About 10 years ago when the Internet was young and people were desperate to navigate the new "information superhighway," we took a wrong turn and ran off the road. We started building the Internet as if we knew what people think, and thus where they wanted to go. We built it on a foundation of "intent."
Don’t get me wrong -- it wasn’t only the early adopter geeks and new age freaks that made this mistake. Society in general skidded off into the dirt.
Intent is difficult to predict before it becomes an action. Here's an example of what I mean. Last night we walked into town for a late night dish of ice cream. Was my intent a result of the advertising I viewed earlier in the local paper? Or a psychological desire to gain weight, and slowly commit diabetic suicide because of repressed oedipal rage? Or was it the result of a political gesture of solidarity stimulated by my support of organic, local farming? Or was I just was hungry?
Damned if I know.
If I can’t figure out why I chose a particular action, how could a stranger, or a computer running an algorithm, hope to do better? Even if they had a complete video diary of my every word and movement, they wouldn’t be able to predict my intentions.
The shear hubris of believing we have the capacity to reliably predict intent, and thus action, has misinformed the last decade of political and economic decisions. Apparently, we "knew" Iraqi President Saddam Hussein intended to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction, and thus justified an unnecessary war.
Apparently, we know if someone has viewed photos of underage nude children, they will automatically become a child molester, and thus can be arrested before a crime is committed and in violation of the principles embodied in the Bill of Rights. (See Ira Winkler’s blog: Are You Unwittingly Violating Child Pornography Laws?)
Apparently, we know every person in the world, in their heart of hearts, prefers a capitalist economic system, and thus seriously underestimated how quickly China’s mixed economy would rise to become a financial powerhouse.
The Internet is built on the same flimsy foundation. Somehow we believe spam can be eliminated by reading every email and determining the sender’s intent. But the best email filters still misfile a few important messages each week. As a result, I have to skim all the email in my "junk email" folder to avoid insulting important correspondents.
Search engine companies believe (as do buyers of the public stock) that they can target ads more efficiently based on invading my privacy and analyzing my last hundred search queries and emails -- and thus charge a premium for each ad served. But last week, while I was seeking information on car recalls, I was flooded by ads to buy the very same lemon from the same company I was investigating. This hardened my resolve to never look in their showroom again. (See Cory Doctorow’s blog: The Future of Ignoring Things.)
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) snoops around our computers to see what music files we're posting and trying to guess our intent. Do we own the track we posted, and are we just backing it up to the net? Are we letting a friend listen, or borrow a track, or are we incenting a stranger to steal? As with child pornography, the RIAA assumes everyone is guilty -- by their version of intent.
The system (and our patience) is getting stressed, and you can watch how intent’s foundation is crumbling. Search engines now present a "universal" panel of results -- some algorithmic, some video, some blog -- because they aren't sure what you are looking for, and because you aren't completely sure either.
There is a practical alternative -- a "transparent" Internet based on actions and responsibility rather than mental telepathy.
A transparent Internet would:
Add cost to spam. As many people have noted, spam is primarily an economic behavior. If you simply charged a few pennies for every email, spam would wither away. No Bayesian filters, no email filters, no inferences about intent -- just fighting cash with cash. The small cost would produce enormous gain.
Eliminate anonymous addresses. Then spam, illegal file sharers, and the providers of patently illegal, underage nude photos could all be stopped based on their actions, not their imaginary intentions. These changes would probably require modifying the DNS and SMTP protocols to require verifiable addresses.
Take cookies out of hiding. Redesign browsers so, if you clicked on a site, you could view on a side panel that reveals "these companies are following your activities." You could either allow this automatic surveillance via cookie, have your browser block it, or trace back through the chain of that cookie to monitor your footsteps across the Web.
These suggestions are all eminently realistic and realizable. A number of standards groups are already working on similar programs and I sense that the momentum is building for change. Like many of the waves that form on the Internet, the rising demand for transparency won’t take the form of new demands for legislation, just increased grassroots pressure that will cause companies to respond.
- it was ARPANET (ARPA changed it's name to DARPA later, as a result of the Church commission)
- BITNET and UUCPnet (UUCP is a protocol) were separate and parallel networks to the ARPANET/BITNET
- the Internet was always called the Internet as far as i can recall, and I'm old enough to remember using the ARPANET in 1971, and working on the Internet at BBN in the 80s (then again, I'm old enough that my memory may be fading as well) - the terms "internetwork" and "internetworking" were in Cerf and Kahn's original paper on TCP/IP and as far as I recall, it was called "the Internet" (capital I) pretty much from the time the first router ("gateway") started passing IP packets
a good reference is Hobbes' Internet Timeline at http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
Quite right, although it had different names over time (see my graph at http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/internetmyths.htm ), but until the browser and a few hundred thousand users, there were too few people to notice the world had changed. It was over a decade ago that non-techies started to struggle to find an analogy, like information superhighways. And the mainstream press started to cover this new phenomena, which meant interviewing geeks huddled around green and black UNIX CRTs, or middle age hippies at the Well.
Somehow a column that starts "About 10 years ago when the Internet was young" raises a few red flags going in. Last I looked, the ARPANET started passing packets in 1969, and the Internet was going full bore in the university community by the early 80s, and the web was picking up steam in the early 90s. That's a lot more than 10 years.
Some of the academic work is pretty arcane, with complex, mulitstep bidding. But I think simply charging a nickel for every email over 50 a day will do the trick- how many spammers are going to send out 5M emails for fake viagra, if it costs them $250k?
Now, I've tried "caller-id" solutions. White lists. Black lists. Honey pots. A pain to maintain, and never perfect.
Most people use ISPs and big email systems, like yahoo or google, ... The nickels would be bundled into the monthly fee, and they could easily track useage. Others would buy $10 worth of credits, and use a micropayment system to debit.
A side benefit, as many have noted, is the same system can be used for inbound permission marketing. That is, I set a rule for $2 I'll let in email political messages. Transparently revese the flow of power.
Your argument about “intent” makes sense, but I disagree with one of the “transparent” alternatives you suggested—charging a few pennies for every email.
This solution strikes me as a disruptive alternative that would end up creating a two-tiered email system, with poorer service for those who don’t pay the email postage.
Everyone agrees that it's getting harder and harder to keep spam out of our email inboxes. But, the Internet works best when innovative technologies—based on intent or not—are used to solve these problems.
Technical solutions like email “caller ID” or certified email system are much better alternatives than charging money—albeit pennies—for using an application that has been free all along.
You mention that “A number of standards groups are already working on similar programs and I sense that the momentum is building for change.” Can you elaborate on these programs?
Great analysis - There is analogy between human and Internet evolution like as our civilisations we never manager to create ideal online environment for us. and perhaps time has come to take a serious look into online cost and security issues in same line of offline security!
I think between all of this Internet still remains one of the finest inventions. Target ads only got better like laser missiles of the recent. Whether we like it or not, we are benefited by collective pain. At least that brings us on the corner of a new invention. The foundation might be flimsy so is every desire. The human need to connect and be appreciated can suffocate the right way of doing things, but what good is a perfect world devoid of it imperfection. So, if you were unconsciously pulled into an ice cream bar, it has to be a net result of your intents with that of others. The ads, the lust, the rage all culminate to create beauty and disgrace.
So I would damn the spam and be thankful - the world lives yet another day for an interesting talk.
I agree, certainly. It's more a commentary on the sheer unavoidability of politics at every turn. It seems a fact of life these days that virtually every activity one can be involved with is infused with political divisiveness. Perhaps just wishful thinking on my part that we could discuss the Internet sans politics.
It's good to see your point about the "political" commentary in the Thinkernet columns. That's what the message boards are for.
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In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
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In the fall of 2011, around 160,000 students in 190 countries enrolled in a Stanford-sponsored online course about artificial intelligence. About 23,000 completed the course and got certificates, including 248 who got a perfect score. The university offered the same course the old-fashioned way to students sitting in Stanford classrooms. None of the those students got a perfect score.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE