I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :))
I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.)
But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them.
I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software.
In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.
HN is like the california gold rush. Nobody is going to stop to think of ethical concerns and if forced to will make the appropriate posturing noises but the focus is completely different.
The irony is inspite of all the posturing about freedom and liberty seen at places like Slashdot its software folks who are currently neck deep in building surveillance infrastructure and selling out the world, of course qualified with suitable hand waving and apologism.
For the same commentators to reflect in a different context you need a more laid back venue like Slashdot. The problem with sites like Slashdot is to retain authenticity they cannot be profit driven. But there appears to be little room for that kind of thinking in the software ecosystem currently.
Let's be honest: It prevented some and created others.
We got a wealth of free tools that allowed us to create things like Slashdot without crippling license fees and we got a wealth of cheap IoT and poorly programmed devices that can DDOS and bring down GitHub.
In the 1990s the fear was that Microsoft would take over everything. Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecting data it doesn't need, and connecting to services that aren't necessary, all in what should be simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine.
The kinds of hacks that were absolutely, hilariously laughable in movies like Virus are now quite plausible. Blender went berserk and set the kitchen on fire? Who would've guessed that's actually practical now, given a sufficiently Internet of Thingsy appliance.
>Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecting data it doesn't need, and connecting to services that aren't necessary
But linux is just a kernel and devices based on it are usually easier to reverse engineer.
> simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine.
Dumb appliances are not going away, you just probably spend too much time on websites that overhype ioT garbage.
Since the licensing costs are often zero it's made products possible that were previously impossible if they needed to license QNX, Windows CE or something proprietary.
Open-source reduces friction. This is good in some areas and bad in others.
>>In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web
I am going to have to call you out.
I had a low-digit ID on /.
We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES.
I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck is up just because they "work at facebook"
I have been a whistle against NSA router backdoors since 1997...
So nobody wanted to hear it then - and the giants have surpassed me - and I concede...
but to think that this is some freaking revelation is bullshit.
We have been talking about it for literally decades. FFS FB threatened to sue me for that which I revealed even here on HN.
I think you misinterpreted my post. I wasn't claiming these were new problems. I was just claiming that now more than ever (since software is eating the world) we need communities like /. raising the alarm. I was also admitting that I underestimated the importance of these things back when I was reading /. as a high schooler in the late 90's (I, too, have a low digit ID on slashdot.)
Indeed. I remember the evolution of ECHELON in the 90s having the same impact in some circles. And then Carnivore coming out a decade later. If someone doesnt (at least) know of SHAMROCK and MINARET they really have no context.
I believe we'd still have better outcomes from a candidate who was trained in the sciences than an alternative completely ignorant about technology.
I make mistakes when I'm writing code all the time. But as a science professional, I test my code against an objective reality, characterize my bugs, then change my approach.
Politics could use a lot more of that.
And I'd also offer that in the mid-90s key escrow wasn't as bizarre an idea. We were just starting to grapple with mass physical communication transitioning to digital.
And while I hate the dragnet currently used, targeted, court-approved interception of communication content is a good to society (via an effective law enforcement branch, hence an effective court system, hence rule of law).
same story here. Low number ID, privacy advocate, etc since the 90s.
the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway."
I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the deathknell of the personal privacy movement.
Whether or not the propagation of that kind of attitude and reaction to such things is state-induced is another question, but the damage that such opinions do to such activism is definetly real. If I were an adversary to a cause, I would definetly consider those kind of tactics against the ideals of my enemy.
Yeah, it's funny. We all heard about ECHELON a long time ago, only to find out it was true and that not many people care because they don't really get what it means.
Hear, hear. I had a conversation last week where I mentioned that 20 years ago, on Usenet of all places, people were saying that due to the growing size of corporate databases, privacy had already been dead for a long time.
22 years ago: "You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like 17 computers a day. 1984? Yeah right, man. That's a typo. Orwell is here now. He's livin' large. We have no names, man. No names. We are nameless!"
Not a great movie in the traditional sense, but they hit on some important stuff. I loved when the one fed was reading from the Hacker Manifesto...
This is our world now... the world of the electron and
the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a
service already existing without paying for what could
be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call
us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call
us criminals. We exist without skin color, without
nationality, without religious bias... and you call us
criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder,
cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for
our own good, yet we're the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and
think, not what they look like. My crime is that of
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive
me for.
I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
> We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons
This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.
Oh, definitely. I'm just intrigued by how my perception of that culture has altered over time, especially as I've become more involved with the world 'behind the curtain', and the true magnitude of the industry required to produce all our modern amenities.
Long distance calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. He was writing about the public telephone system and BBSs, not the Internet. You did not dial a BBS outside of your area code (and sometimes not even within the area code because there might be toll charges).
Long distance calls were expensive because they were trying to pay off billions of dollars of basic infrastructure - the phone network that we're only now replacing nearly half a century later. Those fancy exchanges that the phreakers were exploiting? Those had to be invented, prototyped, tested, mass produced, installed, maintained... and that's not even considering tens of thousands of kilometers of telephone wires and poles, negotiating land rights, etc.
We only think of long distance communication as being next-to-free today because our information tech is already bootstrapped, computers are a billion times more powerful, and the market across which those costs are amortized are at least a million times bigger.
> The anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated.
Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a TV"-like posts are a bit grating as the top comment on every thread, but hey maybe like you say, it's really pushing towards a better future in the end.
Not owning a TV is pushing my kid to watch a lot of YouTube. I'm seriously considering buying a TV, after living for 30 years without one, just so that I can have a quality entertainment feed that doesn't bend to the new media's idea of what my kid should watch, because what that ends up being is endless advertisements ("open this egg! What's inside? A Ken doll!! Wow!!") and videos of pandas killing each other with chainsaws, then reaching into the body cavity to find their surprise egg.
I’m worried that my kid is not getting a ‘big’ view of the world, and is instead seeing it via YouTube, and anti-Trump playground conversations (which I agree with, to be sure, but it’s not a very deep or diverse understanding of the world).
When I think back to my childhood, my view of what the world, and human society (civic society?) ‘is’ came from TV news my parents happened to be watching - and occasional glances at their newspapers.
Even though I try to consume news from wide ranging sources, my kid sees none of that; it’s all an individual pursuit.
I fear there’s also a lack of ‘coherence’ in society today, and suspect that everyone watching the same news programme was something that provided it. When we think of current events, I don’t think that we’re all even aware of things outside our ‘bubbles’ - adults are sort of aware of this. What must growing up like this be like though?
I’m considering starting to watch evening network news. One problem with that is that we don’t have a TV - just iPads, laptops, and a projector for watching movies.
I’ve also subscribed to a delivery of the newspaper on Sunday (though it’s been a month and it’s never actually been successfully delivered to my home yet...)
Who’d’ve thought we’d be lamenting the decline of TV the same way our parents lamented the decline of newspapers?!
Yep. My FB feed seems to be 50% pictures of food and travel and 50% anti-Trump articles.
Even if you agree with the general sentiment, imagine a child growing up whose main media sources are the informational equivalent of a cross between crack cocaine and junk food.
I've limited it to Netflix on the big screen. I don't want the constant jumping from video to video either, pick one and then be stuck with it 'til it's done (or turn it off).
I am considering Amazon FreeTime Unlimited as well, I would recommend trying that before a TV though I would appreciate any anecdata on it.
Depending on the age of your kids, I suggest total YouTube curation. I've only got up to a nine-year-old but I'm thinking it's going to have to go up to at least 13 or 14 before I can have a serious discussion about just what is out there and how people are trying to manipulate them.
Five years ago that would have been more to avoid them from stumbling across the various types of adult content that for various reasons I would have preferred them not to view, and perhaps the HN zeitgeist would have called me a puritan (although I'm not just thinking sex and violence here, but also things like conspiracy theories and politics they are currently incapable of processing and other things [1]). Now, unfortunately, it's more about avoiding the brain hackers that you describe that know how to hack their brains into getting low-level addicted to that sort of garbage, and now perhaps the HN zeitgeist will be less offended at my policy that a poor defenseless six-year-old or nine-year-old in my case can't be expected to defend themselves against this level of sophistication.
(Because however stupid those videos may strike you as an adult, they are sophisticated, in their own way. The "cartoons that were just toy commercials" of my youth were nothing compared to what modern kids are being targeted by.)
The good news is that we're actually finding some channels where we have some common ground. For instance, they're really digging Homestar Runner now, and I've got some others that I can pick and choose from that we all like.
I increasingly pity the "digital natives" that didn't get to ease themselves into this world like I did. I'm not saying they're hopelessly lost; today's article about kids rebelling against social media is heartening. I'm just saying, I had a much easier on-ramp than they did. My first few years worth of youthful indiscretions are now utterly obliterated, because the dial-in BBS they were on is now long gone. I wasn't fucking up on Facebook or where the Internet Archive could find me. By the time I got on to the real internet, oh, I'm sure I could find things that would make me cringe now, but I'm pretty confident I wasn't blowing my foot off anymore.
[1]: Oh, and I'm pleased to say that they both seem to be on track to be voracious book readers, which I think is the strongest Step One to being able to deal with the onslaught they will eventually face. My strategy here is not just mere "denial of access", as I am well aware that doesn't work into their adulthood, and my goal is to raise good adults, not good children. I'm still feeling through what my strategy is, on what is shifting sand anyhow, but there's more to it than just "shield them forever."
"Are you always there with them when they're on YouTube,"
That one. They currently have no independent access to YouTube. (Well... technically if they knew what buttons to push where they do. I'm not using high-tech to block them. But they don't know and I'm not teaching them yet.)
Even a few years ago I might have considered this a bit much. But since "Elsa-gate" my mind on that has been changed. I know it's not just a weird conspiracy theory or something because I've even seen a couple of them pop up in my "related videos" list myself, and I don't really have a viewing profile that looks like a kids profile. (The reason why Elsa-gate is happening may be conspiracy theory related, but the brute fact that it is a thing is something I've seen first hand in my own feeds.)
The increasingly aggressive targeting behavior across the Internet is I think something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately we're going to have to raise our children to deal with it, but my considered opinion is that the best solution before the teen age years is to just cut it off entirely. It is not as if we are leaving them adrift, the only ones without tech in an increasingly technical world; my kids play Minecraft, they've seen enough of the current YouTube videos that they can discuss them at school, their school is using technology in a halfway sensible manner so the nine-year old can already type and the six-year-old is on the way. It's only certain segments of the Internet that they are better off just locked away from.
Heck, it's not even terribly hypocritical of me... I lock myself away from those very same segments for the very same reason! I use uBlock origin pretty extensively, and whenever I see one of those bullshit Taboola blocks, I'm actively annoyed that they are so tuned that I find myself wanting to click through myself. (I'll know I've gone senile when I no longer can resist it.) I'm not magically immune to this crap, and I know it, so I avoid it. I rely on my own discipline to do it. But relying on a pre-teen's discipline is probably not a good plan.
Not the OP, but there is no way that I'm aware of to whitelist (or blacklist!) specific channels on youtube. And thanks to HTTPS, I can't even intercept + modify youtube pages at the network level. Thank you, privacy folks, hope you're happy!
Alternatively, there is always kids.youtube.com which is weirdly just an app for Ios/Android. I haven't tried it, and myself have actively disabled/removed all Youtube from being accessible by the younglings. Curated media, decided by me is all they get to watch then.
A manually trusted cert overrides pinning, it's only protecting against certs signed by another of the default installed certs (otherwise Google and others simply wouldn't work in many corporate environments).
The YouTube Kids app has a really nice interface, but there's no whitelist option unfortunately. I wish there was. It does let you block videos or channels individually, but you can imagine how much good that does on a site as big as YouTube.
As you say, it's also iOS/Android only. No PC option for kids at all.
I'd look into youtube-dl. I tried all the parental controls on Youtube, Netflix, Amazon and devices only to finally realize that my idea of what's suitable doesn't have an equivalent rating.
There are so many safe for any age videos that have a bunch of kids with the worst, most cynical attitudes and no respect for authority and then wholesome shows with "intense emotion" or whatever that get rated tv-14.
So I download everything and put it on a USB hard drive hooked to a media hub.
I've got an Intel NUC I could do this with. Is there a video player app for iOS that kids could use (i.e. Interface isn't super complex), that'd play remote media?
Edit: Looked into this myself just now. VLC Streamer looks decent, as does Infuse by Firecore.
The inability to blacklist channels is a major PITA.
The Power of Block is powerful, and denial of it a major Internet dysfunction.
I do believe you can hack at Squid to intercept HTTPS and terminate if for you, as well as run filtering (Squidguard), also possibly Dansguardian. Though I've not fully researched this yet.
I occasionally hear people complaining about ads on youtube, but I have never seen a youtube ad aside from when random people try to show me a video on their computer. Do people just not use adblock+ any more?
You can't avoid the ads if they are presented as videos.
It's actually a cultural phenomenon of people making a living by buying toys and making you tube videos about them. You tube then pipes children's eyeballs to these videos.
I really just meant the "I left Facebook" posts have the same kind of feel as the old "I don't even own a TV" cliché, but yeah, I know what you mean as well, and it's a problem. I wish the YouTube Kids app let you optionally whitelist a set of channels instead of only allowing a blacklist. It's nice that you can block a video or a channel, but there are thousands of low-quality channels.
> Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little.
In slashdot, PR companies working for Microsoft were operating dozens of sock puppet accounts to post copy-paste messages extolling the company for its perfection, and praising each and every single product they were announcing. Slashdotters became aware of the problem, and what appeared to be a deep collusion between those PR companies and slashdot itself to keep pushing that propaganda while persecuting vocal critics who raised attention to the problem, and started to nurture a profound dislike for the whole affair.
Some people may not like Facebook, but HN is far from the path that slashdot was driven into.
>In slashdot, PR companies working for Microsoft were operating dozens of sock puppet accounts to post copy-paste messages extolling the company for its perfection, and praising each and every single product they were announcing
the more things change the more they stay the same.
It's not a winnable bet (at least right now), but i'd wager that groups are doing that right this very second, even here.
Techies are an important group to influence, and there are a lot of interests here. The level of discourse and discussion is fairly high here, but don't let that trick you into the naiveté that folks with vested interests here are any more honest than they are anywhere else in the world or on the net.
Some people may not like Facebook, but HN is far from the path that slashdot was driven into.
Perhaps, but I have no doubt that there are a substantial number of sock puppet accounts running loose here. I just wish I had enough free time to try and prove it using text analytics. Then again, I'm not sure it would make any difference anyway.
Yes the leaving Facebook has helped so much or the exaggerated posts of how Facebook is just too evil are a bit much. It annoyingly ends up making me want to defend and like FB more. Even though rationally I don't want to do that.
In today's world we need to call out people who do the job for these spy machines. Developers working for Google & Facebook should be ashamed of themselves. Money talks, I guess.
I don't have the vitriol towards the devs you do, but I will admit it's a bit disheartening that some of the greatest minds of our time are figuring out ways to trick your brain into clicking advertisements.
"...education sites are competing with very powerful algorithms that are designed to keep users watching video after video. If youtube starts encouraging users to do a few Khan Academy problems before watching the next video, I will consider our project, DnsLearning.org, a total success"
I work for Google. I am not going to be "ashamed of myself," but I am also not into drinking the Koolaid.
It's an oversimplification to demonize groups in this way. What is more troubling is the (non)reaction of society to the vast encroachment on privacy and rights from all sides, not the least of which are governments, telecommunication companies, and advertisers.
But you should. It's obvious you're privileged enough to change jobs once you have worked for them but you won't, because you don't want to take responsibility of knowingly playing part of the evils and histories biggest and most dangerous spying system.
You actually don't know what my job is, and you can't be sure that my presence here doesn't actually slow the growth of "histories[sic] biggest and most dangerous spying system."
you were lucky to be doing an online gig. the rest of /. audience was probably in desktop software. most of the people there were ruthlessly crushed by Microsoft business tactics.
they mostly had a very good reason to attack Microsoft.
Microsoft deliberately went out of their way to make life incredibly difficult for anyone who competed with them. To the point of corrupting standards bodies. Just look at their document format, and we are still dealing with that bullshit years later.
The steam roller is still there from quite a few companies, make something popular and Google, MS, Facebook will clone it and force it on people. No luck about it though, these companies are only interested in mass market stuff, the long tail has only gotten longer.
> The steam roller is still there from quite a few companies
It never left, it will never not exist.
Amazon is presently crushing the old-line retail industry in a manner that is little different from what any number of giants in the past did to the competition, whether Walmart or Sears before it.
In the days of Sears, you got a big catalog every so often. It had everything. You could go to the Sears store and it would probably have it in stock. I remember that's where you bought Boy Scout uniforms some 30 years ago... and the necessary basic patches.
Last time I went to Sears, I was looking for some good working outside pants. The store had an odor of perfume. Most of the clothes were for women. The size of pants I wanted was sold out with no idea of when it would be in stock.
So I went over to Target. They didn't have any good working pants. They might get some in the next shipment in a week or so. I went over to REI... and the pants were a bit too expensive for what I was after. I ended up at Duluth trading... the outlet a good half hour drive away from where I am now.
If I was living back up in the north woods where it was more than a half hour drive? I probably would have ordered online and probably from Amazon. Sure, Cabela's has same day shipping to a store, but at my previous residence, the nearest store was an hour and a half away... and shipping on one pair is %20 of the cost of the pants.
There was a sears in the town where I lived up north... but Amazon hasn't killed Sears. Sears has been committing a slow suicide for decades with poor availability and service. Other stores with an online presence still have what I would consider exorbitant shipping costs.
Don't blame Amazon for picking up the customers of the once mighty Sears mail-order empire - they didn't get their catalog online fast enough and ignored that silly Seattle company selling books for far too long.
I don't see it as Amazon being aggressive at undercutting competitors or vaporware them in the way that Microsoft was in its day (Competitor A announces a product... Microsoft announces they're going to do it too - everyone waits for Microsoft to come out with it while Competitor A's product withers on the vine). Amazon has a product and a focus, and they're doing a better job of it than other companies are.
>If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.
vs
> If you think you can beat the big three I cheer you on.
Its funny, that on HN of all places, your statement is not challenged. The major point of HN over /. was the startup/incubatorish habits of Ycombinator.
HN attitude is about getting the big payout, Slashdot was much more "fuck the man". I think it's part of a larger trend, in the Slashdot prime we had protests like the battle of Seattle against globalisation, the hardcore left from that era would be cheering trumps trade policy, but offshoring didn't work out so we collectively sold out.
That's why as a user I tend to consider the license of software I use and sometimes even the legal status of the entity behind it.
By no means my statement implies that software developed under a free software license by a nonprofit organisation will for ever keep being fit for my use case scenarios but I do believe that changes that constitute planned obsolescence wouldn't be the case.
Of course such a model has limitations, you can't go on funding rounds but still it's an interesting model.
I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that you could find at the top of pretty much any thread, even if it was about something completely unrelated. At the the height of it these people were painted as communists by Microsoft (and if they had any real visibility in the media, I'd imagine they'd have gotten the same treatment.)
But here I am today sitting at my desk at Mozilla committed to working only on open source software for the rest of my career and never writing another line of proprietary code, after having seen enough good and pure-intentioned closed source projects morph and turn bad after the pointy haired bosses, the "visionaries", and the investor class got enough control over them.
I guess those days have always been in the back of my mind. It took a lot of life lessons to really understand how important the things the /. community was always debating back then around software licenses, privacy, and IP really were. Images of "billg" as the borg were fun, but behind those gags were serious conversations that ended up shaping our world, and ensuring to one degree or another there would always be a hedge against corporate control of software.
In today's world of mass surveillance, corporate consolidation of internet infrastructure, and the call for censorship of speech on the web, a community like /. is sorely needed. Here we are on the modern day equivalent, a site owned and operated by a startup incubator. It's fortunate that a community like this exists at all in some form, but how truly times have changed.