Yes, intermediating so much of our society through the internet has made it extremely vulnerable. The internet offers would-be totalitarians a temptation of pervasive surveillance that goes far beyond what the Stasi could ever have dreamed of. Free society and democracy are not likely to survive another decade, although they will probably be born again later in a new form.

We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the people so that, once again, only the voice of the bourgeoisie can be heard.

  Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed.

No BBS ever changed diddly squat. Even the internet had minimal impact on politics until the 2000's. The entire comment just sounds like speculation about a time that is, in fact, fairly recent history.

  We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.

That only makes sense if you ignore all sorts of pivotal historical events (eg: uprisings and revolutions).

Not that I disagree that populist internet media are really contributing to the betterment of mankind /s

I got suspended in 1999 for distributing a copy of the anarchist's cookbook to other middle schoolers. I got it from my brother who got it from a BBS.

I don't know what I was playing at, I have no need for making bombs, but at the time it was the coolest thing--media outside of the machine.

I can't remember what the rest of my media experience was like (aside from text adventure games over telnet) but I'm pretty sure that the BBS-sourced material stood out to us for a reason.

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech.

The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman, and The Turner Diaries, selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

In 01999 many people in the US could read The Anarchist Cookbook entirely without leaving a government record simply by walking into an open-stacks public library and reading it off the shelf. Even if you checked the book out from a library branch, librarians did not enter that fact into a centralized database, and were famously reluctant to cooperate with the thoughtcrime-surveillance aspects of the PATRIOT act after 9/11.

Today this level of freedom from surveillance is much rarer: you can probably get a copy of the book in 45 seconds, as well as far more reliable and trustworthy information on how to do many terrible things, but there's an excellent chance that the NSA will store a permanent record that you did so in the Utah Data Center. (Even if you use TLS they will probably decrypt that once their quantum computing effort succeeds.) If you walk to the library, Verizon probably stores that fact permanently, unless you leave your cellphone at home; if you drive there, license-plate cameras, wireless toll systems, and possibly OnStar and Tesla record that fact.

We saw both of these futures in 01992, but so did the FBI and the NSA.

In many countries outside the US, BBSes were in many cases a bigger hole in official censorship regimes than they were in the US.

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

As can be seen here, it’s really distracting. Writing years like that is a great way to have people ignore or forget what you’re actually wanting to communicate.

Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.

#notallpeople

It seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the aggressively conventional are something else.

It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush. That way we know who would have cheered on the court's sentence on Turing or Galileo before it matters.

> It's useful for flushing the unthinking conformists out of the underbrush.

you know how its annoying asfuck to reed shit without punctuatuin and capitals and possible misspeeled and those fuckers who never use the shift period or comma keys get read a lot less than they might just because its too much drudgery to shlep through their texts? your abit like that and i dont think thats what your going for

One would think you write to be read; to inform, argue, hopefully convince (and possibly even entertain?). This silly affectation is jarring; it breaks up the reading flow and often makes at least me give up. I may be more sensitive than most to sh...tuff like this, but surely I can't be all alone in it.

So what you're doing is just robbing yourself of an audience. Is that really what you want?

OK, maybe it is: We're "unthinking conformists". So... Why do you use correct spelling, punctuation, and capitalization? The nitwits my first paragraph imitates all say that's the real, you know, sign that you're, like, square. Are you perhaps more of an "unthinking conformist" than you'd care to admit -- above all, to yourself?

Since I already butted in...

I can sympathize with a sensitivity to things that others take in stride: for example, TVs in public spaces, jumping and cutting frenetically, impossible to really ignore.

But here's another example: in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on. I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward -- arresting the reader full stop for the sake of a cultural-politics position completely irrelevant to the point being written about. (Especially since those newer conventions had to evolve.) For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself) -- maybe it's useless to say this, but the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

"But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe. The point is that in a dynamic free culture you get comfortable with genuine differences and you learn it's pointless to make a fuss over such a harmless eccentricity. And a dynamic free culture is the type that can learn to get better over time. I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem. (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread. Can't speak for Kragen.

> in the 80s there was still a live issue of the convention that 'he' could cover both genders, and so on.

Still is, AFAICS. And I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the traditional view that it can.

> I'd been reading long enough, with enough older writing, that I can remember how attempts at nonsexist writing could be jarring and awkward

Still are, sometimes.

> For people to come over to the newer way took time (and I wasn't won over instantly myself)

Long before me, it seems.

> the Right Answer to How We Should All Talk is not divinely revealed.

Kind of isn't -- and kind of is: It's informed by lots of things, like prevailing usage, history, social upheaval, fleeting fashions, and... Simple logic. From a single speaker's perspective, most of those are pretty much "divine revelation"; none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena.

Especially for numbers, which more than most other aspects of language are governed by mathematical logic, which less than all the other governing phenomena changes over time.

> "But this isn't for liberation! It's dumb!" Maybe.

No "maybe" about it; it just plain simply is dumb. That's not how numbers work. Also, to the extent that Kragen wants to promote a "long now" perspective: Why just one prefix zero? Bah, that's still practically the day after tomorrow! That should be at least three zeros! Or, heck, why not six -- or fifteen?

See where that gets us in the end? Yeah, exactly: Nowhere. It's just ridiculous.

> I think seeing so many complaints, so consistently, about this eccentricity, is a real (albeit trivial) signal of a cultural problem.

Yup. And when one person persists in being "a cultural problem" that is sometimes a sign that something is wrong with the culture... And far, far more often a sign that something is wrong with that person. Shaving this situation with the oldest(?) of the philosophical Razors, I'm leaning towards Kragen's affectation.

> (Admittedly I dunno, maybe it's just that HN has a lot more commenters and the fraction who do this is a big enough number now. But it's part of a broader pattern.)

I think it's just simply that the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented, and therefore tends to get annoyed at illiterate -- and innumerate! -- writing more than you might be likely to see elsewhere on the Net.

> I hope this helps you see my point of view, starting this thread.

Sure. Are you getting mine?

> Can't speak for Kragen.

If only they could speak for themself.

Well, I don't feel like I got through, so maybe Kragen in dropping this had the right idea.

We are all of us more wrong than we can imagine. I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. My 80s anecdote was about how an idea I now see as good appeared at first as pointless convention-breaking of negative value, and how you can't tell the difference at first. Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof. ("none of us can single-handedly change these phenomena. ... one person ... something is wrong with that person.") In putting it that way I'm probably exaggerating what you really think, but directionally this does seem to be our difference.

> [zeros are dumb]

As I said, I don't care about this at the object level. In my native culture we shrug and move on.

If Long Now dates end up materially helping to make our culture more farsighted, it wouldn't even be all that surprising. For instance, if it caught the attention of one particular nonconformist and inspired them towards some project that set off another cascade which you didn't see as silly.

> the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

That hasn't changed in this interval.

> I believe cultures that tolerate weird ideas (and there's a difference between tolerating and embracing them) learn faster than conformist cultures. [...] Such changes generally don't happen by conspiracy, but by someone having an idea and doing it, and others running with it or not. The policy you seem to be pushing instead is that ideas to be tolerated must come with social proof.

Maybe something in that direction, but OTOH maybe not quite: I just think it's counterproductive if by running with one's idea, one also actively antagonizes people with it. And Kragen's way of advocating the "Long Now" perspective comes off, at least to me (and apparently at least a few other posters), as equally disrupting to fluent reading as people advocating for other new perspectives while demonstrating their "non-conformist" creds by writing in lower-case-only, skipping punctuation, ignoring (or, likely, more often just not knowing...) the rules of grammar or spelling. (Admittedly, not equally as bad as the arseholes doing all of those at once; just in that direction.) That feels likely to put as many or more people off one's message as it wins converts, so recommending them to drop it was really just honest advice for the good of their own cause. (At least originally, before they apparently confessed to not actually having a cause but just be trolling.)

IOW, TL;DR: Not so much "must come with social proof" as that this seems in practice to be disproving / having disproved itself; while not necessarily as to the validity of the concept itself, but as an effective method of advocacy.

> > the HN readership is above-Internet-average literate and STEM oriented

> That hasn't changed in this interval.

Yeah, I was only speculating about why a quirky way to write numbers, specifically, comes off as innumerate and might therefore be seen as (approaching-)equally annoying here as bad spelling / grammar / punctuation / capitalisation is elsewhere, in other below-average-illiterate corners of the 'Net.

It may be right to say that in HN-like circles nowadays you should keep to a smaller weirdness budget if you don't want to alienate other hackers. I think that's sad, though. Feeling tempted to start following Kragen on this point just out of orneriness.

Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.

Dear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999.

Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing.

So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early.

I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000.

They never got back to me.

He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)

Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.

Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.

So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

While English from 1000 years ago would be unintelligible to most of us now...

And how long is HN gonna keep these threads? I was worried about the NSA but now I'm worried about dang.

Are you surprised that on HN, of all places, we find a date format pedant? :-D

And a wrong one, at that.

My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.

> My opinions are always wrong but sometimes less wrong than others.

"My opinions are always wrong but some times less wrong than others."

There, FTFY. Now it makes sense: Some times they're less wrong than other times.

> So, to be clear, he is worried that in 7000 years time it's the _date_ part of his comment that will be hard for a human, or computer, to parse?

In eight thousand years.

> That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech.

As a student you have a far more limited right to free speech in school. See Morse v. Frederick, 551 U.S. 393 (2007), the famous BONG HITS 4 JESUS case. Those students weren't even technically on school grounds (across the street) but were a part of a school function. A school definitely has the right to suspend a student for distributing material deemed interruptive to the learning environment of a school.

No, they do not. The Supreme Court ruled incorrectly in Morse v. Frederick. Oppressive governments and other institutions infringe on people's free speech rights frequently. The fact that their administrative organs reaffirm those infringements on appeal does not annul the infringements; it merely adds insult to injury.

I wasn't really speaking as to the morality of the thing, more so just arguing the reality of today's legal situations in the US. According to current US Supreme Court precedent, its an acceptable abridgement to a student's speech within the bounds of constitutionality. Not saying that its right or wrong, only sharing what a court would usually find today if you made that argument.

You're forgetting the unwritten "but drugs" exception.

> But it's so famously terrible that many actual anarchists have questioned whether it was really a false-flag effort aimed at getting would-be terrorists to blow themselves up, and its author was admittedly never an anarchist!

Any links on reading more about this?

To the people that participated in the BBS's it meant a lot and changed everything, for them.

I imagine they went on to affect change in the lives of those around them even if in a small way.

Grass roots, even small, is still an important catalyst for change.

If you genuinely believe that people being able to engage in a frank exchange of views hasn't changed anything... how did Orange Man get elected? :D

BBSes weren't powerful enough to elect him.

4chan/Reddit pretty much propelled his primary campaign. He was just one of the candidates before the memes

I believe that the period you refer to had local newspapers, tv stations, and radio stations that were largely independent from this handful of corporations (ABC, CBS, NBC?). During this period, there was limited opportunity to perform population-wide surveillance on the discussion of this coverage. In those days your TV tended not to be equipped with technology that could report what you watched.

In those local markets you had reporters who were friends with those in power and very little got reported.

I think it's fair to say that pre-internet, there were fewer media voices but there were a lot, lot fewer attempts at surveillance.

> We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought.

And we still do. Some of the corporations have changed, some are the same. What else is new?

> That is not by any means a free society.

And it still isn't. No "EARN IT Act" needed for that.

Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP.

A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans.

Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it.

It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.

The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.

One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with similar issues before and survived.

Not really. I mean logically would you also play Russian roulette repeatedly with no payout just because you haven't died yet?

Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".

Actually, no one involved in the 1876 US election survived.

You must not have been around when the government was pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s. Before the internet was a thing for most people.

Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_... actually passed in 01994.

Yes, but if you shut down the most "free" information platform, and make it only free to those who are rich enough to pay for anonymity then you are doing aggregious harm to democracy and freedom. Perhaps moreso that anyone has ever done in human history. Look no further than China to see the wrong way of doing things and that is precisely what this bill seeks to do. It is not to "protect the children" it is to protect the elite power centers from criticism and transparency by forcing you to open up all your secrets and communications to them to judge and eliminate the challenges and criticisms of their power under the guise of "law and order".

There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.

The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID.

Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23

This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting!

I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that.

So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms?

I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons!

The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.

> reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.

Obviously I'm not going to be making copies of it to report because then I can get done for making illegal porn, that is the way the laws are written. Here is an example using whatsapp. https://www.theregister.com/2014/08/05/whatsapp_smut_convict...

Two blokes in a Whatsapp group, someone sent some animal porn and because they were part of the group they got convicted of downloading.

I accept I can be done for downloading animal and child porn from Reddit's front page, but I think its the legislators way of facilitating animal and child porn distribution whilst convicting those who spoke out to report it.

Thats why I sometimes think criminals are running the world in plain sight masquerading as good guys!

The laws are not fit for purpose.

Ok but whatsapp and reddit are very very different. It is very easy to see how people can dissemnimate kiddie porn in an unmoderated WhatsApp group. But for a post to make it to the global reddit front page (not your personalized homepage) it would have to make it past the eyes of probably millions of people. Short of botting or hacking I can't see how it would even be possible.

I do think there is an element of "botting" as you would put it.

Theres a lot more going on behind the scenes than most people realise. There is a lot of data sharing taking place between businesses behind the scenes and there is a resistance for different entities to admit this but GDPR is slowly prizing open those dark pools of data.

Some of us did. America has never been a free and Democratic society for all, and we’re actually closer to achieving that than ever if you’re not white/straight/upper-middle class, which is why they’re so desperate to push this bill through.

The government had de-facto control of all mass media before the internet. They could control the narrative to a degree they didn’t need tight surveillance. They lost control of that with the internet and are desperate to get it back.

Not really, no, not with the media deciding what everybody heard. We had as much of a free society as convenience combined with the interests of every individual running TV news allowed.

It was a complex system and I wouldn't want to describe it all here, but the fact that you and I can talk to each other in front of anyone who wants to listen in, is far ahead of anything that existed then.

>Not really, no,

What? You're really arguing that, to put a year on it, in 1990 we didn't have a free society and democracy?

I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy."

From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it's pretty clear that we're living in a closely managed society with a severely manipulated democratic process.

It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks, much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New York without paying all your profits out to the cops. People in Peoria had enormous freedom in 01930, 01960, and even 01990 that people in Minsk, Shanghai, and Alexandria just didn't.

Today we enjoy many freedoms nobody had in 01990, largely thanks to the internet, but those freedoms are probably not going to last much longer, also thanks to the internet.

Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly distracting and weird. (Yes I know there’s some “foundation” pushing this, but still).

What foundation?

The Long Now Foundation

You say that as if it's a bad thing.

To be consistent, you should pad the other numbers you use too. Like money amounts. And I think you should pad dates out to eight digits, just to be safe.

I think I'll also pad out your name, Nate______.

Ok that's funny. Thank you for not padding me with zeros.

That would be inhumane.

It makes your post come off as an ad for this foundation that 99.9% of people don’t care about and that has nothing to do with the topic being discussed; it’s as if I inserted [DRINK MORE COCA-COLA] into random parts of my comment.

Yes, distracting from your main point by intentionally attracting attention to something completely unrelated is bad.

People who are looking for an excuse to give others grief for harmlessly violating social conventions probably should not be posting on a site named "Hacker News"—after all, hackers have always been weird, think of Turing. In any case they are not capable of engaging with my substantive points, should I have any, so I'm not losing anything by discomforting them.

And it's good to know who those griefers are before that becomes a life-or-death question, as it eventually was for Turing, Swartz, Assange, and so many others.

It is totally useless to zero pad a date in a sentence, it is human to human communication.

BTW it is also useless in any other scenario.

Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about when you say "free society." It sounds like a weird mantra.

edit: maybe if you say it 3x fast I wouldn't have had to have vaccinations to attend public school when I was a kid?

In 1990 school kids were pledging our fucking allegiance to an evil empire. Hell no we didn’t have a free society then.

I remember it well. Hands on hearts, droning on between the food pyramid (wherein the USDA redefined "healthy" to mean "buy what the grain lobby sells") and a D.A.R.E. poster. Meanwhile, the CIA was getting caught selling crack.

Only they weren’t getting caught because the media was censored and nobody knew about it. The people talking about it were dismissed as conspiracy theorists.

100%

In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent, but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)

> We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

But if the internet had been developed earlier, we would have debated something like this in the past.

If the government has the benefits of the internet, and no one else does, isn’t society less free than if no one has it?

Is this sarcasm?

Depends on whether or not one believes that we live in a free, democratic society today. In many ways, yes, we do, in many others, no, we don't.