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The Web began dying in 2014. André Staltz writes about how and why. In a nutshell, traffic from mobile and tablet devices now surpasses that from regular desktop computers and of that traffic the overwhelming majority goes to either Faecebook or Google. Amazon is also in there. None of them have any interest in defending the open Web any more. Rather the situation is the opposite, they are aiming to carve out a section and establish very isolated walled gardens. Net Neutrality, or the lack thereof, lie at the heart of their plans based on the direction they have moved since 2014.
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What the Web Was and What It Has Become
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A kind of Batman of contemporary letters.
-- Philip Larkin on Anthony Burgess
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @11:22PM (13 children)
Twitter is part of the quadnet!
This is an alarmist article.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday November 03 2017, @11:36PM (12 children)
Web programmers were traditionally the "starving artists" of the computer science world. They were once considered the lowliest of the low.
Now, the burden is upon them to utilize their skills and laugh at pure Java scum and others to get things working.
Let me explain. I knew years ago that every hardware gadget, especially those utilizing embedded Linux, from crap to military technology, would utilize the web interface to make it palatable to everybody else. Now that silicon is cheap, even the most insignificant embedded applications would be subject to a LAMP stack. I'm a Tomcat guy only because I hate web shit. But I learned a valuable lesson:
Even in Android apps, web (JavaScript among other) technologies would become king among control. Now web faggots reign among kings in the embedded world.
Now, non-web guys like me are crying into their pillows.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @11:58PM (10 children)
The Portland javascript admirers meet up always has lots of free pizza.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:15AM (9 children)
...and they have their circle-jerk, and then pose an implicit series of questions to determine why they all like each other, believe the same things, etc. They're the same bunch of idiots who still believe that open workspaces were a good idea.
Good thing the rest of the world isn't Portland, or the Bay Area, or Boston, etc.
Damn shame, I used to love camping in Ashland or driving up through Klamath Falls, or running the track in Eugene with the big Donald Duck in the background. This was before hipster scum existed, and someday, I hope the world could return to that state.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:19AM (1 child)
The price of housing has shot way up. Rent too, with the result that many long-time residents are now homeless.
Oregon law allows no-fault eviction. So if you're not getting enough rent, you evict your tenants then rent to some whiz-kid from California.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:36AM
It's no different here. But then again those who can make a living on the cheap won't tell you about the sweet spots. We have plenty of Oregonian scum headed south towards here, unfortunately, only the douchebaggist of them, as we are attracting only the douchebaggist from all provinces, counties, and nations; as I suspect Portland is also.
(Score: 2, Informative) by crafoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:44AM (4 children)
Californians ruin everything. They are the dumbest people I have ever met. They vote for idiots. They vote for retarded laws. They destroy the local economy. What do they care that their ridiculous, shit-for-brains policies make life unfordable for the average resident? Fuck those people! Don't they know what's good for them and the environment?!
Then, after their retarded policies ruin everything around them they bitch about it like little pussies and start googling for "hip new trending communities". They cash out of their $750k homes. They pack their post-modern art. They move to the beautiful new place and do the exact same shit.
Oregon is ruined.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:56AM
Don't blame me, fuckface. I hate my own kind and have been warning about you, and I, for it, for awhile.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:15AM (1 child)
Pretty much. I miss when Seattle was at the high-end of backwater. Before the Californians and idiots from other parts of the country moved here and brought their incompetence with them. Now, the city is pretty much destroyed, rents are unaffordable, traffic is even worse and we can't do anything about the homeless problem because of the ultra-leftwing morons that flooded the area.
It wasn't enough for those morons to ruin the part of the world from whence they came, they had to bring that self-destruction with them to loose upon the city.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:44AM
You moron, Nintendo of America had Redmond as its headquarters since before 1990. It was the prototype of HipsterFaggotVille before hipsters were even a thing.
I remember having to call their overpriced hotline a few times, once in particular to get the 747 MHz frequency of Startropics since I rented the game without the manual, and once again to get the hidden key in Little Nemo's Night Sea stage going into the hidden dead-end.
Before then, my buddy and I used to prank-call it when we were 9 years old. It would start with this canned recording, "Hello! This is a-Mario!" Then once we got a live human on the other end we would try to order pizza and other "Italian" food before the person on the other line hung up on us.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Whoever on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:57AM
That's why Californian's are poor. Oh, wait, they aren't. Perhaps California's policies actually result in a healthy economy.
$750K? That's a shack around here. Not even a fixer-upper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @09:54AM (1 child)
GO KANSAS!! California is a total waste-land, what they need is some tax cuts to fix everything.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:50PM
You know what makes it a wasteland? Mexicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:54AM
The only "non-web guys" that are crying in their pillows are those that can't learn new technologies or choose not to. The ones that can't learn resort to name-calling to try to hide their inability to adapt.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:23PM (3 children)
NNTP is the future.
(Score: 2) by driven on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:05AM (2 children)
Not unless they have found a way to filter out all the spammers. The signal to noise ratio on newsgroups are absolutely horrible.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:17AM (1 child)
That measure has existed for a long time. It's called killfile or score file (the latter is a more refined thing). Add some Bayesian Filtering to the mix (which seems to work quite well for email, so I don't see why it shouldn't work for Usenet).
And then there are moderated newsgroups, where spam is no issue for obvious reasons.
And one would want server admins that are not shy of taking action when required (like an UDP against Google when they were the biggest source of spam with a completely unresponsive abuse department — indeed, I suspect Google quite intentionally killed Usenet in order to promote their proprietary Groups; this is back when the vast majority of people still believer their "don't do evil" motto).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:26PM
I tried to warn people about Google and that whole "don't do evil" thing. I guarantee you that the vast majority of people at good (with the exception of a handful) actually see themselves as doing good. The problem is that Google is an amoral machine that doesn't care about intentions, it focuses on results. So while Google doesn't set out to do evil, it is the natural result.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:28PM (8 children)
According to www.eternal-september.org it started dying in September of 1993.
According to many of us, it started dying during the first dotcom bubble/crash between 99 and 01. Others might peg its death during the mid 2000s when all the current shit social media sites started their meteoric rise and IPOs.
Each generation is to a degree correct, and each generation is to a degree wrong. The real conclusion however is: The internet is continuing to evolve, and much of it is not for the better.
The free market solution is to create better internets that cater to the different kinds of niches. Much of this can overlap with the traditional internet, but be done as a series of separate network protocols relaying their traffic encapsulated in IP. That means centralized hubs however, much like what happened with the physical infrastructure of the internet.
The only real future that will retain some of the 'old' internet, would be mesh networking with decentralized routing based on subnetwork key hashes with each subnetwork providing a public key that can be used to verify changes to it. A solution which was unavailable in the early days of the Internet Protocol due to the complexity of the equipment, but is completely possible to do in solutions architected today without the need to support limited performance legacy networking gear.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @11:43PM (7 children)
You got your email, IRC, Usenet, Tor, Freenet, etc. You can communicate with others using PGP. If you don't want to use GOOG/FBOOK as a gateway for news content, you can use RSS. It all works to a degree. If you have email spam list problems, you can write off certain services as walled gardens/prisons. If sites block Tor or make it a bitch to use, you stay on onion sites.
Decentralization and mesh networking is a good thing but not because they solve some huge problem with the corporatization of the Web. What they do is make traffic more resistant to surveillance or getting choked off by "kill switches".
Because of declining hardware and bandwidth costs, it's cheaper than ever to eschew the corporate Web, especially if you are interested in text and not video. The biggest practical problem is the inability to operate your own servers on many consumer ISPs, but if you want to pay for a little freedom, you can.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:51AM
You have to pay more than a little. Even if I were a billionaire I'm not sure how I would go about getting decent service here. There are two nominal ISPs and I have no sign either actually retains the expertise in house to provide the service. Regardless, they have no interest whatsoever in doing so, either of them. That would interfere with wringing every last penny possible out of the private information of their customers, which they are busily doing, while thinking deeply on how much their current customer base sucks and how much better life would be with a good customer base, one that is happy to pay, never tries to use the internet, only watches ads, volunteers personal info, and then goes to bed so to be sure and be fresh for work tomorrow. Because being late to work could lead to being late for the cable bill. Can't have that. YOU HAD ONE JOB SUBSCRIBER!!!
And there is no security in the absence of physical control of the site. That's the foundation, if it isn't there the best security just crumbles into the surf the first time it's tested.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:47AM (5 children)
Change for the sake of breaking things sickens systems. They may recover, or they may die. However, this article is hysteria. The web is NOT dying.
The one irksome change that occurred sometime this summer was port 80 being blocked somehow. I have no explanation for why my web site is no longer visible, and suspect the ISP made a quiet change of policy. Flipped the kill switch, so to speak, on port 80. There's been this big drive to switch from http to https. Guess I'll have to operate on port 443 from now on. But I'm not convinced https should be used everywhere, and I ought to have the option to stick to http if I want. Whatever the merits of https, forcing everyone to use it it does push tiny websites running on marginal servers further to the edge.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:15AM (4 children)
https: any chance it's being pushed by people selling certs?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:27AM (3 children)
It's not the CAs. Let's Encrypt makes domain-validated certificates available without charge through an automated service.
HTTPS is pushed in part by people selling domains. If you don't have a fully-qualified domain name for the router, printer, or NAS on your home LAN, you can't run HTTPS over your internal network with a certificate that house guests' devices will recognize.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:15PM (2 children)
Thanks for that info.
Could you use a generated self-signed cert. for your LAN https?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Pino P on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
Yes, provided two things:
1. All devices capable of accessing resources on your network are capable of bypassing unknown issuer warnings or installing a private CA's root certificate.
2. All your users are willing to take such measures.
Say you store videos on a NAS on your home LAN, and you've invited friends or relatives to enter your home and view videos. If they are non-technical users, an unknown issuer warning might scare them off.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday November 05 2017, @02:06AM
Thanks again.
Or, they may do what most people I know of do: "Sure, I'll accept that certificate! Certificates are a good thing- I have many I'm proud of!"
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Whoever on Friday November 03 2017, @11:33PM (13 children)
We are going to discuss this piece of fluff, while the most important study on climate change is being ignored?
Is it perhaps that the climate study change has a conclusion that doesn't accord with the biases of the administrators here?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 03 2017, @11:37PM
Fuck you and your co2 nazis.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday November 03 2017, @11:54PM (3 children)
Your story was posted a few minutes ago by martyb.
Submissions that were made before yours are normally prioritized. This one was posted on Nov. 1.
Whining about your own non-breaking sub that has been around for less than a day? Not really a good habit. But go ahead and throw some shade on the editors with your false accusation.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:29AM (2 children)
Like these two submissions, which were submitted after mine, but appear (if I understand the times correctly) to be scheduled to appear on the front page before mine?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:36AM
You have a better timeslot than they do. 8 AM eastern instead of the 3:30-6:00 AM eastern no man's land.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:19AM
This site is NOT your personal sounding board to post stories at YOUR whim.
We have a community here, of whom you are one member. The editors try to find a balance of stories that we think will be of interest to as many in the community as possible. Part of that process is being aware that, say, releasing four linux-related stories in a row would not go over well. We try to choose "a little of this, a little of that". We most certainly DO NOT accept stories in the exact same order that they were submitted! Your story WAS accepted and will appear in due time.
Again, from the Submissions Guidelines [soylentnews.org] aka FAQ: "Don't grumble about declining of your submission." You've already started to sidetrack THIS story's comments. I do not think you want someone doing the same to YOUR submission, right? Please extend the same courtesy to the rest of the community.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:01AM (3 children)
FYI, I spent approximately 10PM to midnight, my local time, queuing up stories for this site last night. And I was up at just after 6am to get ready for work. Then, after a full day at work, I got some groceries, made and ate my dinner, caught up on site happenings in our IRC channels, and then took a look at the story queue. We were down to 4 pending stories (i.e. queued up for release but had not yet been posted to the main page.) So, I hunkered down and pushed out another 9 stories.
Now, I would have liked to have just kicked my feet up and watched a DVD or somesuch, but instead decided to volunteer my limited spare time for this site.
Given a choice, I like to give a little preference to new and/or rarely submitting folk... I know what it is like to wait to see if my story submission makes it out to the site.
I see you've are an active commenter on this site - thank you. Maybe you are unaware what goes into getting a story out. I know I was stunned at how much happens 'behind the scenes' to get a story out the door when I volunteered as an editor.
If you check you submissions page, you'll see that your submission has already been accepted.
If you take another looks at the page where you submit a story, there is a link to the Submissions Guidelines [soylentnews.org]. On that page, among many other helpful suggestions, is this one:
I'm rather much exhausted at the moment, so this may not have come across as well as I would like.
tl;dr: There's a lot more going on here than you knew. Now you know.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:54AM
I'll exploit this ill-conceived whinethread for an opportunity to thank martyb and the other editors and staff for their work in keeping SN running for us social misfits. We complain because we love :)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:30AM
Now, I would have liked to have just kicked my feet up and watched a DVD or somesuch, but instead decided to volunteer my limited spare time for this site.
It really is appreciated around here, even if you don't often get to read statments of such.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2, Informative) by pr on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:35PM
Thanks to the editors from me too. The stories are great. And thanks to the submitters and the posters for that matter.
Cool. I'll go back to lurking now!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:13AM (2 children)
and eventually so is the fate of the web.
We are about 3 or 4 generations away from ceasing to be human in the classic sense. Homo sapiens is evolving toward extinction, to be replaced by homo robitiens, AI-programmed, DNA-engineered commodity beings with no vestiges of individuality, critical thinking, or originality.
"Legacy" humans lacking technological improvements will be preserved as lab/zoo specimens, if at all.
Welcome to the future we're creating right now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:38AM
I welcome this future.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:05AM
The real problem is, how will we notice the change :)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:32AM
Why do I get the feeling you want to force people into listening only to groupthink that aligns with your political beliefs, likely removing all other discourse so people have no choice but to listen to you or listen to nothing, and subsequently to be pressganged into silence or crybullied into pseudo-agreement?
Probably because when it comes right down to it you almost certainly do.
People don't appreciate having other discussions muted so you can cram your opinions down their throats. You would do well to keep that in mind.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday November 03 2017, @11:56PM (4 children)
It's also the only way I have to communicate with my cousin. He has no clue how to send or receive email.
He was valedictorian of his high school class.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:28AM (3 children)
This is why it's important to create unsafe spaces. People that have always been coddled and never forced out of their safe zone are often shockingly naïve and willfully stupid. Someone needs to love your cousin enough to look him in the eye and tell him to quit being a lazy, stupid fucktard. There's a whole generation out there right now just like your cousin, doing stupid things, saying stupid things, thinking they're right, because never in their life have they actually been held to some sort of objective standard by someone that wasn't afraid to tell them when they were wrong.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:15AM
Juhgghggh
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:01AM (1 child)
Mmmm... create unsafe spaces... How about you hack the cousin's FB acount, vandalize it well, redirect all auth to /dev/null (no way to recover the account)? Would that be unsafe enough?
Or would it result in a total mental meltdown, catatonia for a period followed by nightmares and PTSD to the end of the life (which may come in a short time, by means of suicide)?
No, seriously, I only ask to get myself an idea how high the level of FB addiction is among the younger generation.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:34AM
I don't know by how much. I'm 53, I expect he is 56 or so.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:21AM (1 child)
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html
There was an important shift in 2014, for sure, but was only the last little bit of destruction.
"In a nutshell, traffic from mobile and tablet devices now surpasses that from regular desktop computers"
The open web was intentionally platform agnostic, and would neither know nor care what sort of devices you used to access it.
"and of that traffic the overwhelming majority goes to either Faecebook or Google"
Neither of which even has an actual web presence beyond a sloppy placeholder, check.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:23AM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Informative) by SomeGuy on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:27AM (3 children)
I'm honestly surprised that "the web" ever took off in the first place. Back before ~1992 or so, there were a bunch of proprietary online services, and they would have loved to keep it that way.
The only real reason it didn't stay that way is that most proprietary service providers didn't know what to do with their services. They just offered up news, e-mail, and perhaps a few of their own information resources. So they were more than happy to add Internet gateways as it provided access to all kinds of new random things they hadn't though of yet. Then consumers figured out they only needed generic Internet/web access.
What if instead of MSN, Compuserve, Q-Link/AOL or such there were Facebook, Twitter, and a few others? Sort of doing what they do now, but also being the ones that provide connectivity service? If they got enough traction, they would be more than happy to lock every other service out.
And that is sort of that I am seeing today. People only have these gadgets so they can use Facefook and Twatter. They make up the majority, and to them everything else is "dead" and should be "recycled" all the way to a Chinese landfill, with prejudice.
The big companies already have enough control they are putting unwanted shit in web browsers. DRM, re-inventing flash with HTML5, super optimized scripting engines because almost 100% of their content is fancy retarded scripts. Most "modern" web sites are web in name only. Browsers are once again becoming proprietary clients. If you aren't using the absolute latest browser you will find yourself locked out. Without net neutrality, you return to being more or less locked in to a provider.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:47AM (1 child)
Perhaps it will turn out to be a cyclical thing, like mainframe / pc / server / desktop / cloud. In seven years we might all be sitting here dissecting the great bulldozing of the walled gardens and the renaissance of open web. of course it won't be called the open web, it will have to have some stupid marketing buzzword attached to it to convince folks that it's something new, but it will be, essentially, the open web. In fact i'm putting my money on the table now, it will be called 'The Dirt'.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by dmc on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:05AM
"What is old is new again". That phrase is well known in silicon valley. One of these days the big money players will feel in control enough to market home servers that are isp industry blessed, and claim it is all consistent with net neutrality while denying people the ability to use servers that don't cut them into the profits (there are many forms of profit other than currency, whatever the form, the big players will want their cut as tribute before letting you play on 'their' field of privacy crippled nightmares.
Mad props to some of the good comments in this thread. Far too few of the masses understand the issues for the better outcomes to flourish, but it's nice to notice that at least a few people see the utter hypocritical lies coming from industry and political leaders and calling it out as such. And then there is the strange turn of events of a Trump presidency. I'd have to say given that I'm not at all sure where things are headed. I mean seriously, can you imagine a more effective campaign to get the masses to fall out of love with Twitter(tm)? Wow.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:34AM
ftp.funet.fi (still working!!!) - the first place the Linux kernel could be downloaded
sunsite.unc.edu (now it resolves to www.ibiblio.org) - all the goodies in the GNU could be downloaded from there
At least for me, those were the first places I remember visiting in the early '90, no AOL and no Web pages.
Late '90-ies and early 2000... I think the place was call passlords.com?... plus a few others, but choke full of passwords to porn sites (mostly non working, or not working for long), backdoors or freebies. Like the internet directory of xxx sites.
So, there you have it, two reasons early internet adopters broke the wall of proprietary online services: open source and porn. Thanks God. I don't think any of the two will disappear any time soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday November 04 2017, @12:30AM (25 children)
We gave the world an open Internet with access to the sum total of human knowledge. They moved in, looked around and within a generation decided "Nah, give us AOL back."
The big driver was of course "mobile", which is largely the industry's polite way of saying "Not Windows." People will use a phone or tablet even at home, even if they still own a PC, because the choice is that vs Windows, since that is what 90% of people think is the only option for a desktop PC. The side effect of App Stores / Walled Gardens being the only marketed option has now become obvious. The ease of "monitizing" is what is already killing it though. It should now be apparent that it was a mistake.
But the status quo isn't stable and won't last. Twitter is self destructing now, Facebook will implode from the same cause. All we need do is force Amazon to be required to show a profit after twenty plus years and their dominance will also evaporate. Those are the easy wins though; the Boss Monster still awaits. Google: all knowing, all seeing, all consuming, all Evil. If anyone sees a path to killing that thing, please share!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:07AM (18 children)
I thought it was the industries way of saying 'fuck you, humanity.' But I guess I can see how you read it that way too.
Gargle took the linux kernel and managed to build an OS that was even less Free than Windows using it, while touting a supposed corporate motto of "don't be evil." The *chutzpah* was breathtaking. And Apple? Wow. Stole the name from Cisco and the important stuff from BSD (ok, not stole, the hippies gave it to them for Free, granted) and made a system that was EVEN MORE consumer hostile. With better marketing. People, by and large, love it. Even after you point out how it spies on them day and night and doesn't actually recognize them as owner, despite the expensive purchase.
You want to kill the monsters? You have to convince your fellow people, who aren't always the most far-thinking, to quit feeding them. At one level, it really is as simple as that.
Unfortunately, at this point, they've managed to make themselves so integral to such a large portion of our effective technology, that 'quit feeding them' is virtually impossible. They've reached a sort of apex-predator position, where even if you go around and deliberately patronize new and disruptive companies that compete directly against them, all that happens is those companies get absorbed and you find yourself holding stock in gargle.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:27AM (6 children)
They licensed it
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:51AM (5 children)
I've looked for a licensing agreement or even announcement a few times and not found it.
The lack of a lawsuit was still a fair reason to suspect it.
Still, the mental gymnastics are incredible. 'Yes, I know I agreed to an insanely one-sided arrangement where I pay for the hardware but they still own it, they'll probably give me service but this is entirely at their discretion, they'll spy on me in every way imaginable and sell my info to anyone that will pay for it, and this is all contributing to the ultimate destruction of our society and doubtless untold human suffering. But I need to do 'x' and I'm in a hurry.'
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:12AM (4 children)
As there are no longer any barbers, I get my hair cut at hair salons.
During one such haircutting session, the hairdresser realized I had an iPhone 4, and begged me to sell it to her. It's not like she couldn't get one at the mall. No she had to have mine and RIGHT NOW.
I contemplated offering it in return for a blowjob, but decided that would be uncouth.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1) by Arik on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:18AM (1 child)
You should move back to America, we still have barbers here.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday November 05 2017, @01:31AM
He had a few playboys on a table in the weighting area. There is a barber in Portland, but I don't go there much as it charges twice as much as the salon near my apartment. But the barber in Portland also has playboys.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:32PM (1 child)
Barbers are a dying breed... there are a few left but not many.
I took a different solution... I started shaving my head.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 04 2017, @11:43PM
I don't know what you guys are even talking about. I never have a problem finding a barber. I have noticed though that the trade seems to have been handed off from the Italians to the Azerbaijanis.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:09AM (8 children)
The next best thing, feed them garbage in large amounts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:24AM (7 children)
And thus our Greco-tragic hero Aristarchus is fighting the good fight.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:13AM (6 children)
His battle may be honourable, I... don't know why, but I just have this nagging feeling the battlefield is wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday November 04 2017, @07:19PM (5 children)
孙子兵法:
有死地, c0lo, 有死地!!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:54AM (4 children)
Beyond the time I have available to find the translation, magister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:25AM (3 children)
When you find yourself in the cultural orbit of an ancient civilization that is not one of the roots of your own, it behooves you to become at least moderately literate? I, myself, have learned English, much to my Dismay, and Latin, before that. So you cannot look up Sunzi, Art of War, chapter nine? Oh, you tire me, c0lo!
One of the earlier translations, thus out of copyright [mit.edu]:
We are interested in the Last. The Roman strategist Vegetius, in his work De re militari [wikipedia.org], which you may be familiar with, suggested that you always should offer your opponent an easy way out, a "golden bridge", as it were. What you never wanted to do was to back you enemy into a corner, from which they had no way out but to fight. And on the contrary, if you had no other choice, to put your own troops into the "death ground", literally, 有死地, they would have no other way out but to fight their way to victory. This is where we are, my dear c0lo, at the end of the world, with no way out but to continue to punch Nazis in the face, lest they send us to the ovens. I am very clear about this, and I hope some difficulty in languages Nem jut el az úton.
Oh, if you are still too lazy to use the resources of the internets, that last part, in English, is:
Wow, Giles can be wordy in his translation! But I suppose you get my drift. This is the battlefield. If we lose here, we lose everywhere. I am glad to have you as my comrade in arms, and appreciate you misgivings. But this is it. It starts here, with 6000 Soylentils. And once we prevail, the world will be saved.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:59AM (2 children)
Hooves or behoovs, I found many of them, oh magister, but translations are plenty and not all absolutely convergent.
And no, I don't have enough life in me to learn mandarin, or cantonese, or even pinyin, at least not enough to understand Sun-zi in original.
I'll remain a barbarian, come to that, the best I can is to handle the chop-sticks but not the brush.
I doubt it, magister. You jumped too far into the script, are you sure you tried all you could on the line of "Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."?
Are you even sure you identified the generals of the enemy's army and not consume yourself in a useless skirmish?
I mean, look, you are fighting for some years already. May I remind you of "In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns."?
Doesn't it sound strange, like you've been played into this position, so that you waste yourself?
---
This (to cite a future planet of fighters or an old religious order based on mysticism) is Ghafla [wikia.com] - there may be more than one reason I was asking you to be more (westerny) specific, why did you assumed that one?
It it wise to recognize Ghafla and acquire the discipline to reject it - it should be much easier than Sun-zi, as it is something that may grown in you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:13PM (1 child)
Ah, but c0lo, what did you think "death ground" could possibly mean? And yes, even Sun-zi was well aware of this. The only winning move, is not to play? Or, one might think, to play a different game than your enemy/partner thinks they are playing? We will carry on, will we not?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Sunday November 05 2017, @12:52PM
Oh, magister, really... do you even need to ask?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by Yaa101 on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:26AM
Smartphone==Heroïne so good luck trying to keep people from using...
No comment...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @06:08PM
ai will probably have to decide what is best(rank who the experts really are instead of who has money?) then the herd wont be dependent on whoever happened to have used/stole/whored his way to the top. right now the ignorant herd just listens to whoever is on top whipping them. it would be nice if the boss was at least a fellow cow or sheep instead of a laughing wolf.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:24AM
Or DARPA gave tons of money to face fork. google and twit to create a global surveillance system to abuse and harm people for their own benefit. you know could go either way
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:06AM (3 children)
Facebook will implode when the current FB generation will have teenage kids.
I mean... how lame would it be to share your personal space (even if virtual) with your parents?
I have a feeling the process should have already started.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by jmorris on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:37AM (2 children)
Worse and sooner. Generation Zyklon rises, yet Facebook is obsessed with real names and starting to swing the SJW banhammer. As they get tossed off for Crimethink they won't be getting back on like people do twenty or more times on Twitter. Btw, twitter is now demanding a phone number to create an account so they are accelerating into the abyss. SJWs Always Double Down. Yet these young people will still want to be part of a social network. I suspect the marketplace will find a solution.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @04:23AM (1 child)
My teenage daughters are already there. They think FB is simply barbaric. Email? What's that?
Instead, they have created a whole new language based on "memes". Seriously, think emojis but with memes. They have whole conversations via so-called texting these images to each other, also over instagram, snapchat and others, always via a slew of context and audience specific fake accounts. An added comment can alter or reverse the implied meaning of the meme. It's fascinating. I'd like to see a cultural anthropologist or linguist study it.
I'm lucky I have such a good relationship with them and they trust me with this stuff. I feel sorry for the other kids' parents.
The Times, they is a changin'. And fast.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Saturday November 04 2017, @10:56AM
Smart [wikipedia.org]. This is one way to keep your privacy. There's hope yet.
A technique used extensively in everyday life in former communist countries, except that all we had was text... easier nowadays, isn't it?
(take that, Google AI... and NSA. Deal with thousands of "dialects" if you can, without a common life experience to act as the foundation to decipher these dialects).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Saturday November 04 2017, @05:43AM
Starve it by not using it?
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:07AM
OK typo "author" means 2004
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Saturday November 04 2017, @02:55AM (1 child)
The big 3 (or 4) sites put quite a bit of tenuously-verified trust in their users' inputs. They trade on this data so it's an obvious weak point. I think the real harm done is widespread denial of personal servers. The internet was designed to be a bidirectional thing. ISPs not providing "real internet" is a serious issue and not one that I see an easy way to solve.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @01:20PM
ISP's have offered asymmetrical (your 'non-real') service because it was easier and that's what their customers wanted.
Easier because of the architecture of cable modem systems and PON, and the physics of DSL Crosstalk.
What they wanted was web browsing as in, send up a little request and get back a big page.
With fiber, newer Docsis, and vectoring, upstream b/w is more doable if there is demand.
The question is, is there a widespread demand past pushing things upstream for distribution by major sites?
As long as one upstream push supports multiple downloads, the desired service will be asymmetrical.
It seems like the connecting folks type of apps could be decentralized.
But, where's a profit motive to build a cloudless/p2p service that supplants G, YT, and/or FB's server farms?
The trust thing might come down to accountability thru reputation (see ebay/amazon). Perhaps p2p is a better way to do this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 04 2017, @03:05PM
Thanks for sharing.
I don't use any of those services or own a "smartphone". I intend to keep it that way, even a bit more after that read.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by darkfeline on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:11AM
To play devil's advocate, blame yourselves.
The Web still exists. The Web is still as alive as it ever was. You can write HTML documents that link to other HTML documents. These documents can be requested using HTTP and displayed and navigated using all manner of Web browsers. Many web servers exist that can be set up on a proverbial toaster by anyone capable of following directions. Even with how bad ISPs and regulation has gotten, it's going to be a long time until your 5MB of annual bandwidth will be at risk. None of this has disappeared. If anything, things have gotten a lot better. Internet service is far more widespread, cheaper (for the piddlingly few MB needed to use the Web regularly), and hosting a website has never been easier (install nginx, write HTML files, done).
If there is any deterioration of the Web, the blame can only be placed on those who write or would, or would not, write content for the Web. That is to say, you who whine about the death of the Web.
I still browse the Web, sometimes with Chromium and sometimes with text browsers that do not support JS like EWW or w3m. I can assure you that it is alive and well, at least for now. If it dies, it is because you are whining instead of doing.
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