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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

I remember being so excited as a kid when I started getting drawn into the computing age. I remember when the internet seemed like mankind's next step forward. I remember being excited about so many new trends, social media, the age of everything being free on the internet.

Then, everyone else caught up. Now it's just like watching television. A bunch of companies vying to get you to buy something at any cost, and taking that strategy further than they ever did before the internet.

Now, I just want to leave my phone at home and go ride my bike. I rarely feel like developing anything anymore, haven't done a side project in over a year. Whenever I get motivated to do things like that I see shit like this and it just feels hopeless. There's no way to defeat these companies, because they are full of people struggling to get ahead and doing their cog's part in the machine that ultimately does this to us all.

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This will force the country to learn about how important privacy is. Couldn't have done it any better myself.

You can all feel as hopeless and defeated as you like. When it comes down to it nothing in history came easy. With the Advent of the internet it forced the hands of those in power come up with new ways of making us think they are more powerful or have more power.

And unfortunately it works like a charm. A tech revolution would completely undermine the entire worlds markets over night. With the help of HN, it's members and a few months and some serious agenda pushing anything can get done. Problem is you all feel so defeated nobody wants to agree on the same agenda.

Like I said. It works. But we know how now. And with all the brain power on HN it's only a matter of time before they start targeting us. And they already have by passing this and putting that shit head in charge of the FCC.

I'm a lawyer whose practice involves privacy issues. My opinion is that identity itself is going to completely unreliable and impossible to verify within my lifetime. When your phone rings and you have absolutely no way of knowing whether the person on the other end is who they say they are, even if you know them well, and even if there is video, biometrics, etc.--that's when personal identity will be truly over. From there, it will progress quickly until even an in-person meeting will be hard to authenticate.

You would probably enjoy Hannu Rajaniemi's work. Even individuals may not know for sure if they're who they think they are.

Thanks for the recommendation. I think we're quite lucky to live in this time before that transition is completed.

> There's no way to defeat these companies

What about working to elect representatives who will pass privacy legislation?

Problem with that being:

If they're not corrupt(-ed) before entering office, they most certainly will be through lobbying (aka "generous donations") once they enter office. Exceptions to this rule are certainly rare and seem to only surface ahead of elections and vanish -again- as soon as they are elected.

And yet this law did get passed in the first place.

Correct. Everything can be solved with more layers of abstaction though. Elect people who will reform lobbying and campaign finance (even if it takes an amendment), eliminate gerrymandering, and fix the other beyond broken parts of the political process. Then maybe we can consider policy.

If even that proves impossible, well, then I guess it would have to come down to violent revolution.

Nope, violent revolution produces worse regimes than what they replace. Emigrate instead.

Lobbying is a serious US problem and sounds absolutely corrupt from European POV, it just makes us more desperate.

> Lobbying is a serious US problem and sounds absolutely corrupt from European POV, it just makes us more desperate.

German here. Absolutely believe there's virtually no difference in that regard. Lobbyists write law proposals that end up being the verbatim law.

That's provably false. If it were true there would be very little difference between the votes of the major political parties on most important issues except around election time. Yet on most major issues there are significant consistent vote differences between Democrats in general and Republicans in general regardless of the nearness of elections.

This would be true if the vote for this bill were not so close.

That helps solve the privacy problem. It doesn't solve the walled garden, monetized, commercial web outcompeting smaller hobbyists who usually have less slick but far deeper or more interesting content.

I remember that in the late 90s through early 2000s, I would regularly see personal sites pop up on my searches through the web, but I'm finding less and less non-commercial content. Either all the search results want to sell me something, or they're optimized to make money off of my clicks.

> I would regularly see personal sites pop up on my searches through the web, but I'm finding less and less non-commercial content.

That's because personal homepages have died off, to be replaced with better replacements - not because Disney and TimeWarner have paid Google to rank their results higher.

For example, Wikipedia (and Wikia) have replaced personal museum websites for all kinds of esoteric information - ditto fansites. For "Prof. Smith's computer science examples webpage" we have GitHub; Reddit has replaced "Links" pages and Webrings, and Google itself has rendered curated directory sites completely obsolete.

The only thing on Geocities and Angelfire/Tripod that Facebook has replaced are those insufferable "The Baker Family Homepage" websites.

> That's because personal homepages have died off, to be replaced with better replacements

Is it really a replacement if it's private and stuck in some walled garden? I don't care about the platform used, I care about the surfacing and availability of non-commercial content.

Why do you consider Wikipedia a private walled garden? Arguably it's freer and less commercial than older personal home pages because of the mandatory copyleft license.

Wikipedia has heavily curated content that must be presented in a certain way, protected from editing by trolls, and is reverted regularly.

Try making a significant change or writing a new article without being mired in beaurocracy.

It's not an example of diverse user-generated content any more. For good reason -- it can't be, if it wants to be considered a useful source on anything.

Here's a tally for S.J.Res 34 with profile links to each representative:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/115-2017/h202

Plenty of dots in there to scape, connect, visualize, and disseminate for anyone looking for a fun way to let off some steam.

A big shout out to the reps on both sides of the aisle that had the guts to stand for what's right.

And anyone reading this should take a minute to check the list to see how their rep voted and take action. The easiest thing to do is call your rep and let them know how you feel about their vote (good or bad), but it's even more affective if you share the link with your friends and family outside of your area. Explain to them why this is a bad idea and point out how their representative voted (good or bad) and make a date to check back with them before the next election.

>> There's no way to defeat these companies, because they are full of people struggling to get ahead and doing their cog's part in the machine that ultimately does this to us all.

I don't think this is true at all. It certainly won't happen fast enough for most people's liking though.

The best example of this is how Microsoft had no option but to do a 180 on open source once it realized that it was turning into an object of ridicule. (Although Windows 10 shows they still have some ways to go). You are really underestimating how powerful peer respect is amongst geeks.

For example, imagine if someone from Google asked you to come work for them in 2002-2004, and said "Our motto is Dont be evil", and suddenly that became a sort of rallying cry and everyone knew who the target was. Imagine if they said the same thing today - they would be laughed off. And that is a great thing. I would guess most geeks working at the tech giants have some part of them thinking they are doing things which really benefit humanity.

Here is a thread where you can see this in effect, when the person's motives are challenged, they become completely defensive. We want more of that. My prediction is at some point there will be serious internal conflict, which is excellent!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13868299

Once more people start making a lot of noise about this in the very places that the geeks wish to hang out, they will find themselves with fewer and fewer places to go hang out. And it will then only be a matter of time before there is a large exodus from the top companies to the more obscure companies - those which can't do much damage simply because they are too small.

At that point, both outcomes would be favorable - either things get so bad that the tech giants implode from internal conflict and external competition, or they will change their behavior so that they can continue to attract the developers who actually care about these things.

Or it could go in the exact opposite direction because everyone stops caring, in which case we are all just completely screwed :-)

I would like to believe you are correct but being the cynical Eastern European that I am, and having a big experience from watching our corrupt governments get away with everything, here's what I think will happen instead:

(1) Companies will become better at deceiving their employees they are not evil, not eliminating small competition, and that they care about privacy and diversity. Many younger devs are as naive as cocker spaniel pups and will easily buy any corporate propaganda.

(2) How will there be an exodus to smaller companies when the giants do their very best to kill competition? Google is known for buying an emerging company in a certain area then quietly shut it down but still keep patents and knowledge for the future, being one prominent example.

(3) People become more and more indifferent every day, I feel, even on HN. I know I am in that group as well. The people who want the internet to be a controlled environment are, as of today, much too powerful and very, VERY persistent. Plus it's not like you can just sue; for a long time now it's not about justice, it's about who has the deeper pockets for lawyers. And that's not you and me.

IMO we're headed for a pretty classic cyberpunk future. I kind of hoped that I will die before that but at the rate things are going... It's pretty scary.

No offense, but you should act the opposite way, if you feel the world is that wrong, think and act

For example here, there is a good example in France there is fdn, an association of very smalls internets providers, they are not companies, but associations,

What if everyone could make an internet provider with no motivation in financial profits...

Maybe it will be a bit more expensive, because it scale less, but trusting you internet provider is priceless.

>Now, I just want to leave my phone at home and go ride my bike.

I understand your sentiment; it sucks.

One can still do stuff that doesn't need net access, computing is a very broad field, not limited to the internet. Or one can search for technological fixes that make it harder to snoop on us ....

Kids love their you tube, god bless them.

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