Posted on 04/14/2018 4:47:19 PM PDT by HangnJudge
Weren’t there flame wars on Usenet in the 80s and 90s?
As if Socialism has never been weaponized...
...As if Socialism has never been weaponized...
USSR and Communist China come to mind
“...who first coded web pages to force video on you...)
Hah, I thought it was the junk Chinese web browser I’m using on my phone. So, everyone gets those videos?
Yes, death should be excruciating for the inventor of those.
With Regrets
“The web that many connected to years ago is not what new users will find today. The fact that power is concentrated among so few companies has made it possible to weaponize the web at scale.” —Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web
“We really believed in social experiences. We really believed in protecting privacy. But we were way too idealistic. We did not think enough about the abuse cases.” —Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook
“Let’s build a comprehensive database of highly personal targeting info and sell secret ads with zero public scrutiny. What could go wrong?” —Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
“I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network.” —Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.” —Sean Parker, first president of Facebook
“I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, What did we bring to the world?” —Tony Fadell, Known as one of the“fathers of the iPod”
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. This is not about Russians’ ads. This is a global problem.” —Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of user growth at Facebook
“The government is going to have to be involved. You do it exactly the same way you regulated the cigarette industry. Technology has addictive qualities that we have to address, and product designers are working to make those products more addictive. We need to rein that back.” —Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce
We are the internet, the internet is us. Most people are idiots. They always have been and always will be. Technology is a double-edged sword that unveiled that fact at the speed of light. Shallowness just a click away, stupidity at your fingertips.
AdGuard and its kin are your friend.
Ethan Zuckerman, MIT media scholar. Invented the pop-up ad.
You ever notice the relatively recent phenomenon and rise of school shootings started around the age of the Internet, like took off in the 1990s? In an era of “Instagram celebrities” and e-celebs who’ll do anything for attention, it must be attractive to some deranged teenagers to shoot up a school for quick widespread notoriety. I certainly think the Internet and 24-hour cable news have played a bigger role in it than guns, which were prevalent in the U.S. in the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, etc., and kids then weren’t shooting up schools left and right. To say guns are the main cause almost implies that the possession of guns in the United States wasn’t legalized until the 1990s.
Now it is very difficult to host content content on the Internet. Most users don't realize that they are not directly connected to the Internet. ISPs using something called NAT (network address translation) which corrals you into a private unroutable network. Even though your computer has an "Internet address" assigned by your ISP, it is meaningless outside of your "jail".
In the early days of the Internet, if you wanted to make files available to others, you just ran an ftp server on your machine. Today that is no longer possible unless you pay recurring fees to your provider for a "real" Internet address. Just look at your network speed. It might be something like 30 Mbps down, and 5 Mbps up. This asymmetry is not the normal way the Internet was meant to work. Up and down speeds were the same. But now you ISP stands as a mediator between you and the real Internet.
There has been talk of creating an Internet 2. It is still nascent, but it will fix what has been broken and corrupted by the present system. The current Internet has become a one-way street for corporations to track you and to flush their video toilets into your living room. They have turned the Internet into something worse than cable TV. The censorship imposed by Youtube, Google, and Facebook is appalling to all those who remember the early days of the Internet and its promise of the free flow of information and ideas.
Did the inventors of radio and TV feel the same way? They must have.
oh yes, there are lots of web pages that force videos on you.... some browser settings allow you to put a stop to it, but I haven’t had the problem in a while so I think I found a way to derail those videos (can’t remember, it’s been a while since I poked around in my browser settings).
Well what would be the alternative? Everybody has a full address space and all manner of havoc happens. That ISP is a shield in both ways.
Didn’t he apologize for inventing pop-ups?
Oh that’s right, I installed AdBlock a long while ago and haven’t had much of any problem since, so it’s really good.
Well it does mean a lot of news sites give you a pop-up complaining that you have ad block software. Some of them will still let you browser their site, while others will stop you unless you “whitelist” them to allow their ads.
So I do still get all the pop-ups which complain that I have an ad blocker!!
This isn't actually about the evolution of the Internet, it's about the post-partum depression over the advent of social media, which is not the same thing at all. It is rather amusing to hear the cyber robber barons bleating for more government regulation as the answer to their own excesses. In the face of such regulation they wouldn't be in a position to demand it.
"Don't gather the data" is probably the least workable of solutions, since it's unenforceable and not really the source of the problem. It's what is done with the data that is the problem. In the face of this, Google's notorious corporate slogan "Don't be evil" is certainly the most cynical bit of post-modern irony ever constructed; "be evil and revel in it" only requires the additional caveat "and blame somebody else" to be a perfect formulation of the actual activities of the self-named gatekeepers of information flow. In fact, the pendulum has swung from a pretense that perfect objectivity is possible to the present conviction that any objectivity is impossible and irrelevant in the face of the accretion of power.
This may swing back to a slightly more acceptable middle ground, but it's making an awful mess in the meantime. One of the most unintended results of the empowerment of the common user to communicate to millions of his or her peers is not the freedom it confers but the ruthlessly enforced groupthink it allows. The answer to that is not, unfortunately, more regulation.
It’s Tim Berners-Lee’s fault, if not for him we’d be swapping text files via Gopher.
From the slashdot comments
Open letter to tech’s crybabies.... (+1)
WolfgangVL 3 hours ago
Please, don’t ruin everything that is great about the net because a vocal minority has no damn self control. It seems the same people that have been blowing off a decade of warnings have suddenly decided we were right all along, and now they need to make a few power moves to save face.
Please guys, enjoy your expensive coffee, your avocado toast, and your 6 figure salaries while they last, but don’t bring the rest of us down with you when the chickens finally come home to roost. Believe it or not, even though YOU’VE BECOME ADDICTED to your own supply, the majority of us have been quietly avoiding the dumpster-fire that is social media. You don’t hear us because we are not playing. Please don’t invite governments to “fix” whats not broken. Fix yourselves.
Go outside. I hear the weather is nice in CA
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
