Even before opening this article I knew it would be
overflowing with cries to drop this self-dependency stupidity and
just surrender to the corporate gods.
Hello friend. Perhaps you haven't noticed - Slashdot's original
core crowd left a long, long time ago. Sure, we (the original,
older crowd) stop in now and then, but the generational gap here is
growing, and daily.
For most of the (new) Slashdot folk here, the corporate way of
life is the only life they relate to. Silicon Valley apparently has
gone from "daring to make changes that affect future generations
in a positive way by doing cool and new things" to "how can
we suck the corporate teet hard enough to milk dollars into us before
our VC funding dries up". This mentality is not just there, but
everywhere; it's spreading, and it appears to be a function of how
the current generation of programmers, web designers, engineers, and
many many others have been taught. And in some cases, even how they
were raised as kids.
It's OK though. There are enough of us, the so-called
“neckbeards”, out there to know better, and we're lurking
quietly in the background. Sooner or later, the more deluded ones
will completely fuck things up, and they will come crying with their
boo-boos and howling in pain. And we'll just have to step in and
clean up the scrape, put a band-aid over the top, and send them back
out. Because, for some reason I haven't been able to trace yet, the
next generation's method of learning has been completely stunted.
They don't ask why anymore, they only ask how. More on
that in a moment...
In the meantime, it's funnier than hell to watch them just fuck
things up, and then they wonder why things don't work like they
should, and then they re-invent the wheel to fix a problem that only
existed in their head to begin with...
You're just aware of this transition now? Well, better late than
never, I suppose.
What is the purpose of free software if you are not
supposed to use your freedom? You can build your system using open
standards, install an open source OS with an open source mail server.
But you will get blocked because you are not a business? More over,
what is the purpose of freedom when you are not supposed to exercise
it? It really has come to the point where "freedom" means
"freedom to work for the system".
This is the Grand Co-optment of both the Internet and the Open
Source movement. The PTB have long known (and feared) these two
disrupting factors, but they've since found a way to get sheeple
the upcoming echo of the boomer generation to come around, and are
still hell-bent on subjugating both of those phenomena to their
interests.
With regard to the Internet, the transition from an open "network
of networks" to a completely sealed and monitored panopticon is
nearly complete. Hosting a home server in this day and age is
promoted as "an anachronism", or "a throwback".
The road blocks thrown up for home use are intentional - we don't
want you to do your own thing, we want you to consume our
services , because all you are to us is a tube that we ram
worthless crap down the front of, and dollar bills get shit out the
back of you. This is pretty much how the major corporate entities
see everyone, even their own employees. This isn't about
defending networks from spam, it's all about making a profit from
hosted services. Any idiot would realize that sealing port 25 on
home DSL/Cable/Fiber routers does jack shit – a good
virus/malware writer would simply move the port around to 2525 or
even employ SSL. But try to get a connection to port 25 on your home
router. There's about an 80% chance (plucked that figure from the
top of my head based on empirical observation only) that you just
can't do it. Why? Because – gawd forbid – Joe Sixpack
might actually realize that he doesn't need the cable company or the
telco company for anything else other than the “data pipe”
coming into his home.
With regard to Open Source, the slow and insidious inclusion of
commercial interests have succeeded in debasing the real value of the
movement. Open Source is now synonymous with "low cost",
instead of what it should have been - freedom. This works out great -
now those corporate interests can start charging you money for
something that you could get for free. That's how desperate things
have become. Think about it - why pack a bottle of your own tap water
for pennies, when you can buy bottled water for several multiples of
what it costs you? The same thinking applies to just about any
resource that can be had at no cost or extremely low cost, and what
used to be free software is no different. Sooner or later, the
micro-transaction system will grow up to be the monster that it
really is - corporate interests aspire to have a major
transaction for everything in the waking moments of your life.
Don't believe me? Start searching back from about '98 onward, and
start jotting down the trends over a time line. Watch as the profit
motive is used to justify twisting things to increase the power of
very specific interests, instead of its original intended purpose -
to inspire and make people want to do the best they can.
It should not be like this, it doesn't have to be like
this. There's plenty of solutions, something like WoT can be build to
prevent spam much better than a simple "block everything not
from gmail yahoo or hotmail" that's just business whoring.
Agreed. As an email server admin of over 8+ years, I can tell you
from personal experience, that the so-called horror stories are
nothing more than that - just stories. Running a
Postfix/SpamAssassin/Amavis setup, I rarely spend more than 24-36
hours a year doing anything of note. The people grousing about
"it'll eat your time and babies" simply don't know what the
fuck they are doing. There's a simple solution for that. Buy a
fucking book, and read it. It's amazing what you can learn once
you read about why a feature was implemented, instead of what
the feature does. For example, the O'Reilly Postfix book is small,
light reading, and the small size of it shows you just how simple it
can really be.
But no...that would take precious, precious time to actually learn
about something, instead of sticking to the mentality that pervades
the industry now. Because when you only ask how, it's so very
easy to make a sales pitch for some kind of shovelware product that
whitens your shirts and saves kittens when you buy it. And when that
happens, it's very important to ignore the why of it...
Instead of actually knowing what the fuck you're doing.
And that is the true threat – people waking up to the
fact that they don't need all this crap anymore. It's “think
of the children!” applied to the corporate mentality, only this
time the corporations are screaming “think of the lost profits
and mass layoffs!”.
