future of ~the internet~

I'd say that the idea of devices being "locked-in" -- which is complete bullshit because we're more cloud/web app dependent now than ever -- isn't all that important in the long term. If anything, the breadth of devices available now is ridiculous. Instead of having one device that is easily modified and expanded (PC), we have computers in everything and they're all able to futz around with data and communication in different modes.

http://searchengineland.com/google-forecloses-on-content-farms-with-farmer-algorithm-update-66071

I am doing this twitter thing, who's with me

future of ~the internet~ depends on it

whats ur handle

handsofthedevil

Following u. You'd better be good so that the two times I month I actually remember to check it aren't big disappointments. Don't let me down here E3.

yah youre in the spotlight, on deck circle, got my eyes on you

PRESSURE

dag yo

basically i dont see how the history of the internet up till now which has been 'liberating content' switches to 'locking down content' is all - at least present a plausible narrative where users would be cool w/giving up their freedom/free stuff

app stores are cool, the OS provider is the ultimate middleman/arbiter of content, generally speaking people seem more than happy to hand over the keys? This is the trend I see.

I like your point about liberation vs control. I think both have been pretty strong drivers for internet activity - if there wasn't some temporarily satisfying illusion or promise of control then the degree of investment we have today probably wouldn't have happened. On second thought compared to my first argument above, there are pretty strong points to be made for the pendulum trending in either direction at the moment - apps/hulu on the one hand, wikileaks/anonymous on the other.

I personally have worries about increasing segregation between phone ppl and freebsd ppl but frankly that is the kind of concern only I have, and the truth is those two demographics are closer to one another in how they use computers today than they ever have been.

Maybe if people start making more apps that make it easier to set up and manage your own cloudiddy content/service that's not necessarily tied to somebody else's branded packaging and distribution scheme (not that there aren't a few already, I guess) I'll be pretty convinced. Maybe I'll see if I can put a tumblr authorin' app on grandma's ipad and fool around with it.

sort of an update: all the twitter/tumblr apps for iOS devices seem just designed for one-way blathering and seemed really poorly suited for content liberation theology

but then again letting even more of everyone have a fairly cheap broadcasting platform is still a step closer to where we think we ought to be, even if that broadcasting platform does ostensibly belong to a device vendor, an app developer, an ISP/phone service and some semi-describable funny-named content distribution service before it belongs to you

http://theinternetwishlist.com/

This is a collection of ideas for apps and websites people are wishing for.

Think of it like a suggestion box for the future of technology.

If you’d like to contribute, simply post an idea on Twitter and include #theiwl in your tweet.

standalone apps will not be the future:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/apps_are_not_the_future/

If you’d like to contribute, simply post an idea on Twitter and include #theiwl in your tweet.

Somehow I doubt this is the future of the Internet: http://moodfish.com/

That Reg piece is dreck. bojennet otm in comments.

I started an album based on the concept of markers to deter inadvertent human intrusion, I keep meaning to get back to that...

http://downlode.org/Etext/WIPP/

whoops

In the future, the internet's massively interactive computing and information sharing capacity will enable humans to both form and expose conspiracies with breathtaking speed.

http://www.slate.com/id/2289342/

So in another vein let me share my automobile analogy a bit

we're like 30 years in to the history of the personal computer - rounding up, but not really, 20 years in to the Internet

now 30 years in to cars, you still have all the major manufacturers within 50 miles of one another. More importantly, they only really have to compete with one another, and nobody gives a fuck about safety

it wasn't until the late 50s or so (~40 years of mass automotive growth and adoption), with overseas competitors like Volvo leading the way, that anybody cared about safety features, and even then it took leverage from insurance companies to get American manufacturers to take it seriously

Massive adoption of seatbelt laws and legislative requirements for things like airbags are really recent developments, overall; it's relatively terrifying to think about how many years people spent behind the wheel of what we would now consider deathtraps, although it's important to consider that traffic wasn't nearly as bad for most of those years (less humans around, and certainly a lot fewer cars on the road)

Computers and the Internet ostensibly should adapt to the circumstances at a much faster rate, given the speed of adoption and the population of users, but:

- seriously, there's like four companies driving the bus: apple, adobe, google and microsoft, MAYBE two of which have half-decent patching programs, summed together, so I guess that's like saying if one of them was rock solid, or if they were all .25 of the way there (the latter seems accurate)

- nobody is getting killed or even filing claims for losses against these companies, so there's no reason for insurance brokers to bother stepping in to prove a point

On the other hand, car accidents happen because of driver errors and random chance/malfunction; Internet shit happens because of those same kinds of things PLUS common, outright malfeasance. Should I feel better because we're right in line with the auto industry's slow crawl towards safer engineering, or worse, because while we're not actually killing people outright, we're still making everything more difficult and risky than it has to be?

Internet of the future looks like your iphone, not because apps will kill the web, but because the web is a hellhole. Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best; jailbreakers are hot rodding jackasses asking for it on the drag strip (much props though)

Apps and App Stores are service whitelisting at nearly its best

This is a really interesting analogy, I like it.

IMO the dark spots of the internet are the large, large data systems powered by software that's almost completely run on intranets and only pops up as data sources for web tie-ins and the occasional consumer application. I mean, commercial entities like IBM and SAP are still ungodly huge, make software and sell services, and they're virtually invisible unless you're a large business. Microsoft lives in this realm too, but their products aren't really that different in that area.

^ the dark spots on the internet are the info aggregators who buy and trade your personal info and browsing habits. they may be storing that info in IBM or SAP systems (more like oracle or w/e) but that's neither here nor there.

True, true. Maybe I mean grey? There's still a hell of a lot of info in the backwaters, and defining "the internet" at the consumer, individual level and the companies they work with directly is a little short-sighted.

I mean, what about your health insurance company? They're (semi-)legitimate in being a repository of personal info, but if someone breaks in or if they use it wrong, they have the possibility of being worse than the commercial aggregators.

I guess I look at it like the info your insurance company has is as secure as it's ever been, and industries like those have a long history of regulation and oversight. however there's still a wild west out there when it comes to tracking consumer info + behavior. I have been in meetings where companies have pitched matching consumer purchases via credit card info across a variety of websites to figure out their aggregated purchase profile. it's still not clear what the total fallout is going to be from the epsilon data breach.

That sort of thing makes me cringe because it's more about your identity as a person, as far as what you consume can provide, and can result in some really insidious marketing and being creepy. Then again, you can always cancel credit cards, right?

"as secure as its ever been" is kind of slippery when you consider no one was ever really that secure, and now all their records are in modern computers that aren't supposed to be internet connected but may be. Dumping databases has never been more lucrative.

I'm just thinking of people I've talked to/worked with who were at places like Progressive and Sprint and the ridiculous security holes they said existed around ten years ago. People are generally better now, but...

Then again, when I started college, posting your test score next to your SSN (a "secret identifier" that wasn't your name) on a board outside the lecture hall was normal, and *that* wasn't much more than a decade ago.

one of the things that comes up a lot in certain conversations I have with ppl is that the cloud is actually going to be a fantastic thing for security, because now you have to pay attention to enforcing your controls instead of letting it ride because the server lives in a building you rent. The false sense of safety from physical (or "kinetic") aspects of all these logical services is finally going to go away, meaning that CIO/CISO types may have to finally own up to the fact that so much of this bullshit has been a paper tiger slash consulting racket for the last decade.

Outsource everything you do, then tell me exactly what's different about your security profile other than you maybe don't know the first name of one of the sysadmins because you see him on the elevator a lot. Control and state assertions are only more important in cloud country if you were an idiot in the first place and thought your inventory stickers on the servers were helping you avoid some kind of risk.

I mostly agree, but people will still be dumb.

please, please i urge you, do NOT WATCH THIS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x96KP1wfbpY

ok

you've seen it already, hush.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html

Bitcoin P2P Currency: The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen

Of course, since bitcoin transactions are untraceable, you would have zero recourse if you sent a dozen bitcoins to someone for a couple of tabs of LSD. Just like you might lose your $10 if you gave it to a kid in the school yard for a dime bag and he never came back.

5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*

ok I watched that vid and now I believe in 5/21

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.

I feel it when I'm wading through a stack of emails, keeping up with an endless Twitter feed, accepting Facebook "friends" from a past I prefer not to remember, or making myself available on the Web to readers to whom I should feel grateful — but instead feel obligated. And it's not a matter of what any of these folks might want me to do, but when. They want it now.

This is not a bias of the Internet itself, but of the way it has changed from an opt-in activity to an "always on" condition of my life.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/rushkoff.html

Man needs to discover the concept: "no, thanks".

can you expand on that, aimless

The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.

Sounds just like talking to people face to face to me.

http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

sorta touches 12 different subjects, but what do we think of dis guy?

he doesn't seem to understand marx particularly well but he does have some interesting things to say here and there

like I'd never thought about this:

But Google's thing is not advertising because it's not a romanticizing operation. It doesn't involve expression. It's a link. It's just a little tiny minimalist link, and basically what they're selling is not advertising, they're not selling romance, they're not selling communication, what they're doing is selling access. What they're doing is they're saying, "You give us money, we give you access to these people, and then what you do with them is up to you."

love lanier, have the new book sitting uncracked on my couch atm

already had this open in another tab lol but haven't read it yet

we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did.

But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less.

not really sure what 'monetizing more and more' vs 'less and less' means but i'm interested in this idea that thinking all we deserve is 'reputational currency' there's a surplus value thing happening

nice profile of dude in the nyer last month btw

The answer, as I see it anyway, and the path to Jaron's "third way," is new media literacy. People need to know how to work with this stuff. We have to teach programming in our schools – not just because Chinese hackers are going to take down Citibank, but because this is the landscape on which we are spending an increasing amount of our lives. It is the territory on which – and through which – we are going to create and exchange a good portion of the value humans have yet to create for one another.

<3 rushkoff <3

he uses 'hearts and minds' a few times without getting specific, which is a shame

but I like the idea that we can save the middle class by paying people to use facebook