Re:The modern HTTPS world has no place for old web servers
by kragen on Thursday May 14, 2020 @01:24PM
(#23182447)
When I joined the internet in 1992, it was pretty symmetric among machines but not among people; I typically used a DECstation that had another 50 or so people using it at any given time, and we didn't have root. We couldn't set up an FTP server, and although we could run an HTTP server on port 8000 or something, we couldn't run it on port 80. And if we started up a long-running process, it was liable to get shut down for loading down the machine. We didn't have access to cron; I don't think we even had access to at.
I didn't have root then, I didn't have root a couple of years later when I was doing sysadmin intern tasks on the math department's machines, and I didn't even have root on my desktop SPARC 5 in 1996 when I was working at a company, although I did on my roommate's Linux box at home and, later that year, my own. But IIRC our internet access was through Slirp on a shell account: we didn't have our own public IP address. (My workplace SPARC did.)
That was about the time the unwashed AOL colonist hordes started thinking they owned the internet and remaking it in the image of the world they knew, giving primacy to commerce rather than knowledge and sharing; but, of course, they didn't have public IP addresses either, or I think even private ones.
I'd say that the internet was still young then because it was only 23 in 1992 and only 25 in 1996, and now it's 51. But I think it's actually easier for people to put things online now, despite the NAT growth and HTTPS churn and whatnot, because an awful lot of people at the time had some kind of internet access but no distribution capabilities and no usable software. I don't know how long it would take an average internet user to learn to spin up a DigitalOcean droplet and start running nginx on it with LetsEncrypt, but I imagine it's on the order of a day or two, and the startup cost is like US$5 or something.
But however much easier it may be to initially put something online today, it's enormously harder to keep it online, and I think that's a terrible price to pay. And we're increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary censorship decisions made by Google, Apple, etc., even if currently that is more a potential risk than an active catastrophe — much like the next pandemic was a year go.
Today the menace is not so much commerce — though it continues to be a pervasive corrupting influence on our discourse and a frequent excuse for political censorship, it is also the underpinning of the internet since the beginning — as it is partisanship. Want to distribute health "misinformation", such as advocacy of wearing face masks (a month and a half ago, anyway, when this contradicted official guidance from the CDC)? Better hope Google and Fecebutt don't find out.
I didn't have root then, I didn't have root a couple of years later when I was doing sysadmin intern tasks on the math department's machines, and I didn't even have root on my desktop SPARC 5 in 1996 when I was working at a company, although I did on my roommate's Linux box at home and, later that year, my own. But IIRC our internet access was through Slirp on a shell account: we didn't have our own public IP address. (My workplace SPARC did.)
That was about the time the unwashed AOL colonist hordes started thinking they owned the internet and remaking it in the image of the world they knew, giving primacy to commerce rather than knowledge and sharing; but, of course, they didn't have public IP addresses either, or I think even private ones.
I'd say that the internet was still young then because it was only 23 in 1992 and only 25 in 1996, and now it's 51. But I think it's actually easier for people to put things online now, despite the NAT growth and HTTPS churn and whatnot, because an awful lot of people at the time had some kind of internet access but no distribution capabilities and no usable software. I don't know how long it would take an average internet user to learn to spin up a DigitalOcean droplet and start running nginx on it with LetsEncrypt, but I imagine it's on the order of a day or two, and the startup cost is like US$5 or something.
But however much easier it may be to initially put something online today, it's enormously harder to keep it online, and I think that's a terrible price to pay. And we're increasingly vulnerable to arbitrary censorship decisions made by Google, Apple, etc., even if currently that is more a potential risk than an active catastrophe — much like the next pandemic was a year go.
Today the menace is not so much commerce — though it continues to be a pervasive corrupting influence on our discourse and a frequent excuse for political censorship, it is also the underpinning of the internet since the beginning — as it is partisanship. Want to distribute health "misinformation", such as advocacy of wearing face masks (a month and a half ago, anyway, when this contradicted official guidance from the CDC)? Better hope Google and Fecebutt don't find out.