Technology

O shit waddup!

I wish I could be this optimistic, but I believe it's way too early to be talking about fixing the internet right before it's about to be broken like we're only just beginning to see.

With the rise of AI becoming borderline indistinguishable from human in the areas of text, image, audio, and video generation, we are only getting the first taste of how badly the very foundations of our communications are about to be broken. That foundation is trust.

Like with anything there will be the good with the bad, and it's probably not going to be the doom of the world. But it's too early to be talking about fixing the internet as we are about to see a huge paradigm shift - how can we have a solution when a huge new problem is right around the corner?

Just my 2c.

Have they tried turning it off and back on again?

Seriously though, just raise the technical skill barrier to entry. Anything that requires more than idiot-level tech savvy will scare off most of the horrible people that make the internet a horrible place. It didn't even really take off until smartphones were a thing, dropping the barrier to the absolute minimum number of simple steps.

When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay.

Yes we are, just look at DKIM and similar. Their noble purpose is to protect from spam, but in reality it's a way to monopolize email. Here's a casualty.

The internet’s original sin was an insistence on freedom: it was made to be free, in many senses of the word.

My first reaction is Hell yeah! but servers do use paid electricity.

When the internet began to be built out commercially in the 1990s, its culture was, perversely, anticommercial. [...] This ethos also extended to a passion for freedom of speech, and a sense of responsibility to protect it. It just so happened that those people were quite often affluent white men in California, whose perspective failed to predict the dark side of the free-speech, free-access havens they were creating.

Ah... so it's that kind of article.

It’s targeting that makes people think their phones are listening in on their conversations; in reality, it’s more that the data trails we leave behind become road maps to our brains.

In reality there has been more than one occasion where researchers have proven that indeed mics are used as data points, especially in the likes home assistants.

As an individual, if you see [hate speech], you can just leave

No, if you post something on the fediverse that mildy offends someone, somewhere, for whatever reason (even if you're not targeting anyone specifically or the one who's complaining isn't the targeted one), then your post gets reported and the instance admins will at the very least delete the post, or just delete your account (that's a 50/50). Unless, of course, you belong to a perceived minority, then you can do what the hell ever you want.

I can't really take this article seriously, then again it's MIT, the killers or Aaron Swartz, so...