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Paraphrasing an article by Time Magazine's Joel Stein:
The Internet's personality has changed -- once it was like a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger's. [ Submitter's note: the "Sociopath with Asperger's" comment is not my addition, but a verbatim phrase in the source article ]
The people who relish their online freedom to act under influence of the online disinhibition effect are called "trolls." Trolling is, overtly, a political fight; but it has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men's rights and against immigration. They derisively call their adversaries "social justice warriors" and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weaknesses to gain pity, which allows them to control the leverage of political power.
When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethic and religious minorities, gays -- anyone who might feel vulnerable. The alt-right argues that if you can't handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that's arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet.
The article closes with a description of an exchange between Stein and a detractor. In meeting the detractor in real-life, he was surprised by her lack of bravado, to which she responds, "The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury."
Stein ruminates in response, "Maybe. But maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:47AM
We're losing the internet to the culture of marketing, tracking, and surveillance. I don't see much hate, but I have tools that show me how I'm being tracked and it's scary. I also know the NSA and google are monitoring my every keystroke as well as they can.
Actually, to be honest, I've got tools that block the local tracking. But I'm not an expert on internet surveillance so who knows how well they work. And I can't do squat for the traffic I generate through my ISP.
The one I like the most is the one that sends random queries to google every minute or so while the laptop is on. That's gotta futz some people's metrics.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:53AM
You could use Tor if you really wanted. If it's good enough for Iarnian dissidents.... I actually have no idea if the NSA/Google can break it. But I would put way more money on the NSA/Google than the Iarnian government.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:00AM
I've used TOR, it's too farking slow for anything I do that isn't illegal.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Informative) by number11 on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:04AM
I've used TOR, it's too farking slow for anything I do that isn't illegal.
Then use a VPN. There are ones with servers in dozens (or hundreds) of places that don't track you. TorrentFreak [torrentfreak.com] does surveys of their policies regularly (people who do file sharing are sensitive about using IP numbers that can be connected to themselves). Some don't track you, Private Internet Access was mentioned in a criminal court case where the FBI said they tracked the perp to PIA but PIA didn't keep any records so they couldn't follow any further. (That doesn't mean that the NSA can't, but they're not likely to spend their time or chance letting anyone know, if it's not a major terrorist or national interest issue.)
(Score: 3, Touché) by Snotnose on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:59AM
Yeah, I don't do anything that I need to spend the money or hassle with a VPN. I don't like being tracked and love my privacy, but if Uncle Sam cares that I frequent /., Soylent, and fark, then so be it.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @09:42PM
Not scary enough to tack on $5/month on top of what you are paying your ISP to get on in the first place, apparently. You could also use a free VPN occasionally.
"I have nothing to hide."
(Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday August 21 2016, @04:03AM
I don't do anything that I need to spend the money or hassle with a VPN.
The money isn't much. They run $35-50/year. Boingboing has been plugging some that are less.
I find my VPN often speeds up file transfers. Don't know why (I'd expect the opposite) but I've measured and it's true. Depends on the server and location. Maybe the bigger datacenters are just really well connected. But if you're a gamer, ping times will probably increase some.
The only hassle I've found is that some CDN (Cloudflare?) keeps throwing captchas at me, and a few asshat websites refuse connections. And that if you use a German server, it breaks a lot of Youtube (but that apparently happens to everybody in Germany, my German friend says "we all use VPNs to the US or Thailand".
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:40AM
It's easier with HOAs (uggh), but if you can get an entire neighborhood together it's possible to completely obfuscate your location with wireless meshing & obfuscation with onion routing protocols like TOR. Bitblinder was an interesting project attempting to do this at a very local level. As with everything of course, it require participation.
Imagine 3 small utility sheds maintained by the community that have commercial fiber. From there it's wireless communications layered on top of an onion routing protocol, for everything. Your IP address is actually in that utility shed, with you tunneling all traffic to that router over obfuscated wireless where those networks could even change on a regular basis, across IPv6, which is 128bit.....
Your IP address would be localized to a point that could easily be 10-15 miles away from, and not in a straight line of sight, much less in the direction of the initial onion node. Higher population density is even better, and with fiber connects inbetween utility sheds in multiple communities you could expand that further.
It wouldn't be fool proof of course, but I think it would be possible to require interception of a large amount of wireless traffic across an entire city protected in such a way in order to eliminate anonymity. It does gain us something, because then even Google and others can only isolate us to the utility sheds at best, and we may have obsfuscated thousands at once. We're not attempting to remain completely anonymous, because we do actually register our real names in the collective, to help maintain ownership over property and to get it paid for. Your actually paying a group of locals in Smith Town USA to help distribute your own ISP service across hopefully a large number of nodes.
We can dream though right?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:02AM
> The one I like the most is the one that sends random queries to google every minute or so while the laptop is on. That's gotta futz some people's metrics.
Don't count on it. Seriously, those things are a waste of effort and breed a sense of complacency. The classification tools that Big Data places like google use understand noise, because noise in the signal happens under natural conditions anyway. They don't classify you by individual search terms, they classify you by groupings so sending them a thousand random searches with 20 real and non-random searches just reduces their confidence threshold for categorizing you a little bit.
If you wanted to meaningfully pollute google's profiling, you'd need to feed google a bunch of searches that are inter-related - that paint a picture of a coherent personality and identity, but a personality that is different from your own. But to do that, you'd probably need access to the kind of profiling data that google has compiled. Either that, or a full-fledged AI that could simulate a distinct person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:30AM
Use a VPN. If it's too slow, ditch the cat videos.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:36AM
What honestly concerns me is that the current generation will begin to accept this as the 'norm', and not see anything wrong with mass tracking, marketing, or surveillance.If something isn't seen as a problem, it isn't something that will be fixed.
Honestly, the world we live in makes 1984 look tame in terms of the analytical data available to to corporations and the government. I try to be an optimist on such things, but in a post Snowden world, even I'm struggling to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Still, I suppose its a victory that at least in this very quiet corner of the internet, we don't have anything but the most basic of IP logs and such.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @04:00PM
> will begin to accept this as the 'norm', and not see anything wrong with mass tracking, marketing, or surveillance.If something isn't seen as a problem, it isn't something that will be fixed.
I don't think that's happening. I think that people are resigned to it, but when they have a choice that is reasonably accessible, that doesn't require total online hermitage, then they gladly embrace it. For example the way kids segregate their lives across social media services, using instagram for one social circle and snapchat for another. To one degree or another people are aware of big brother constantly looking over their shoulders and it makes them uncomfortable. They just don't have a better option. For now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:35PM
That's why they want what little "hate" there is gone too, it's easier to focus market to a bunch of placid people that it is to people busy infighting.