I saw a link over at Boing Boing that points to this article at the Financial Times. It manages to grate on one of my pet peeves. In that article, the author asks:
"Test yourself on the following questions. In each case, it is 1991 and I have removed from you all knowledge of the past 15 years.
"You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open – open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?"
Let’s see, in 1991, I would not have had to pick, since the Internet already existed at that time. I hate it when people think that the Internet did not exist until the World Wide Web came around. Sorry to break it to you, Financial Times, but folks were FTPing, Gophering, Telneting and the like long before the Web. The Internet != World Wide Web.
This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Computers, Random Musings, Science/Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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