Life on The Net in 2004 554
NewtonsLaw writes "In recent years the Net has changed very quickly from a great place for geeks and nerds into a highly commercialized marketplace in which everyone is making a grab for your wallet. If it's not wave after wave of spam in your mailbox, it's excessively intrusive ad banners and popups, or demands by websites that you pay a subscription for access.
The DMCA and other pending legislation could soon mean that companies such as Microsoft and the recording labels will cement their total ownership of your online rights -- leaving you with nothing but a hefty bill to pay whenever you want to use their software or services.
Today's Aardvark Daily carries an interesting editorial that speculates on just what life could be like in the very near future. Sobering -- but perhaps not too far from reality?"
and we will allow this to happen.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I see one of four things happening (Score:4, Interesting)
2) The internet turns into tv + shopping. Lots of ads you can't get past
3) The internet gets so bad, that the geeks create decentralised, efficient, free-floating network partially on top of the existing network, partially outside of it, and it all begins again
4) It goes on exactly like it is now. the (x)AAs of the world keep trying to hold us down, the advertisers keep trying to make us look, MS keeps trying to make us pay (again), and we keep trying to stay one step ahead of them all. This is IMHO the most likely situation.
Re:Let 'em charge per use (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, there are already a lot of people buying their automobiles by the mile. It's the most expensive way to go, but they are seduced by the low "down" and lease payments that are a bit smaller than they would pay if they purchased instead of leasing.
Microsoft is obviously considering this model for software.
DRM exists now (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe DRM is closer than you think.
-
chmod +a rwx
Re:It's called 'capitalism' (Score:2, Interesting)
Indeed, more have been killed by authoritarian anticapitalists than have been killed by any amount of capitalist inequality.
In fact, it was just your sort of attitude about capitalists that allowed for that kind of brutality in the first place. Its easy to kill people if you think there're evil.
Consider the language of the left about capitalists versus "the people." By implication, the capitalists aren't people. Atrocities against non-people become easy.
"It is important, my countrymen, to shout this to the world again and again, for they are brazen democratic liars who assert that the so-called Authoritarian States are out to conquer the world, while in fact, the conquerors of the world are our old enemies
"However, every proposal, coming as it did from me, was sufficient to cause excitement among a certain Jewish-international-capitalist clique, just as it used to happen formerly in Germany when every reasonable proposal was rejected only because it was made by National Socialists."
"But the ruthlessness of the capitalist plutocrats in these countries always broke through in a short time, fostered by emigrants who presented a picture of the German situation which was naturally quite mad, but was believed because it seemed agreeable and then, of course, it was propagated by Jewish hatred. This collection of capitalist interests on the one hand, Jewish instincts of hatred and the emigrants' lust for revenge, succeeded in increasingly beclouding the world, enveloping it in phrases, and in inciting it against the present German Reich, just as against the Reich which preceded us. At that time they opposed the Germany of the Kaiser, this time they opposed National-Socialist Germany." -- Adolf Hitler
Welcome to the world of anti-capitalism.
Yes, it has even led to anti-semitism and Nazi Germany. For the Germans, the Jews represented the capitalists. In 1930, over half of all companies and firms in Germany were owned by Jews, who made up less than 2% of the population. For Germans, Jew meant capitalist.
This was even expressed in children's books like
[calvin.edu]
Money is the God of the Jews
"This story comes from Der Giftpilz, an anti-Semitic children's book published by Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer. He was executed as a war criminal in 1946. "
This illustrates the "micropayment" fallacy nicely (Score:4, Interesting)
When people set their mandatory micropayment prices, they'll do it to maximize profit. The prices will find and sit at the awareness threshold of users, so you'll look up and see you've spent $5 over the course of a few minutes without really noticing it. People will respond to this by thinking of internet use as an expensive activity, and keeping it to a minimum. The reduced demand will drive prices up higher.
That's a natural consequence of each entity setting the prices of what their selling. Information doesn't compete on price very well. I forget who said it... "Information wants to be free, because it's so easy to distribute, yet information wants to be expensive, because it's so useful." When the people owning the information set the price, they can make it expensive, because it takes a fairly high price before it's better than not having the information.
However, voluntary micropayments don't have this tendency, being set by the users. Ultimately, I think voluntary payments will win out in any area with a sufficiently clued-in audience to make it work. The competitive advantages of free information are obviously huge, so wherever they can make enough profit to develop a comparable product to the restricted information, they'll win. Also, voluntary micropayments are much simpler and cheaper to implement.
I've written a bit [buskpay.com] on the kind of systems that would be needed (and can fairly easily be developed) to replace intellectual property restrictions, and I've done some work developing parts of them (see my sig).
get scared, get mad, get prepared (Score:2, Interesting)
A free economy does not suppose a free people. Even an economy in which one thinks he is free may not be free. A government is supposed to serve it's people and corporations are supposed to serve their customers.
Please indulge my imagination for a moment. Pretend that corporations have been merging for long enough that only two remain, the civil service provider and the corporate service provider. *eerie music* The Final Merger. Now turn both concepts into one and you have Service Commerce. You are provided everything. The opportunity to spend money, the opportunity to have your garbage collected. The opportunity to get higher education so you can be an engineer or an art major.
What you are not provided is the ability to choose who provides you these services. You don't get to choose the popups you see, they just popup. You don't have the option to get free information, you must subscribe. Since the advent of Service Commerce the head CEO's and execs now own roughly 80% of the world's money while the rest of us all get paid the same regardless of duties.
Then consider that instead of being fired, bad workers are just put into the correctional work force where they no longer even choose whether they will watch a particular commercial or speak a certain way. Those on the outside may still opt out but are none the less hurded through the Service Commerce machine.
My point is that all the common intrusive examples - spam, popups, subscriptions - posed by this article are no more the root problem of this orwellian prophesy than run down housing tenaments and squalid living conditions are the root problem of inner city violence. They merely reflect the state of the organization.
So what can we do? Simple, we can know. We can get educated. We can know our rights. We can vote not because it's just one vote but because we are allowed to. We can realize that we are consumers and we DO vote EVERY DAY. For all those who have already expressed their vote for linux and the Open Source community, wonderful, you've already started to make a difference and you know it and you are proud.
If you use linux for any of the same reasons as I do I can bet you are a perfectionist of sorts, perhaps a rebel, iconoclastic even and desire complete and full knowlege and control of your computer. Now realize that you have the same power to control your government, the people that put arsenic in your drinking water, BHG in your food and carbon monoxide in your air. Go vote at the next school board election, go rant at the next city buget proposal, write your congress people, write an editorial, join a peace rally, join a hate rally. Let your own voice be not heard, but affective (yes affective, not effective). Get mad. Go vote.
Re:The "axis of evil" is not going to win (Score:2, Interesting)
A particular subset of this scenario is the DirecTV war on satellite TV piracy. They benefit from the same laws we are discussing. The piracy community was very friendly, very sharing at first, much like the open source community is now. It even overlaps, or at least used to (check out the open source app pitou, on surceforge... got shut down due to DMCA). However, as the heat has turned up, the community is growing ever smaller, more unscrupulous. No one trusts anyone enough to talk to new people about it. Hardware dealers are being busted left and right. They're profiteering, more often than not, and I can't even be sympathetic to them for that reason. It is a dying community. Buying hardware outside of the US isn't possible, it's US-centric. DirecTV is introducing a new access card, even more formidable than the last (the 4th generation "p4" card). It's very difficult to crack a new card, even the HU (or "p3" card) hasn't been fully cracked yet (this is after several years of trying). The only reason the piracy can exist at all, is because they haven't phased out the H or p2 card yet. In another 2 months, that will be corrected. Within 12 months, even the HU/p3 will be gone. The only way that any of this can be accomplished in a timely fashion, is if dozens/hundreds of people can provide their own bit of expertise in a collaborative enviroment, without a ludicrous amount of interference.
When that interference increases, you're more likely to see the seedy characters and profiteers, and less likely to see people just sharing.
I actually think I know how to fix most of the problem myself, but I need someone to bounce ideas off of. No way to talk to anyone, in a safe enviroment, no one to help me. My method would eliminate an access card black market, that some people make small fortunes off of... the same people who more often than not tend to have the expertise I spoke of. Right now, they are busy making wads of cash, selling a temporary, dangerous to hardware method... having abandoned the easy/safe/semi-permanent method as soon as DirecTV gave them the opportunity. And it is only getting worse.
Within 6 months, there will be no sharing community left at all. It will be gone. If anything exists after that, it will be the odd hacker figuring it all out on his own, and never letting anyone know... maybe 5 or 6 across the entire nation? If you think this can't happen to you, you are mistaken. All the problems the article illustrates, you dismiss as a technical problem. Normally, that would impress me, I'm much like that myself. But when they make it illegal, in every single way, I'm willing to bet, that few will risk it, when the stakes are so high. Then the community shrinks. Which makes those still in it, stand out more, and the heat rises. Which makes more quit... it will get ugly. You may laugh it off, but I'm scared to death.
Before you judge me, know that I don't condone DirecTV broadcasting signals onto my property, and trying to prosecute me for doing something with them. They paid how many millions in licenses, to a natural resource that by birth, we all own a part of. While, me, I could never hope to "own" even a small part of it myself. They charge people to watch tv, then cram commercials down their throat. Meanwhile, all the corps that used to at least provide some free broadcast tv, water it down, to make their cable and satellite divisions more profitable. While they broadcast substandard HDTV signals, so that they can carve up their bandwidth for cellular and other lucrative markets, despite the fact they were allocated double bandwidth for the express purpose of phasing in HDTV. I don't feel in any way guilty, if I watch the Star Trek on the clean pirated digital channel, instead of watching the impossible to recieve "so fuzzy every other word is 'shzzshtitgrrrr' static" broadcast channel.
Re:The "axis of evil" is not going to win (Score:1, Interesting)
Well I agree the battle isn't over I also think that there is a good chance we will lose much of what we like about the web. Sure there are a lot of people out there who will fight against it but there are many more who really couldn't give a shit. For instance, most people don't even own a dvd player. Most that do, don't give a shit about region restrictions and if they get the kid at Best Buy to explain it to them think "oh, okay." and assume that it's reasonable. Same thing with the web - Mom and Pop rarely think of the web as anything other than a place to get their AOL-delivered email and news and maybe to shopping at some AOL-sponsored sites. DRM? Huh?
Now, there are those of us who care and want to fight to prevent a bleak future from happening. However, we aren't organized as a powerful political lobby, which is exactly what is needed. If laws are passed like the SSSCA how will they deal with the millions of us who break the law? Issue us fines, send the people who break the DRM protection to prison. I don't doubt that people will circumvent whatever technology is put forth but they'll be monitored, caught and punished for doing it. Mom and Pop will rarely hear a thing and when they do, the people will be "pirates who cost xxxxxxx industry billions of dollars a year." No sympathy for thieves. Focus on the politics of the situation, not the technological aspects.
Re:It's called 'capitalism' (Score:1, Interesting)
Woman to saleclerk: "do you have Windows xp? Office xp crashes when I run it, and Microsoft Tech Support says I need to upgrade to Windows xp."
One big happy Windows world.
Worthless read (Score:2, Interesting)
<count floyd 3d-glasses="on">
Ooh... the future is sooooo scary.
</count floyd>
It would be easy to tear this article apart piece-by-piece but it would be a further waste of time and little more than opinions clashing. Keep this in mind when reading these kinds of doom-and-gloom pieces: if the Internet has proven anything, it is that it is flexible and bends in unexpected ways that are usually dictated by the demands of the majority of its users. How successful have corporations been in harnessing the Internet so far? A few pop-up ads? Spam? Really, is that a threat to our freedoms? Thus far, major industries throwing millions of dollars at lobbying and technology development have hardly put a dent in the ability to download music. It's been, what, two years now since the recording industry has attempted to kill off Napster and its P2P spawn? How successful have they been? Let's project their success two years into the future... hmm....
Not quite $264 worth of scary, is it?
The Internet is too unpredictable and too young to be tamed, in my humble opinion, by corporate interests that require stability and predictability to achieve anything. Spouting doomsday theories at this point is ludicruous, plays into the silliest fears of the most gullible geeks out there, and runs counter to everything we've seen thus far.
--Rick
a new net (Score:2, Interesting)
This Isn't Fantasy - It's Reality (Score:5, Interesting)
The ACCC is fighting to make Region Encoding of DVDs illegal in Australia - claiming that it's an anti-competitive trade practice.
I browse with images off as often as possible, because images cost ten times as much as the article they're obscuring. Spam costs me money. Running "apt-get upgrade" on my Debian box will cost me about $3-$10, depending on how much "woody" has changed in the last fortnight.
Opening Internet Explorer costs me money because it insists on redirecting me to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 home page and claiming that I really, really should download this new version of IE.
Thanks to spam, "postcards", NTP, scheduled IMAP checks and other non-interactive traffic, I can easily spend $1/hour when I'm sleeping. I don't even have to check my mail in the morning to start racking up the bills.
You people in the USA are living in a market-share-broadening dreamland, where providers are tripping over each other in an attempt to get you signed up to their networks. They all realise that once you've been using their service for 6 months "for free", they can start charging for traffic, and you'll just roll over and accept it like the good consumer-sheep you are.
In any Capitalist economy, you have to keep repeating this holy mantra - "The money has to come from somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch."
Re:The "axis of evil" is not going to win (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a nice idea, but it's not gonna happen. If it gets to the point where everybody who uses a computer is violating some obscure law, then all that does is give the authorities the ultimate powers of selective prosecution. Play along with them, and they'll ignore your little pecadillos. Do anything to piss them all, and they'll have every ability to drop the hammer on you just as hard as they feel like.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." - Ayn Rand
Or, to put it more contemporarily:
Agent Smith: We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start. All that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing a known terrorist to justice.
Neo: Yeah. Well, that sounds like a pretty good deal. But I think I may have a better one. How about, I give you the finger
Re:Translation (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, a disturbing trend recently has been that the software and entertainment industries are enjoying the use of a new toy *CONGRESS*. Now they literally have the power to legislate certain competing practices (like open source or free software) out of the market.
GJC
you dont get it (Score:3, Interesting)
With the billions of people in third world countries (the majority) into the information society
Work will be much easier, robots could control everything, theres 6 billion people in the world, about 5 billion of this 6 billion are in third world countries.
if these people all put their minds together technology would LEAP, imagine us having a billion scientists instead of millions, imagine a billion programmers, this is easily possible when you bring the third world into the information based economy, give them all computers and linux, give them free books on programming, and let them in the door.
If we gave them some way to educate themselves, things wouldnt be fair, but they wouldnt have to starve anymore, they could make money.
this is why i support free information. free software, open source etc
Unlikly to happen IMHO. (Score:2, Interesting)
In the early ninites everyone, thought that the future lay in some kind of "interactive" TV system. A paradigm that still rears its ugly head from time to time (much like virtual reality, that most over hyped of technologies). With the killer app being "downloadable movies on demand". Basically, people in suits "get this" business modal, with installation done by some local company and subsriptions sold to punters. More or less what cable TV is today, or phone services etc. This has been the dream of failed tech like push and its kin.
It stands to reason that companies like to push this along, because, after all, it is all they understand and, over the years, have become very good at making money off this modal.
However, they forget the far greater power of the internet (as a medium). Is in its ablity to provide personal empowerment, I go online because I like to post stories on slashdot (despite getting trolled most of the time), to play interactive games, To download stuff just to see if it will compile, not to be some mindless consumer of some pathetically put together medium pathetic in comparison broadcast TV (which is still the better tech for delivering that kind of crap, for the time being).
To better illustrate my point, even if the perfect copyright scheme was introduced (very unlikly) or that most fascist (and unconsitutional) of laws introduced, The medium would still survive, things like linux and music underground would just become more popular, since the kiddies have to have something to download, and if band's become expensive, smaller for once.
The strength of the net is that it gives you access to some weirdos opinion of 911, and his freedom to post it, with out that the medium would just die. Ardvark fail to expain that, If "evil corps" had surceeded in bending ppp to their ends, then why the hell would the narrator even bother to use it? when all you got was overpriced access to MSN. He could have, just plugged into the local underground wireless LAN, which are sure to be everywhere by then.