Category: Internet & Computing

‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It – NYTimes.com

“I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Evan Williams says. “I was wrong about that.”

The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.

Mr. Williams’s mistake was expecting the internet to resemble the person he saw in the mirror: serious, high-minded. … It was just another Utopian dream, Mr. Williams says. “The problem is that not everyone is going to be cool, because humans are humans,” he says. “There’s a lock on our office door and our homes at night. The internet was started without the expectation that we’d have to do that online.”

“I think we will fix these things,” Mr. Williams says. Just don’t hold your breath. The work has barely begun, he says. “Twenty years isn’t very long to change how society works.”

Source: ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It – NYTimes.com, by @DavidStreitfeld

Internet freedom may not be the safest future: Instead, nations could consider “the splinternet” to protect their digital borders — Quartz

The solution to a safer internet—and world—might be more digital borders, not less.

The internet freedom agenda presumed the benefits of the free flow of information only cut one way: in favor of open societies, values, and ideals. But we’re now seeing that its destabilizing effects cut both ways. And that doesn’t bode well for the borderless internet we enjoy today.

The open internet provides a vast canvas for states to undertake information warfare, manipulate each other’s citizens, and project their interests past national borders

China’s internet policy may be a forerunner of a federated, loosely connected set of national internets called “the splinternet.” This future potential state of affairs would be characterized by digital borders that are meant to protect both real and cognitive sovereignty while keeping out unwanted foreign competition or influence.

This system would not likely appear suddenly or dramatically: It would emerge over decades as a sea change of small technical and legal changes slowly add up.

the underlying values of the internet freedom agenda are still the right ones: freedom of expression, freedom of exchange, and a more open world. Will we still cherish these values, even as we learn of new threats to sovereignty and security?

Source: Internet freedom may not be the safest future: Instead, nations could consider “the splinternet” to protect their digital borders — Quartz

The Internet Is Mostly Bots – The Atlantic

the latest survey, which is based on an analysis of nearly 17 billion website visits from across 100,000 domains, shows bots are back on top. Not only that, but harmful bots have the edge over helper bots, which were responsible for 29 percent and 23 percent of all web traffic, respectively.

More than 94 percent of the 100,000 domains included in the report experienced at least one bot attack over the 90-day period in Imperva’s study.

Facebook’s feed fetcher, by itself, accounted for 4.4 percent of all website traffic, according to the report

Source: The Internet Is Mostly Bots – The Atlantic

Google AMP is Not a Good Thing

We’re talking about an all-powerful ad company that’s looking to explicitly break the peer-to-peer model between creator and consumer, for the singular purpose of increasing profits.

Will it make pages load faster? Sure. But we can fix that in lots of ways over time. You don’t break the peer-to-peer model of the internet because it’s annoying and in need of optimization.

Source: Google AMP is Not a Good Thing by Daniel Miessler

Berners-Lee: WWW is spy net • The Register

Source: Berners-Lee: WWW is spy net • The Register

Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned that the internet has become the “world’s largest surveillance network.”

“The problem is the dominance of one search engine, one social network, one Twitter for micro-blogging. We don’t have a technology problem; we have a social problem.”
– Sir Tim Berners-Lee