Arthur Besse
cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
- 241 Posts
- 358 Comments
Snippet here; can’t find a scan of the entire article.
I went digging and found it, it’s split across two pages (which was the style at the time) here and here.
here is the full text to save you a click:
The Golden Age of the Internet
06.21.06
By John C. Dvorak
How many people realize that we’re living in a golden age, the Golden Age of the Internet? It won’t last; golden ages never do. Some of it will remain, but there’s evidence that much of it is headed for the trash heap of history.
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Radio days. The golden age of radio lasted from about 1930 to 1950. It was nothing like radio today. Money was thrown at it. Thousands of great dramas and variety shows were made. Huge news organizations were built. Today, radio consists of rightwingers ranting about liberals, psychologists analyzing moaners-and-groaners, and mediocre music from CDs. We do get all-news stations with erroneous traffic reports, and public broadcasting stations with thoughtful shows on fascinating topics like the art of Gebel Barkel from the first millennium BC.
Every new technology that widely affects society has a golden age, and we give things a lot of slack. Porn on the Net symbolizes this leeway. But so do podcasting, blogging, free video servers, chat rooms, P2P, free e-mail, and other flourishing services.
A proprietary, closed Net is coming. A golden age ends either when something new comes along (as with radio’s golden age, killed by the advent of TV), the government gets involved, or entropy sets in—usually a mix of these elements. In the case of the Internet, we are already seeing a combination of government, carrier, and business interactions that will eventually turn the Net into a restricted and somewhat proprietary network, with much of its content restricted or blocked. Only a diligent few will actually have access to the restricted data, and in some parts of the world even trying to view the restricted information on the Net will be a crime.
It’s already a crime to post intellectual discussions about copy-protection schemes that are protected by the DMCA. If the American public tolerates that sort of onerous restriction, then it will tolerate anything.
Continue reading… (page 2)
Filtering and blacklists now common. Most U.S. government agencies now use filtering mechanisms to keep their own computers from accessing blacklisted Web sites. Third parties maintain these blacklists, and they put whatever they want on the lists. For example, my blog was blacklisted for a while, with no explanation.
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Most companies go much further and carefully monitor all network traffic. They can then pinpoint the use of streaming media and other verboten uses of corporate computers and simply block such usages and blacklist the sites involved.
Even e-mail is lost in the shuffle. The New York Times has a system in place that prevents certain press releases from getting to the reporters.
Blame spam and porn. Spam, porn, and other forms of questionable content are the reasons for filtering and blacklisting. But increasingly, content that mentions birth control or evolution is blocked. Nazi memorabilia sales and hate sites are also banned. It is folly to think that any government, no matter how progressive, won’t be tempted to choke off certain content of which it does not approve.
This sort of intervention becomes ever easier with the consolidation of the Internet. It’s all headed to AT&T; and Comcast. AT&T; has already sold the public down the river by turning over phone records to the government without blinking an eye. Ask it to filter Google results? No problemo!
Is there anything the public can do about this? Yes—enjoy the Golden Age, while you can.
Discuss this article in the forums.
More articles from John Dvorak:
- The Conroe Effect
- Net Neutrality Has a Spokesperson
- Understanding Digg and Its Utopian Idealism
- The Golden Age of the Internet
- Dvorak Reveals Old Formula, Panic Ensues
- more
See John get cranky about technology in his new Cranky Geeks IPTV Show.
1·2 days agoFYI, the day after you published this blog post, a spam blog posted… their AI reimplementation of it 🤦
details:
here is a snapshot of (maybe?) the “original” slop post borrowing from your title; i first saw it reposted on this slightly-more-credible-looking (at least if you haven’t seen it in previous search results and already realized it is spam) page:
i tried to archive that page with the repost of it, to avoid directly linking to spam from this comment, but it crashes archive.org’s browser:
i also was curious to see if this spam is in search engines, so i searched for AI reimplementation, and… well, the good news is that your blog post is the first hit and the above-linked spam blog is pretty far down in the results list.
The bad news is that the second hit is to yet another piece of slop/spam evidently also “inspired” by your post:
Nice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).
A couple of minor corrections to your text:
Blanchard’s account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.
Blanchard doesn’t say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version’s implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn’t prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude’s training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).
The GPL’s conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.
The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL’s obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It’s the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service…)
2·6 days agodeleted by creator
2·8 days agoNice, thanks.
It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.
re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/
imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.
are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?
Full-page machine translations are disabled
Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).
Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?
Reality is now officially just a series of popular misconceptions
That is a misconception, but not (yet) a common enough one to be listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
4·8 days agoIt’s a library for detecting which character encoding a string is encoded with.
Here are the docs for the vibe-coded rewrite, and here is the version before it.
The new vibe-coded version also adds language detection; it isn’t clear to me why the current version of the readme shows it classifying the string
"It’s a lovely day — let’s grab coffee."as Spanish with 99% confidence, without any comment in the docs about that being a misclassification, but I guess that if the LLM-authored program says it is then that must be one of those phrases that looks the same in Spanish as in English 👀
15·8 days agothis post links to an article in (checks notes) The Washington Post
your instance has a list of communities federated to it here: https://piefed.zip/communities
the most active community for announcing new communities is [email protected] (which includes communities on many different instances, not only .world)
fosdem talk by the people who made this: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/
when i browse my lemmy profile via your mastodon instance i see that my first post of this same wikipedia article (to [email protected]) does render correctly there - it is only this cross-post i made to [email protected] which has the wrong preview. (if you figure out why, i’d be curious to know!)
why is this the OG preview
no idea, that is odd. from searching i see that that preview comes from this post from 2023 (who’s permalink is on a domain which no longer runs lemmy; the instance which was
feddit.deis nowfeddit.org).if you look at my post made today here on lemmy.ml it has the correct thumbnail from wikipedia.
12·11 days agoThis post caused me to look up what changed: sadly they aren’t exiting the consumer space but rather are just ceasing to include lane-keeping in their basic package to instead require new customers who want it to pay a monthly subscription fee for what they amusingly call “Full Self Driving (Supervised)”.
4·11 days agois it time for a Windows edition of the classic Jamiroquai sound meme?
If you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn’t be bigoted, I don’t know what to tell you.
it’s not that people can’t, but spaces which have unlimited tolerance for sealions suggesting that it’s necessary to argue about that are likely to have less interesting discussions than spaces which do not 🙄
But don’t call it an anarchist space
tell me you’ve never been in a non-internet anarchist space without telling me 😂
(hint: offline anarchist bars tend not to tolerate fascists either)
rules of anarchism
😭
(this is a bit, right?)
You’re correct on both points (🤦♂️ indeed).
I’ve now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.