Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

calvertjournal.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 187 posts

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#141

Post by unmole »

tropdrop wrote: post #84
influx wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shocking that a regime in which, "the communist leaders of the Soviet Union were responsible for no fewer than 15 million deaths." could be painted in a bad light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...

To paint a government in a bad light is one thing. To rob its citizens of their humanity is another. A bad writer thinks they're equivalent.

Red Plenty absolutely does not rob the Soviet people of their humanity. If anything, it emphasis their humanity and juxtaposes it against the inhuman absurdities of a command economy.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#142

Post by unmole »

cambalache wrote: post #50
WC3w6pXxgGd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the novel be pro-soviet?

So are those the only 2 options? Why the fondness for a dichotomy? Sign of the times I guess. To expand my comment, the problem is not that it criticizes the soviet regime, that is OK and even needed.The big problem is the total lack of nuance which robs the work of any artistic value. When you read non-fiction and fiction soviet authors (Chekhov, Dostoevski, Grossmann, Zhukov, Bulgakov) there is always criticism of…

That is definitely not the impression I got from reading the book. I can mostly only recall accounts of ordinary people trying to make the best of the absurd situations they faced.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#143

Post by unmole »

nickpp wrote: post #137
tropdrop wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a phenomenon unique to Russia. What was in it for the United States to drop 108,000 tons of bombs over Cambodia? What is in it still for the US to continue having troops in Afghanistan? Powerful countries have agendas. I cannot think of any entity that names itself a "country" that does not.

Not the same, and it’s plain to see. Russia publicly was (and still is) the friend and sustainer of every crackpot psychopathic dictator on the planet.

While US policy was "He might be a bastard but he's our bastard."

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#144

Post by quesera »

talideon wrote: post #107
quesera wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but this is also precisely the description of land ownership on the US, as GP alludes. Call it "real property tax", or call it "domain registration fees" -- if you don't pay up, the item is taken away.

No, I think you'll find that if you read your registration agreement, that is not the case. I spent about a decade of my life as running the management systems of a domain registrar, with all the fun of dealing with ICANN, the various gTLD and ccTLD registry operators, other registrar, and so on. One of the recurring issues that got registrants into trouble repeatedly was the fact that they didn't understand that the…

Call it a "lease", or call it a "deed".

If you do not pay recurring fees to the relevant administrative body, your operating privileges for the asset are taken away.

"Ownership" may be expected to confer more privileges than a lease, but that's just a matter of traditional terms.

I don't see any meaningful difference.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#145

Post by 082349872349872 »

omazurov wrote: post #72
082349872349872 wrote: post #37

Several years ago a colleague sent me a 60's or 70's soviet film exploring the idea of the Turing Test. Does that ring a bell with anyone here?

Most likely "Who's behind the wall?" [0] [0] "Кто за стеной?" (1977) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECvsD4b0JlU

That's it! спасибо...

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#146

Post by fivre »

wwwwewwww wrote: post #13

"Red Plenty" is a "historical fiction" novel that is an easy read and deals with this subject. Glushkov is the main character.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24945323-the-red-web is a nonfiction work on the subject (and a bunch of other related stuff) and is excellent.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#147

Post by winstonewert »

zackmorris wrote: post #140
jandrese wrote: post #89

IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a scale that massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and when the designer is well ahead of the state of the art like this it doesn’t stand a chance. ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked in and…

It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in the 1980s, everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop culture). '95-99 was when the internet popularized the idea of barely controlled anarchy leading to success that we take for granted today. On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to do, and th…

> not to mention that elections can't be rigged when votes are centrally counted

What?

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#148

Post by thodin »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #99
truantbuick wrote: post #76

Isn't this article missing the point of the internet? It talks about an ambitious (but ultimately aborted) top-down project to build thousands of interlinking mainframes. But building large networks wasn't particularly novel. It was the idea that you could build a logical layer that potentially linked any network. The key to the early internet was you didn't necessarily need to build anything physical. You could link…

Could you please elaborate? How would one link up two existing networks with different systems and infrastructure? What I can think of is either installing a couple translating routers, which do speak TCP/IP as well as their network's internal protocol, or making them, by repurposing existing machines with software-only modifications. Is that what you had in mind as not really counting as installing something physica…

Modern "Internet" is about about making everything tcp/ip based. Interconnection between networks with different protocols was a real thing long before tcp/ip conquered our planet:

"An amusing side note on the VNIIPAS connection: while the author of this paper was in Havana, he connected to a VAXNMS system at his home via the following path: PAD program on Unix microcomputer at CENIAI in Havana goes over X.25 board local to that system; X.25 line from Havana to Moscow, via satellite; VNIIPAS X.25 data switch receives call, routes to international Sprint network via Western Europe; Sprint carries call through some number of cities and links to Reston, Virginia where it conveys call to Columbus, Ohio, to CompuServe's X.25 gateway; CompuServe carries call from Columbus, Ohio to Tucson, Arizona, where it gets translated from X.25 formats to internal DECnet format and passes over the University of Arizona DEC net network, through Ethernet, fiber optic, 56 Kbps synch and asynch 19.2 Kbps TCP/IP lines to author's home over another Ethernet from gateway to workstation, returning with the prompt "Username:" The miraculous thing about this call is that it was done with a single X.121 address at the Havana end." - this is how it was in 80s.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#149

Post by wahern »

gumby wrote: post #78

A similar system was planned for Chile until the CIA overthrew their government in 1973. Allende was really far sighted and imaginative.

Allende wanted Cyberdyne as a way to bypass the informal, distributed signaling networks of the economy that mediated supply and pricing, which were by definition managed by those owning the means of production. In the end, though, Cyberdyne's only significant success was circumventing worker strikes--truckers, specifically--protesting Allende's mismanagement of the economy. (And like with Trump, blaming opposition and protesters for sabotaging your reform plans is a cheap excuse.)

And the CIA never overthrew Allende. Chile was never a banana republic. The myth the CIA held the strings is just an American conceit. IIRC, Allende's overthrow was orchestrated by the Chilean Senate, where Allende supporters only nominally held power, and only until Allende's expropriations became intolerable to moderates.

The truth is that for better or worse, Chile was too conservative for both Allende and socialism. It's like the U.S. that way--a relatively conservative society where liberal factions only enjoy sporadic (albeit crucial) successes.

Re: The Soviet web: the tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet (2017)

#150

Post by CryptoPunk »

zackmorris wrote: post #140
jandrese wrote: post #89

IMHO the project was doomed from the start. Top down design on a scale that massive and distributed is nightmarishly complex, and when the designer is well ahead of the state of the art like this it doesn’t stand a chance. ARPANET by contrast started from the bottom and worked up. This is crucial because it makes it easy to iterate on the design until you get it right. With a top down design mistakes get baked in and…

It's interesting to hear you say that. When I was growing up in the 1980s, everything was top-down (NASA, IBM, even pop culture). '95-99 was when the internet popularized the idea of barely controlled anarchy leading to success that we take for granted today. On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure. The US has lost its ability to articulate what it needs to do, and th…

>>On a tangent, I personally feel that bottom-up design has been an almost complete failure

I don't see the evidence supporting that assertion. The US has by and large moved to a top-down design since the 1950s:

Creation of Medicare

Creation of OSHA

Creation of EPA

Occupational licensing rising from 5% of jobs, in 1950, to 29% today.

The Code of Federal Regulations massively expanding since the 1950s: https://www.mercatus.org/video/visualizing-growth-federal-re...

Govermment spending as a percentage of GDP increasing substantially since the 1950s.

The financial surveillance state growing rapidly in scope, with OFAC, FinCEN - only created in 1990 - and other financial crime/surveillance agencies becoming far more substantial in their impact on banking and finance.

Healthcare regulations have become significantly more burdensome since the 1950s:

https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...

Public sector unions have also become much more powerful since the 1950s, with deleterious effects.

In teaching: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/111/3/671/1839935

In policing: https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ceswps/_7718.html

The bright spots in the economy, in terms of providing more value for less cost to the consumer, are all bottom up, whether it's the internet and digital industries, consumer electronics, or the food industry. These are heavily dominated by the private sector and relatively unhampered by government regulation, and consequently, very competitive.

Post reply on HN