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Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks

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On 2014-02-11, Vince Mulhollon <vincemulhollon@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday, February 8, 2014 5:31:14 PM UTC-6, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
>> This is an excellent point.  I think that if we can get people to come 
>> (back?) to Usenet they will discover the large variety of groups that 
>> are still active.
>
> On the other hand I left rec.crafts.metalworking in the late 90s because it was under perpetual political rant spamflood attacks that seemed unfilterable, at last to non-computer-types who had something of value to say, because they couldn't figure out how to filter the spam (heck I could barely figure it out myself, it was a vicious attack), they left, so there was nothing to read but the eternal infinite spamflood attacks, which I'm told are still going on to this day.
>
> Another group I had to leave was alt.comp.hardware.homebuilt around 1993 or so.  It was intended as a place for people like me to talk about mark-8s (well, I don't remember if the -8 existed then, but at least in spirit...) and homemade relay based ALU designs and homemade DTL NAND gates and basically relive the 70s at least WRT home computing, at least as we experienced it as kids.  Instead it was painfully crossposted about 50 times a day with idiotic questions about the dumbest contemporary PC hardware configuration problems.  "I can't figure out the well labeled I/O jumpers on my soundblaster, could someone on the internet read the manual for me, and do the thinking for me too?"  It was a flood of junk, had to leave.  The worst part is you couldn't zap everything crossposted because 1) You'd just get a different brand of idiot that asked the same dumb question without crossposting 2) Actual on topic crossposting would get zapped so people crossposting into the z80 group talking about their homemade home designed SBC would get zapped.  It was awful.
>
> One flood was intentional and malicious and the other was just eternal September non-malicious idiocy but in both cases nothing could be done about it other than leave.

> I'm not sure what, if anything, has changed, that would save "us" in 2014.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here is my optimistic theory-

What has changed is the Snowden revelations.  I'm not suggesting usenet is
going to become truly a viable thing for us this month, or this year.  But
this decade, I have hopes.

On the Snowden front, consider the history of mozilla and advertisers.  The
reason that advertising is so pervasive, is not because the software
technology to block and filter it doesn't exist, or is hard.  Clearly
adblock and noscript are there.  But the problem was that mozilla caved
to the pressure from advertisers in the beginning.  I.e. by not ingesting
adblock and noscript (perhaps default off even).  This was a clear case where
open source failed.  Those were clearly useful features that users wanted,
that there was no technical reason not to merge into the open source project.
The only reason they didn't get merged years ago (again, perhaps default off,
but available via prefs for users to enable without having to seperately
install some add-on)- was because of megacorp advertising pressure.

With the advent of the Snowden revelations, for instance the recent one
about the NSA piggybacking on advertising cookies and so forth, there has
been a fundamental shift in the landscape.  No more can the kind of sell-out
arguments that mozilla gave hold sway with the public.  No more can they
claim that the importance of placating the advertising community outweighs
the technical and user-desired privacy benefits of merging in features like
adblock and noscript.  (and if I'm still wrong about that today, I think
within 10 years, people will come around to that wisdom)

The next fundamental thing that has changed is the coming IPv6 future where
everyone can run servers at their home.  Now, setting asside my seemingly
going-down-in-flames net neutrality crusade against GoogleFiber, I still
believe that like it or not, 20 years from now all users on the internet will
have the ability to run servers at their residence, publicly addressable via
IPv6.  This is what will allow more distributed communication systems like
nntp and diaspora to flourish.  Clearly without the bandwidth, or the ability
to run a server, setting up a truly distributed system like nntp without
gatekeepers just wasn't possible.  But as storage capacity becomes much 
cheaper, it becomes much more viable for a landscape where everyone has their
own usenet spools with at least the list of groups they are subscribed to.
Again, yes, I'm clearly losing my 'right to serve' fight in the near term.
But I think it is inevitable that in the long term everyone will have personal
servers, if not embedded in their heads or earrings, then at least in their
cell-phones or wall-warts.

Again, it may take 20 or 100 years of polishing, but I think we will get 
there.  We may have to violently overthrow OCP (sorry, just watched
1987-robocop[1][2]), but we will get there.

And as I mentioned in a previous post, the solution to spam and other
information warfare is doable with social networking and webs of trust.  
I.e. you maintain killfiles and friends lists/circles, and these get
automatically propogated to result in the sorts of personalized datastreams
that we see on FB and G+ (I vaguely recall that G+ lifted their ideas from
diaspora after the diaspora lead-dev committed suicide) The key is to just
remember that it is totally doable with the tech we already have, and the
tech we are clearly going to have 20 years from now.

People have now had their eyes opened to what the NSA was doing.  I.e. taking
full advantage via PRISM of the ease of MITM-ing Skype and GoogleHangouts.
People will figure out that an open source solution that involves video calls
that are encrypted, and IPv6 direct between them and their friends are a
fundamentally better thing than going through a corporation like Microsoft or
Google, which are trivially easy for the NSA to infiltrate.

$0.02...

-dmc

[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57617686-76/robocop-not-so-sci-fi-anymore/
[2] http://mega.co.nz/#!G1YQUDJY!d01k313ZXF3l5eT7xfchiEVPH_VVBgkTlo_IdvUXbkA
(please only visit [2] for educational fair use purposes only)

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Slashdot Beta Sucks John Brownalt <deconfliction@filteredperception.org> - 2014-02-07 10:45 +0000
  Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks 2phar <none@example.com> - 2014-02-07 11:45 -0500
    Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks "Dirk T. Verbeek" <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> - 2014-02-07 18:01 +0000
      Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-07 19:35 +0000
        Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 15:02 -0800
          Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks 2phar <none@example.com> - 2014-02-07 18:18 -0500
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-08 00:12 +0000
              Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 16:36 -0800
                Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Kees Nuyt <k.nuyt@nospam.demon.nl> - 2014-02-18 22:56 +0100
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 16:33 -0800
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Lance Orner <lance@orner.invalid.net> - 2014-02-09 03:23 +0000
  Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks CoolHand <coolhnd28@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 21:29 -0500
    Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks TrueSatan <true_satan@fastmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-08 02:48 +0000
      Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks CoolHand <coolhnd28@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 21:54 -0500
        Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks TrueSatan <true_satan@fastmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-08 04:09 +0000
        Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 22:39 -0800
      Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks "Dirk T. Verbeek" <dverbeek@xs4all.nl> - 2014-02-08 12:09 +0000
        Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks brendan.halpin@ul.ie (Brendan Halpin) - 2014-02-19 23:24 +0000
  Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks 2phar <none@example.com> - 2014-02-07 23:15 -0500
    Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-07 22:41 -0800
      Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-02-08 20:03 +0000
        Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks 2phar <none@example.com> - 2014-02-08 15:16 -0500
          Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-08 15:31 -0800
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks shvelven <shvelven@gmail.com> - 2014-02-09 02:30 -0500
              Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks TrueSatan <true_satan@fastmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-09 10:53 +0000
              Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks TrueSatan <true_satan@fastmail.co.uk> - 2014-02-09 10:54 +0000
                Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-09 15:35 +0000
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Vince Mulhollon <vincemulhollon@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 13:32 -0800
              Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks John Brownalt <deconfliction@filteredperception.org> - 2014-02-12 00:06 +0000
              Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks vehka <heikki.wilenius@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 17:55 -0800
                Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks "tdk" <forum.tdk@squte.com> - 2014-02-12 08:47 +0847
                Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-26 00:34 -0500
            Re: Slashdot Beta Sucks Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> - 2014-02-25 23:43 -0500
  Re: Slashdot Beta -> Technical reasons? "q.kontinuum" <achsis_of_elvis@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-11 09:05 +0000
    Re: Slashdot Beta -> Technical reasons? John Brownalt <deconfliction@filteredperception.org> - 2014-02-11 12:11 +0000
      Re: Slashdot Beta -> Technical reasons? "q.kontinuum" <achsis_of_elvis@yahoo.com> - 2014-02-11 13:26 +0000
      Re: Slashdot Beta -> Technical reasons? Lance Orner <lance@orner.invalid.net> - 2014-02-12 03:38 +0000
    Re: Slashdot Beta -> Technical reasons? Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> - 2014-02-11 09:58 -0500

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