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A retrospective of my time on the internet

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Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#31

Post by hypfer »

gspr wrote: post #24
hypfer wrote: post #12

It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it. And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness. It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always. I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the…

> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing. I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like y…

I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong.

But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.

The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure.

This.. apparently(?) was done to reduce overhead for usage with e.g. LoRa(?), but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.

___

You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.

That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#32

Post by windexh8er »

lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.

Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.

I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.

I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.

I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.

I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#34

Post by iamnothere »

intended wrote: post #14
smalltorch wrote: post #10

With enough pressure, corporate reliance may become unpopular and push people to become more sovereign. The first time I realized there was no permission slip to setting up an onion service I remember thinking this is how it was supposed to be and shocked at the simplicity and ease. I really don't think there is a big enough billboard about this. Id love to see the community build on top of these principles and make…

This framing sets up variables incorrectly. People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day. People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier. There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.

“People” != Internet people.

“People” at large were not part of the early Internet. They came much later and turned it into a shopping mall/surveillance hub.

I would love to return to a smaller Internet without the masses. We did just fine.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#35

Post by Sophira »

> This would result in an airplane level of whirring while it used maybe a few GB of memory and hard drive storage to boot up Windows 95.

In those days, RAM was measured in megabytes, not gigabytes. My first Windows 95 PC had a grand total of 16 MB of RAM and a 1.6 GB hard drive.

It ran pretty well from what I recall.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#36

Post by felix-the-cat »

I miss the whole dot-com boom era - that was the best. I was working in Austin at the time and would drive to work down a road that was lined with all the latest dot-com goodness like DrKoop.com, Living.com, et al. And who can forget reading f*ckdcompany.com every morning and marveling over the latest startups rumored to be hitting the skids.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#37

Post by sire-vc »

This is the classic 'things were better back then' crap. It was easy to let people set up their own website on your platform when CSAM was unheard of. It was easy to host a website when IPv4 addresses were plentiful and free. It was easy to get more land when you could declare war on the previous owner. It was easy to dump toxic waste when that was legal. The world changed for a reason.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#39

Post by btheconqueror »

lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#40

Post by iamnothere »

Borg3 wrote: post #11
anthk wrote: post #2

It's still there, at IRC/Usenet/some niche forums. Replace phreaking with maybe some mesh networks and ways to connect computers without calling an ISP. There are still niche blogs and even phlogs . And you can still use Pidgin and libpurple plugins to connect to a huge array of protocols. Ditto with core Biltbee or Bitlbee+libpurple allowing you to use any IRC client (even the ones without TLS for DOS and Win9X) to…

I dont understand fastination of gopher... its inferior protocol compared to HTTP. Yes, today HTTP2/0 and up is bloated crap. But hey, you know there is good old HTTP1/1 that still can be used? Why bother with gopher when you can setup nice and lean webpage? Okey. there is one valid point for that, AI scrappers..

Text only means limited opportunity for vulnerabilities (new HTML/CSS parser bugs all the time), and it’s trivial to roll your own client if you want.

Text only also means your value has to stand on words alone. No memes, no flashy design. Some of us value that and feel that it’s been lost over time.

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