SoylentNews

Ask Soylent: Is the Internet Broken Beyond Repair?

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

Appalbarry writes:

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?

• Re:Usenet was a lot better than the Web (Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday May 18 2015, @06:52PM

  by isostatic (365) on Monday May 18 2015, @06:52PM (#184710) Journal

  I can't tell if you're being subtly clever or pointlessly complicated by using "tee -a"...

  However as it stands that line makes the assumption you have grep, sudo and tee in your path, which is a fair assumption. Using another more esoteric command to append instead of tee would mean fewer people being able to use the line. Attempting to use a redirect

  sudo -s "echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com >> /etc/hosts"

  Has different behaviours under BSD and linux from what I can tell.

  If he was being more clever, and more complicated, he could have a grep for the line in hosts first, before echoing:

  grep "^127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com$" /etc/hosts || echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

  or similar?

  Of course that still fails on something like my own hostsfile, which contains

  127.0.0.2 traffic.outbrain.com outbrain.com images.outbrain.com widgets.outbrain.com paid.outbrain.com odb.outbrain.com www.google-analytics.com comcluster.cxense.com dailymail.co.uk www.dailymail.co.uk

  Perhaps something like

  grep "^127[^#]* www.google-analytics.com" /etc/hosts || echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

  shoud do the trick.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+1
  Interesting=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Interesting' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		3