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I go back on the 'net to the days of Mosaic, and earlier on Usenet and BBSs. I'm feeling pretty nostalgic, but also saddened. Between the crooks, the government, and fun loving pranksters it seems that there is no corner of the 'net that can be considered truly secure. I now routinely assume that nothing I do is safe.
I remember when the 'net was 90% thoughtful discussion, it was about web pages, pure HTML, and the content that they served up.
Now it seems as if no forum is safe from endless idiotic, threatening, and increasingly offensive trolls and bullies. Many good smart people just refuse to participate. In its early days the whole idea behind the 'net was the free sharing of information. Now you find things behind paywalls, registration pages, or removed after threats from lawyers.
Each week seems to bring another attempt by government or business to regulate the 'net, both what you can put on-line, and what you can look at. Add to that the many geographic blocks and other restrictions that keep out some of the people, some of the time. We rely on multiple layers of flash and java and other technology, each requiring some special software to make it work on your computer. Inevitably stuff breaks.
It was only a decade or so back that the very idea of marketing on the 'net was considered ridiculous. Now we're buried alive with ads, pop-ups, and stupid YouTube ads in front of every video - unless you want to pay them to remove them.
Increasingly using the 'net feels like more of a chore than a pleasure, and I can't see it improving. Is the Internet broken beyond repair?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:18PM
Yes it is. It is the "you will build it, they will come".
Today, the web is more about the internet is the disk drive with abusive / poor coding styles. So we are now back to the early days on LANs (where the LAN was the disk drives. Developers have moved the processing to the browser and waste the user's power grid. Oh, "we" can make "programming" easier. So you setup an event that tells your code when something changed. But under the covers hundreds/thousands of packets are streaming back and forth going, "did it change?". Cookie are equally waste full because of poor development practices, not to mention privacy.
Just sat through 2 OOD meetings going over how things work... YUCK! Developers thinking "push tech" because the event tells that a change occurred - did not understand that it was PULL - keep asking if change was made. That the lower functionally that they were consuming was badly done. But not their fault, it is tool builders fault. We are going change how we code because of them. It is not them paying for network access. ARGH!