I was trying to make something recently, and I couldn't find the source material any more on the web. Luckily I turned to Pirate Bay and bittorrent and found what I needed. I forget how cool those things are.
Winning back the Internet by building our own
31–40 of 159 posts
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#32Somehow the BBS was so much easier to connect to than your bookstore LAN is today. No TOR required, just a modem and a phone line.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
In throwing out the complexity of HTML, Gemini is also disposing of some markup that really helped screenreaders properly handle content. It would be a real shame if this "return to the good internet" left out the visually impaired. I agree with the goals of returning to a more bare-bones, text-heavy internet, but please, include the disabled in your vision from day one!
As a blind person, I dearly miss the textual Internet as it was. The original Internet -- the textual one -- was perfectly accessible. The extra markup added to HTML to help screen readers was added because the web stack had gotten too complex, not because it was too simple.
The lang attribute added to the span tag in HTML really helps with ensuring that a screenreader outputs quoted foreign-language text in that language, instead of just pronouncing gibberish. And this tag and attribute go pretty far back into the 1990s, it is not part of the modern-web-gone-mad. So, similar markup is one of those little things that Gemini should have thought about from the very beginning, and it would not have made their stack appreciably more complex.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#34Without the Javascript:
curl -s https://roarmag.org/essays/win-back-the-internet/|.*
" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htmRe: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#35Can somebody explain to me, what "winning back the Internet" actually means?
It means it would have stuff they like but not things they don't like. Also normal people are unwelcome, only technically adept users but only those making things they want.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#36Well I clicked it because I am quite a fan of making internet more open.
Unfortunately this article in my opinion is at best just bad and misguided.
New laptops rarely have RJ-45 nowadays, point here is that article is technically misleading and overly simplistic. You are not going to achieve much by just connecting laptops with cable, let alone just switches and then connecting those to more switches, it is far more complicated.
I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.".
In the end "focus on infrastructure, not coding" because "programmers useful only for large companies". Most of that infrastructure needs code that is written by programmers.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#37This article basically describes how the current internet was created.... why would this new internet end up any different? You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network,…
It doesn't mean anything to "start from scratch" anyway. The Network is a meme, knowing what it is has the effect of creating it.
The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990.
That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network.
Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point.
Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#38> Would-be dictators like Trump and others across the globe use the Internet to bend both people and institutions to their will using misinformation and fear.
Once Trump is gone, who will the simpletons hate? Elon Musk, probably.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#39I stopped reading at "would-be dictators like Trump".
I made a similar comment. Both will be flagged and removed soon. If there's one thing HN hates, it's people who don't hate Trump.
It's sort of ironic that this article purports to be "anti establishment" and then parrots a the most establishment-friendly talking point imaginable.
Re: Winning back the Internet by building our own
#40I stopped reading at "would-be dictators like Trump".
Probably going to (and should) be downvoted as well, but... while I respect republican/conservative views, how can you not see that this moron is the epitome of a shitty wannabe dictator? He's used all his power to try to falsely prove that the election was a fraud (while building up for it all summer), and failing miserably at it. He would definitely try any other viable means if could.
I don't even know what his actual "policies" are (who actually knows, he just leans wherever the wind blows) but I'm hard-pressed to find a more ungenuine person (maybe because the ones beating him are actually not outright idiots).
My view has nothing to do with policy/politics. The guy is just a fucking disaster - whatever text-to-speech puppet making public announcements would sound smarter and more knowledgeable.