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posted by n1 on Monday May 18 2015, @12:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the 4-da-lulz-and-$$$ dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday May 18 2015, @10:36PM

    by zafiro17 (234) on Monday May 18 2015, @10:36PM (#184856) Homepage

    W3M is pretty broken. Lynx is pretty much the go-to client, and overbite for Firefox adds it to the browser. I confess it's a limited ecosystem, but it's nice to have alternatives to the WWW for sharing info. My server runs pygopherd, for what it's worth - it's a dead simple install and runs practically straight out of the box.

    --
    Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
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  • (Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday May 19 2015, @12:44AM

    by Marand (1081) on Tuesday May 19 2015, @12:44AM (#184896) Journal

    KDE has a gopher KIOslave (package kio-gopher) that makes gopher:// [gopher] addresses work in konqueror and rekonq, for another option that doesn't rely on a browser addon. Also, apparently Elinks has native gopher support too, but it's disabled by default for some reason. Unless you compile it yourself it just runs lynx.

    I don't have use of it very often, but I like to keep clients with support around for occasional use. I hate how http has gradually subsumed other parts of the internet, absorbing other protocols and tasks to create less-functional http-only "replacements" via web APIs and javascript hacks, so I support any attempt to keep other useful protocols active.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:59AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:59AM (#184968) Homepage
    Thanks for that. w3m's toast. The overlaps between the other three clients were much greater, I'll focus my server on supporting those in priority order lynx (so the xterm crowd is covered), firefox (so the GUI crowd is covered), gopher (hell, a gopher server not supporting "gopher" just seems wrong (however, by "server", it's literally only 10 lines of perl (it also serves simple HTML and has the output part abstracted away, the gopher specialisation of the abstraction layer's only 10 lines))).
    --
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