The irony is inspite of all the posturing about freedom and liberty seen at places like Slashdot its software folks who are currently neck deep in building surveillance infrastructure and selling out the world, of course qualified with suitable hand waving and apologism.

For the same commentators to reflect in a different context you need a more laid back venue like Slashdot. The problem with sites like Slashdot is to retain authenticity they cannot be profit driven. But there appears to be little room for that kind of thinking in the software ecosystem currently.

We got a wealth of free tools that allowed us to create things like Slashdot without crippling license fees and we got a wealth of cheap IoT and poorly programmed devices that can DDOS and bring down GitHub.

In the 1990s the fear was that Microsoft would take over everything. Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecting data it doesn't need, and connecting to services that aren't necessary, all in what should be simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine.

The kinds of hacks that were absolutely, hilariously laughable in movies like Virus are now quite plausible. Blender went berserk and set the kitchen on fire? Who would've guessed that's actually practical now, given a sufficiently Internet of Thingsy appliance.

But linux is just a kernel and devices based on it are usually easier to reverse engineer.

> simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine.

Dumb appliances are not going away, you just probably spend too much time on websites that overhype ioT garbage.

Buying a "dumb" TV these days is an exercise in frustration.

Open-source reduces friction. This is good in some areas and bad in others.

I am going to have to call you out.

I had a low-digit ID on /.

We (people like me) have been calling this out for FUCKING DECADES.

I feel that we can talk about generational millenials etc.. but we can also call out DIGITAL millenials; those who thing they know what the fuck is up just because they "work at facebook"

I have been a whistle against NSA router backdoors since 1997...

So nobody wanted to hear it then - and the giants have surpassed me - and I concede...

but to think that this is some freaking revelation is bullshit.

We have been talking about it for literally decades. FFS FB threatened to sue me for that which I revealed even here on HN.

Today's "world" has been here since the 70s.

I make mistakes when I'm writing code all the time. But as a science professional, I test my code against an objective reality, characterize my bugs, then change my approach.

Politics could use a lot more of that.

And I'd also offer that in the mid-90s key escrow wasn't as bizarre an idea. We were just starting to grapple with mass physical communication transitioning to digital.

And while I hate the dragnet currently used, targeted, court-approved interception of communication content is a good to society (via an effective law enforcement branch, hence an effective court system, hence rule of law).

the part that disgusts me recently is that when these conspiracies are turned into fact by post-facto released information from official sources, a good amount of the reaction is "So? Everyone already knew that anyway."

I feel like that reaction is so blasé that it will ultimately be the deathknell of the personal privacy movement.

Whether or not the propagation of that kind of attitude and reaction to such things is state-induced is another question, but the damage that such opinions do to such activism is definetly real. If I were an adversary to a cause, I would definetly consider those kind of tactics against the ideals of my enemy.

    This is our world now... the world of the electron and 
    the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a 
    service already existing without paying for what could 
    be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, 
    and you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call 
    us criminals.  We seek after knowledge... and you call 
    us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without 
    nationality, without religious bias... and you call us 
    criminals.

    You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, 
    cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for 
    our own good, yet we're the criminals.

    Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  
    My crime is that of judging people by what they say and 
    think, not what they look like. My crime is that of 
    outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive 
    me for.

    I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.

This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.

Long distance calls were expensive because they were trying to pay off billions of dollars of basic infrastructure - the phone network that we're only now replacing nearly half a century later. Those fancy exchanges that the phreakers were exploiting? Those had to be invented, prototyped, tested, mass produced, installed, maintained... and that's not even considering tens of thousands of kilometers of telephone wires and poles, negotiating land rights, etc.

We only think of long distance communication as being next-to-free today because our information tech is already bootstrapped, computers are a billion times more powerful, and the market across which those costs are amortized are at least a million times bigger.

Can you talk more about this? My curiosity is piqued!

Just a side comment, I feel like Hacker News is going this way with Facebook a little. Posts that tangentially mention Facebook, there's usually a high-rated comment about how Facebook is evil and since the user left Facebook their life has improved. Those "I don't even own a TV"-like posts are a bit grating as the top comment on every thread, but hey maybe like you say, it's really pushing towards a better future in the end.

What a world.

I’m worried that my kid is not getting a ‘big’ view of the world, and is instead seeing it via YouTube, and anti-Trump playground conversations (which I agree with, to be sure, but it’s not a very deep or diverse understanding of the world).

When I think back to my childhood, my view of what the world, and human society (civic society?) ‘is’ came from TV news my parents happened to be watching - and occasional glances at their newspapers.

Even though I try to consume news from wide ranging sources, my kid sees none of that; it’s all an individual pursuit.

I fear there’s also a lack of ‘coherence’ in society today, and suspect that everyone watching the same news programme was something that provided it. When we think of current events, I don’t think that we’re all even aware of things outside our ‘bubbles’ - adults are sort of aware of this. What must growing up like this be like though?

I’m considering starting to watch evening network news. One problem with that is that we don’t have a TV - just iPads, laptops, and a projector for watching movies.

I’ve also subscribed to a delivery of the newspaper on Sunday (though it’s been a month and it’s never actually been successfully delivered to my home yet...)

Who’d’ve thought we’d be lamenting the decline of TV the same way our parents lamented the decline of newspapers?!

Even if you agree with the general sentiment, imagine a child growing up whose main media sources are the informational equivalent of a cross between crack cocaine and junk food.

I am considering Amazon FreeTime Unlimited as well, I would recommend trying that before a TV though I would appreciate any anecdata on it.

Also, a shout out to https://dnslearning.org/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14913547 (Aug 2017) <- expanding that whole YouTube discussion might be worth your time.

> utefan001: This is how my 11 year old daughter uses YouTube now... After 30 min, DNS no longer works for entertainment sites.

(Pricing was 1 free, $10/month but I don't see any info now... boo!)

Five years ago that would have been more to avoid them from stumbling across the various types of adult content that for various reasons I would have preferred them not to view, and perhaps the HN zeitgeist would have called me a puritan (although I'm not just thinking sex and violence here, but also things like conspiracy theories and politics they are currently incapable of processing and other things [1]). Now, unfortunately, it's more about avoiding the brain hackers that you describe that know how to hack their brains into getting low-level addicted to that sort of garbage, and now perhaps the HN zeitgeist will be less offended at my policy that a poor defenseless six-year-old or nine-year-old in my case can't be expected to defend themselves against this level of sophistication.

(Because however stupid those videos may strike you as an adult, they are sophisticated, in their own way. The "cartoons that were just toy commercials" of my youth were nothing compared to what modern kids are being targeted by.)

The good news is that we're actually finding some channels where we have some common ground. For instance, they're really digging Homestar Runner now, and I've got some others that I can pick and choose from that we all like.

I increasingly pity the "digital natives" that didn't get to ease themselves into this world like I did. I'm not saying they're hopelessly lost; today's article about kids rebelling against social media is heartening. I'm just saying, I had a much easier on-ramp than they did. My first few years worth of youthful indiscretions are now utterly obliterated, because the dial-in BBS they were on is now long gone. I wasn't fucking up on Facebook or where the Internet Archive could find me. By the time I got on to the real internet, oh, I'm sure I could find things that would make me cringe now, but I'm pretty confident I wasn't blowing my foot off anymore.

[1]: Oh, and I'm pleased to say that they both seem to be on track to be voracious book readers, which I think is the strongest Step One to being able to deal with the onslaught they will eventually face. My strategy here is not just mere "denial of access", as I am well aware that doesn't work into their adulthood, and my goal is to raise good adults, not good children. I'm still feeling through what my strategy is, on what is shifting sand anyhow, but there's more to it than just "shield them forever."

That one. They currently have no independent access to YouTube. (Well... technically if they knew what buttons to push where they do. I'm not using high-tech to block them. But they don't know and I'm not teaching them yet.)

Even a few years ago I might have considered this a bit much. But since "Elsa-gate" my mind on that has been changed. I know it's not just a weird conspiracy theory or something because I've even seen a couple of them pop up in my "related videos" list myself, and I don't really have a viewing profile that looks like a kids profile. (The reason why Elsa-gate is happening may be conspiracy theory related, but the brute fact that it is a thing is something I've seen first hand in my own feeds.)

The increasingly aggressive targeting behavior across the Internet is I think something not to be taken lightly. Unfortunately we're going to have to raise our children to deal with it, but my considered opinion is that the best solution before the teen age years is to just cut it off entirely. It is not as if we are leaving them adrift, the only ones without tech in an increasingly technical world; my kids play Minecraft, they've seen enough of the current YouTube videos that they can discuss them at school, their school is using technology in a halfway sensible manner so the nine-year old can already type and the six-year-old is on the way. It's only certain segments of the Internet that they are better off just locked away from.

Heck, it's not even terribly hypocritical of me... I lock myself away from those very same segments for the very same reason! I use uBlock origin pretty extensively, and whenever I see one of those bullshit Taboola blocks, I'm actively annoyed that they are so tuned that I find myself wanting to click through myself. (I'll know I've gone senile when I no longer can resist it.) I'm not magically immune to this crap, and I know it, so I avoid it. I rely on my own discipline to do it. But relying on a pre-teen's discipline is probably not a good plan.

Alternatively, there is always kids.youtube.com which is weirdly just an app for Ios/Android. I haven't tried it, and myself have actively disabled/removed all Youtube from being accessible by the younglings. Curated media, decided by me is all they get to watch then.

There might be a better article if you search deeper than I did to come up with a quick link, but here:

https://blog.heckel.xyz/2013/07/01/how-to-use-mitmproxy-to-r...

As you say, it's also iOS/Android only. No PC option for kids at all.

There are so many safe for any age videos that have a bunch of kids with the worst, most cynical attitudes and no respect for authority and then wholesome shows with "intense emotion" or whatever that get rated tv-14.

So I download everything and put it on a USB hard drive hooked to a media hub.

Edit: Looked into this myself just now. VLC Streamer looks decent, as does Infuse by Firecore.

You could drag an icon to the desktop for an HTML page with thumbnails if it was necessary to get fancy.

The Power of Block is powerful, and denial of it a major Internet dysfunction.

I do believe you can hack at Squid to intercept HTTPS and terminate if for you, as well as run filtering (Squidguard), also possibly Dansguardian. Though I've not fully researched this yet.

http://squidguard.org

http://www.squid-cache.org

If it were possible to mitm HTTPS specifically for YouTube that would still be a lot of work, maybe a good Raspberry Pi project.

It's actually a cultural phenomenon of people making a living by buying toys and making you tube videos about them. You tube then pipes children's eyeballs to these videos.

In slashdot, PR companies working for Microsoft were operating dozens of sock puppet accounts to post copy-paste messages extolling the company for its perfection, and praising each and every single product they were announcing. Slashdotters became aware of the problem, and what appeared to be a deep collusion between those PR companies and slashdot itself to keep pushing that propaganda while persecuting vocal critics who raised attention to the problem, and started to nurture a profound dislike for the whole affair.

Some people may not like Facebook, but HN is far from the path that slashdot was driven into.

the more things change the more they stay the same.

It's not a winnable bet (at least right now), but i'd wager that groups are doing that right this very second, even here.

Techies are an important group to influence, and there are a lot of interests here. The level of discourse and discussion is fairly high here, but don't let that trick you into the naiveté that folks with vested interests here are any more honest than they are anywhere else in the world or on the net.

Perhaps, but I have no doubt that there are a substantial number of sock puppet accounts running loose here. I just wish I had enough free time to try and prove it using text analytics. Then again, I'm not sure it would make any difference anyway.

I'm curious as I don't remember things as being that bad - no expectations of any unwanted research just for my sake though!

"...education sites are competing with very powerful algorithms that are designed to keep users watching video after video. If youtube starts encouraging users to do a few Khan Academy problems before watching the next video, I will consider our project, DnsLearning.org, a total success"

It's an oversimplification to demonize groups in this way. What is more troubling is the (non)reaction of society to the vast encroachment on privacy and rights from all sides, not the least of which are governments, telecommunication companies, and advertisers.

you were lucky to be doing an online gig. the rest of /. audience was probably in desktop software. most of the people there were ruthlessly crushed by Microsoft business tactics.

they mostly had a very good reason to attack Microsoft.

That has to be hyperbole. Even at the height of Microsoft's aggression, there were many professional software devs left uncrushed.

Happened to me three or four times and I picked up a pitchfork too.

It never left, it will never not exist.

Amazon is presently crushing the old-line retail industry in a manner that is little different from what any number of giants in the past did to the competition, whether Walmart or Sears before it.

Last time I went to Sears, I was looking for some good working outside pants. The store had an odor of perfume. Most of the clothes were for women. The size of pants I wanted was sold out with no idea of when it would be in stock.

So I went over to Target. They didn't have any good working pants. They might get some in the next shipment in a week or so. I went over to REI... and the pants were a bit too expensive for what I was after. I ended up at Duluth trading... the outlet a good half hour drive away from where I am now.

If I was living back up in the north woods where it was more than a half hour drive? I probably would have ordered online and probably from Amazon. Sure, Cabela's has same day shipping to a store, but at my previous residence, the nearest store was an hour and a half away... and shipping on one pair is %20 of the cost of the pants.

There was a sears in the town where I lived up north... but Amazon hasn't killed Sears. Sears has been committing a slow suicide for decades with poor availability and service. Other stores with an online presence still have what I would consider exorbitant shipping costs.

Don't blame Amazon for picking up the customers of the once mighty Sears mail-order empire - they didn't get their catalog online fast enough and ignored that silly Seattle company selling books for far too long.

I don't see it as Amazon being aggressive at undercutting competitors or vaporware them in the way that Microsoft was in its day (Competitor A announces a product... Microsoft announces they're going to do it too - everyone waits for Microsoft to come out with it while Competitor A's product withers on the vine). Amazon has a product and a focus, and they're doing a better job of it than other companies are.

If you aren’t insane you sell it.

If you think you can beat the big three you probably deserve to be crushed.

vs

> If you think you can beat the big three I cheer you on.

Its funny, that on HN of all places, your statement is not challenged. The major point of HN over /. was the startup/incubatorish habits of Ycombinator.

By no means my statement implies that software developed under a free software license by a nonprofit organisation will for ever keep being fit for my use case scenarios but I do believe that changes that constitute planned obsolescence wouldn't be the case.

Of course such a model has limitations, you can't go on funding rounds but still it's an interesting model.