Wednesday, April 03, 2019

I think it's funny how all the early internet people have become luddites about it.  Clifford Stoll, Jaron Lanier, and now Linus Torval.

I think the internet is the same as it always was. Just on a grander scale. If they do not believe that, they are fooling themselves. The old Newsgroup days are exactly like the internet is now. The mobs were just not as big. Their perception has just changed.

9 comments:

  1. Capital of Texas RefugeeFriday, April 05, 2019 12:38:00 PM

    If you've been wondering why comments from me weren't showing up, that's because of a little difference between Internet 1995 and Internet 2019 that isn't immediately obvious under the hood ... until you start banging up against it.

    When I improved my browser security by removing a long-standing privacy leakage source that was actually meant to improve SSL/TLS security, I wound up shutting that browser out of any Google site, including Blogger.

    In fact, I've got it down to that change to eliminate HSTS tracking plus one add-on, something called FingerprintAlert for Firefox.

    How am I doing this now?

    I have a separate Firefox profile in which I'm manually deleting the several text files that are holding "super-cookies" for HSTS and other browser leakages, and I'm only using that profile for Blogger and other Google properties.

    It took about two hours to add enough privacy leakage prevention stuff without that to get most of what I actually need for this purpose.

    So I don't actually think that these guys are wrong about saying that the Internet is very different now: back in 1995, I don't remember being shut out of parts of the Internet by the likes of Google just because my browser wasn't leaking enough information for user profiling.

    What's happening with Linus Torvalds is that there are semi-anonymous "accusers" who are trying to fuck up his shit and to disturb his calm, and because he takes random Internet noise seriously for some reason, he's now wanting to get all Internet Passport and authoritarian and shit.

    That's the exact opposite of what I want: I actually want more of a de facto state of lawlessness on the Internet, but with the ability to reach out and fuck with someone who's abusing that lawlessness.

    I don't think trust is necessary just to read a fucking blog posting or to send in a Snarkasm(tm) comment, especially if the blog has moderation turned on.

    Google's gone way past creepy with this: they do so much more than is necessary for data collection related to commercial use that they absolutely, positively have to be some kind of covert intelligence platform. The same is probably true of Facebook as well, and there are far too many coincidences with how certain DARPA projects got wound down in terms of timing.

    Basically, what's wrong with Internet 2019 is that there's too much of the "Hi, we're here from the government and we're here to fuck you" element to what passes for everything-as-normal above the water line.

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  2. Well.... I completely agree with that. But I still don't think things are all that different. You had to go out of your way to be anonymized because the only reason you were on the internet was because your employer was an internet company or university or .gov. It kept people a little more respectable because your job was on the line. Not like today. But out in Newsgrouo land (baby Google) - things are exactly the same. Google wasn't necessarily the one doing the spying back then, but your employer could if they wanted to. So... I still don't think it's that different. It's why old timey intent people keep a low profile. That's how we behaved back then.

    There are things that they could do to make it measurably better like do something to people who threaten to kill others. Which seems like a huge fad. It's illegal in real life and the internet should be no different. That has got to stop.

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  3. I think google is in the running to control the world. Sounds dumb doesn't it?
    Way back it was Dukes & counts & local kings who controlled things. Then after a huge & long war they had a treaty and the nation states took over running things.. I think we're working into the time of corporations and and google is right out there in front.
    But what do I know?

    Are the newsgroups still out there?

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  4. Na. I had to google how long ago it was. I thought about ten years. But here is a link of when Duke shut down their Usenet server.

    Here.

    It should be noted that I also ran across this link.

    "Third problem: etiquette. Yeah, yeah, I am coming over all elitist here, but the original usenet mindset was exactly that. These days we're used to being overrun by everyone who can use a point-and-drool interface on their phone to look at Facebook, but back in September 1992 it was a real shock to the system when usenet was suddenly gatewayed onto AOL, I can tell you. Previously usenet more or less got along because the users were university staff and students (who could be held accountable to some extent) and computer industry folks. Thereafter, well, a lot of the worse aspects of 4chan and Reddit were pioneered on usenet. (Want to know why folks hero-worshipped Larry Wall before he wrote Perl? Because he wrote this thing called rn(1). Which had killfiles.) Anyway, a side-effect of this was that when web browsers began to show up, the response was to double-down on the high-powered CURSES-based or pure command-line clients rather than to try and figure out how to put an easy-to-use interface on top of a news spool. Upshot: usenet clients remained rooted in the early 1990s at best.

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  5. P.S. I also felt like google might run the world until a guy I was talking to once said - if they can kill the baby Bells, Google can also die. It gave me hope that no company is too big to die.

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  6. Hauptstadt von Texas FlüchtlingFriday, April 05, 2019 10:56:00 PM

    Aaaaaand ... the captcha denial crap is back again.

    I think I'm going to sit this bullshit out for a while.

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  7. Awwww! Just look at it like a video game. Is it just making you it do many different times? or.....

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  8. Capital of Texas RefugeeTuesday, April 09, 2019 6:33:00 PM

    No.

    Nota not-so-bene to Google: I'm not a bot, this is censorship, and this heavy-handed crap that also includes crapping all over your own product offerings is why people are becoming wise to the fact that you're really a US covert intelligence gathering project that just happened to make an insane amount of money at that.

    This doesn't affect just you, BTW: this happens on every Google product, including all other Blogger sites, and it affects reading content on them if there's a captcha challenge for that.

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  9. Wow. That is pretty intrusive. I am very free market, but I think we are the point the Google needs to be broken up. They are a very big reason why Silicon Valley is dying. It was cute when they started snapping up companies left and right. But now they have gotten to the point of "we will buy you or we will kill you" And they control so much of the net no one even has a chance.

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