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| Change.
It's defined as "verb - to make or become different" by webster. It also defines the flux of today's internet experience. I've been online for a long time, and while I could go off on a hundred different tangents about the crappy modems and hundreds of BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) that I used, suffice to say things were a lot more "cozy" and "personal" than they are now. One big bonus, I really enjoy the speed of today's connections, and the webservers for most of the sites I go to are blindingly fast, serving up pages before I can even blink between mouse clicks. The downside? As a resource becomes more "common" or used with minimal cost, a certain inevitable process creeps in called simply, "Tragedy of the Commons". (See two resources about this, notably at this site and here is a reference to crowd behavior applicable to the online 'crowds' now inhabiting the net.) Whether you know it or not, you see this online quite frequently. The most obvious example would be online gaming. I've had friends ask me why I don't play certain games. It really isn't because I wouldn't like them or find them fun to play with other people, it is just a sad fact that as the internet has become more accessible and gaming has made substantial inroads to a more populous user base, that the online experience has begun to degrade. I realize that it can depend on the safeguards enacted by the developer team working on any given game, but most of the responsibility to sustain a pleasant playing experience is thrust upon the gamer. If I'm determined enough, without exploiting any game design holes or using custom tools designed to sit between my machine and the server to insert bogus information, I can act in such a way that will immediately start to affect the players online with me. It doesn't take much. Hell, it can even be an offensive nickname, or just someone abusing the "chat" ability of most games to flood other people or launch text abuse at them. The cycle seems to be that as more access is granted to whatever "space", and the cost for that access is diminished over time, that the abuse and exploitation rises with it. Luckily this doesn't extend to websites...or does it? When you play online, you select a server out of a list of hundreds, and then further reduce that list to the ones that are close to you (from a latency perspective) and make your final choice based on that final collection of servers. This makes it difficult to avoid troublemakers and other people driven to inexplicably ruin the online experience for everyone. Websites on the other hand, are numerous and you usually don't have to be too selective about where you go, sites hosted in japan load nearly as fast as those near you - it is practically transparent. One small problem. What degrades the online experience as fast as a cheater in your favorite online game? That's right, obnoxious advertising. Who doesn't know about the still-continual assault of the "X10" camera folks? Just in case you've been under a rock, they have "pop-under" ads that just flash annoying shockwave-based ads at you, trying desperately to get you to buy their webcam-looking products. They also have the annoying tendency to be served by popular sites. Ah, there we go - the "Tragedy of the Commons" again. In fact, web-based ads and spam only continue to flourish because there is a customer base for them. And why is that, you may ask? Because people, however baffling it may be to you and me, still provide enough of a response to these tactics that make them a viable business option when selling things to online denizens. The popularity of the internet has allowed other things to happen, such as a infection vector for digital viruses, fileswapping and other "dangerous" activities (depending on your perspective). The population that allows flow of information and other positive things about the net will also bring its downfall, as shown by Microsoft's new plan to lock down the entire thing down to the protocol stack. So, the future. What do we have to look forward to? I'm not too optimistic, and as supporting evidence suggests (Palladium - The Digital Rights Management nightmare.) we may have to suffer through the net becoming so intensely commodified and locked down that the only real alternative will be some kind of "Undernet" (not in the IRC sense) that will coexist or rewrite protocols to former open standards. In one way, open source may be the only thing standing between a regimented corporate controlled network and the freewheeling open network we grew up on. Here's hoping the trough of the cycle will pass quickly. Then I can complain about the "Commons" again on the new network. :) Desiato desiato_hotblack @ hotmail.com |
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