Hacker News Reader

Comment by iopuy | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it was the dialogue coming from the teachers or glazing over the content of the newsletter, but I am highly skeptical of this article.

I've never heard teachers talk to students or each other how this is written. 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity, turns out Geocities has been around since 1994 but I can't recall a single instance of sites being shutdown for this sort of thing in or around 1997. In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?" Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity? Why did he even has this information? It is technically feasible for this to have happened, I'm just saying I have my doubts.

View on HN

The dialogue from the teachers is precisely in line with what I experienced in gradeschool. I'm sure you can find dozens of others to corroborate: there's something about school administration that seems to attract (or create?) petty authoritarians who convince themselves that any slight against their person is an egregious crime in and of itself.

> 1997 also seems very very early for this kind of activity

It wasn't.

> Also is it being implied the American friend gave up his identity?

Could have been the teacher saw his reaction, overheard rumors, or asked/coerced the information from other students.

This happened all the time, all over the US.

Felt like authoritarian heavy handed red-faced response to early anonymous publishing of tracts and pamphlets, all over again.

Good read starting with the 1500s here:

  THE IDEA OF A FREE PRESS:  
  THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS UNRULY LEGACY

— http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/org.oclc.lac.ui.DialABo...

I was part of an early ISP (1993 - 1997). There was this kind of "insolent" free speech vs. fumbling authoritarian quashing all the time.

Our ISP policy: Don't like what you have to say, but will defend your right to say it. And we, not teens but in our twenties, thought this new power for the individual voices was indeed "hilarious" — and awesome.

I often miss the truly self-published pre-ad-driven ecosystem days of $19/month for a dial up modem and your own web site.

// As it happens, in addition to offering both web hosting and shell, I also invented dynamic DNS, with connection event driven mapping from Portmasters to a custom DNS host, to point your username.isp.com to your own dynamic dialup IP address so you could host whatever website you wanted on your own box, not ours.

I'm not in the US, but I used to have a hosting/redirect service in the 90s and got plenty of takedown requests. Most often just because someone didn't like the content.

In 1997 many people were still asking "What is the internet exactly?"

People are still asking that now, to be fair. But the Web was certainly well into the public consciousness in North America by 1997.

Yep, definitely 1995-1996 was the tipping point for internet awareness in the U.S. At universities, and perhaps some well-connected high schools, a couple years earlier. I was a college freshman in 1993, and already knew about 'the internet' (long before most people because I was a nerd, finding public access dial-up gopher leading to public access unix systems, all over a 14kbps modem connection), but hadn't heard of the web before -- I distinctly recall someone showing me Mozilla in 1993 in a computer lab, a website for a museum of some kind, and I was like "Woah, you can do THAT on the internet now?!? This is going to be big." In 1995 I was hired by the college IT department as a student worker, to make an experimental prototype college website, the first website the college had. The rest is history. :)

(One thing I remember is that my website had a campus map easily accessible from the home page. Once the Communications department took over website responsibility from IT a year later, that disappeared not to return for many years, heh. https://xkcd.com/773/ )

Also... What 16 year olds weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons in 1997? I mean, yeah when it came out and I was 9 in like 1989 maybe it was edgy... But 1997 it was prime time. South Park was a little edgy in 1997, but not The Simpsons.

I had friends who could not watch the Simpsons because they said "Damn"

Did this friend happen to be called Leopold Stotch?

hah this was pre-SouthPark

Probably just as well. They would have realised the Flanders's's' were a caricature of they're lives and unravelled years of meticulous parenting.

I think this might have been more common than you would expect, particularly with devout Christian families. A good amount subscribed to newsletters that told them which media was Christian/family-friendly. Simpsons was definitely banned in our house along with MTV completely.

Meanwhile I watched Harry and the Hendersons with my 5 year old last week and was shocked at the amount of gunplay going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com