Re:A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System
by TheOtherHobbes on Monday March 19, 2018 @05:29AM
(#16617108)
I suspect there are Laws of Social Computing which guarantee that public networked systems inevitably converge on certain kinds of uses and applications, with certain consistently reinvented “abuses” and failure modes.
Networked computing is just a mirror. We seem surprised when some of the things we see it aren’t very nice, but perhaps we shouldn’t be.
Re:A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System
by drb91 on Monday March 19, 2018 @09:36AM
(#16618212)
> Those systems of old didn't separate between "an user" and "a developer" because they assumed all users are trusted (and responsible people). With the Internet, this assumption immediately becomes false - between people attacking the network and social engineering, it's dangerous to let people have that much control over their environment.
More than that: ads. They really did destroy the internet.
Re:A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System
by walterbell on Monday March 19, 2018 @12:13PM
(#16619524)
We now have the HW/SW technology to authenticate and isolate code and individual humans, including the creation of parallel universes (copy-on-write disk and memory for transient VMs that are forked from running code) with optionally persistent side effects. Some of these ideas are present in https://cappsule.github.io/faq/
The problem is the Internet. Or, more precisely, other people.
Those systems of old didn't separate between "an user" and "a developer" because they assumed all users are trusted (and responsible people). With the Internet, this assumption immediately becomes false - between people attacking the network and social engineering, it's dangerous to let people have that much control over their environment.
Which is something that pisses me off, because I'd love to work on a modern-day version of a Lisp machine, but I understand this can't ever become mainstream (and myself I'd be worried using it to do my banking).
Or, as I sometimes phrase it, Star Trek-level tech requires Star Trek-level society.