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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

#291

Post by throwaway129917 »

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?

I've always liked to think of it this way:

The internet is a creation of the mind. Its impact is felt by the mind, and is capable of creating mental health problems in people. See the old Facebook story about how they manipulated people's feeds to provoke an emotion from them for an example.

The internet also enables mass communication. So you can massively communicate in such a way as to impact the mental health of a massive number of people. Most people who use the internet regularly are bombarded with this type of communication, mostly in the form of ads and sponsored content.

There are undoubtedly many parties who've realized they can use this to their own ends. By using the internet to actively impact the minds of other people using the internet, people have weaponized the internet.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#292

Post by codegeek »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #102
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…

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.

It is a fair question. I assumed based on my own experience that this is very clear but let me clarify. I am privileged to be living in the United States (richest country in the world) but I am originally an immigrant even though that was 20+ years ago. I hire people from all over the world as freelancers from time to time. Internet allows me to hire some random person from a random part of the world and in many cases from a very poor country. I am more than sure that if they didn't have internet, they wouldn't be able to get those freelance jobs and make a living since their home country does not provide a whole lot of options.

So I don't have exact data and technically I am guessing the impact but considering how many people live in countries like India, China, African countries, I would assume internet has helped millions out of poverty because without internet, they would not be able to do things to make a living that they do today. Go to upwork.com for example and see ppl from all over the world making a decent living for themselves even if it is low wages for rich countries.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#294

Post by [deleted] »

Swizec wrote: post #275
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the costs of living back home for you? For instance, $20k/year is a very decent upper-middle class salary in Poland.

In Slovenia we have a joke: A German and a Slovenian talk about life and work. The German says, "You know, life's pretty good. I make 5k a month, send my kids to school, put 2k in my mortgage, spend 1k on groceries, and there's plenty left over" And the Slovenian says "Wow that's cool. What happens with the other 2k?" "Oh we don't ask that in Germany. It's impolite" So the SLovenian goes "Ah that's nice. We got it go…

[deleted]

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#295

Post by ocdtrekkie »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #98
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Creating content has an inherent cost.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#296

Post by jslabovitz »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #30
yetihehe wrote: post #10

How did it go so wrong - the same way it did go wrong with many other tools - people used them to better themselves at the cost of others. > We could try to push the internet back toward its ethical roots. However, it would be a complex challenge requiring a joint effort by interested parties — which means pretty much everyone. That "everyone" also includes bad actors.

> ethical roots weren't they all working for the .mil?

No.

There were plenty of us there who were accidental visitors, curious kids who found ourselves in this interesting world. Kleinrock mentions this briefly in the original article, but there was a high degree of trust and optimism on the early internet, and if one was technically inclined and a little outgoing and generally a good egg, it wasn't hard to get an account somewhere.

When I first logged into MIT-ITS around 1982, coming in over dialup as a teenager calling a modem bank near the Pentagon, the login-failed message said something like, "Sorry, that username does not exist. Would you like an account?" It was RMS himself who gifted me (and a lot of others) a free account for the asking.

It's a hard thing to explain to people who weren't there -- I think this is why so many people in this thread see Kleinrock as naive or worse. My girlfriend never believes me when I try to explain the early internet; it seems an impossibility to her, as if I was talking about some pre-historic hunter/gatherer culture.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#297

Post by fragmede »

dxbydt wrote: post #233
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…

It’s a particular point of view that obviously won’t find resonance in this HN audience. Were the author’s view to prevail, you would be out of a job. Vast majority of people here owe their livelihood either directly or indirectly to the democratization of the internet. But that doesn’t mean the author the author is naive. There are certainly (unvoiced) masses largely sympathetic to his point of view. Take the exampl…

Those who teach history, as they say, are doomed to teach history. GP and parent's message will be hugely controversial for any whos online peers can reject its message (for various reasons), but hopefully everyone can acknowledge that it requires quite more wealth and access to be able to interview at a FAANG i the first place, than is ideal for humanity. (I was born with, and enjoy, that same privilege, mind you.)

The Internet has done wonders to democratize the world (as elsewhere on this thread). It's brought people together that would never have found each other. That gay and sad teenager in Somalia who would have killed themselves decades earlier now has online peers. I am not sure that gay Somalia teen is not castigated among their peers for being gay, and even if they aren't, I'm not sure it's not due to the US's cultural export. What I'm sure we will see, a decade out, is the kind of unrestrained communication GP expressed without any sort of disclaimer. GP's comment is seen much more favorably when analyzed as coming from someone whos first and native language isn't English, and doesn't live under some of the demagogory that plagues some other Western Nations. Hopefully we can cleanup the mess we've made in the interim.

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#298

Post by winternett »

smolder wrote: post #181
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…

It's actually very easy to make websites and apps now IMO, never worrying about hosting and network intrusion and things like that, but you sell out to the centralized, pervasively monitored model of the web in doing so.

I meant in terms of being able to totally own and control your design, presentation, and content...

If you want to use a platform like WIX, sure it's easy, but the minute they run broke and need to shut down you're screwed. Also having your own (independent) domain pointing to a web site that you made is very costly to a layman without an enterprise account...

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#299

Post by matheusmoreira »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #295
matheusmoreira wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Creating content has an inherent cost.

I mean the cost to me as a user. Why don't content creators charge me for the page view?

Re: Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet

#300

Post by Faark »

codegeek wrote: post #292
jrochkind1 wrote: post #102

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.

It is a fair question. I assumed based on my own experience that this is very clear but let me clarify. I am privileged to be living in the United States (richest country in the world) but I am originally an immigrant even though that was 20+ years ago. I hire people from all over the world as freelancers from time to time. Internet allows me to hire some random person from a random part of the world and in many case…

Seems like you only look at one side. I thought by now we have mostly understood that unlimited globalization also has dark sides, especially for the broader local population in richer countries.

To me the sentiment of GPs post felt like "internet makes it better on average for all of us". You're "now I very easy can find even cheaper workers" doesn't support that, even though it certainly is an improvement to a select few at the very bottom.

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