
How the Internet Turned Bad - Osiris30
https://hackernoon.com/how-the-internet-turned-bad-b85b079ac45f
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missingPieces
There are many more facets to the internet now, than there were in 1999, prior
to the dotcom boom and subsequent crash, when visions of a future with no
downsides prevailed.

The only real problem the internet had to deal with at the time was spam and
indexing.

Broadband didn't exist, so video didn't exist, high resolution touchscreens
didn't exist, so smartphones didn't exist, and most importantly nothing was
secured, and almost everyone (in the civilian, commercial sectors (†) was
(often, willfully) naive to the cold hard facts which outlined why security is
important.

Security, of course, has been the real cross-cutting driver of change. It took
about a decade for serious malicious behavior to materialize in full, but it
really ramped up after file sharing threatened old media, and was retaliated
against, in the form of spiking peer-to-peer file shares with poisoned files.
Then other actors appeared, and branched into spyware and identity theft, and
more.

Security is hard, and people have pretty much been herded into the handful of
large walled gardens, because no one has the energy to fight a fight that can
kill industrialized nations. After all, information security is what killed
the Axis powers, with the compromise of Enigma and Purple during World War II.
[0,1] Are regular people supposed to succeed where armies have failed?

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enigma_machine)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_code)

(†) We know that non-civilian actors knew better all along. This is why Pretty
Good Privacy had been banned as a munition even in 1993.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#History)

