet I wouldn’t even have known it’s possible to get here. Both physically and in mindset. qed

Are you happy ?

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#85

Post by notacoward »

Ygg2 wrote: post #12

I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams' quote from Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Very insightful. No, I'm not being sarcastic. The internet has in general been great for literally billions of people, but it's not an unalloyed good. It has a dark side, which Adams foresaw. Some people need to be kept isolated. It's great that people who suffer from some rare condition can find and support each other. It's not so great that Nazis can.

I don't know the solution. I'm not sure anyone does, or even that there is one. Maybe this is why the rest of the universe seems so empty.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#86

Post by ineptech »

workthrowaway wrote: post #25
Accujack wrote: post #7

It didn't go wrong. It went very well. It didn't turn into the idealized vision that the author apparently had for it, but that's not unusual.

something definitely went wrong, imo. when that pizzahut website link was posted a few days ago, i felt nostalgic about old web pages. most of them were about favorite topics, shows, hobbies and links! friends (the show) had thousands of fan made websites. websites linked to other websites with similar interest. now it's all about "us" and "me". we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks…

> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct.

I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally.

I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#87

Post by efdee »

masswerk wrote: post #64
efdee wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. And you could find a name like that for pretty much every website in existence in the 90's. I strongly disagree that it's a special case, and I strongly disagree that there are only few websites left that feel like part of a bigger something. I think you are romanticizing the past (as most people do with most things they remember from their youth - remember when kids' TV shows were actually good?).

There's definitely a difference. In what may appear here as "the good old days", authors usually showed their authority on a subject by frequently linking to other sources they would consider interesting in context, thus contributing to knitting the web. (Edit: It was this very phenomenon, which provided the base for the Page rank.) Personally, I see this rarely nowadays. Also, the entire idea of adding "something am…

Out of curiosity, what period are you referring to as the "good old days"? Must be prior to, say, 1993-1994?

I also remember these days as the days where we had to be very, very nice to other people and play by their rules (universities, free hosters, ...) in order to get something published online. Domain names were expensive. $5 cloud hosting? I don't think so.

I mean, I get what you mean - but I simply cannot agree.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#88

Post by deskamess »

The very nature of networks and the internet has resulted in the concentration of "information flow" in a few 1000 (10,000?) nodes globally. These key nodes which act as transit points in the network have become monitoring points for many agents. In essence, the internet, in an effort to liberalize and disseminate information easily, has sufficiently centralized information flow into a few nodes. Encryption can help in this scenario, and hopefully gets stronger.

Prior to this, the means of monitoring were varied and took effort, often human. This meant it had to be selectively applied since there was a burden/cost to all out monitoring; as a result you had to know the task/persons you were to observer (and get a warrant). Now, capture can be all encompassing and automated; "searching for issues" is done later. Monitor everything, ask questions later.

Now this in itself is troubling but another side effect is that these transit nodes can be disabled by agents to suppress the dissemination of information from troubled areas. In this scenario, cryptography cannot help as the wire to the outside has been cut.

As traditional dissemination methods disappear or go online, and our information consumption is primarily online, these nodes can become very effective 'information suppression' points.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#89

Post by efdee »

u801e wrote: post #61
efdee wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your posting this on a website that is pretty much exclusively links to other websites, "hey I made this" stuff, and people talking about their hobbies. I think it went /okay/.

The last two items in your list were already a thing on usenet.

Sure. Most things happening here also happened back in the days. That was not my point though ;-)
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