I heard Vint Cerf say similar things at a talk at Georgia Tech many years ago. Basically it was "we made this decision because of this reason, but had we known this thing now we would have done it yet another way." Those points were largely technical in the beginning of his talk, but then he started talking about it in terms of the philosophical implications which were largely not realized at the time. It was clear that he (and assuming his team) were in it as much if not more for the technical challenge than anything else. Its utility was just as clear, but long term implications were (seemingly) not considered. It was both funny and a little disheartening.
Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
131–140 of 327 posts
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#132The 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…
“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)”
I think that’s a debatable point. I don’t feel safer and I preferred simple tools like ftp, telnet, Usenet over Facebook, Dropbox, google cloud or whatever app is the focus of the current tech hype cycle.
“I'll take all the spam, fake news, trolls, ad stalking and attempt to capture my data than live through a war.”
That seems like an odd nonsequitur. Surely you don’t think there’s a dichotomy between war and Facebook? We have both now, and will have both in the future. Zuckerburg ain’t Jesus, apps are just widgets.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#133It 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…
Don't blame the tool, blame the user.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#134> 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…
I think it will be different based on the economics of the two systems.
On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your own computer or something like geocities and thus an explosion of content was created in a decentralized manner. Then the internet grew in popularity and it began to cost a lot of money to maintain all of the servers and bandwidth needed which cut off all of the smaller groups and consolidated power to a few corporations who could fund such an enterprise.
With blockchains we are also currently in the amateur stage where anyone can build something and put it out there but the difference is that dapps cost nothing to run and anyone can publish one. The cost to the developer of Uniswap is the same for 10 people and 10 million. The cost is just the development of the initial dapp. A small group of open source developers could create the new Facebook without needing millions of dollars to pay for hardware and buildings.
This low barrier to entry and maintenance removes the centralization point that corporations rely on. This is to say nothing of DAOs like Moloch and other novel funding methods that allow non-corporate projects to compete on the same level as anyone else. It's quite possible that the blockchain space will have a much longer and possibly lifelong period of true decentralized content and network creation the likes of which we had on the early non-corporate internet.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#135Earlier 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…
> 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 t…
Maybe this was a more novel thing to discover 15-20 years ago? Perhaps it is people and their opinions that have changed?
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#136arpanet was not really the precursor to the internet, rather the precursor to email. Big distinction. Because the www is graphic rather than text based.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#137I find this post quite disappointing. I don't mean to come off harsh but it is quite naive and utopian and I cannot take the call to arms seriously. Saying the internet went wrong is like saying the invention of cars went wrong cause we still have car accidents. For every powerful force in the world, it will be a source of good and bad things. The internet has changed the world, increased communication, allowed peopl…
agree. the inventor does not get to decide or choose how his invention is used
I would also agree the internet has been a huge net positive.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#138The 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…
Thanks. I wanted to write something similar, but you said it way better than I ever could.
It is always about how we use technology, not the technology per se. For the good, for the bad, for making money. Whatever.
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#139"You should be able to clearly articulate your preferred privacy policy and reject websites that don’t meet your standards." It occurs to me that this could be a rough description of ad blocking extensions, although rather like the Aldous Huxley quote about means determining ends, ad blockers are the result of an adversarial relationship rather than a consensual one.
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…
Well, the visibility would have to be there. If my privacy settings blocked Reddit, would it know? If I said "Okaaaaaaayyy let me view this particular site this particular time" would Reddit also know? ("There's a customer that we likely won't see again because of our privacy settings.")
Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
#140Strongly agree with the idea that nowadays internet is become very bad.
But i strongly disagree with the idea that governments should do something.
Politicians usually doesn't have enough technical background to do anything useful here. They do very little in the "real" world to make it a better place to live, why they should succeed in the "virtual" one?
Internet user should take care of internet with new trust mechanisms, Operative systems should help users taking care of their data. People should return nice and polite.
Netiquette (the hard one of the early '90) should be applied and respected.