> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.
From the HN guidelines: "be kind." I do not think your comment fits that _at all_.
My converse opinion: Dr Stoll is an extraordinarily humble, kind, and enthusiastic person who I've only ever interacted with online, but found to be one of the best human beings on the planet.
There's extraordinary value in being smart, dedicated, and in the right place at the right time. He was all three. His book, I think, definitely recognises the role both luck and determination played.
As for the web being nirvana... ten years ago, I would have thought he was overly pessimistic. (And many luminaries have written things about the future that were not accurate: even Bill Gates wrote books that have IMO not aged well.) But now, in 2024? I feel he was not a "siren" but a "python": an oracle a quarter century ahead of his time. The web is not nirvana, and I don't think that Google or Facebook have made the world a better place. Wikipedia has. It's not all bad. But I'd side far more towards his article's view this decade than I would have last decade.
Back in the 1980s you had plenty of human contact. You would hang out at the newsagent of your town and wait to find out who bought the other two copies of your favorite computing magazine. And teenagers would swap floppy disks and try them out on the display machines of department stores in bigger cities. There were also computer clubs, and people met up to play computer games.
What destroyed a lot of that is that you can play on the network without organizing a co-player to play with; everybody "meets" only online. The worst of this is teenagers call these remote acquaintances "friends".
> There is nothing inherently wrong or lesser about online interactions that makes them inferior to “irl” interactions.
They are inherently lesser because they lack full spectrum of senses man has evolved to have. In person we don’t just see and hear our counterparties, but are able to exercise all our senses. We touch when we shake hands; we can smell someone else in the room with us; we can even taste should we kiss, whether as a greeting or romantically. We can sense the heat rising from others, and see all their body language in full resolution, not just the lower-resolution, in-camera subset. In person, your buddies can slap you on the back; you can interact physically; you can enjoy one another’s presence. In comparison, an online interaction is awfully weak sauce.
I suppose there are some things that an in-person meeting lacks than an online one does — a full database of all previous interactions sure would be helpful. And it’s convenient to be able to fully consider one’s response, rather than have to answer immediately (but does convenience equal goodness?).
Viewing it as black and white as 'inherently wrong' is missing that it's an area that can have both good and bad aspects. (In the context of Dr Stoll's prescient viewpoint, the negative ones are severe.)
I'm about 10,000 kilometers from most of my friends right now and have been for several months. I can stay in touch with them in a way that would never have been possible several decades ago. This is a wonderful thing.
Equally, the negative effect of social media on teens, its impact on depression and suicide rates, is a terrible thing. Let's look at [4] below:
> There have been increases in adolescent depression and suicidal behaviour over the last two decades that coincide with the advent of social media (SM) (platforms that allow communication via digital media), which is widely used among adolescents. This scoping review examined the bi-directional association between the use of SM, specifically social networking sites (SNS), and depression and suicidality among adolescents.
This isn't 'old man shaking fist at cloud'. It's real negative (life and death!) impact on the young, growing, and vulnerable.
Of course, online interactions are inferior to irl interactions as a lot of sensory input just isn't been catered for and/or its use is suppressed. Might at some point change or humans will evolve to no-longer use them but until then there is huge difference.
Also, "kinetic options" generally are not on the table online, so the risk profile of an online interaction is different, too.
Online, humans interact with what are "reduced" versions of humans.
I've got no idea how far we are from useful bio-printing, as I've been seeing the same headlines for the last 30 years: here's some cartilage and by the way we're also working on internal organs.
Specifically, think about what The Thought Emporium is trying to do: make a living meat robot. Imagine they succeed. I have no idea how long this will take, so your imagination is all you have for now. Flesh on the outside, robot brain on the inside.
Done right, I doubt we could tell them apart from real humans.
Worse: I'm sure we'll falsely convince ourselves that there is a way distinguish nature from artifice, and many natural humans will be dehumanised and killed as a result. (And that's a separate question to "have we made a machine that has qualia?")
But for now, sure, it's easy to tell humans and robots apart when you get to meet them in person.
Or you were somewhere rural and had nothing of that & were isolated. Now you can reach out a communicate with your community, even if niche & if you are somewhere remote or rural.
I grew up rural and luckily at the same time as the internet was sort of gaining pace.
People can shit on the internet and all it enables today all they want, because it’s very easy to do from a position of privilege of having had so many more options available to them. Options not available to all then or now.
Unless experienced, most people will simply never be able to comprehend what the internet brought to people like me, people who would have been effectively cut off from society and culture otherwise (as I was for many, many years during my formative youth.)
I always wondered whether smartphones were the cause or smartphones just exposed the true nature of life, hence bringing depression with that realization.
The view of life through smartphone apps that have automatically adjusting skinner boxes purposely designed to get you addicted ("""engaged""" they call it) and have you churn through rage bait and """content""" is the least authentic depiction of reality that has ever existed, maybe only behind minstrel shows.
It's like when people call video slot machines "video games". No, not even close.
> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war).
The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it.
I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way.
> he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more
That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.
I read Silicon Snake Oil soon after it was published (1996) and I felt Cliff Stoll's views were excessively pessimistic at the time. He was definitely out of tune with the Dot Com Zeitgeist. But a quarter of a century later he might be experiencing a degree of Schadenfreude.
Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers.
Computers have still not changed the way government works.
Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems. Student performance has declined despite vast investments in technology for education. Student attention spans have declined and mental health problems have greatly increased along with increased exposure to technology.
Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much.
What Cliff Stoll seems to have underestimated is people's willingness to put up with cheaper, lower-quality technological alternatives to quality newspapers, good teachers and public administration.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced newspapers.
I never read print newspapers. I do read print magazines.
> Computers have still not successfully replaced teachers
Largely institutional inertia. Those of us who do not send our kids to school have found the technology incredibly useful.
It is also not just a matter of replacing teachers, but greater access to them and how one interacts with them. My daughter has remote tutors, one where I could not find a subject specialist (currently classical civilisation and Latin, previously astronomy, all for GCSEs for those familiar with the British system) easily near where we live. She is set and submits work online. She is doing an online course for another subject with assignments marked by a tutor.
My older daughter's school (college for A levels) made good use of technology, particularly during lockdown, but also before that. Her university seems to use a lot of remote assessments and submission of assignments etc. (I do not know how well though).
> Computer technology has undoubtedly had enormous effects on many aspects of society but it has failed to produce benefits that many early technology idealists and entrepreneurs predicted, and it has made some things a lot worse.
I agree. That is why the middle aged of us here are so cynical. We saw the promise and feel cheated.
> We have lost the quality journalism that was nurtured by the old broadsheet newspapers because they no longer have the necessary money nor inclination to do it.
That is also because people are too lazy to look for alternatives. There are blogs by experts in every field. You can get your economic analysis for an economist, your foreign news from people in other countries.
Do not get overly nostalgic for old broadsheets - the lack of diversity of sources also meant their errors and sloppiness was never spotted by most people. Gell-Mann amnesia was rampant.
> Education systems are in decline everywhere. Teacher quality has declined. The best teachers find jobs outside the education systems.
I do not think that can be blamed on technology. We have that problem in the UK, and it is clear to me that the biggest problem is the tendency to manage by target setting. League tables and metrics dominate. Teachers leave because they hate the working environment and cannot do their jobs properly.
> Governments at least have benefited from technology in that has enabled mass surveillance and control of their citizens. But other areas of government administration for public benefit, such as health administration and education have not improved. Yet governments have wasted vast amounts of taxpayer money in failed technology projects. Wider citizen participation in democracy? Not so much
Governments do not necessarily want what citizens want. Politicians have one set of values, civil servants another. The big influential groups (media and big business) have yet another set of interests. None are aligned with what the population at large want (even when their is a consensus) nor their interests.
Are you laughing because we lost most newspapers to garbage online news, because schools are digitalized with no benefits, because social media made us less democratic, or because fake products are sold on the most successful online stores?
For sure he underestimated the impact, but he was not /wrong/. Most things did not get replaced by computers, they were lost to computers.
Read the whole thing. Maybe there are undigested kernels of truth and foresight amongst the excrement, but on the whole, it's easily one of the worst, most unimaginative, and most dogmatically narrow-minded futurist thinkpieces to have ever been written:
> Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
He wrote those words in 1995, a year after Amazon was founded, and just two years before its IPO.
I have read it fully now - I agree he had some rough blindspots (like requiring in person salesmen for capitalism).
But my opinion is the opposite: maybe there are some rotten pieces in the otherwise delicious meal. On the whole it's a wise piece; if perhaps too optimistic that people would evaluate fairly the (negative) value that the internet brings in some areas and stick to the better offline options. But that might be a transient state, the future is long (or so I hope).
We still (by and large) don't buy newspapers online! They're ad-funded, and the whole media industry has gone away from pay to read.
What does everyone do when we find a paywalled article? Use a site that bypasses it. We don't buy news in 2024.
We do buy books. I grant that :) I don't want to be seen as agreeing with the article wholly, but I think that predicting the future is a hard game. I'm inclined to be sympathetic towards it.
> Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
> Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
Topkek. Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). At best he was a siren, being one of the first to sound the alarm about the importance of security, but he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more.