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

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#211

Post by behringer » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:44 PM UTC

cpitman wrote: post #177

pastor_elm wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A person in Nigeria can teach themselves Hindu, just from pure curiosity and no budget Again, these are poor examples. It's not terribly easy to learn a language for free using just the internet. Everything is freemium and it's only getting worse. It's arguably easier to go to your local library and use their resources. Many people have this idea that some things would be impossible if not for the internet, but that…

I've been using the internet to learn a language for a month now, and have had far more success then I had in multiple years of high school language classes. Between tools that provide Spaced Repetition learning, to websites that are basically textbooks, to youtube videos both meant to teach and others that are native media, and finally people who curate all these materials, this is way better.

Most of which are funded by showing you ads for things you don't need or selling your personal information.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#212

Post by carapace » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

riazrizvi wrote: post #179

In summary, the internet initially reflected the values of its socially conscientious creators, but as the community diversified it was used for business (making money, marketing, spam), it suffered cyber attacks, nations are balkanizing regions of it with censorship firewalls, and businesses are exploiting our privacy. Users need to spend more time reviewing privacy agreements. Scientists need to work harder on encr…

Conway's Law on the global scale?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

> "organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

The Internet as image?

- - - -

I like it, but then there's the problem of too much, too little, and differential transparency, eh?

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#213

Post by slapshot » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #180

tim333 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p... )

The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year. Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by th…

That's not how subsistence farming is counted in GDP and poverty statistics. The value of home production is still counted. If you are eating only $2 worth of rice per day, you are counted as poor whether you buy it or grow it.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#214

Post by oblio » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

reyqn wrote: post #199

ArtDev wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned cars, which is good comparison. Obviously, cars are essential. But here is short a list of completely unnecessary issues brought on by greed and industry: * The health and societal cost of leaded gasoline and the industry resistance to transitioning to unleaded. * The Automobile industry purchase and subsequent removal of train and light rail tracks in the United States. * The Automobile industry resist…

He mentioned car, which is an awful comparison. Cars should never have been invented and they are the worst thing that happened to humanity. Just imagine how much money has been wasted into cars, and roads, when any other mean of transportation would have been more efficient.

Just imagine how much personal freedom cars have brought, especially to disenfranchised groups.

There's two sides to every coin and some sides have a lot deeper grooves than what can be seen at first glance.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#215

Post by pwthornton » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:46 PM UTC

adim86 wrote: post #103

I 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…

The Internet is not as bad as cars. That's harsh!

Cars kill more than 1 million people a year, and are actively cooking our planet. On balance, cars -- at least our ability to use them -- has been a huge negative.

The Internet is a lot more balanced, but both show how a lack of foresight and system design can lead to a lot of negative consequences. We could drastically cut down on the number of road deaths if we took it more seriously and made some big system design changes, but we haven't. We can also make the Internet a better place, but there will always be issue with all massive systems.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#216

Post by oblio » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

behringer wrote: post #211

cpitman wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using the internet to learn a language for a month now, and have had far more success then I had in multiple years of high school language classes. Between tools that provide Spaced Repetition learning, to websites that are basically textbooks, to youtube videos both meant to teach and others that are native media, and finally people who curate all these materials, this is way better.

Most of which are funded by showing you ads for things you don't need or selling your personal information.

And regular people would consider that a net gain.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#217

Post by Sargos » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #192

Sargos wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> On the early internet it was extremely cheap to host a webpage either on your own It still is. You can get your website hosted for $5/mo.

Not if your site is popular.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#218

Post by mc32 » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

adim86 wrote: post #103

I 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…

I think you’re right. If it didn’t “go wrong” it would have stagnated and not been very useful.

Kinda like the minitel. It didn’t “go wrong” but it also went nowhere.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#219

Post by Aunche » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #180

tim333 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The number of people in extreme poverty globally have dropped roughly 650m since 1990. Some part of that is probably due to the internet though I'm not sure you could say how much exactly. (Our World in Data graph https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/04/Extreme-Poverty-p... )

The often-repeated trope, touted as an achievement of capitalism, relies on defining "not poor" as earning 2$ PPP per day, or 60 bucks a month, or 700$ = 0.7k per year. Not to mention, ignoring any other measures of quality of life or progress besides raw dollars. It's judging capitalism via a metric internal to capitalism. Pure circular reasoning. E.g. subsistence farmers in rural areas made 0$ and were "poor" by th…

The international poverty line does take into account of subsidence farmers [1]. Dollars is just used as a standard, so that there can be a tangible value.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-home-production-and-consu...

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#220

Post by K0SM0S » Tue, Oct 29, 2019, 3:50 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #97

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…

Right, this is exactly what I try to explain in a long comment[1] (different thread, comparable topic).

I essentially argue that we should not confuse the medium (internet, a "network of networks"; like air or water or space) with the usage and information passing by said medium (the "high level" stuff like "speech" or "websites"; like oral speech or stores and parks in the physical world).

I'm surprised that a researcher who contributed to building the medium, the infrastructure itself, would fail to recognize we're talking at very different levels, totally different scopes when we conflate 'internet' with any private company or citizen operating over the medium. It's romantic and doesn't help solving any kind of issue, whether low-level or high-level.

I will echo user `riazrizvi` in this thread:

> Simply the internet has always reflected the segment of society that used it. Now that everyone uses it it reflects society at large. So I don’t think this is an internet problem, but rather an opportunity to see the worlds social problems being translated into a more transparent codified form. I reject the author’s two solutions as being low effort addendums. Let us acknowledge we are not seeing new problems, but rather we are seeing old problems with a new lens.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21383074