Back in 2015, I traveled to the US and wanted to buy a Macbook Pro at the Apple Store. The configuration I wanted wasn’t available in Apple Stores, and I couldn’t buy it online because at that point there was some limitation in the online store like they only took US credit cards, or something.
At the Apple Store, the employees suggestion (a more senior one, who was consulted) was to buy a gift card for the computer’s cost (~$1500) and pay at the online store with that. I didn’t do it because buying “virtual stuff” for that amount seemed crazy (this was a huge amount of money for me, at the time).
I don’t think I’ll live long enough to trust AI coding assistants with something like schema validation, just to name one thing I use dependencies for.
For over one decade now, maybe two, seemingly every big (or mid?) budget movie Hollywood has produced is based on existing IP: a comic book, novel, previous movie, TV show, or even non fiction article. I’ve been surprised many times by movies which seem original but are actually based on a French comic, or some other semi-obscure (internationally) source.
That tells me that ideas aren’t free. There’s a value to a fully cooked, ready to wear, tried and tested ideas.
As a second point, many good Hollywood pitches remain in development hell, unable to get a satisfying script, or a “second act that works”.
I administer a PHP website with very little legit traffic per month, but a few thousand pages probably. The bot traffic is crazy. We're not using Cloudflare for that site, but we're using a local static-page cache... and without it, the site simply can't function.
You don't need to be the target of a dDoS to use a CDN.
Also, using CDNs (Fastly via Github pages, not Cloudflare, in this case) once allowed us to be featured in a very large newspaper without worries, extra expenses, or extra work.
Simply put, in order for moving off of Cloudflare (or similar) to be practical, bot and scraper traffic is going to have to be reigned in heavily.
Getting bots under control would be better for the health of the web anyway, but the chances of that happening are practically zero. Even if the AI bubble collapses entirely, there's still going to be loads of ill-behaved scrapers and exploit sniffers roaming about.
I don't know if it's possible to fix this issue, short of the entire world enacting strict regulations mandating that scrapers and bots be well-behaved, which is never going to happen and even if it did could end up being just as or more destructive than rogue bots.
I self hosted on one of the company’s servers back in the late 90s. Hard drive crashes (and a hack once, through an Apache bug) had our services (http, pop, smtp, nfs, smb, etc ) down for at least 2-3 days (full reinstall, reconfiguration, etc).
Then, with regular VPSs I also had systems down for 1-2 days. Just last week the company that hosts NextCloud for us was down the whole weekend (from Friday evening) and we couldn’t get their attention until Monday.
So far these huge outages that last 2-5 hours are still lower impact for me, and require me to take less action.
It’s possible to lose one’s irises. Most identical twins have almost identical DNA. Then there’s the “right to be forgotten”, people on witness protection, refugees and immigrants who enter the system as adults, etc. I don’t think there’s an easy technical solution.
Blind twins* will need to carry an alternative. /s
Of course the technical solution isn’t easy, (or necessarily all good),
but that doesn’t make it any less likely, or intriguing to discuss the roadmap.
(You combine the scanned data together from both of those scans, regardless of value, as your recovery mechanism, by the way - accounting for abnormal anatomy in a defined, reproducible way is a challenge, not a barrier)
Seconded. I remember a decade ago it was really easy to find legitimate ones just by googling. Last week I literally spent 20 minutes trying to find one that didn’t use a redirect through some sketchy site. It would have taken me less time than that to install a CLI tool, vibe code it, or self-host some OSS package, but I foolishly thought it couldn’t possibly take more than 60 [additional] seconds to find one, which I kept reassuring myself again each minute of my frustrated search.
a dear friend generated a QR code for his show, used the code on flyers that he printed, made sure that the code worked, and a ~week later discovered that the qr code was now showing an ad and requesting payment to not do that
I had rarely seen him that angry - but I totally, totally got it... qr code freemium gating is such a pettily predatory business "model".
It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.
The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.
What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
There was the WELL, CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, all of which predated the web, and which were all commercial and proprietary services
I was on prodigy and AOL, and then the web
This thread actually shows the curse of inventing things and giving them away: some of the people who benefit from the idea think it is obvious, and some also think that you obviously should have given it away
It’s odd that if you create user-hostile products like Microsoft and Apple, you’re somehow more respected by (some) users
yes and back then remember there were a battle about how to keep the web open, so the Internet doesn't become an AOL walled garden. Now who really knows AOL.
Now days is about META/GOOGLE apps vs web standard. Just seems like the empire always wants to strike back. We techs better be on watch.
Yeah exactly, there WAS a battle back then, and it WAS won for a while
But that doesn't mean it's won forever -- the people of the NEXT generation still have to put in effort
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This thread shows the ingratitude: You didn't fix our problems for all time, in a rapidly changing world! The thing you invented and gave away only fixed it for a decade or so
Comment below:
> The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything
Memories are short; history is written and framed by interested parties
For me it is funny to remember it differently from you because I used the www much before AOL.
When I tried AOL I felt it was so closed and limited.
I understood the idea but the WWW was at the same time less professional but also free.
I was maybe around 12y or 13y when I tried AOL and by them I was using the www for maybe 3y already.
My family had zero technology knowledge and I only came to know about BBS and other stuff after was an adult and those things were not relevant or dead by then
I’ve heard it blamed for stunting France’s later adoption of the internet, because people were able to do many useful things on it and didn’t have as compelling a reason to get online to the internet as they did in other countries with no similar system.
It was decidedly non-free. The code was owned by Autodesk, and the protocol was supposed to include micro-transactions applied to all content access so that authors would always get paid.
There were quite a few, I think. It depends who you ask as to which was the leading one.
There was also Microcosm, HyperG and others. The Web was notable amongst them in avoiding money and licensing sort of stuff altogether (e.g. Xanadu made a point about micropayments for lots of content, and I think many of the others fell to the temptation of catering to cash in some way or other).
Anything with micro transactions is dead on arrival without massive disintermediation, or a revolution in the way we handle the incestuous relationship between finance, crime, and law enforcement.
You can have a world where all people are capable of trivially transacting, without having anyone else say no, and consequently, financial crime is trivial, and a nigh-intractable problem to handle. Or you have the ability to enforce sanctions, anti-money laundering, and taxation laws, financial crime is at least tractable with sufficient will, and you have the perfect abusable engine of tyranny through which people can be completed ousted from society through financial lockout or micromanagement. Almost inevitably, you will not be the one with your hand on that button.
But don't you think that today's internet already provides lockout and micromanagement without ever needing the microtransaction part?
This is actually all the talks around censorship on various platforms and random ejection from various marketplace/social system without much recourse for some (can go from being censored on any given social network, to being prevented to publish on app stores, to having your google account fully taken away).
Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant? What people come to do on the internet is more in relation with other people than anything else. Tech doesn't matter that much; everything ends up being built around social networks/issues.
And in the end, the internet is just a layer built on top of a physical system that is very much dependent on a given social structure/hierarchy. If that social structure wants you out, it won't make much of a difference how your internet software works.
I kind of get what you are saying, but I fail to see how a microtransaction internet would be any more tyrannical than the "real world".
> Sure, you might still be able to access the internet, but is that relevant?
I think that's the core point being made: if transaction are built into the infrastructure, then all the financial controls inevitably get built into the infrastructure such that you can't access the network any more.
I feel like your response rests on the assumption that Facebook/Google/<Provider that can choose to lock you out> _are_ the internet. But the defining point of the Web that succeeded for many was the long tail part of it, people and provider who aren't motivated to reject people for monetary related reasons.
As long as we're on the Web without transactions, there'll always be somewhere/someone you can go and interact with.
If transactions and subsequent monetary policy were implemented in the low level protocol, then you could be locked out in a way which meant you can't reach/find the people who would still want to interact with you.
One allows subcultures and counter-cultures to grow if they want, the other doesn't.
I think microtransaction methods still exist using cryptocurrencies. They were going to be difficult without crypto anyway, because of the hurdles that the stubborn national authorities put up in the way of an international payment system.
I definitely would, if payments in 10s of cents was possible.
But we only get full on subscription that are at least few euros per month and those are annoying to manage and it's quite complicated to evaluate the value beforehand (unlike say a traditional magazine that you can buy as a single issue to test before subbing).
And when you find one-time payments, they are usually high price (around 3€ minimum seems to be the usual) and worse than that, you rarely can own the stuff. You purchase "access" with a license and no way to really save the thing as your own, making the whole thing a bit of a joke, and piracy the only truly sane solution.
A seamless ubiquitous interface and accounting system for penny sized transactions hasn't been introduced anywhere I am aware of.
It would need to be incredibly convenient, easy, reliable, secure, private. With flexible permissioning (subscription list, ok to pay list, etc.) so people were not hammered by "Do you want to pay?" popups all the live long day.
Gopher was the early front-runner for a hypertext system. However it was proprietary (UMN owned if, IIRC) which meant you needed a license to write a client or server that used the protocol. HTTP came along and ate its lunch.
According to Wikipedia, UMN only announced that they would charge for their implementation of Gopher. They said nothing about the protocol and its competing implementations. But this ambiguity made people a bit apprehensive and this proved costly for Gopher at a time when WWW was actively competing with them. TBL and CERN capitalized on this by unamiguously opening the standard, while the Mosaic browser became competitive with Gopher implementations.
I think it's not meant in contrast with proprietary standards, but (if you look at the book blurb) in contrast with people like Gates and Jobs. Bill Gates invented some things but is mostly known for taking his inventions, and those of others, to great commercial success. Steve Jobs never invented anything but was extremely successful at packaging existing tech into usable products people would buy.
Tim Berners-Lee on the other hand never attempted to turn the WWW into a product to sell, or make a browser company, or anything of the sort.
I also thought of it through the lens of comparing him to Marc Andreessen, who played a huge role in the open internet with Mosaic and Netscape and now sits at the far, far other end of the spectrum with his VC investments and government involvement. It's plausible that Berners-Lee could have followed a similar trajectory and notable that he has not.
Again, all of this comes from Ted Nelson. He also had philosophical antecedents, but in terms of software it was his dream of Xanadu that was the first hypertext system.
However, it’s worth pointing out that every attempt at Xanadu (under the name Xanadu) thus far has also turned out to be a fractional implementation of Nelson’s dream.
Ward Christensen always said that Xmodem was popular specifically because he didn't charge for it. (He worked at IBM, and didn't want to risk his job, so it had to be non-commercial)
I think the trend is likely to repeat on any system you care to examine.
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