Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#91

Post by notzuck » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

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

Same story here but that alone doesn't mean anything. Just because it worked out well for me that doesn't mean anything. I watch as my Grandad gets told to go online to pay his bill by the gas company and he has no clue what to do, then he gets letters from debt collection agencies because it's too hard to figure out how to pay using another method. This kind of thing also happens to lower class poor people in the UK. Some level of phone or internet savvy is assumed for many services now.

Side note: I'm in a hotel room right now overlooking San Fran as the morning traffic starts to pick up. It really is a shit-hole city.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#92

Post by elwell » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:35 PM UTC

Ironically can't read the article because of the paywall.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#93

Post by masswerk » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:36 PM UTC

efdee wrote: post #87

masswerk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agre…

I'd say, "surfing" became a popular buzz-word around 1997/98?

Edit: Regarding availability of webspace, back then some for personal use usually came with an e-mail account for free (but you usually had to pay for this e-mail account, as free e-mail wasn't yet normal.) And, you could find full-fledged dedicated web-space for about $5/month. (Personally, I have been working for/with ISPs since 1996 and am hosting a personal website since 1999, before this using free webspace, which was provided either by the university or the employer.)

Edit #2: Who remembers tilde-addresses (www.domain.com/~/)? – These were usually free webspace.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#94

Post by Legogris » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

> Blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin and other digital currencies, also offers the promise of irrefutable, indisputable data ledgers.

I see a recurring pattern here. While we have huge potential here, there's a significant danger that the same kind of centralized control emerges out of decentralized structure just as with the Internet. I hope enough people working on and using blockchain technology in the early stages learn of past lessons.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#95

Post by efdee » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

faizshah wrote: post #83

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/.

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 regu…

I would say that the people who today only consume, and stay on single sites (eg not clicking the links on reddit) would simply not have cared about the internet if it had been the way you suggest.

Whether that would be a good or a bad thing is up for discussion, of course :-)

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#96

Post by rock_hard » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

Toine wrote: post #84

Swizec wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I am in in the same situation and am very, very happy!

I was so depressed before I came to Silicon Valley...it took years of therapy to overcome that

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#97

Post by segmondy » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

The internet never "went wrong". Nor did it go right.

If we want to talk about the internet going wrong, we can talk about running out of IPV4 addresses, the garbage that DNS/BGP can be. The insecureness of SMTP etc. Yet from a technical standpoint, it has gotten amazing. There was a time https/ssl was not a thing, when everyone shuffled data via FTP, when telnet ruled, when NFS was world rw and rlogin/rhost was the way of things. So the net as a tool has gotten better to address it's weakness in relation to privacy(crypto), spam (captcha/ML), fakes news (ML)

Spam, Fake News, Trolls, Privacy Abuse etc is all about people. We can ask, how did the world/people get so wrong? But then, when we sit back and think about it, this is the world that brought us a few world wars and tons of other wars. All that crap going on over the net is annoying but nothing.

I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture my data than live through a war.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#98

Post by matheusmoreira » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32

bilbo0s wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly in my opinion. My understanding of the passage is that he wants to block the entire website outright. So not, "Look at reddit, but block ads." Rather it would be, "Block reddit." Curiously, blocking the entire website outright due to incompatible privacy policies is a solution I never really even considered? It certainly changes the dynamic game theoretically speaking. I wonder what the internet would be…

This is effectively what we should be doing: Either accept what the site is offering (content monetized by ads and data collection) or don't. But what happened instead is entitlement: People decided they had the right to view that content without paying it's cost, and went for ad blockers instead. As much as I loathe ads, I am still surprised ad blockers work: That vastly more websites haven't simply made it impossib…

What cost? Web sites don't charge anyone for the HTTP response. They distribute their pages free of charge.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#99

Post by austincheney » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

All the problems mentioned in that article can be distilled down to two words:

* anonymous

* broadcast

If either of those words is eliminated from the technology all of the spoken problems immediately die, and thus new never imagined problems will take their place.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#100

Post by Merrill » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 2:38 PM UTC

Use of telecom networks for criminal activities predates the Internet, and the use of computer networking for fraud and abuse was recognized long before the Internet was opened for commercial use. The movie War Games was released in '83 around the already popular meme of computer hacking. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was passed in '86. The Morris Worm occurred in '88.

Usenet started in '80 and soon had all sorts of sketchy activity going on. Corporate email systems in the mid-80s were being used for flame wars over internal disputes. It was clear by then that computer networking allowed all the good and bad human interactions that were possible.