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Dole Kemp '96

dolekemp96.org

34 pointsMcKittrick19 comments

Not that I ever gave a wit about Bob Dole, but this is HN relevant:

Bill Clinton Wants to Put "Big Brother" in Your Computer

Bill Clinton believes in bureaucratic micro-management of the information economy.

Within his first 100 days as President, Bill Clinton proposed the Clipper Chip -- a secret government-controlled encryption algorithm -- and a companion key escrow system where two government agencies would hold a copy of the keys for every Clipper user. Since then Bill Clinton has released updated versions of encryption proposals which insist that the government hold a key to individual's private data communications.

The Clinton Administration's Internet Task Force has proposed legislation that would reduce the rights of users of copyrighted material if that information is used on the Internet. Their infamous "NII White Paper" ignored important court decisions which balance the rights of information users with those of information creators.

Bob Dole Will Protect the Constitutional Liberty of Internet Users...

It's amazing when a candidate from 1996 sounds more reasonable on tech issues than most of the modern candidates.

Why would it seem amazing? To borrow an expression from cstross, the legislasaurus has woken up and smelled the roses. The legal/political class is now well aware of the importance of the digital frontier, which is full of terrorists/pedophiles and won't you please think of the children?!!!1one

You'd like to believe that things would move forward over time. I mean, as much as we love to hate on things, we have come a long way even in just the past 100 years.

But progress seems to be more of a buzzword than anything substantial most of the time.

Or in 1996, it was easier to put up a page on your website which panders to some hypothetical internet libertarian demographic that might vote for you.

Ultimately this is just typical American presidential political theater. By election day 1996, Dole and Clinton were in almost total agreement on internet issues. Telecommunications Act, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, etcetera.

In 1996, good luck finding many people who thought copyright was going overboard or talking about balance (heck, that's still a bit rare...). The DMCA would become law in just a couple years, it was a real pain to get a browser that wasn't hobbled with export ciphers, and Bill was actively pushing the Clipper chip.

About the only good thing that year was that Bill did ease encryption export restrictions by reclassifying it so it was no longer a "munition" but there were still controls, just via a different list.

It's a shame that people need to be reminded of these.

For some reason, people tend to see the past through rose-colored glasses.

Whenever I hear about Dole, I think immediately of Kang and Kodos:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4v7XXSt9XRM

Getting a 503.

From web.archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20150403043329/http://dolekemp96...

Not only is this site still up (I'm assuming parts of it have gone down since it was originally posted), but the web-design firm that built the site still has a functioning front-page, made with the rock-hard kind of HTML design that maintain its appearance and functionality for at least the next decade of browser and standards changes:

http://www.presageinc.com/Presage%20Digital%20Stratgies.html

I think 1996 were the days in which high school age kids could get $30-$50 an hour making webpages of this quality for local businesses. That's not bad small town money when you adjust for inflation.

Surely you're joking! That page may look like text, but in fact it's all (not just the header) a big image:

http://www.presageinc.com/Presage%20Digital%20Stratgies_file...

The same goes for http://www.presageinc.com/Presage_Digital_Strategies,_Inc./P..., to which http://www.presageinc.com/ redirects.

Exactly. Totally consistent as long as image formats don't change ;)

I'm amazed at how much HTML markup it took for them to just display a static image. And it looks intentional, i.e. not like markup generated by saving a standard Frontpage/Dreamweaver file.

From the source:

I actually remember watching Dole awkwardly calling out his "homepage" during a debate. For some reason I remember it as www.bobdole.com, which would have been an improvement over the real, mumbled thing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrDktE8D_gw&t=88m48s

...as for that election, the RNC basically just gave it to Clinton, allowing Kodos a chance to pretend to run for president as a reward for his decades of service in running for other elections. As it turns out, they should have gotten a relatively young Donald Trump to run.

Dole went on to be a prominent supporter of penis pills.

Whois Lookup:

  Domain Name:DOLEKEMP96.ORG
  Domain ID: D98201782-LROR
  Creation Date: 2003-05-27T14:15:22Z
  Updated Date: 2015-08-11T19:32:00Z

Cute.

A relic from the days when people thought that cheesy animated gifs that played continuously constituted good design.

Yet looping animated GIFs are more popular than ever today...

if you re-read the above comment imagining yourself as someone reading it many years in the future you can really appreciate it much more. thanks for putting me on that train of thought.

Also the proper-nouning of "Web site" which I remember seeing in so many 90s-era style guides, but by the time I got my first professional web developer job in 2000 already seemed hopelessly antiquated.

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