How healthy is the internet?

https://internethealthreport.org/2019/

113 78 7 years ago

I fundamentally disagree with Mozillas notion of "openness". The internet always was open to LGBTQI+ people. The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X. Done.

Problems only arise when professional activists try to change existing communities. E.g. the new linux kernel code of conduct and it's, let's say "questionable", author.

DanBC2• 7 years ago

The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X.

We don't discriminate against you, but you have to hide every aspect of who you are otherwise we're going to threaten to rape you to death.

otabdeveloper12• 7 years ago

Non-discrimination and acceptance isn't the same thing. You can't force people to like you, and you shouldn't.

mindslight• 7 years ago

As somebody who wants to hide every aspect of who I am regardless, I don't find this a particularly compelling argument. I'll admit it's easy for me to say, but I'm less concerned about receiving stateless baseless threats than to have my entire life cataloged and foreseen by surveillance machines.

I suspect this is a big part of the divide between the old guard "nobody knows you're a dog" and the new "broadcast your identity". I turn to the Internet to not be participating in the monkeysphere. Any trace I leave behind is due to laziness rather than intent.

I do have to wonder how much this is just inevitable "normie" human behavior, and how much it has been stoked by companies pushing realname policies and profile selfies.

dang5• 7 years ago

Anyone threatening other users here would soon get banned. You surely know that as well as anyone.

Would you please stop upping the inflammation like this in HN comments? You've been doing it a lot, and we've been cutting you a lot of slack because you've been a good contributor over the years, but this is not cool, and I can feel my roll of slack running out. If your taste for ideological warfare is growing, please gratify it elsewhere, not here.

This comment violates numerous site guidelines, including:

"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."

"Eschew flamebait."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pmlnr2• 7 years ago

On IRC still nobody knows you're a dog. Nobody cares. What write is what matters.

ForHackernews3• 7 years ago

It's really ironic to see HN posters staking out bold claims about the value of totally "uncensored" platforms...in a thread with dozens of dead, hidden comments, on a message board subject to heavy-handed, arbitrary and unaccountable moderation.

chasd002• 7 years ago

Moderation isn't really censorship IMO, if a comment was deleted that would be censorship. Or, if you were prevented from reading downvoted comments then I would qualify that as censorship as well.

It's subjective in some ways which makes the discussion complicated.

dang5• 7 years ago

heavy-handed

It's "heavy-handed" when there's too much and "cesspool" when there's not enough. There are as many definitions of enough as HN readers.

arbitrary

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

unaccountable

You must not know what it's like to get flamed by this community if you think that!

anon10002• 7 years ago

A lot of the problems came about when sites began mandating "Real Names". People began to assume that online is somehow analogous to real life (it isn't). Combined with the nonsense claim that "hateful/rude/unpleasant speech and violence are the same", we're hurtling down a dangerous path.

anc84• 7 years ago

A opinionated, non-technological, political, negative and very social justice-ish compilation of:

- Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

- How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.

- Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.

- Who can succeed? Getting online isn’t enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.

- Who controls it? A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.

zzzcpan• 7 years ago

Also hypocritical. Mozilla should take responsibility for its part in centralization of the online world, being one of those players with control and pushing even more of centralization into its browser.

omnimus• 7 years ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean? Firefox has become ~5% browser i don't understand what "pushing even more centralisation on Firefox" means. It looks to me that currently more firefox users = decentralisation more than centralisation. Do you mean the past when it was major browser?

forgottenpass• 7 years ago

I struggle to figure out what they mean by this list. I would normally dismiss it as meaningless pablum, but experience tells me people do take it seriously, and when I try to I'm left frustrated. I can't find a more charitable assessment than very poor communication skills.

For example:

The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

I disagree entirely. Not with the the ideal of course - it's about as positive sounding as possible - but with the word "could." We don't even have this offline, it requires a level of cultural conformity that doesn't exist outside a cult's commune. It's not going to be any easier on the internet, which nullifies the distance between mutually-incompatable cultures.

At this part in the line of thinking, someone tells me to stop being unreasonable, that they represent all the reasonable people's interpretation of "loving and communicating freely," and I'm being too strict in my definition, and I should really scale it back a click. It doesn't mean a cult, it just means a large social group that gets along really well. OK been there, done that. In different groups I've been both an insider, a fringe member, and an outsider. I don't think "live, love, learn and communicating freely" describes a single one of them. It might be easier to get along than randos, but you're either at the core steering the group to keep everything from falling apart with lots of bite marks in your tongue, riding the wave by keeping up with the broadly-acceptable norms you don't mind adopting in the context, or rolling your eyes at how "welcoming" the culture is while obviously incompatible with your own personality.

Then at this next point in the line of thinking, people usually just imply I'm socially defective and incompatible with all the good shit that's going on. But all I see is a bunch of fretting over the good shit not happening correctly.

Mirioron3• 7 years ago

Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.

If the system protects you then you can't be yourself, because invariably these systems that protect people also censor people. Nowadays we hear about it quite often how the people that advocated for hate speech rules online are getting screwed by those same rules.

The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate.

Except those we (you) disagree with.

Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.

If you find that it's not welcome, then why not add a place that is welcome for people like yourself?

The most amazing and important thing and the internet is that it lets regular people share things with the world with little interference. Their opinions, thoughts, experiences etc.

anon10002• 7 years ago

This "safe" language is the normal Orwellian thin-end-of-the-wedge nonsense; Rude/Unpleasant/Hateful Speech, contrary to all the hand-wavy claims, simply isn't the same as violence.

Who is welcome? Anybody with a computer and an ISP. Note that everybody from white supremacists to the most Left of Left-leaning SJW have a voice.

z922• 7 years ago

By health of the Internet, the numbers that I look for is how "stressed" is it when it comes to resource management. Like bandwidth or dns.

And how much "free" is it, still?

pmlnr2• 7 years ago

free as in beer, free as in freedom (libre), free as in DRM free, free as in freemium... ?

z922• 7 years ago

Free as in speech. What are permitted and what not. How much of the net is banned or blocked in which regions of the world.

DRM isn't a problem as long as non-DRM isn't forcefully eliminated by it.

ThePadawan• 7 years ago

Are we ready for something like the Doomsday Clock [0]?

Something as simple as https://status.dropbox.com/, but for all of the Internet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

GuB-42• 7 years ago

The Doomsday Clock is a joke now. It made sense during the cold war when the threat was clearly identified: a nuclear war between the USA and USSR. It is now a game of finding new unrelated threats to make sure the clock doesn't tick backwards.

We could make the same useless "clock" for the internet, advancing it every time a website is blocked or a new backdoor is discovered. Making sure new threat categories are added when things get better. "Oh, it looks like https is becoming the norm, that's good, make sure to add fake news in the mix to make it look like things are getting worse..."

By comparison, the Dropbox status page provides useful technical information.

A similar page for all of the internet would include things like the states of root DNS servers, tier 1 networks, etc... That could be useful.

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

I think it would be possible to make a clock that does not rely on judgments as inputs (although has judgements as rules)

You mention a couple

- Status of root DNSServers

But we could come up with more (I suspect around 50 metrics would be comprehensive)

- Ratio of servers reachable by http vs https - Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work) - Ratio of devices able to reach "representative servers" (ie can your device in beijing reach bbc news and WeChat and Russian newspaper)

- Ratio of devices in areas with "24 hour" electricity supply

- ratio of servers that do not have basic security holes plugged

- ratio of devices that have uptodate security patches

- current volume of DDOS attacks

- Number of successful ransomware attacks per day

- number of networks only reachable through N pipes (ie resilience to network failure)

I would be interested in any thoughts / extras / improvements

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

It last ticked back in 2010. It doesn't only go forwards.

tomatotomato37• 7 years ago

I agree, mostly because I believe the mixing of environmental catastrophe muddies the waters of both threats when there is value in knowing which is more... urgent at a point in time. Splitting the clock into a human-human clock and a human-globe clock would be more useful I believe.

vkou• 7 years ago

The Doomsday Clock is a joke now. It made sense during the cold war when the threat was clearly identified: a nuclear war between the USA and USSR.

The USA and Russia have been closer to a shooting war in the past five years, then they have in the last decade of the Cold War.

And there are many ways for shooting wars to escalate to nuclear wars.

drb91• 7 years ago

The threat you mentioned is still there in the shape of an automated nuclear response system. It is just a matter of time until it malfunctions and kills us all.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

I yearn for a day when Mozilla approached tractable problems with practical solutions, like improving their web browser, or integrating new fancy technology like RSS, or making people feel welcome the old fashioned way on the bug tracker and the IRC.

It's no wonder that Brendan Eich's new browser is Chromium based. ;- )

jaabe• 7 years ago

I’m amazed that it’s 2019, and we still haven’t figured out a good way to share interesting content.

The portals worked for a while, then came google and Facebook, and now we have nothing. I mean, if HN stopped how would you find anything interesting on the internet?

adrianN• 7 years ago

In the same way you find interesting things in real life. You talk to your friends what they like and collect RSS feeds starting from that nucleus of websites.

Aeolun• 7 years ago

Switch back to Reddit? Start a copy of HN and wait patiently?

landhar• 7 years ago

Webrings?

Theodores• 7 years ago

Another thing that has failed: journalists. They get sent press releases and do the filtering. Something like 80% of 'news' is PR. But they don't want you leaving their news website. That would be bad for revenue, allegedly.

Imagine a 'newsworthy' story about a budgerigar that can dance to jazz music. The source could be on a website that has all kinds of fascinating stuff about budgerigars. But this you would never know, perhaps you might get a link to the original tweet but that would be it, no link to the website that gave rise to the one thing that went 'viral'.

oliwarner• 7 years ago

There's some absurd irony here in that the report about the health of the Internet is an omnishambles of the absolute worst practices on the modern internet.

I could not grok the web version. I got headers and those took me to tiles and those took me to blog posts? I was lost. In the end, I downloaded the PDF to read this.

And that's a lie. To start with I had to tell NoScript to allow their third party domain scripts because the content did not work without javascript.

They make some interesting points, but the standard scientific paper format vastly outperforms Web 4.0 routers and widgets for conveying it.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

The real being reported is complex and subjective. The presentation isn't up to the task. That said, the "README" helps at least to frame the project:

https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/

And OMFG the 2018 report. Ow my balls!

https://internethealthreport.org/2018/

2017 is the best of the bunch: https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/

sbwmk• 7 years ago

https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sit...

paul7986• 7 years ago

Don’t see how much of the Internet is fake?

If over 60 percent and increasing that’s very detrimental to the Internet as we know it today.

qwsxyh• 7 years ago

I find it ironic to be holding an absolutist free speech view on a website that automatically deletes opinions the community doesn't like.

stelfer• 7 years ago

Wake me up when it's dead and we can start working on what comes next.

dredmorbius2• 7 years ago

As unclear and uncommunicative as the 2019 report is, it's at least not the 2018 version: https://internethealthreport.org/2018/

I've sugested to Mozilla that unclear labels, vague stock photos, and acres of whitespace are a poor choice of media for conveying a complex, and yes, truly important, story.

But at least it's not animated floating balls.

The page wants more clear relevant text.

The first iteration remains the best to date:

https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/

jmichaelhudson3• 7 years ago

The internet is not healthy.

edit: self censoring myself even I'm afraid to say that here

someone is trying to erase the entire history of the events of Tianmnen Square involving Tank Man.

The United States, defending freedom and multicultuarlism supposedly, is recording basically all internet traffic and sharing it with the most racist country in the world while they create hordes of refugees due to their never-allowed-to-be-spoken plans for aggressive expansion in violation of the very United Nations that created them.

Processors will be made in this country and shipped all over the world. Routers, microwaves, all phones, plagued with endemic backdoors. Auditing capacity is overwhelmed and results seldom in any changes, see iratemonk seagate events.

Social media has basically given TPTB the easy capability to harass and interfere with all of the next generation of anything, while placing their agents in 'key positions' all over the place.

It's a bad situation, the real internet is not the public one anymore. Power exists, and the physical structure of power is, as always, hard at work trying to regulate the ideological structures.

Make us forget Tiananmen, and who knows what else we'll forget.

Wasn't there something that happened in Las Vegas a few monthyears ago? hmmmmmmmmm

The internet is being used, successfully, to attack the human mind on a global scale and the people with the most money are doing it while a bunch of really bright people think they are just solving math problems and making good money.

The situation is bad, I don't need algorighms and network maps to tell me that. The internet has lost China and Russia, and is running away from The United States of America.

How healthy is the internet?

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