Month: April 2017

So there is an article on Yahoo from Reuters that is titled:

“Web needs rethink to stop “nasty” ideas spreading, says its creator”

The World Wide Web needs a complete rethink to prevent spying and the spread of “nasty, mean ideas” on social media websites, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, said on Monday.

Me:

Before I was online I used to operate along with lots of other people BBS software where people could call into our computers and download files and discuss stuff on our public and private forums.  They could also play games on our computer systems.  Then the internet became a big thing and some BBS operators began to pull usenet into their forum system.  Back in those days, it was a big deal.

Now understand, the software we used was way ahead of and superior to the crap that would come to be called  the web. The web was more simple to use but it was inferior in many ways to other access tools people might use such a telnet, ftp, and mail systems.  The early web sites were far inferior to what we could do with our own network systems that people could access by phone.  When myspace came along, it largely emulated what people could do on the old BBS software.

The BBS software people could use back in those days was free speech.  Usenet was free speech.  And from the very beginning there were what was called flame wars where people disagreed and sometimes the forums had to be closely monitored just as online internet forums still do.  But the monitoring was done in such a way that largely allowed free speech and dissenting opinion.

When you read stuff like Tim Berners-Lee you need to remember that the BBS systems largely went away as people discovered the internet and the web.  But do not think those systems were inferior as far as social networks. They were not.  They were inferior in that you had a limit to the number of phone lines and the number of people who could connect at once.  We could not compete against the Information Services like AOL and GEnie and Compuserve and the larger internet which many of us didn’t have the resources to provide an entry to access.

Also remember that the government wanted us and CB radios and to some degree HAM radios to go away.  They wanted the communication on a system they could spy on and that they could censor.  Although it has been a long winding road we have gone down from the 1980’s, the “fake” privacy,  the secret spying,  and the blatant censorship that Tim Berners-Lee speaks to was the government agenda from the very beginning.

This is opinion.  Do not read this as an attack on Tim Berners-Lee.  It was not intended as such.

The point of this is to hopefully make you think and to oppose ideas that support broad censorship.  Never be afraid of ideas.  Not even nasty ones because even a nasty idea can lead to the mother of the next invention.

Don’t believe there is such a thing as privacy on the internet.  There never has been.