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Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

I miss the early 90s and 2000s when governments were still struggling to understand what the internet was, rather than trying to control it.

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Did that time ever really exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

I also remember writing some (naive) crypto tools as a kid and I had to report it to permit re-export from the US.

Also, the DMCA is from the nineties:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

Wow those are interesting.

I'll need to do some digging on the UK government, to see what they were up to back then.

I concur that it's unlikely that time ever really existed, at least in the US.

After all, the internet came directly from the Department of Defense funded ARPANET. Before that, computers were so expensive and large that realistically only governments or large companies could fund even routine work with them.

I suppose all that's changed is now the average human is on the internet. I mean that literally, since it seems that we are about to cross the threshold of 50% of humanity using the internet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Internet_usage).

So the things governments wish to do on the internet are more and in line with things that involve the population at large. For better or worse (mostly the latter, IMO) that involves lots of intelligence gathering, copyright enforcement, and national security work.

I remember the US federal govt. hired around 20 Unix sysadmins around 1984-1985 to monitor/archive IRC and newsfeeds (pre-WWW.)

The ban on the export of cryptography strikes me as a great example of the US Government misunderstanding technology - I don't see how it's remotely possible for a ban on exporting ideas to affect bad actors in any way.

This is an example of you misunderstanding the US Government's motives for labeling crypto as a non-exportable weapon. ;)

If they had been able to keep it up, they would have. Unfortunately for them, practicality won over here once it began to threaten corporate profits.

And this is an example of a meta-misunderstanding that the motives for labeling crypto as non-exportable with clamorous pleas for backdoors to get the public frightened and then finally reassuringly concede to overwhelming defeat with the eventuality of the practical vision held by academia, industry, and especially prescient revolutionary anarchist-libertarians for ironclad strength of a ubiquitous crypto primitive monoculture praised for its open standards detailing specifically its applicability for hierarchical control, designed by a completely unbiased select group of security researchers whose proposals are judged to consensus, tweaked to optimal security parameters for the benefit of all with lovingly chosen constants that couldn't possibly be related to undisclosed attacks the previous standards that were replaced suffered from requiring update once a few undesirables got wind, who rightly espouse a fundamental belief in the professional exclusivity of implementation and analysis while making sure to mentor the next generation in extensive confidence with complexity conjectures based on buried assumptions, gently redirecting their pupils towards the future away from the glaring history of churned systems, compromised research, and perverse financial/legal/social incentives of keeping the ball rolling gently, are not just two sides of the same coin.

"Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics."

-- Accelerando by Charles Stross (cstross around here), first part published in 2001

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

I remember in the 90's being unsure if I should be afraid of echelon or if it was just a conspiracy theory. It was very real.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Problem is they still don't understand what the internet is and want to control it

What? This was never the case. Especially china.

The internet was born from a Department of Defense project (ARPANET). The british, french, etc governments were also early internet players. Every major power understood the internet.

It's why china in the 90s/00s decided to create their own internet companies. It's why we have alibaba, baidu, tencent, etc. The same thing with russia. The same thing with south korea and japan.

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