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Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

latimes.com

111–120 of 327 posts

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your theory of how the internet has "lifted so many people out of poverty". I'm not saying I disagree with it necessarily, I don't even understand what you're suggesting enough to disagree or agree with it. It's definitely not _obvious_ to me that the internet has somehow lifted so many people out of poverty, I just don't understand what you mean.

Created jobs, increased global trade, allowed for people to teach themselves, new types of products available, higher awareness about what is going on around you, technology share, open source, free products etc.

OK. Except for possibly "created jobs", it's not obvious to me most of those things lead to "lifting so many people out of poverty." (For instance, I suspect very strongly that "new types of products available" has nothing to do with lifting people out of poverty).

I am gonna want some analysis based on actual numbers of some kind that shows the internet did those things, and it lifted so many people out of poverty.

(For starters, I don't even know if fewer people are "in poverty" now than pre-internet or not!)

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#113

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…

Power hierarchies are part of human nature. We always create them, the super-nodes.

This is not limited to computer networks. We do it with relationships as well, how many does not know of Madonna and Justin Bieber, compared to random Joe? Our very ideas and thoughts are subject to it as well.

There already exist meshing technology that counter our human nature and does not produce power hierarchies. Decentralized hashtables for example.

Maybe if we hand over the control to the machines, we could solve this problem. Pretty much noone wants that though... It's limited to some fringes of our society. The darknets (i2p more than Tor) it, and BitTorrent swarms. It works here, because the programmers never gave the users a choice.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#114
The internet came at us too hard and too fast. We have not had time to determine what are the pitfalls we've already falling into and how to get out of them, to name a few; addiction, anxiety, FOMO, jobs market, specialist skills, internet personalities, fake news, data gathering, manipulation, privacy, security, peoples rights, ownership.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#115
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)

[deleted]

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#116

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…

> surveillance

Just the tip of the iceberg, the security services facilitate the criminal underworld playing its part keep GDP up, lots of experiments being done on people individually right now, most of it messing with peoples belief systems which in extreme you see with muslim terrorists carrying out acts. I know I've had similar done to me.

Jimmy Saville was a state apparatus intelligence tool, nothing more nothing less and look at how the state labels him a pedo now!

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#117

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…

Before the internet, many people only worried, economically, from people in their immediate sorrounding. Often only in their city.

Knowledge was much harder to ackuire and more valuable, and it was harder to compare prices.

That led to an environment where many, both business owners and employees could akuire some valuable competitive advantage, and make a decent living.

Now that's much harder. Significant competitive advantage(or significant bargaining power) rarely exists, for most.

Most have little economic power. And psychologically that's probably more important than relative wealth.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#119

I don’t agree the internet had “ethical roots.” Drugs were sold on the internet since the 80s. And the whole thing was funded in the name of warfare. Also the idealized notion that the internet allows for more extremism, as if the thoughts people express online would not be possible in the brains of these people had they stayed offline, make no sense. I think the article is correct to assume the internet will become…

A difference is that the "unacceptable" opinions people once expressed to their friends in the neighborhood bar can now be broadcast over the internet to a wider audience.

The Intenet is only one piece though. The other piece is how digital technology makes the production of media cheap and ubiquitous. This breaks the monopoly of media organizations on production, just as the internet and hosted web services break the monopoly on distribution.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#120
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/.

However, we could also call this a dedicated bookmarking app with discussion threads appended to it. This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.) For "normal" websites, there are only few left that consider themselves as part of a bigger web, in which they are constituting yet another node (trying to make this web as a whole worthwhile).

>This is certainly a special case (and also somewhat of an endangered species.)

I'm not so sure about that. This site isn't that different from stuff like reddit or tumblr at it's heart, even if the level of discussion/quality of posts is higher. If you distilled these types of sites even further, it's really not all that different from social media like facebook or instagram. The only difference is the type of content shared and the fact that facebook and instagram are usually used with you being "yourself" rather than just a username. Then again, enough people on hackernews link their profiles to their own personal websites/linkedins/etc. that even that distinction isn't so sharp.

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