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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

#221

Post by auiya »

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…

> All that crap going on over the net is annoying but nothing

Sorry, but no. Ask all the US banks that were DDoS'd between 2012-2013 by (presumably) Iranian nation state actors if "all that crap going over the net was annoying but nothing". Ask Sony if the property and PR damage done to their networks was nothing. Ask Saudi Aramco if the thousands of computer disks they lost were nothing. Ask the Bangladesh banks that lost $81 million to online theft if that loss was nothing. Ask all the businesses who had to pay out incident responders to fix their networks when they got hit by Wanna Cry if those costs were nothing. Large scale crimes happening over the Internet can be more than annoying, they can incur physical damage and costs.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#222

Post by jueij9jk »

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…

You and I had a very different emotional takeaway.

This isn’t a call for idealistic utopia. IMO that’s what Facebook & AWS are pushing for: idealized world, organized around perfectly modeled hierarchy, using algorithms they control (aka traditional values belief in law and godhead, I digress).

Yes the technological invention as a literal thing is incredible.

But it’s almost entirely comprised of compelled speech in how we design the systems/code itself to support business goals, the most visible content bubbles up via paid ads, and conditioning to favor constant commercial trade.

Is “constant feudal trade is good for us” a mantra like “war is peace”?

Do we owe political deference to using humanities most important tool, the planet, to the demands of ideology that we know is materially destroying broader value of that tool?

The internet has shown us it’s possible to believe very different things given the same access to information. Why is online discourse so often filtered to financial trade & wealth generation?

It’s a technological wonder, but being used to conduct society in the same old way for the most part.

IMO technologists have failed by jumping on the startup band wagon.

Social pressure for conformity to finance won.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#223

Post by criddell »

cle wrote: post #150
winternett wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These jobs are shrinking as low level apps get dumbed down... The process of creating a simple web site has gotten much much more complex as scripting languages have changed. I still can't believe we're compiling code for simple phone and web sites and apps. Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. Social media sites d…

The Internet is changing because people who use it are changing it. This is what happens with tools. The Internet’s current state is a reflection of our societal values, which I think is what you’re really decrying.

> The Internet’s current state is a reflection of our societal values, which I think is what you’re really decrying.

I wish that were true. It feels more like the internet is a reflection of a very small number of greedy, amoral people from the bay area.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#224

Post by tuesdayrain »

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

I taught myself how to program through the internet, which is the only reason I have a job right now. The internet also let me discover cryptocurrencies which is the only reason I have a house at a young age. As far as I'm concerned it's an objective fact that the internet helps motivated people multiply their wealth in ways that were not possible prior to its creation.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#225

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

wadkar wrote: post #200
UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been a science and technology enthusiast all of my life. I started running my own BBS over 30 years ago on a Commodore64. To say that I am passionate would be an understatement. Alas, lately I am becoming a Luddite. Feature creep is the enemy. I don't want or need an 'info-tainment' screen in my vehicle. I refuse to join the Apple or Google walled gardens. The warnings from Science Fiction have been ignored, a…

I would like to agree with you, but I am not sure I understand how internet has been weaponized. Can you please elaborate on how the internet is/can harm?

-Election manipulation.

-SWATTING of competitive Gamers.

-Cyber bullying (not just limitied to those instances that end in suicide)

-The stalking and death-threats to Black Lives Matter organizers.

-China's "social credit score"

-The need for Hong Kong protestors to hide their identity.

I don't have time to post specific URL's to substantiate my claims, but I feel I've given broad enough categorizes to convey my meaning.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#226

Post by gugagore »

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…

Even though the facts appear wrong, I think this comment does raise the interesting question of whether money is a metric that is internal to capitalism, or if capitalism is the natural consequence of using only money as a metric.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#227

Post by y4mi »

lmpostor wrote: post #208
reikonomusha wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about the internet being used as a mass surveillance machine and the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers? That facet isn’t a drop in the bucket of internet usage. M I think focusing what it could be used for and what it has been used for isn’t the right way to approach thinking about it. The internet is by and large used for consuming content from a handful of corporations (disclaimer: I have no sourc…

>the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers More consumers begets more producers. I would assert you have better odds of producing in a wide variety of areas.

No, it does not.

everyone is just following the most popular producers and the rest are basically irrelevant.

Just look at the follower counts and how it drops off on any of the popular sites such as YouTube, twitch, patreon etc

We got more consumers than ever, but they're all following the same people, centralizing it even more

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#228

Post by daedalus_j »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #22
daedalus_j wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least you could see the popups. I default open things in an incognito window, and it won't even load if you're in incognito, just shows you a big banner shaming you for using incognito mode and asking you to log in. It'd be kinda cool if HN had reddit-like flairs for stories so you could tag them as "no-incognito" or "soft-paywall" so you knew what not to bother clicking on.

Just disable javascript. Media sites are too broken these days to take a risk on their code any way. The LA Times devs have done a good job keeping the fallback readable.

Really good hint, didn't think to try that. Toggling javascript off for that site in uBlock Origin should make future clicking on links to it a much happier experience, thanks!

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#229

Post by WillPostForFood »

winternett wrote: post #127
ThomPete wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These jobs are shrinking as low level apps get dumbed down... The process of creating a simple web site has gotten much much more complex as scripting languages have changed. I still can't believe we're compiling code for simple phone and web sites and apps. Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive. Social media sites d…

Corporations have lobbied to take away Net Neutrality, and to institute throttling and make running a personal web site much more expensive.

There is literally no impact on personal web sites. You neither pay more, nor are you throttled.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#230

Post by wutbrodo »

celticmusic wrote: post #173
ianhawes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there’s our smudgeness.

It's not clear to me how the correction of a cultural nature is being smug. The poster in question even admitted it was a "small nit", but it's still useful information for both the poster, and other readers.

This is a quote from the Office, which leads me to believe it's at least a little tongue in cheek.
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