Larry Ellison weighs asking Elon Musk to bail out Larry Ellison. God knows he needs it and Musk is the only person in the world who has enough cash to make a difference and might be stupid enough to waste it for sentimental reasons. Wake me up when Ellison has to sell Oracle to Carlos Slim for four cents on the dollar.
Nothing strange about it. "Liberty" is a euphemism for unaccountability, and libertarianism, probed with steel, advocates only that business must be above the law. Most predictable ever.
Any discussion of this must center the fact that the surveillance began in Jan.-Feb. 2001, NOT after 11 September. The one telecom executive who objected was instantly framed into prison.
There are no blue states. There are only blue cities. If they wish to "secede", what that indicates is that they have not thought through how easy it is to block a road.
It is easy to say that we live in a bad time. It is also empty, because there has never been a good time, and because each bad time-and-place (h/t Tolstoy) is bad for its own reasons, which must be accurately understood in order for "bad" to have semantics and not just be a primal scream. Then, your reasons need not be anyone else's reasons: new levels of emptiness. Extracting meaning from this is not easy and is not meant to be easy. My own view is that that last fact implies that the wrong questions are being asked. That's as far as I've got, after disproportionate time.
Censorship isn't done because it "works", just as torture is not. The public discourse is worth protecting IFF people think it is. (There are things that Freddie-baby wants it protected from. (The preceding sentence is one of them.))
None of the above. If (as is far too likely) AI is given any "control" over infrastructure -- the power grid and banking come first to mind; transportation might be a little more resilient -- the results could cascade into a general collapse.
It had more to do with the ecosystems and the corporate relationship. The -10s came from a earlier perspective. It was open source before "open source". You bought the software and you got the source, because of course you did, you couldn't even install it otherwise. Compuserve tracked TOPS-10 up to version 6.01, with their own additions and patches: far-reaching but well encapsulated. They could not track 6.03, so they "forked" it, to use the modern word. The question of support was always fraught. Compuserve offered all of their changes to DEC, who mostly sniffed at them. But from DEC's perspective, one of the major purposes of the VAX platform was to lock all that kind of thing down and go to a support model more like that of IBM.
Systems Concepts may have had other prospects, but they had so much trouble getting the product out the door that Compuserve ultimately helped them finish it, licensed it (? exclusively), and produced all but a couple of the machines that went into production. I found a microcode bug in one of the first SC-built machines that caused the string-comparison instruction to return true whether or not; Gary Brown took that to SC and reported their reaction as "Damn, you caught us!", and that was kind of the end of that. You might have some stories to tell of the flight from X.25...?
There is a guy on YouTube playing with SC-40s who has part of the TOPS-10 based stack, which I guess is what you mean. The Internetty stuff went by the umbrella name of HMI (Host-Micro Interface) and was guarded like the recipe for Coca-Cola. The boundary between the server and client was...fractal. Everything was about saving/spoofing bandwidth. The "browser", WinCIM, contained a huge library of UI element templates.
I was there. What killed Compuserve was an attempt to build an entire back-end infrastructure, software and hardware, de novo, using immature consumer-grade technology. It was a shocking thing to witness from the inside. The pivot from proprietary to open-standard was not the problem. The problem was trying to build a software ecosystem in which no one knew what they were doing and the OS (Windows NT) didn't work yet, and to populate a data center with almost-but-not-quite redundant commmodity compute and networking. Came time for the big relaunch ("WOW!") and for every person who succeeded in signing up for the new service, ten others tried and failed. No one could come back from that.
All of your questions assume that prevention has already failed (where never-being-attempted is a category of failure). In this, you are in numerous, perhaps effectively universal, company.
Humans are born mad; the purpose of education (a concept that goes beyond, and before, any kind of school) is to heal them. I was taught: an unpleasant process, but looking back, I wouldn't have missed it. Looking around me, I see people who not only were not taught but cannot conceive of the nature or purpose of such a thing.