What Parts Of The Web Would You Leave Behind If We Built A New One?

No.content content

Like a solid Certified Hood Classics greatest hits album, too many to pick one.

No contest for me. It's the constant malicious spreading of lies designed to hurt other people. Even though that doesn't rhyme with any of the other choices.

I never signed up for Facebook, and it makes me feel like my exposure to all the above was trimmed by about 65% and was therefore the best decision ever.

where the fuck is the 'reddit' option

fb gets a p bad rap its got more uses and less noise than a lot of other betes noires

i wouldn't leave behind "everything"- a lot of the internet is still really cool! i like being able to listen to 90% of everything. i like being able to learn about just about any topic i can imagine.

what i want is a non-anonymous internet, where people who go around making rape threats and swatting and all of the other things people do because they know that nobody will ever, ever, hold them accountable for it- where those people are held accountable. edward snowden is all well and good, but i don't want people like that deciding that the "public interest" is more important than, for instance, the privacy of my personal health data.

how exactly would you guarantee a non-anonymous internet? surely that would involve verifying your identity through some sort of information tied to your real life identity - the kind that you can't replace easily and would devastate your life if stolen?

there are laws to tackle swatting, rape threats, etc. Twitter's own policies prohibit the kind of grotesque harrassment that goes on there already, and yet it goes unchallenged. That's Twitter's lack of interest to blame; if these policies were robustly enforced, then trolls would be squeezed out. taking away pseudonymous or anonymous spaces harm more people than they help, and forcing everyone to sign up online only guarantees that identities will be stolen, not that trolling or criminal behaviour ceases.

I would say for mine:

- shit not connected to the internet needlessly (this includes health data. does this need to be online? no. stop it)

I have to connect my health data because I get Walgreens reward points every time I weigh myself on my wifi scale.

...except that identity theft, fraud, compromise of personal private information, happens all the time on the internet. if somebody decides they don't like something i say, they can doxx me, cyberstalk me, harass me, anything they want without my possessing any recourse. if the masses, and not just the few who dedicate their whole lives to anonymity, actually had the ability to trust in their own privacy, i'd be opposed to taking that away, but as it is both privacy and security are a complete illusion on the net today, with internet security being on about the same level as putting your shoes through an x-ray machine. anonymity? it's an established truism that anonymized data isn't.

do i trust governments? no, certainly not, but at this point it's starting to seem the lesser evil. do laws exist? sure. without the practical ability to enforce them, though, they're meaningless. (xref: drug laws).

would love to hear your ideas for building health data interchange not involving the internet. health professionals can't treat based on information they don't have.

Swatting?

yeah, falsely claiming a terrorist threat in the name of somebody streaming on the internet and watching the swat team break into their home. it's some kids' idea of a good time.

wtf

I'm not in America so I'm not coming at it from the same clusterfuck of HMO/gov/whoever else would be, so I'm bowing out of that.

if somebody decides they don't like something i say, they can doxx me, cyberstalk me, harass me, anything they want without my possessing any recourse
ok, I can understand that, but I don't quite understand how that lines up with your initial suggestion. in exchange for this, you're stripping away the rights of activists to communicate privately, Chinese citizens to get under the government's firewall, even our right to exchange views pseudonomously(?) right here. forcing the internet to adopt a real name policy puts a lot more people at risk to compromise the few, who will just hijack someone else's profile (or whatever their hypothetical equivalent we're looking at in this scenario).

I'd be in favour of more robust enforcement of existing laws, and I'd be in favour of fines for organisations who lose or have data stolen, like huge ones. internet security such as it is is pretty weak, but there's more that could be done.

i absolutely understand that what i'm proposing will have a tremendous cost. there is a genuine need for true anonymity, for whistleblowers to be able to do things beyond the reach of retribution. unfortunately, i've come to conclude that true anonymity is, on a fundamental level, incompatible with both privacy and security. we can't have it all, and by trying we will wind up with nothing. and if i have to choose between privacy and anonymity, i will take privacy.

incidentally, i think that fining organizations that lose or have information stolen is an absolutely terrible idea! because maintaining security on a network that was not built to be secure is a fundamentally impossible task. one can take steps to mitigate the risk, but given the basic flaws in the internet's design with regards to security (computer system interchange as well as computer-human interface operate on an assumption of mutual trust), it is impossible to guarantee data security with any degree of certainty. it is much, much easier to compromise a computer system's data than it is to defend that computer system.

true, and i acknowledge you obviously know a lot more about the subject of data security than me. when I commented above, there were things I was thinking of, like for example the regular un/password leaks.
is there any excuse for organisations not hashing passwords? is there any reason for data being stored unencrypted on servers? is it necessary for organisations to have everything connected to the internet? as it's impossible to guarantee a system will never be breached, shouldn't orgs concentrate on limiting the damage if a breach occurs? it's a fascinating, scary subject.

relevant - this was announced in the week - what do you think of this?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/for-security-singapore-taking-100000-government-computers-off-internet/

is there an excuse for not following best practices? no, absolutely inexcusable. does it happen? widely. i think there's a case for government, in whatever country happens to be relevant to you, mandating security best practices and putting a couple companies out of business for not following them to show they're serious. i mean, that government would actually have to start following security best practices themselves first, which they probably don't, but it's worth doing.

my experience is that the strongest opposition to robust security i've encountered, besides just not wanting to spend the money on it, is that good security is massively inconvenient and time-consuming. you start implementing best practices and suddenly it's taking people twice as long to do their jobs, and they're already underresourced and understaffed, so they rebel. add in the way that security best practices are in extremely rapid flux, which is to say that we're always in charge of implementing new horrifically inconvenient security procedures which most users don't understand, and you run into problems.

so, ok, the singapore government takes all their computers off the internet. how are the people who work for the singapore government going to do their jobs? is the data on those computers going to be usable or useful in any meaningful way? how far are they from just reverting to using pen and paper for their data?

if you're having to abandon electronic data interchange for security reasons, i think that's a pretty good sign that the security of that framework is lacking.

another problem: to really practice good security, you have to, to some extent, think like a computer. most people don't do this. this makes them vulnerable, in a way that's not related in any way to their intelligence or their competence. plus, the larger the organization, the greater the risks- my gut on this is that the risks scale something approaching exponentially with organization size.

A lot of this is about social media, not the internet at large. Security & privacy being compromised are obviously the biggest problem, but of the choices here, which are pretty much all characteristics of social media, the "here's how it happened" clinics are the most irritating and gross - cynical, self-righteous, and self-serving, tearing down others to build yourself up. But all of these pale in comparison to identity theft, revenge porn, stalking, doxxing, etc.

whatever shreds of anonymity we have left on the internet are the last bits of human decency we have left and the last things we have standing between us and a genuine state of constant doxxing and harassment.

facebook is great because they are strongly committed as a company to messing with their users' heads. whereas sites like twitter want to present unmediated public dialogue, and reddit devotes itself slavishly to the plebiscite, signing up for facebook is like walking into an enormous skinner box, with the goal in question being "how do we encourage prosocial behavior in internet users?" and man, i just love it, it's like some massive science experiment from the 1960s before they invented scientific ethics, with the wire mother and everything.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I guess Ilx didn't rhyme

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.