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The Internet

What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like? 165

Posted by Cliff from the peering-into-the-next-century dept.
kayser_soze asks: "I am curious as to what you guys at Slashdot think of the way the Internet as a whole will develop in the near, and not-so-near future. Personally, I always imagine something akin to the ideas William Gibson has written about in his books: a global matrix of information to which all have access. How do other people envision the Internet to come? What technologies do you guys see becoming prevalent, what things will become obsolete, and what are the most far-fetched things you can imagine will happen?"
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What Will the Internet of the Future Be Like? More

What Will the Internet of the Future Be Like?

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  • He didn't happen to work for the phone company [amazon.com]?
  • Well one thing I predict that all audio and video media will travel over the net. I'm hoping that within 5 to 10 years I will be able to order 30 episodes of the Simpons and instantly have a simpons marathon.

    I also see the emergence of server's in every home. Being able to log into your home machine from work or travel will be a common operation. The World Wide Web will continue to evolve, and all common applications like spreadsheet and word proccesors will operate in some ultra-modern HTML.

    Phones of course, will be over the net. I doubt they will be able to still charge for "long distance".

    -Jon

  • what will the net be like? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Idont know what it will be like

    but i guess i will have to install some new plugg-ins for my browser to see it.
  • The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell [gac.edu]'s Relation Arithmetic [geocities.com]. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing [rdrop.com]). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee [ruku.com] calls the semantic web [w3.org]. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's [stanford.edu] signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

    When I invented the precursor to Postscript [berkeley.edu] (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS [ucl.co.jp] which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America [uiuc.edu] back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC [rwth-aachen.de] guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine [cmu.edu] migrate into silicon (ala Novix [bournemouth.ac.uk]) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak [squeak.org]) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

    Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare [ox.ac.uk]'s "communicating sequential processes [bton.ac.uk]" paradigm and its Transputer [loyola.edu] realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart [mozart-oz.org], since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre [davis.ca.us]" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam [bton.ac.uk]") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses [ox.ac.uk] about this issue.)

    Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan [utk.edu], then, of The Naval Postgraduate School [navy.mil], and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay [sheridanc.on.ca] at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs [apple.com]. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed [reed.com]'s work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes [lotus.com] was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato [thinkofit.com] days by the name of Ray Ozzie [cio.com] -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac [mactech.com] which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT [bton.ac.uk] which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT. [umd.edu]

    This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript [netscape.com]-based technologies like Tibet [technicalpursuit.com] promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS [neu.edu] and Self [sunlabs.com]. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata [w3.org]" in the form of XML [w3.org] -- particularly when it comes to speech acts [ohiou.edu] and distributed inference [w3.org]. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

    We are now poised to move forward with type inference [sun.com] based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

    The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

    Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

    Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

    And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic [hps.elte.hu] failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

    The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard [pair.com] did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

  • We plan on multiple 3D virtual channels operating in parallel. Each VR channel will have its own content and our customers will be able to smoothly transition between channels via environment selection off of our web presence. There will be entertainment channels, where complex, multiplayer 3D worlds are navigated in adventure fashion. There will be e-commerce channels and 3D storefronts. The 3D storefronts will allow our customers to examine and purchase products in full 3D. Our virtual storefronts will have the ability to be staffed by knowledgeable clerks able to answer questions via an audio channel inside of the virtual environment. Virtual community channels will be available depending on the synchronicity of customer interests. Our customers will be able to homestead in our virtual communities. They will be able to meet with their friends in virtual space for interest area discussions or just chat. Our customers will be able to create their own corner of the virtual space they desire to occupy. We will have virtual education channels where our customers will be able to attend lecturers and presentations in virtual space. Imagine virtual tours of historic sites by educated docents. -- Excerpt from our doc to the VCs
  • Hmm, this is wonderfull topic, is not it - will Microsoft be ever delivering INTERNET OS which would replace UNIX as a king? I mean in the serious way of asking, Microsoft is a great software engineering company of the proprietery traditional kind. It is having being able successfully, build products for consumers, and close to consumers customers. In the every market they started they have succeeded. Could such/this company create a product which will make internet creation/ maintenence / adminsitration / life easier and better as Windows 2000 making it better for the corporate administrator? This is not really clear for me, I am perhaps not technical enough. So far it is not the case, and imagining even Windows 2000 at the backbone of the internet looks like nightmare. Internet is eveolving too fast to have closed or semi closed technology behind it, everybody is tweaking it to their favor. But then again everything changes, and slows down... Will it be enough time for Microsoft before natural enthropy destroys their company somehow? Or perhaps, this is stupid question since I guess U.S. government would not allow that, so then they have no chances... It is still an interesting theoretical question to be asked here. What do others think? On the abstract side... Perhaps it should replace the air and light - those are mostly the things through which people communicate, and gather information. The problem of course is that communication through air and light is rather free, and no one could possibly control it. On the techinical side of course there are rather more intersting questions about which protocols, which format of data mostly - it is easy to fill internet with sound/video but then how informative is that? Perhaps another way to get some help of the internet is to decrease travel neccesisty to gather info, something like virtual travel - you wear some kind of equipment and then you are inside the "android" of some kind which walks, talks, hears, sees, smells for you as well as behaves like you. That is the only reasonable way to travel faster, but that's a lot of information. And then again, the problem is of course that you need to deal with all of this info. F.e. - www.google.com is good now to find staff, but 10 years from now? May be not.

  • You want to know what will happen to the net? Then look at TV. Honestly. They both started on the same educational ideal (well actually the net first started military, but its public release was to the universities for educational purposes). With TV, people thought everybody could see and hear the greatest operas, plays, and cultural events in there own living room. And what has come of this? Advertising, advertising, advertising.... that and the quality of the programs themselves are way down. Have you watched much TV lately? I can count the number of shows I consider "good" on one hand, and even then, they're good in the kind of crappy funny way.

    And the same thing is happening to the net. What people initially thought would be a way for everybody to access all the wisdom of everybody else has turned into so much else. The omnipresent ad banners are just.... hideous. And the ad banners are just the beginning. All of these .com IPOs are pretty ridiculous as well. All in all, it's the same thing all over again.

    Now I'm not preaching against capitalism. I just thing that capitalism shouldn't necessarily be strictly applied to mediums of communication. Both TV and the Net would be sooooo much better without it.

  • Re:musing on The 'Net (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @09:10AM (#1043799) Homepage
    You can already do that in many places. I can order a pizza on the web from Pappa John's [papajohns.com] and the order is automagically relayed to a printer at the local franchise.
  • you mean you actually use 8 bit embedded controllers - you wus! Real hackers do it with bread boards and homemade transisters attached to giant 12V batteries. You've been spoiled by those sissy "prefab" silicone devices. sheesh.
  • Get real, Rev. Most of the known world knows nothing of the net. My inlaws in Kagbatung, Masbate, Philippines are more concerned about drought, floods and snakes in their grass roof then whether there will be sufficient band width for our future needs. Given how the net has changed in the last 3-4 years, I'm not sure that they're not better off. They really have no need for Amazon.com... they never learned to read. The nearest telephone is a day's travel away through the jungle. This net that we all know and love is widening the gap.
  • Sooner than later the PC, as our primary method of access to the internet should by some sort of routing-appliance attached through our entertainment consoles, from there we will access the internet via smaller appliances specific to thier utility. commerce, news and entertainment will be better handled by each having thier own protocols and will be "banded" with different frequencies achieving multiple broadband connections through a single medium. (burp)
  • Yes it is depressing, however if I remember back to my days at College, it was the money driven types who ended up on the corporate consultancy gravy train, making their money but doing nothing for the art, it was the geeks who ended up doing the interesting, albeit financially unrewarding stuff, there will always be geek kids and the _quantum leaps_ in the shape of the future internet will always be inside their heads. Needless to say the suits will make money out of selling it to no brain corporations, but the geeks really aren't interested in this aspect of the future Sig removed due to lack of imagination.
  • The future, as we know it - will likely throw back to older times where we are a more closely knit and socially alive society. Technologically speaking we will have, by necessity, dealt with the disappearance of oil reserves by 2050, the outbreak of major virus plagues by 2010, and one day, a comet. The net will go on, however, even without us. The net is likely the next form of life we will inhabit. That is a much longer view. I will stick to cellphones: good resources are available at Barnes and Nobles for this kind of thing.
  • The problem with the internet is not the "big corporations" or The Man. The problem is the people behind the terminals. Most of the views of the future present this vast sea of information which anyone can peruse, but what happens when people do not want to give up their information? Movements like open source will expand our knowledge a hundredfold, but until everyone embraces them, nothing will come to fruition. It's like the file sharing programs like Napster, Gnutella, etc. If someone chooses, they can share all the files they have, for the benefit of others. But some people just go in to leech, and sadly there are more leeches than sharers. I'm afraid that's the way things are.

    Which leads to the problem of greed. People are greedy. You, me, everyone around us is. There is no way around it, it is in our nature. So what? Well, that means that instead of everyone just pooling their resources into one venture, like the "Total Complete Unified Universal Encyclopedia" we will always have separate companies that keep their information under tight control and will never reach this data utopia.

    Which of course leads into the next point, of copyrights. Now, I believe it is completly fair for ANYONE to hold a copyright on something they have created, be it text or music or visual arts. But the whole reason for having a copyright is because people are not honest. People rip of each other's work and don't thank the originator. They profit from someone else's labor without giving that person what's due. They download MP3s to "sample" the music, yet if they like a song, they will just download the whole CD instead of buying it. And no, the fact that company "pigs" set the prices way up there is not an excuse for stealing.

    Now, if everyone just learned to be not greedy, and actually behave like moral, honest human beings (oxymoron eh?) then the view of a promising future could be a reality. Always keep in mind, that we have all these laws because people are unable to auto-regulate themselves. Sadly, a Star Trek like world where money does not exist anymore will always stay in the realm of fiction.
  • How far into the future will that take? Remember that 40 years ago, people thought that we would be wearing space suits, using jetpacks, and flying around space. Things like that get over-rated. I predict that 10 years from now, the computer industry will be mucho faster yes, but it all depends on what the government allows us to have access to. They just recently unlocked the power of the GPS (so to speak) and don't forget that all the technology that we get is always used federally first. LCD screens, gps, the internet, they were all federally funded projects. Keep that in mind. I do wish I had a jetpack though. =)
  • Wtf does that have to do with anything, smart guy?
  • Just some thoughts I typed up a while ago. Their might be a better way to implement this than the one I discuss, its just what came to me at the time and I haven't had much time to work on it since then.

    ------------------------------

    Imagine being able to go out for a night on the town, party for hours, have a great time, and never leave your house. Imagine being able to physically interact with people without being in the same room as them. Imagine being able to sit down on your couch and visit the Louvre. Imagine being able to completely submerse yourself in another world whenever you got tired of reality. Imagine the future.

    If you want something bad enough, anything, it can be yours in reality. In the Internet of the future, you can have anything just by thinking about it. The Internet of the future will be a fully realized replication of reality, only better. It will be what reality would be like if magic was real. The future Internet will be what I like to call an "X-Windows to the Soul".

    The future is being built as we speak. As 3D engines get closer and closer to reality they become the software that it will be built upon. As research in electronic implants in the human body progresses it becomes the hardware that will create the interface. Researchers today are already making implants that can communicate with, and even control, the nervous system. Implants that can input information directly to the five senses are not far off, and once they are a reality the hardware will be ready.

    The system will be built upon a worldwide, wireless, network of these implants communicating with strategically located, and incredibly powerful, servers. The implants themselves will act as video cards and sound cards do in computers today, giving the monitor and speakers, which will be the brain, the information it needs to create the user environment. The servers will manage central processing of information. Servers will also store data, but the users will be able to use memory cards placed into dataports in their skin for local storage.

    If you think e-commerce has reached its peak with showing pictures of products on two-dimensional pages with text to communicate with consumers get ready for a surprise. In the future the client will be able to see the product, touch the product, hear the product, taste the product, and smell the product in real time. Bots will interact with the client, answering questions and helping them in any way possible during the sale. It will be easier for clients to get exactly what they need and easier for companies to help them do so.

    All information sent from the implants to the servers that will manage the buildings and streets of this world (which are separate from the user information processing servers), and back will be encrypted with the strongest possible encryption. This will allow users to feel more comfortable about making secure online transactions, as well as providing for secure corporate extranets.

    The sensory input system will be fully user configurable. If the user doesn't want input from any of the five sense systems he can simply turn it off or turn it 'down' to a lower level. For sound this means volume; for taste, touch, and smell, this means intensity; for vision it means different visual modes. Sometimes it might be more practical to work with a simple two-dimensional interface, like the computers of today. Sometimes a user may want to be able to see what is happening in both the real world and the virtual world. There are two methods by which this may be accomplished. The user could set the input to only part of his field of vision. The user could also make the input transparent, allowing him to see reality through the virtual view. These visual options could be used in any combination. I could, for example, see a transparent three-dimensional input in only half of my field of vision.

    The implants will be far more cost efficient than computers of the past. In the past you needed a computer at home, a computer at work, a computer at school, and sometimes more at each location. With the implant not only does one computer complete the task in all of these places, but it does it everywhere. And that is only if you want to leave home to go to work. Ever wanted to spend the rest of the day in bed but had to go to work? Just turn on full sensory input and take a trip to your offices counterpart in the virtual world. Now you can spend the rest of the day in bed and go to work.
    ________________________________________________ _______

  • Once we've got rid of all those pesky television transmissions clogging up the airwaves we can all have cellular broadband wireless networking - Mmm.... Of course, everything anyone sends will have to be strongly encrypted - there'll be none of this "anyone who uses encryption must have something to hide" rubbish any more. (Call me an optimist if you like...)

    And we'll need some sort of ingenious indexing system to find useful stuff amongst all that information. Today's search engines are good, but they still don't quite cut the mustard in all situations.

    I just hope that all the protocols are free and open so that nobody's locked out.
  • Jaron Lanier (a pioneer of VR) talked of post-symbolic communication, in which the maliability of cyberspace was more expressive than abstracted language. In the meantime, we still speak in sentences and words. I think invoking and controlling apps will be as easy as speaking them out, "invoking spells" if you will.

    Yet the power struggle of personal empowerment versus corporate greed tends to battle, cycling over one another. (The same people who empowered us with MSBASIC in every old home computer are now the same ones who hide APIs internally.) Since programs can not only include trojan horses and logic bombs, and lisencing has become a funny rat's maze of contractual obligations, the battle is bound to get interesting. Perhaps the very programs we "summon" will be difficult to "subjegate."(Yeah, wouldn't that make an interesting CyberPunk premise... Run with it!)

    M$ has proven that a corporation can wage Cold Warfare on its own customers and partners. GNU and Open Source movements have shown that the people don't have to subject themselves to that food chain if they don't want to. Protests in "the revolt" aren't as subtle as M$'s ways... perhaps they're "hot warfare" although far short of the extreme warfare seen in nuclear exchange.

    Hot and Cold running warfare. In the end, it's all very low energy physics, frigid by the cosmic scale. Programs are written either for the left-brain drudgery of corporate protocol, or for the expression of personal creativity.

  • Considering that the original "backbone" data line AT&T installed for ARPANET was a ~50K line, I would say that evolution is the most probable path. Another thing to consider is the very thing that makes networks so valuable, Metcafs law, also makes it more difficult to get all of the internetworking people to make changes together.


    ___

  • Soon we will have devices that we can hook up to our brain, which will connect us to the 'net. The 'net by then would become the collective conscious of the human race. And more than just the conscious... all info ever accumulated by the human race would also be available.

    No more GUIs or human-computer interfaces... all will be available and accessable with just a thought. 8^D
  • One thing I've noticed in the short life of the Internet and computer networking in general is that people don't seem to put up with "suit" behavior for very long. It is somewhat easy to show that the general Internet, as precieved by the average person, is already suffering from rot. When a new method of communications come along, it will either be absorbed by the mainstream (IE: web sites) or left to the fringe (IE: newsgroups). Anyone remember gopher servers? They were wonderful basic ways of navagating the various text and telnet resources of the Internet at that time. Unfortunatly, they have mostly been replaced and shut down now due to lack of use. But, the protocol is still out there, and if geeks or other folks see the web as getting too commercial or messy, they have an option. (and would work great on all those web phones)

    Also, there's no reason why people can't form another grass roots network. With telecom prices falling daily, projects like the Linux router making a 486 into a decent, useful router, and telecom deregulation a reality, there is little reason to believe that it is not possible to build your own backbone (using wireless, perhaps?). Sure you may not be able to make any money at it, but from what I've seen of the .coms, I have my doubts that anyone will be showing profit anytime soon.

    One last thing: Ham radio is dead (or, at least terminal). All the guys are over 50, and there are very few young people getting into the hobby. There is a large chunk of spectrum available, including very long distance bands, that specifically cannot pass commercial traffic. There is a real chance to recharge the hobby with getting higher speed, Internet-like networks working over these bands, but no one seems interested in doing the work (including myself, I guess). This is a golden oppertunity to create a network that can't be touched by the "suits," and push the state of the art as well. And getting your license is just about as easy as filling out a form, so it would be easy to get people signed up.

  • People will eventually release worms onto the Net which are autonomous, semi-intelligent, and self-replicating. The best of these worms will survive on the net and rapidly evolve into artificial creatures that will not be controllable, though it will be tried.

    Eventually they will develop a low-grade of semi-intelligence and begin engaging in primitive activities such as posting first posts to slashdot and threatening copyright infringment suits.

  • It makes way too much money to go totally non-commercial.

    The net as it is wouldn't exist without commercial funding. And it certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as useful. So a totally non-commercial net would be as bad.

    The problem is striking the right balance

  • The net seems to move toward a giant TVfication, I mean ads and stupid pointless big sites diffusing intox into the steady looking led-as-blind audience pool (panurgian sheeps, beeeh)... Maybe I would like a revolution and the becoming of a new democracy life structure. But well, I don't know.

  • Where are these ads again?

    I have decided to thoroughly support adblocking. I believe (but I can't prove) that if you can't support your site without ads, you have lower quality stuff. Take PBS... no matter how people complain about their fundraising campaigns, it's still here. And it's the only radio station on the dial (monopoly alert) that plays classical music. (WNED FM, 94.5 MHz, Buffalo NY) So I say that a non-commercial web can exist, it will just be sans news... like a library.


    -- LoonXTall
  • Babylon of "Standards." In Genesis, God foiled the Babylons by confusing their language so they could no longer understand one another. Any similarities to the present state of computing technology chaos? 1010011010...

  • Virtual Reality is a matter of time. (Score:3)

    by belgin ( 111046 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @09:58AM (#1043819) Homepage
    You didn't say how far into the future of the internet we are talking, so I am going to jump ahead at least four decades. Virtual Reality. Can we do it with technology we have now? Possibly. If we had the advances in broadband access that I expect in the next decade or two, people WOULD be developing VR. We have it in a very limited sense in a few settings already, but it is simply a matter of focusing a few major companies to throw money at it for ten years or so.

    Now once VR is a reality, I would expect that the cost for access would rise just a bit. I expect that there will be two types of stratification that emerge at the beginning: coders vs. non-coders and rich vs. poor. The coders would be the people who could actively modify their simulations on the fly, possibly even while in a public area where things are supposed to be set. These would be like the hackers and crackers of today. Non-coders are stuck in the ride that they were given. In gaming, the rich/poor stratification is already happening. A player with a 1.2 Ghz Athlon, the best video card, and a T3 connection has a bit of an advantage over a person using a Celeron 400 over a 56.6 modem. In VR this gulf would get wider as a person with a lot of money could afford to stay on the net more, have the best equipment, buy special code, and have specialized devices to give advantages in various situations. Such people also will be likely to find less and less reason to leave home and may eventually build there real-life homes as glorified bedrooms with kitchens, because everything else they need and want is on the net.

    As to the net itself, I forsee it developing a UN-style administrative counsel from the countries with heavy net usage. I see business and government comandeering about 75-90% of the web resources with the rest distributed to various individuals and organizations. There will be various disassociated networks that are difficult or impossible to get to via the net for when people want security or to get away from the rest of the netizens. Most literature, vacations, shopping, etc. will all be accessable via the net. Teaching about almost anything would be done via VR. Many people with good net access will suffer a decline in physical health due to simple lack of activity. In short, I see it being much like the first half of Tad Williams's book: Otherland: City of Golden Shadow.

    B. Elgin

  • I think that we'll be able to connect to it directly from our minds... ala The Matrix... and information can just be uploaded to our memory, and we can walk around in a virtual world and talk to each other as if it were real... except without physical limitations. Then no one would want to leave that world. And i think that we'll communicate with Artificial Life beings too, and they will be no different from real humans. Who would need drugs to cope? Although, the people who could not rectify this virtually real world with the real world in their mind would probably go insane or something.

  • It all depends on whether the corparate side of the net can see that if they overregulate the net for their own personal gains they'll be destroying it at the same time.

    As long as the net doesn't become nothing but a bland advertsing exercise then interesting things will continue to happen. Otherwise, everyone with any innovation left in them will get bored and start looking for "the next big thing". Which would be a shame cos there's still loads of innovating left to do online.

    or maybe I'm being optimistic...

  • I like to think of the internet of the future as we see electricity today - ubiquitous, invisible, and standard.

    Past that, I think they'll be much greater commercialization of the internet in general, it will be THE media source; there'll be one wire with data, audio, video and holography, and your house will have it all. The age of the internet applience is here and will continue to become more important, with all your appliences talking to eachother, keeping your house as you'd like it and as you program it.

    I hope to see voice control of computers soon that does not require training on the part of the user, along with natural voice recognition. Once this is accomplished, so much more is possible, and so many more people will be able to interact with their digital world.

    I dream of having every document digitized and searchable - every book, magazine, report, study and gov't document - all at our fingertips. Luckily enough, this dream is possible.

    The internet is, and will continue to be, everywhere. Hopefully we will notice it less and less, until it's just a part of our lives and we use it for ANY communications need we have. There's nothing else quite like having information for those that want it.

    The Good Reverend
  • ...Yet we insist on using a network protocol that allows for casual network probing, port scanning, untraceable DOS attacks, spoofing, snooping, and so forth that requires effort to secure from the defaults. (i.e. firewalls, anti-spoofing filters, add-on encryption, etc.)...

    C'mon! Just think how much fun DOS attacks will be in the future. Your new online toaster/coffee machine? Or car?

    Oh, the humanity! :)

  • 3 day ago I saw a program on Dutch TV about this. There was a man who did research on human genetics(Don't know his name anymore). But he was sure that in about 30 - 40 years you could get a brain inplant that alows you to comunicate with other people. I was puzzled when I saw the programm, we could turn into machines. But who knows, It seems handy.

  • Re:One thing I know will be obsolete- (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is wires...

    I don't think so. This was exactly the same thing that Nikola Tesla said would happen with the transmission of electrical energy. What he didn't count on was his old friends at Westinghouse being very opposed to this idea. Why? because they had already invested way too much $$ in the electrical grid (and this was before 1910!)

    Today, we have an almost identical situation with the large investments being made in fibre optic lines to support high bandwidth internet access.

    There are other problems with wireless communications. One is channel isolation. The EM spectrum is very heavily allocated, even now. It is very hard to isolate the channels in the EM spectrum, since they all travel through the same "wire". So in order to isolate data channels in the EM spectrum, you either have to build entirely different hardware (to operate in a different EM band,) or you have to limit their range. This is in stark contrast to wired communications. You can have unlimited bandwidth using identical hardware by simply adding more wires (I know its not exactly "simple" in practice, but it is still much, much easier to do than with wireless.)

    The second big limitation is security. It is relatively easy to eavesdrop on EM radiation compared to wired communication. I, for one, would never give my CC# over a cell phone. The chance that someone may be listening is small, but finite. It is also much harder to make an isolated network using wireless, and firewall implementation becomes a true nightmare. And this is just the security of the data! There is also the problem of DOS attacks. You wouldn't even need a computer to implement one. Just a van with a big broadband EM noise generator.

    I'm not saying that wireless won't be important, I just don't think that it will replace the wired internet any time soon.

  • In the year 2000. . .

    The global internet will be confiscated by United States Federal Marshalls under an ex parte writ of civil seizure in an international class-action lawsuit by Metallica, Microsoft, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Church of Scientology, the Estate of T. S. Eliot, the sock puppet on pets.com and white rapper Kid Rock.

    Nobody will notice.

  • Convergence is what the big boys are striving for. Convergence is what they're going to get.

    Your broadcast picture will only take up 70% of the screen, but the screen'll be twice as big, so that's okay. The other 30% will be the side and bottom-bars (ala home shopping networks)

    You'll point your remote at the TV and be able to maneuver a small cross-hair around on the screen. Like the outfit that Britney Spears is wearing? Point at it and click your INFO button. On the sidebar you'll be able to see that dress, modify it's color and size (and perhaps style somewhat) and hit your buy button.

    The bottom bar will pop up a number of payment options, as well as a listing of accessories that the system conclude you'll be >70% likely to purchase, according to your total profile that's stored in the combined database of everywhere you've shopped and every survey you've filled in.

    Hit your BUY button - deliver is all taken care of.. except..

    You decide though that you want to go the party across town, so you hit the "To Go" button, grab your things and head out. In the ultra-compact vehicle, you hit your approximate destination on the touch screen of your car, and say "Party" since it's not one of your regular destinations. The system references the map point you touched with your e-mail looking for a Party at about this time to give you a HUD of the exact address of your destination. Your party dress should be waiting by the time you get there.

    On the way, you notice the destination address change. The system had too many responses so had to move the party to a larger location. The route on your screen-map changes accordingly from where you are now. There's now a cover charge. Do you want to proceed? Tapping the yes button on the map, the charge is deducted from your credit and your watch and sunglasses are provided with the entry code - your purse isn't because you had decided you didn't need it so left it at home.

    You arrive at the party and your car directs you to a reasonable parking spot - the billboard in front of it is of course advertising the party sponsor - which by the way has a great sale on perfume you might want to try; simply hit the yes button in your car and it'll be added to your account and put with your dress delivery which is waiting for you in slot 21B inside the main foyer.

    The party, like life, is great.

    Of course.. you're one of the "in" crowd. You don't have any nasty habits people might be offended at, no real opinions on any issue beyond the next fashion craze, and if there's some people who are cut out of the system and starving just outside the wall, what business is it of yours? They could've grabbed a data-mining job just like you did. They certainly didn't need to go around spouting off about how this company or that company is abusing people. They deserve what they get for trying to make life unhappy, right?

    Right?

  • I would think the Internet would turn into the matrix, but where its the human that rules it - so people can go on Internet with VR, and visually view all the information and search. With the invention of those lightspeed-memory/CPUs, realistic VR might move a bit more nearer -Sts
  • I sure hope so. When the Web degrades to that point, it will prompt competetor designs of something like the web to gain popularity by those who know whats going on. Maybe freenet, maybe something other than freenet (never been able to use it... good ole Java). And the cycle will repeat; eventually C-Net and Wired will have articles on it and will be given a web based interface (dejanews) and degrade like everything else. But for a short time it WILL be great.

    ^Z
  • Look, its inevitable that as something that started free of commercial interest, and grew because of its ability to allow people to openly share information becomes larger and more important the companies will take over the web. I mean, its banner ads everywhere, already. Only the pick of the crop of non-commercial sites (Slashdot, par example) will continue. And people will no-doubt move on. Though, i suppose that is only how i see the web to continue. The internet as a whole? evidently, everything that uses power will end up with an IP address, one day. Cell phones will operate always in their new switched mode data fasions, and phone calls be routed across the 'net to other phones, or applinces with IP addresses. Maybe even your remote control will turn your TV off with a new ICMP packet (type 20: volume up). :-)

    I forsee this to be the future of the net. It is true that everything that people deal with in their day-to-day lives involves the transfer of data. Be it a phone conversation, watching television, compiling a document: the internet will grow to be the distributed architecture that supports this.


    --
  • I've been intrigued by the idea of downloading a copy of yourself to a computer. It is believed that within 30 years our technology will have the ability to scan in a human brain without killing the person, we can scan a human brain now but it is done one slice at a time and not as detailed as it could be. I think it would be cool to have an alter ego that lived online helping you out with what you want, I think my other half would have a fun time in their as well.
    Another possibility is that we could manipulate or brain to see or feel things that aren't really there, a la Matrix. An online world identical to the real one just easily adjustable.
    Well, anyway it would probably be a bitch to set it all up, but I think still worth dreaming of.

    Reed Robertson
  • hey all,
    Anybody have any *positive* predictions of what will become of the internet? All the posts i've read so far are *so* negative. Even that online comic is pretty depressing (well, up to what i read, anyway)... c'mon guys, anything positive to see in the future?
  • This is basically how I see the future of the internet. Everyone has an optical link dummy terminal that puts a (openGL?) gui semitransparently over your normal vision with adjustable opaqueness. There is a link to your ear drum as well so you can listen to whatever completely silently. Voice activation command, retinal controlled mouse, and a tiny roll-up keyboard that you could fit on your belt, etc. The entire planet will be blanketed with wireless 10mbit per/sec eithernet, the antenae is in your skull. All Data is kept on huge comercially owned databases and storage servers from which you buy space as needed. Hardware itself would never be needed, unless obviously somthing new came out for the term. Buildings, cars, etc will be wired with some form of Jini so that everything can be smart. The conection will be free, the space will probably cost. In case you are wondering, there is no way somone could "hack your brain" because it's just a dummy term, you could make it powered off of your body heat. Lastly, Bill Gates will have formed a Galactic Empire and a cirtain source weilding guru will fight him over the fate of the Universe over the moon of Endor.
  • When I first read "Neuromancer" by W. Gibson I thought "that sounds *so* real. that's how the internet is going to be". Then I picked up "idoru"...
    In idoru the internet is some virtual reality place that everybody can acces with a nintendo-style vr-set. However, it has been commercialized and is under control of the government. The only place where there is still some good ole internet anarchy is a hidden part of the net that only hacker know about and where 'normal' users don't have access to ("walled city").

    With governments nowadays telling the people what they may put on their pages and what the must not, with content-rating systems openly supported by many countries and with companies making incompatible plugins and proprietary extensions to standard-protocols (and thus blurring the open nature of the web step by step) i think it is quite possible that the net may turn out the way gibson describes it in ~8 years.
    Fortunately, prognoses about the future development of the computer industry have never beent accurate a lot. I hope *we* won't hide in some secret places but openly defend the freedom of our net before it is too late.

  • Here [boisestate.edu] is an interesting and completely reasonable outlook on what the internet could become in an all optical age. Of course it requires that the telcos permit it.
  • The very first thing I envision about the future is that we will have/need much speedier access to the net. MOst people are still llanguishing on dial-ups. DSL is a step in the right direction. But I forsee in the future almost instantaneous access to all information. It may not be truly instantaneous, but the perception of so: Streaming video/audio, etc.

    The second thing I'd be looking for is a better interface. The browser metaphor really is at the edge of its abilities. Whatever interface comes along will be amazing compared to the abilities of today. As I'm typing this, there is an ad for those I-Glasses from thinkgeek which let you immerse yourself in your computing environment. That is totally cool. Add to that some sort of VR input device and you would be sitting pretty for interacting with the new interface, whatever it may be.

    The last thing I envisage happening is that the "One Great Internet" will really be split up into several specialized networks. We've seen it happen before in other areas. Specialization vs. Generalization. I can't imagine in what ways things will be split up, but it will happen.

  • Dante' couldn't have writen a more evil vision.
    ___
  • I remember that I didn't really understand what people meant with it about ten years ago, when they told me advanced digital informaton technology could potentially disrupt society in such a way that systems such as capitalism and democracy would crumble.

    Back then, I looked at my computer with the bright green monitor and 300baud modem and wondered how this could ever be the case - since other technologies such as television and radio were far more advanced. Or so it seemed.

    Now, ten years down the road, the Internet is huge and has an enormous impact on both society and business in such a way that I'm beginning to wonder if some of those theories from back then might become reality.

    For example, digital information technology basically makes copyrights obsolete. You might disagree and say that the idea is still here and that a new form of media doesn't change the law or the morals, but once a system exists that allows you to anonymously create an infinite amount of perfect replicas of any work, it's time to wake up and be realistic.

    Besides changing the way we look at copyrights on the Internet for example, it might change the way we look at copyrights in general. In other words: the Internet is possibly not just a revolution for business and technology, but very possibly also for society as a whole. And it'll be very interesting to see how this develops.

  • We all know that corporate greed and overprotective governments are the main threat to the future of openness of the net. This battle needs to be fought in multiple points.

    • Educate Mr.Joe Common about the importance of independance of the net. Most of the problems occur because the general public are miseducated by the public.
    • Struggle to avoid enacting laws like DMCA and UCITA by educating the politicians about the problems in such laws.
    • Make corporations realise that how evil they are in a civilised manner. Most of the times corporations act the way they do becuase they don't even realise that their acts are affecting others.
    • Avoid corporate dependance on the wherever possible. For example, about 4000 Open Source projects are dependant on VA Linux for their infrastructure. (Hey, I am not saying that VA Linux is a greedy corporation. But most of the world's big companies started the same way).
    • Encourage artists to create content independant of corporations. Make them realise that net is an effective medium to distribute their art. From Lars interview yesterday you would have realise how little most aritists understand the net dynamics.
    • Document the ways to fight the corporate greed . Linux advocacy was one such well documented and most successfull efforts.

      • -Sivaraj.

  • One thing I know will be obsolete- (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    is wires. In the coming few years, we will surpass the number of wireline connections to the net with wireless connections. The Mobile Information Society- coming to your 3G handheld internet appliance in 2003. Nokia and a few others have already begun with Symbian.

  • Rose-colored version: what's at stake (Score:3)

    by re-geeked ( 113937 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @11:02AM (#1043841)
    As a counterpoint to all the CorpNet posts, here is a vision of what the Internet could be if we are vigilant about maintaining freedom, access, and openness:

    In general, an internet that continues to be (or goes back to being) open and free becomes a place where everyone has an equal voice to communicate to as wide an audience as they want, everyone has access to the entire variety of information available, and the tools of the internet excel at ensuring that your message can be heard clearly, while you can also find out all that you want to know.

    Commerce

    The free internet of the future creates a frictionless, level marketplace where disintermediation has been taken to the extreme. Whatever business you're in, you have the means to compete on a sale-by-sale basis with anyone else in the same field. What will set your business apart is quality, service, convenience, and specialization.

    As a consumer, you can use this situation to great advantage, always commanding the lowest price and greatest value available.

    Some side effects: commodity products will be produced as close to where they're consumed as possible, with the most-available materials, by cottage-industry producers that can respond cheaply to the needs of local customers. Meanwhile, exotic products and materials will be made available to wider communities, increasing the value of local resources and skills. The economies of leverage and cartel will nearly disappear, allowing "banana republics" to develop independent, self-sustaining economies, while reducing inequities of wealth and power in all countries.

    Culture

    Broadcasters, advertisers, and media conglomerates will also succumb to disintermediation, making culture both more global and more heterogeneous. While the prurient will always survive, the hyped, ad-financed, over-promoted, cross-marketed garbage that we and our children currently have shoved down our throats will be rightfully outcompeted by those whose voices currently can't be heard because they don't market well or might make the media conglomerates uncomfortable.

    Education, Science, and Technology

    If discoveries can be kept from becoming property, and the advantages of open information and peer review are recognized, the internet can continue to benefit science and education as the evolving encyclopedia of our shared knowledge.

    This all sounds pretty lofty and idealistic, but that's what freedom can do for you. And if it doesn't turn out the way I've described, we'll have to ask how our future got taken from us, and by whom.

  • The future internet will be even more a snarl than it is now, with present and future layers of protocols, tunnels, FreeNets, Walled Cities, and so on making any centralized registry useless. Every player wanting to declare a universal standard wants it to be easily policeable or profitable mainly to themselves, or both. But we don't want to organize more than we have to. A universal standard would be sorta nice, but we can't (and shouldn't) trust the motives of those who are eager for it. So people will just accrete around the standards of their choice. For addressing, you could have IPv6m (military), IPv6c (commercial), IPv6s (spook), IPv6k (krypto; sorry, "s" is already taken). traffic between the entities using the different standards may communicate freely, somewhat, or not at all. They'll have to come up with a new word for balkanization, since the internet will make Bosnia, with its skinny bit in the middle, look as Balkanized as Kansas. Or think of a rat's nest of n-dimensional Klein Bottles. Zones like the hypothetical Walled City will look from one point of view like a single blob (to its members); from another, like an archipelago, and to others it will be invisible. The internet is not just another flat piece of land (with maybe a few caves under it) that can be civilized like any other half-wild territory by sending in US Marshals, Bengal Lancers, or Spetznaz troops. It used to be that if you got tired of civilization, you lit out for the territory. Now you just tunnel back into it, using wasted or uncompressed bits of the "official" internet, or carve out your own. It will happen because we despair of physical escape from stupid bosses, nosy cops or U.S. foreign policy. The few places beyond the reach of these tend to be Libya or Iraq or if you're lucky, Cyprus. And running a south Pacific cyber-libertarian paradise is too much like work. So we might as will live in "civilization" and build our fantasies of another world into the internet, as we are doing. It will happen in a year or three. After that, things will just get weird.
  • The internet as a whole signified the beginning of the second giant leap in human evolution.
    In the prehistotic era, when men had no real language to speak of, no way to share ideas or thoughts (The llittle they did have) they were truly individuals. They did what they pleased with little relation to the surrounding people. As language began to emerge they started loosing their individuality to the bigger whole - the family, the tribe. No one was really independent in his thoughts, cause everyone were sharing ideas with one another.

    The internet signifies the next change... people who hook themselves up to the net and become take part of the "global community", talking with everyone, no matter how distant. Think how much information flies around in it... a person that learns to interact with the net will have great advantages over the rest, knowing more, learning more. Sooner or later, when mind-implants become standard issue, men will gradually succumb to the net itself, sharing themselves up with it completely, their very mind. Together with conventional nut-cracking circuitry, processors crunching up numbers at amazing speeds, there will also be living human brains analysing problems, solving algorithems. They will completely lose individuality and become a part of the bigger organism which is the Internet. There will be little distinction between the electronic parts and the biological parts. They'll all be part of the bigger, growing whole. Some kind of Borg proto-type.

    So you're asking - why would people freely give up their basic rights, their individuality and their freedom for this gargantuam organism? Well, they would really have no choice. People within the net will have so many advantages over the 'free' people that the latter will evolutionary perish. Disconnect yourself from the net and you'd have no food, no education, no mental stimulation to speak of. It would be suicide.

    So if I were you, gentlemen, I'd start brushing off my 'Resistance is Futile' proverbs. :)
  • I don't know if I can believe that. I doubt that we as a society would let that happen. Although we have gone to pretty big extremes... I don't exactly shine on becoming 1/2 robot.. Genetic engineering is something that should have been stopped quite some time ago. We have no right to play "God" (Which ever god you worship) if it's dealing with technology or biology... Computers running my life? Telling me what to do? I don't think so. Screw my palm V, I want to go for a hike, oh wait, I cant anymore.. there arent any more hiking trails.. I have to run a program.

    Sorry for that little rant :)
  • Now I finally understand the pretense for Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
  • Hrm, I don't know. Look at the state of the internet right now. If you hop into a game of Quake3 or just go for a chat somewhere, you are filled with children, trying to hack, or spam you..

    A perfect reflection of this would be JeffK [somethingawful.com]. People really do think he's real. Gullible fools..

    The claim of the internet as the information superhighway has pretty much stopped... that information superhighway needs to be fixed of it's pot holes before we widen the lanes..

    Freedom? I dont think so. We cant even keep ourselves mature, much less try to make the internet a better place. This is only a dream for now..

  • What I see is our government lacking the power to stop illegal activity and hunt down offenders. In a desperate attempt to regain control they restrict access to the internet.
  • That's bs... No, wait I take that back; that's pathetic. What the hell happened to getting off your fat ass and walking down the store huh? I could just see it now; people sitting around, their automatic chairs taking them to the fridge, uh oh, no pork rinds, better order some more..

    "Of course.. you're one of the "in" crowd. You don't have any nasty habits people might be offended at, no real opinions on any issue beyond the next fashion craze, and if there's some people who are cut out of the system and starving just outside the wall, what business is it of yours? They could've grabbed a data-mining job just like you did."

    What a sad world that would be. And more and more as the "lazy technology" would set in, people would get more and more out of shape, weak minded, and weak period. Then they would brood more weak children, escentially making a society of sloths.. I like to call it De-Evolving...

    Right?

  • What I dread most is that in 40 years we will be watched and guided and not have to make our own choices. If that happened, there would be no purpose for ./ would there? =)

    "Big Brother is watching you, Big Brother loves you."

  • That won't last. I heard about someone researching the 'worlds most inaccessible tribe'. They couldn't find much info on it, until someone suggested they look it up on the web.

    They found quite a bit of information actually. Turns out they had a web page, together with a picture of their new helipad ;-)

  • Corporate control--everywhere (Score:3)

    by browser_war_pow ( 100778 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @03:40AM (#1043851) Homepage
    I predict that within 10 years we will have as much corporate control of the internet as the russians had government control of their lives during the soviet years.

    I also predict that the real violations of rights will come from corporations, not the government as the government is often too clueless to be able to effectively handle technology. It will ultimately come down to libertarians (restrain the gov AND corps) vs the pseudo-libertarians (just restrain the gov).

    My final prediction is that libertarians around the nation will begin seeing the publically traded megacorporation for what it is: a barrier to free market enterprise and an institution whose power must be limited just as the government's power must be limited. If we don't limit it then other companies cannot rise up and challenge it. God knows if teddy roosevelt hadn't done his famous trust busting we might have an industrial-aristocracy equivelent to the old European aristocracies.

  • Re:Evolving Obsolescence (Score:3)

    by Bookwyrm ( 3535 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @03:40AM (#1043852)
    It is difficult to get people to make changes together, but that is only required because people keep insisting on having the same protocol end-to-end.

    I believe this needs to change. There is zero reason for the transport layer to be bound to the data it is transporting, protocol-wise. The application should be able to request a certain type and quality of connection from the transport layer, without caring if the data is going over IPv4, IPv6, ATM, IPX, SNA, or what-have-you. There is *NO* reason for the application to care what it runs over as long as the desired quality of connection is satisfied. The transport should be an opaque layer.

    Undoubtedly there are people who feel some reflexive horror at the idea of not being able to look at the transport layer. (In the scenario I am envisioning, there would be no traceroute, perhaps not even a ping as we know it on the Internet today. No 'addressing' that is bound to the protocol (i.e. IP addresses and port numbers), no way to probe/scan a network.) Oddly, I would suspect a fair number of these people also chastise Microsoft for leaving the default setting of MS software products for the least security, and thus requiring user effort to secure the machines. Yet we insist on using a network protocol that allows for casual network probing, port scanning, untraceable DOS attacks, spoofing, snooping, and so forth that requires effort to secure from the defaults. (i.e. firewalls, anti-spoofing filters, add-on encryption, etc.) Where are the people working on creating new transport layer solutions that by default are secure? Where are the equivalent of the folks who urge people to change from MS products due to security reasons to urge people to change from IP for security reasons? But I digress.
  • I think that the Social Security Number acting as the main unique identifier of a US citizen will be supplanted by an IP number. This new number will eliminate the need for dozens of smaller pieces of identifying data such as: Telephone number, physical address, email address, financial account numbers, etc... Strong digital signatures will become no-brainers as a way to protect one's identity. However, registering a unique yet halfway meaningful name will become even more of a headache.
  • i think in 5 or 10 years there will be a wireless PDA network that is largely, but not totally, separated from the rest of the internet, largely because of bandwidth differences.

    what should happen:
    an open standard PDA net is devised, based on ip, and using existing cell towers. PDA makers, digital appliance makers, and cell companies jump onto it because users like compatability. a .pda TLD is set up for PDA skewed sites hosted on the internet (to differentiate from the rest of the web, where the average page size is half a meg, mostly ads and all anyone does is buy stuff, look at pr0n movies or d/l large pirated filez). MS, yahoo, aol, etc will all have their presences on .pda, but bbs/irc/usenet culture will thrive there as well. .pda will be where to go to get actual information, or communicate with others, while the rest of the web will become primarily an entertainment medium.

    What will happen:
    companies will compete over proprietary protocols for the next 5 years, until someone gets a monopoly. wireless access will be limited to about 200 monopoly approved .com sites.
  • If a medium (book, cinema, music...) is ultimately a representation of the writer's outside and inside, then the future internet will be no different from today's (maybe different from a technology perspective, but not fundamentally in terms of its purpose). I think the more important question is, will the future generations of humans be different because of the internet? Already, people are beginning to think that paying for a CD or news or financial advice is something old-fashioned and unnecessary. Just imagine - a world where no company charges for any of its produce - a world where we all work for free, no bills to pay, everyone does things because everyone forms a critical part of the human supply chain. The Pharmaceuticals stop charging for medicines, cure for cancer becomes free, rock groups do not care for royalties and money, my ISP stops charging me for the service...will the internet actually make the world a better place? And make the future generations happier and freer? Maybe not, but in my fantasies, that's where we are going!

  • Public Bands (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I tend to agree.. if the internet proper does turn soley into a commercial distribution channel (which I have at least some doubts about) people will build another net(s). Citizens net or whatever and likely make use of part of that spectrum. I guess it's six of one, half dozen of the other considering we already use TDM and FDM in various forms in the infrastructure.. but in a fanciful moment, one could imagine hundreds of multiplexed internets assigned various carrier frequencies, in addition to an IP address. This would be a little wierd and would probably require an overhaul of the infrastructure, but would make for a lot more breathing room. A channel thing. I guess it's all virtual really and depends on how you want to implement it. The strange thing about authorities and commercial interests is the old "If you build it they will come". Somehow, they simply must be there to regulate and try to sell you shit..Maybe the next time geeks invent a net, they will bring some experience to bare on the matter and develop guidelines/policies and appropriate technology to maintain the integrity of the thing. Kinda like the usenet stuff, if someone is a bad netizen.. corporate, gov. or not.. and after some warning period in which they don't play well, every one simply gives a tiny fraction of there compute resources into a pool for extended DDoS attacks on the boneheads. Then voting process maybe to pull em out of DNS or whatever. There is a healthy handul of exceptions, but generally most technical people have limited interest in operations, law, etc.. so stupid stuff keeps happening all around. Until they shut off your favorite news groups or block your connection or arrest you for not swallowing the newest religion it doesn't quite hit home.
  • 1) The United States Congress passes "The Internet Freedom Act". As is the case with all laws containing the words "Freedom" or "Equality" or "Liberation", this law has nothing of the sort. The "Freedom" this law protects is the freedom -from- information. It establishes that the Internet backbones are to be owned by mega corporations which are charged with governing the content allowed to be transmitted across the 'Net. Broadband access is provided to even the smallest households, since all aspects of life are conducted across the wireless ether. Since all household functions (electricity, water, software) are rented from the same mega corporations, this always-on connection is also the on-off switch to all vital household controls. Because it is a wolf-in-sheeps-clothing environment (if you're not pissing of the owners, then the broadband access is great), the Windows users of the world, by benefit of sheer numbers, herd us into this new paradigm because it is easier than having to read and think. Modems are no longer manufactured since the market base has disappeared, so personal modem-to-modem communications all but disappears. Hence the passing of Act 2:

    2) The Personal Communications Liberation Act establishes that modem communication, having been the singular cause of all computer cracking successes, are no longer permitted. Since everyone has broadband access, and only a few "rebel elements" refuse to embrace the corporate-owned broadband world, this is passed with minimal resistance. We will have been "liberated" from unmonitored slow computer-to-computer communication since the act pays telephone companies to dismantle the old infrastructure in favor of supporting the broadband pipeline. No only are modems no longer produced, but the underlying technology no longer supports the concept.

    3) The Data Accessibility Equality Act states that all information flowing across the net must be freely available to everyone without restrictions. In essence, this means that data encryption has been outlawed since that would restrict access to only those people who have data encryption/decryption software. Since the mega corporations have shut down all the sites that carry such software, the cry that those "nasty eleet hackers" are trying to shut out the rest of the world prevades the data stream.

    In short, George Orwell was right; except his crystal ball wasn't Y2K compliant, which is why his predictions landed in the wrong century.
  • I would suspect a fair number of these people also chastise Microsoft for leaving the default setting of MS software products for the least security, and thus requiring user effort to secure the machines.

    I would direct your attention to this article about yet another microsoft scripting virus [nytimes.com] spreading across networks even as we speek. The original lovebug caused more than 10 billion in lost productivity and damaged data worldwide. This new one (and it's many variants) could double that 10B number before this is all over.

    Given the above situation, using the word microsoft and security in the same thought is utterly laughable. What they know about secutity wouldn't fit up a knats ass.

    I would submit that the transport security layer is statistically irrelevant when contrasted with such gross neglagence in the applications layer.

    On the issue of TCP/IP being open, your forgeting that the reason the *BSD TCP/IP stack is so good is that it has 30+ years of expierience. Something MS is just starting to comprehend today, and will not fully apreciate for another 30 years.

    Personaly, I have set a goal for micros~1. I'll consider deploying their products on my network when they're products cause less than a billion dollars a year in damages. Happily, at the current rate, I won't be doing any ms product evaluations for another 10+ years. ;)
    ___

  • Eventually domain names will go by the wayside.
    Instead each will have "link" or "Site" names.

    Gone will be the .com, .org etc as no one adhears to the hiarcy anymore.
    Instead it'll just be a commen link registar network with no one in command.

    The exact form this will take depends on who dose it. It may be a franchise where new link name companys pay link name franchisers to "link up"... There being more than one link name franchis but they all link together so it's a commen network like the Internet itself.

    The protocalls used will be more like a mix between Napster, FreeNet and RealNetworks than todays world wide web.

    Dial up connections will retain the static IP issue long after IPng becomes the standard however link names won't have any problem refering to users sites.

    E-mail will probably still be sent to user@e-mail_site.com but some e-mail clients may support the link name version of the e-mail address.
    It's also posable that many e-mail protocals exist. Classic Internet, Sony Standard, Nokia standard, Microsoft standard (Undocumented), AoL standard, Open Standard, Open Standard 2, GNU offical standard, SVL project standard and The portable e-mail conversion gateway standard.

    The World Wide Web will likely go aside and be replaced with something else.

    After Rob Malda retires (Many years from now.. when he desides he wants more time for his grandkids when they graduate from collage) Slashdot will enter it's corprate phase (Belive it or not Slashdot is still operated like Robs hobby.. thats what made it great.. No one wants to fitz with success). Micro managers will try to replicate Rob but you can't and they'll over react to the trolls slowly bringing a much needed death to the tech site unless someone in charg realises you can not replicate Rob instead you make Slashdot yours. At that point Slashdot will be a data node not a website.

    Data nodes will have adverisements attached and a way to varify you accually saw the advertisment.
    Some will attempt contract requirments.. Abuse of this will eventually lead to the termination of "Shrink wrap" liccensing of data nodes.
    Others will mingle the advertisement and the data node so blocking, not loading or not viewing the ad will make the data node useless.

    Many more will be cool about it and leave a "no ad" option and markup the ad so the clienet may ignore the ad.

    More and more advertisments will imbed themselfs in our data. (This post brought to you by Slashdot)

    Spam will eventually be replaced with virus ads.. "Malisa secure consultents.. this could have been a distructive virus.. Come to us and we'll sheald your system against this and all viruses..."

    As the general population become more tech savy they will use a more diverse range of operating systems.

    PC hiarcy will go the way of the dino...
    new open hardware standards will replace the PC.
    Closed systems will also be designed but history shows standard hardware wins the marketshare.

    Some consummers will complain about being forced to pay for a second disk just so they can have source code. This will represent a minnority. Many companys will solve this by simply providing a data node when the source can be downloaded.
    This a side effect of open source becomming the defacto standard thus making it hard on any closed source develupers.. However many will continue to do closed source and they will survive.. just "back shelfed" (the practace of not premoting software by stores due to lack of source code and fear of being connected with obsolete busness practaces)

    A bulk load of data nodes will be e-commerce.. Ebay, E-McDonalds, E-Food, eToy, E-eek. Etc.

    Delivery services will exist so your e-shopping will be delivered quickly to your home (for a nominal fee) brick and morter stores will exist as discount shops...
    (Log into McDonalds order Extra Value Meal 5 Hyper size it pay with bank dept incripted key)

    I suspect phone lines will be used so your computer can dial your bank directly to get a one time "dept code" for your on-line shopping directly from the bank in real time using a "secure" line.

    WebCam fedish will continue where some people have there whole homes wired by webcam.
    At some point a crook will be cought on webcam with about 20 to 50 people as eye witnesses. At that point webcams will explode. There will be no turnning back.
    Eventually some market droid will have the brlient idea of using webcams to gather market statistics.

    In short corprate and personal intrests will compeate but the Internet will be basicly ballanced for many years to come.
    It will however look nothing like this...
  • You then remeber that George W Bush cancelled the DOJ case the first month he was president and re-assured microsft that they could do whatever they wished because of there $300 million campaign contribution that rivaled Bob Doles whole entire campaign budget for 1996.

    That's one of the most ludicrous, poorly informed comments I've heard in a long, long time. Bill Gates is a monkey's arse before he's a Republican supporter. Strongly supporting all kinds of abortion, and other such democratic ideals, Bill Gates closely alligns himself with SatanH^H^H^H^H^the Democrats. Not only is this ill informed, it's merely the poster's bias. Not based on fact in the least.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • glasses that you wear, and they superimpose the net over the real world, so you can pull up a webpage just by looking at something.

    When you look at a can of peas, it pulls up nutritional information, price comparisons, other places to buy peas, etc.

  • ROFL (Score:1)

    by cronio ( 13526 )
    Wow, you actually thought this post was meant to be realistic? All I have to say is...this post is funnier than the one it's responding to if that's true.


    One Microsoft Way

  • The internet is a big boot stomping on your face (Score:3)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @03:37PM (#1043863)
    If you do not get politically involved in protecting your basic rights on-line, such as privacy and anonymity, and freedom of speach, the internet will not look like anything Gibson envisioned.

    Rather it will look much more like what Orwell envisioned: a boot stomping on the face of humanity.

    FreeNet [sourceforge.net] is one possible way of combating this, if everyone who can runs a freenet node and thus helps provide protection in numbers. However, even this possibility goes away of the "Progressive" Institutes recommendations are taken by congress and such anonymous, distributed protocols are banned outright.

    But of course, it isn't cool to care too much about politicals and thus be labelled a "radical," is it?

    To judge by comments here and in the old style media alike, it is far more hip to just be labelled "yet another mindless sheep," complete with social security number, Mediocre credit report, and Discount Card from your local Grocery.
  • There is a lot of speculation that if he is elected, Bush will do
    something to frustrate the DOJ court case. I think it is ill-founded
    speculation, but MS has been giving lots of money to the Rebuplican
    campaign chest, and some senior Republicans are certainly opposed to
    the antitrust case.

    A piece of history: there was similar speculation 20 years ago that
    Raegan would axe the AT&T antitrust case...

  • Everybody has such a wide variety of opinions. It's good to know that the "company I keep" is of the cerebral type.

    In 1995 my father told me he wanted to buy a computer. He was 70 years old then. He asked me a very obvious question. "What can I do with a computer?" The only answer I could give him was the one thing that really annoys him and that is answering a question with a question. "What do you want to do with a computer?"

    The internet will go the way of the radio and TV. Big business wants your dollar so they'll find a way to get you the internet "for free." Have you bought a car that doesn't have a radio? You don't really need cable or satellite. All you need to do is buy a TV or radio and you get programming for free. freeinet [freei.net]

    I think that Sony will find a way. Sony TV's, radios and MP3 players. This is where the dog could be brought to the ground or catch it's tail. Napster is being shot at. Sony "bought" Sting for 55 million dollars. ("and the only thing you have to do Mr. Sting is give us all the rights to any music you make for the next ten years.") Prince went and changed his name to some unpronouncable symbol till his contract was up so that he could get his name back.I can't wait for SONY to take a couple shots at Napster!

    We need to contact all netizens and let them know that the internet will be what they want it to be. How can we do it gracefully?(Nobody wants SPAM!)
  • As far as the "lights turning on and off" trick from remote control, a Ed Winn
    (host of a widely-spread variety show in the 50s had the best solution I've
    seen to date...it couldn't turn lights on, but sure could turn them off from
    any distance.
    What is this miraculous invention? A bigass rock. Don't want to get up from bed
    to turn the light off? Throw a bigass rock at the bulb and your problem is
    solved.

  • "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face. Forever."

    George Orwell. Smart guy.

  • Hmmm, SSIA not allowed here? Crap! I guess I'll just fill the message body with crap so it will go through. Crap. There. Done.
  • I think the convergance of TV & the net will change everything about the current 'net. They'll be less independent interests (or at least they'll be less visible). And then, after awhile, something new will come around that replaces the 'net with something newer & greater (much like radio's dominance was replaced by TV).
    - Jason

    $20 domain name registrations -- click here. [silverscape.net]
  • Or was it a rollover bug... Rollover at 1951...
    Setting the vision at a much earlyer date...
  • It'll be likes the voices in your head that are with you all day.
    It'll be invisible until you really try to see, sorta like those little lights behind your eyelids.
    It'll be the adjunct that you're naked without, your mental clothes.
    It'll be like a god or devil or both had been given license to freely tap into, and mess with, your senses, your consciousness, your self.
    Surreptitiously, we'll all be entertainment at best and dandruff at worst for the actual masters: thinking super machines that keep us on because they've no pressing reason not to.
  • To see what kind of losers would be on the Micro$oft Internet of the future click on TummyX's User Info and check out his posting history.
  • The main thing that I see is the evolution of several distinct facets of access, with a couple of parallel net experiences evolving to be seperate from each other. I will call these Domains, cause they a name.

    The first Domain I will call CorpNet:
    Corporate/Media forces will continue to conglomerate, untill it is hard, or even imposible, to follow links from this top level net to anything non-corporate. They will even have their own search engines, that only search corporate sites (and are almost perfect, because the sites being searched are cooperating with the search engine). Everything will be beautiful, and big production. Most people wont even notice that they never leave CorpNet. Think of it as a Subspace (in the mathematical sense) of the internet.

    The second domain I will call SchoolNet:
    It will be much the same as CorpNet, except it will take up the academic world, and will be much less flashy, but even better indexed. This will be another subspace.

    The third domain I call GovNet, and I think you get the picture about what it will be. Subsapce again.

    The fourth domain will be the loose conglomeration of personal sites, and small interest organizations. Lets call it OrgNet. It won't be very easy to search, because it will be so HUGE, and at the same time run by people that are largely ignorant of the underlying tech. But it will leak out to all the other Nets, and as such it will NOT be a subspace (ie. it is possible to leave OrgNet, from within OrgNet)

    The next domain I want to talk about is DevNet. This is where the developers will hang, and it will have some ties to OrgNet, but will be much more cohessive, and better indexed.

    And of course there will be countless ShadowNets, domains that are diliberately closed, and probably encrypted, because, for whatever reason, their users want them to be. (criminal, 1337 h4x0rs, artists, bored teeners, etc.) Think of the anoying people over at http://hell.com

    And as to VR interfaces, well, I really, really have a problem with the visualization of both Stephenson and Gibbson.

    The net will not ever be one uber vr world. There will be different Portals, the same as we have now, that coordinate how the net is accessable from the portals. But we will never get rid of command line access, it is simply so much faster than anything else could be, and serious users are not gonna give it up, and take "trains" through the net, or "fly" when we are searching for something.

    ---
    "Elegant, Commented, On Time; Pick any Two"
  • Geeks are good for the net, and will hopefully be around for a long time to keep it free and honest. Geeks are looked at by the business suits as people who want everything to be free of charge, and by the government suits as people who want anarchy. Geeks are the wild element on the Internet. Business are trying to develop (and exploit) it, and governments are trying to bring order to it because they can't stand disorder.

    People are not going to like this analogy, but it is almost like the early United States. Geeks are the Native Americans. They have a primitive way of living in harmony with the land (medium). They have a problem with the concept of people owning it. They use it and live off of it, but leave it relatively unharmed. Business suits are like industrialist. They see natural resources to make money off of. They do believe that people should be able to own the land, and that the people should be them. Pretty soon they are running railroads, mining, and eventually polluting (advertising). Then you have the feds, who play pretty much the same role in both situations. They want to tame the wild frontier, make it safe for those industrialist because they are good for the economy, and basically push the Indians out of the way to make room for progress and bring order to the land.

    It it a flawed analogy. People will point out that the government and modern business are responsible for the Internet's infrastructure, so it's not at all like taking land from Native Americans, and then trashing it. The point of the analogy was the show a pattern.

    The Internet belongs to everyone, not just geeks, business, or government. But the geeks are the ones who will get trampled on. Business, especially established media types, believe that they should still be the content providers, like they always have been. They don't want anyone finding ways around them, and they especially don't want anything interfering with business operations. The government want's to instill order, so that the nation may prosper and be safe from wild people. Some geeks push back, like hackers. Some just want to be allowed to go about their lives and make their way just like they always did before business and government decided to start infringing.

    -tta
  • Due to the population explosion and increased traffic, people will stay at home much, much more. We'll have little cameras everywhere in our homes and videoconference almost all the time. Want to have a party for New Years Eve? Send a video mail to all your friends so you can all get together in a video chat room 5 minutes before midnight. Television will be on demand; pay per view and all the "good" sites on the net will be pay per view. Everything will be ordered on-line and anonymity will be impossible.

    Does it piss you off to have to fill out a card at the grocery store to get "discount" pricing? Ha that's a drop in the bucket compared to what they'll know about us in another decade or two.

    They opened up the GPS... why? Think about it what possible good thing can from them opening up the GPS? They want us all to GPS's that also send out position back up. Severe weather watchers have been using this kind of stuff for years.

    The ability to open up your PC and mess around will be gone. The PC will be little box that's encased in epoxy with a really fast USB-like port, that handles video and sound output, with some kind of encryption (to keep us from recording movies we watch or music we hear), and a couple of IR ports for input. Monitors will be 4' X 8' flat panels that hang on the wall. The new net will handle all our phone calls, television, mail, court summons, paychecks, etc.

    It's not all bleak though. There will still be hackers and crackers and the job of admining all this stuff will still fall to the geeks, as the average working stiff won't be smart enough to keep the hackers and crackers out. We'll still have horrible personal sites only instead of "Here's a picture of my dog Rusty" we'll get to see glorious high res movies of ol Rusty. The routers will be setup to scan packets for keywords and simply deny a route to sites that contain certain keywords. We'll just misspell these words (like Filez Warez etc.) and the elite will still be able to get around the BS.

    Apps and drive space will be stored on central servers on the net and we'll pay as we go. Our little boxes won't have any non-volatile storage space whatsoever. We'll get around all that but it will be a pain in the ass. It'll be ruled illegal to use any non government sanctioned software on their network so as to keep a lid on cracking etc. We'll get around that too but more and more of us will go to jail and for reasons that have nothing to do with hacking, cracking or pirating (sorry). We'll goto jail for using our own rigs and software on their network. We won't buy those those little boxes we'll rent them just like we do cable boxes. The powers that be will occasionally ask for them back to "give" us the smaller faster ones just to make sure we aren't tampering with their little boxes. They'll send a signal to the GPS system to let the powers that be know where they are at all times. It'll be for our protection from theft of course. The little boxes in our cars will do the same.

    Of course I could be wrong about everything :)

  • advertising (Score:3)

    by kootch ( 81702 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @06:53AM (#1043897) Homepage
    I envision a future where there are more banner ads than content, more stupid flash movies than written paragraphs, the moment you turn on your computer you're being tracked by companies like doubleclick, and a day when if you actually want to learn something, you'll pick up a book or a newspaper instead of logging on.

    scary? I think we're just about there...
  • It's been my experience that the Internet turns geeks into suits.

    k.
    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  • I think you are way too pessimistic about the amount of corporate control of the Internet in ten years. You forget about the rapidly growing movement against "globalism" which scored decisive victories in Seattle and Washington, DC last month. This movement has a strong anti-capitalist flavor and we're discovering that many normal folks are receptive to our messages. Not only that, many of us cyberactivists have been at it for nearly ten years now.

    I think our strength will only grow once new tech like Gnutella and Freenet become operational and widely used. If you asked me a year ago, I would have said that the implementation of anarchic tech like these two examples was still 5 years away. It's good to see them arriving now, when we so desperately need them against the corporations.

    Too many predictions about the future tend to leave out the social factor.

  • Geeks vs. Suits on this one (Score:3)

    by Katravax ( 21568 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @01:57AM (#1043903)
    It may sound jaded, but my opinion as to what becomes of the internet is whether or not the geeks continue to maintain some basic control over the medium. We know what the suits do when they get enough control over it (see the RIAA, various federal governments, and my bet is eventually things like the DMCA). The fact is, we geeks tend to be free-information junkies and as far as the suits are concerned, at the risk of sounding silly, dangerous rebels at times. My fear is that eventually as the discovery period closes, the jobs once belonging to geek-types and technology adventurers will become the jobs of journeyman types who are doing their job as a job and not as something they enjoy and beleive in. Many of our managers even now are still geeks and understand and love what we do, but that won't last forever as the money men put their own into management positions and our chosen professions become just another semi-technical line of work. I fear we may not get the say on how it turns out. This may not answer the question as to What technologies do you guys see becoming prevalent, what things will become obsolete... but I fear our type may move on to the Next Big Thing and the internet will become just another commodity. And I also fear that the money men already know this, and the best of them are already planning for it.

  • Obsolescence (Score:3)

    by Bookwyrm ( 3535 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:01AM (#1043906)
    My personal curiousity about this matter is wondering about the network that will replace the Internet. I do not believe that in the relatively short time computers have been around that people have already managed to develop 'The' network -- the Internet is just one of the first.

    Any opinions on how long it will be until the Internet is either replaced by something new or it evolves/grows into something sufficiently different to be incompatible with what it is today? Given that the Internet only took a bare decade to go from backroom to mainstream, and that the rate of change has only been accelerating, it would be easy to believe that the Internet could find itself being replaced by something new in five to ten years. Just what that is, of course, is hard to say. I would prefer to see a new network evolve that was truly decentralized and dynamic (no central DNS servers to monopolize, no central authority required for addressing, real quality of service, etc.) If I had time, I would probably try to flesh out the ideas for how to build such a network someday.

    My personal dark horse choices for setting up new standards/protocols (though not necessarily ones I would favor) in the near future are Nokia and Sony. My private guess is that in a few years those will be the two companies fighting it out for control of standards/access to data. (i.e. people will be accessing the network through cellphones/PDAs or through their home entertainment equipment/PSX[23...n].)

  • The internet will cease to exist... (Score:3)

    by Glowing Fish ( 155236 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:02AM (#1043908) Homepage
    ...when Steve Case takes Ester Dyson to be his concubine (he got tired of Natalia Portman) and throws out the internet.

    Then, using a beowulf cluster of opal photonic servers in his secret headquarters, he will connect to the implants of the mark of the beast (under ipv6.66) in everyones skin.

    The situation will only be saved when Linus the Red, asssited by a crazed gun-totin survivalist ESR, manages to rise from the desert and save the monks of Qumran\Mirabilis, who were held captive by the beast; and they lead the armies of the 31,337 chosen to paradise.

  • The internet is transport layer.. (Score:3)

    by Pengo ( 28814 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:10AM (#1043914) Journal

    It will be the transport layer for various other networks such as Freenet. As time goes on and the network gets bigger, the need for having more specialized networks will grow.
  • The massive thing we call the internet today is going to be changing a great deal in the next ten or so years. Right now we're trying to max out a system that wasn't really designed to handle the traffic it now handles. Sure Cisco and Lucent make googabit routers and fibre lines but on those lines are flowing vast streams of packet switched data. Packet switched data was great for redundancy that would be needed were there some kind of bad thing happening that day, like a war. The problem with it is that many of those packets get lost or float about a while when someone set their ttl too high. Besides that the routers and switches made by Cisco and Lucent make take a while to send off your particular packet of data. If you need a really high bandwidth HDTV stream or something you probably ought not try a packet switched network. Many people realize this.
    The network of the future will most likely be a hybrid of packet switching and circuit switching (soft switching mind you) with packet switching dying out until a need for it arises (hax0ring and IP spoofing don't count). The circuit switched network with give us a dedicated path between the server of our choice and us. The network will still have a web-like structure with variable connection pathways but when we talk over it we'll be speaking through a direct channel rather than scattering our packets to the wind with an address attached. As for content, more people and places are finding themselves with fat pipes with newer structures being installed all the time. Hopefully by 2010 we'll have a single optical fibre (or receiver dish depending on your area) that we'll stuff our media into and get hit by as it shoots out.
    The final question is "What will we be getting hit by flying out of said fat optical pipe?" Right now everyone and their mother, literally, are hopping on the net and trying to find an idea that hasn't been flogged to death to run with. America is in lone with their moving pictures and teenage musical pop princesses. This means we're going to have plenty of media sites that resemble the broadcast networks of the 20th century. You'll be able to hop over to MTV's site and watch Carson Daily reminice about his "career" as an MTV VJ or maybe even catch a glimpse of those zany kids all living in a Winnebego on the open road trying to survive. The question of downloadable movies and music will be a long settled argument since everyone will have the bandwidth to download HDTV quality video on demand. Besides just static watching, kneeling, and praying to the glowing screens we'll be streaming our applications and such things through said pipe. The idea of the Network Computer will finally be realized since the average shmuck has the bandwidth to work off a network rather than a local drive. Maybe we'll even see the rebirth of mainframes-frame style time sharing. Instead of the servers residing on a college campus they'll be sitting in Joe Geek's livingroom or garage and people will be logging in with 3D avatars rather than terminal emulators. For the most part I think the shit we have to put up now is just the birth pangs of a bigger bitchier beast. I enjoyed the way it was, before the dark times, before Amazon.
  • Freedom is the most important issue at stake here. It is probably one of the few potentially negative side affects to having everyone wired to the net 24/7. As Micheal pointed out, many people are willing to give up freedom for safety. How many people would be willing to inplant a harmless tracking device on their children if it ment that no one could ever kidnap them, rape or abuse them, or that they could never get lost or run away. There are already people would would do this now. In fifty or a hundred years, I'll bet most people will. The idea will eventually cease to seem strange. People who didn't put monitoring devices on their children would be viewed as neglectful. The law might eventually require it. It could be used to fight crime. They may start with people who commit a crime. Eventually surveillance technology may eliminate the need to have an sort of implant.

    I've always considered George Orwell a genius because he wrote 1984 well before the technology actually existed to realistically implement such a society. It was actually pretty low tech, except for the two way televisions (telescreens I think he called them). I remember once thinking that people would never allow such a thing in their house. Sure every house has at least one television, but they are only one way. I knew I would never allow it. Now I have a cable modem. Sure, no one can see what I'm doing in my living room. But if someone wanted to they could read my email (since I can't convince any of my email buddies to use encryption), they can see that I down load MP3's, visit porn sites, and post comments about the dangers of a surveillance society.

    What were people thinking a hundred or two hundred years ago. Do you think they could even conceive of our society with all of it's technology? What do you think they would have thought of the notion of sacrificing liberties one by one to large powerful governments in the name of safety? Most of them would have considered our laws and dependence on technology a danger to personal liberty. Look how far we've come. Now imagine one or two hundred years into the future.

    Chaos ----------------------- Order

    Freedom ----------------------- Safety

    We must be vigilant in maintaining a balance here. If we ever achieve perfect order, then it will be very difficult to regain freedom. Technology will be so advanced (in surveillance and perhaps even mind control), laws will be so restrictive, that it will be nearly impossible stage a resistance.

    -tta
  • Come to think of it, I suspect we'll see the following:

    1) An "Internet" tap coming into every home more or less like television cable does now: $20/month allows you to turn the Internet spiggot on. Ubiquitous "Internet" machines (similar to the iOpener or WebTV) will probably become the way many households who don't have home computers will get onto the Internet, and I suspect you'll see more and more of these machines in places such as schools and libraries.

    2) While things like Napster and music (and eventually, movie) piracy will still be fairly popular, because the Internet spiggot is fairly large, I suspect you'll see more and more well-encrypted content delivery systems which permit the MPAA and RIAA to deliver content across that spiggot with strong copyright protection. And I suspect that piracy will become a smaller percentage of on-line content transfer than it is now.

    Actually, I would hope that people here would help design these content delivery systems, as I suspect we would be able to come up with something that would simultaneously address (a) our right to "home copying" of content (say, from the home stereo to the car stereo), while (b) preventing wholesale rebroadcasting of content to millions of others. (Perhaps by embedding some sort of "number of copies" field into the encrypted data stream?) Of course there are some out there who would disagree with me--but then, I suspect they would also come down on me like a ton of bricks if I were to advocate their argument in GNU-licensed space: that is, if I were to advocate using GNU licensed software in a proprietary system without making source code available.

    3) Eventually, someone will figure out that having just one wire make the "last mile", and delivering all content across that wire, makes the most economic sense. In fact, I suspect the only reason why we don't have just one twisted pair handle all phone and cable service right now is more regulatory than it is technological. But eventually I suspect more and more people will have something like a "DSL signal splitter" device that's sitting underneath my house, with outputs providing cable, Internet, and phone lines for up to a half-dozen differnet phone numbers. Turning on each service then becomes a matter of hooking up a jack to the external box, and phoning the appropriate company and establishing service.

    4) Movies on demand. Once the bandwidth gets large enough to allow broadcasting a movie digitally across the Internet, it seems inevitable that someone would set up a "movie on demand" service which would broadcast a movie to your television across the wire. And if everything comes across the same twisted pair, it makes sense to me that your cable company would figure out a way to handle this service.
  • This sounds very science-fiction, but I think it might happen quite soon. Relatively speaking. I think in fifty to a hundred years, you won't need computers any more to access the Internet - or any other source of information to which you are allowed access.

    The world is now in a situation in which a change of mind regarding genetics and biotechnology must take place. Whether it is for the better, I cannot say, but my opinion is that computers (and networks) will be really mature only when we can regard them as real extensions to our own senses. Not some clunky TV with a typewriter in front, but real mind interfaces.

    Of course, this is dangerous in some ways. Of course, this might (and WILL) make lots of people scream "mind control!". Of course, I would never install Windows for Telepaths [linuxfaq.de] ;-) But, in the long run, I don't think merging biology with technology is avoidable. The benefits are too big - theoretically, you can replace every organ with a better working steel one (and I want a special high performance liver...)

    And this is a topic that has been exploited in so many good sci-fi novels (Peter Hamilton, Asimov, Silverberg, etc.) ... I surely am not the only one taking this seriously.

  • This is the the future internet..... (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:23AM (#1043938)
    ...you wake up one morning 10 years form now and you hit the power button on your computer and the cute microsft logo pops up. After that you see a dialog box that says connecting to internet-2 "The very best of the Microsft internet experience". Then Microsoft Outlook opens and connects to the Microsoft Internet using the Microsoft tcp/ip-2 stack with the microsft wire protocol from office 2000 built in it and you see all the ole objects being loaded up before a transfer can even occur.

    After your connected, Microsft explorer then transfers to the Microsoft hotmail website. You recieve your usual email from work and work and one of the emails catches you eye. You select the message and a video pops up from your manager saying you have done a great job makeing the serers in the computer room more stable. He syas "Great work! I only had to get once last night from a server crash. Great work!

    You then grin and feel good abotu your accomplishments and then you wonder about the good old days. Once a night is good hey? I remeber in the old days with unix that this was unaccep[table. Boy have times changed. You then hear a beep. You walk into the kitchen and the coffee is done and there is the paper clip from WOrd smiling at you on the coffee makers lcd screen. You have gulp slowly and dash as fast as you can towards the kitchen and hope the paper clip doesn't see you. The paper clip "says good morning ". Uh can I just have my coffee.

    paper clip: "Would you like some help getting your coffee. "

    you: NO!

    paper clip: "How much cofee do you have left?"

    you: I have plenty of cofee. GO AWAY!

    paper clip: "I sense fustration, I will connect you to Microsoft Grocery store."

    You then unplug the coffee maker and take the coffee out and our yourself a cup.

    After this you get dressed and you enter your car for work. As soon as you start the care you here a the usual connecting shreiks of a modem connecting to the internet. You gulp and grip the sterring wheel hard for you know the paper clip will know to talk you on your way to work.

    paper clip: I sensed you were difficulty with your microsoft coffee maker so I billed a repair man to your credit card and he shall be over at your house at noon today.

    you: Cancel!

    paper clip: sorry I can't do that for you.

    A few hours later at work you were having lunch with your manager and you were telling him about the old days with linux and tcp/ip-1 stack which today is the iso tcp/ip stack and you mentioned that even though linux was banned by the dmca act of 1999 and also by Bill Gates the "King of the internet", you might still have a few old disks and you could run it at there servers.

    The manager blinks at you for a few seconds and then laughs. He says, ", linux can't connect to the network. Remeber Microsoft changed the tcp/ip stack years ago by cripling virtually every client sold with there own tcp/ip stack that was protected by the DMCA act to prevetn linux form ever being compatitible. I am sorry but if the clients can't connect to the server, then teh OS is useless.

    You then remeber that George W Bush cancelled the DOJ case the first month he was president and re-assured microsft that they could do whatever they wished because of there $300 million campaign contribution that rivaled Bob Doles whole entire campaign budget for 1996.

    This is what I believe will be the scenario in 2010.

  • The Guy I Almost Was (Score:3)

    by kris ( 824 ) <kris-slashdot@koehntopp.de> on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:26AM (#1043939) Homepage
    a global matrix of information to which all have access.

    Have a look at The Guy I Almost Was [e-sheep.com] by PSP... A comic book story, extremely well done, on this topic.


    © Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp

  • The future of the internet is TV (Score:3)

    by pkj ( 64294 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @08:25AM (#1043946)
    I started using the internet back in 1986 when you could print out the cannonical /etc/hosts file (the days before DNS, you know) on about 100 pages. Connectivity for the entire university of 10,000 students was a 9600bps modem, but this really wasn't a big deal because the few dozen people who knew how to do ftp all knew to be very judicious of bandwidth use and only downloaded large files after 3am.

    The internet was a cool place back then. It was this incredibly cool system that would let you send mail anywhere in the world in a matter of minutes or to talk (talkd) to people in real-time. There were public message forums (usenet) that allowed people to converse, discuss, and exchange ideas. And yes, even then, you could download pr0n.

    It was so cool because there was just nothing like it. It was cool because everyone using the system had a brain. And yes, it was cool because it was underground. Kinda like watching R.E.M. play to a club of 200 people.

    And then, I guess maybe arround 1989, came the Portal System, the first real ISP, although they were called "Public Access Unix" systems at the time. And with it came the first flood of the clueless with their stupidity, bigotry, and spam. The Portal System died a few years later, but not before many other similar such systems spring up. The downhill slide had begun.

    But it wasn't until 1993-4, with the introduction of Mosaic that things really started to change. Although http has been arround for a year or so, the text-based browsers really didn't seem all that different than Gopher. Mosaic's X/windows display and their addition of the img tag was what really kicked things off.

    For a while, the web was cool, because it was very much a two-way system of interaction. Much like usenet news, but much more structured, and more permanent. But this didn't last long. In just a few years, big media and the advertisors discovered the internet.

    And what have they done with it? Have they tried to push it in new directions? Have they tried to expand on the principles that made the internet so great to begin with? No, they have not. They have turned it into Television. As if 500 channels of crap were not enough, you now have five million.

    So, what really has happened in the last 15 years? Sure, the network is faster and easier to use, but what has really been added since then? The only major new item I have seen in the past 15 years is that you can now buy stuff over the net in a fairly safe and reliable fashion. But that's hardly remarkable or revolutionary, and from a strictly practical matter, not very profitable for the seller either.

    What do I see becoming obsolete? Not much. I expect things to become recycled more than anything. Slashdot, for example, is nothing more than a repackaged version of usenet news. Not that this is bad. On the contrary, the same things that made usenet news so great are the same things that make slashdot so great. Oh, and by the way, people were experimenting with moderation on usenet before the web ever existed.

    But the major change? I expect TV to die and be replaced by the internet. By the time HDTV ever gets to the mainstreem market, every TV will come with a computer as powerful as today's desktops built right into it. And that will be the biggest step backward that has ever happened to the internet...

    -p.

  • I think fiber to the home will replace the current DSL and cable modem kludges. The fiber will provide a multi-gigabit/sec interface to the neighborhood network. There will be thousands of IP multicast video streams available on the network, some free, some requiring a subscription. This will result in the death of conventional CATV systems. It will also destroy the economic base of local broadcast television stations. High-speed international data links will shrink the world to the point that regional broadcasting and distribution will become an anachronism. Telephone service over copper wire will disappear, replaced by wireless and VOIP.

  • Nit & The Corporate Internet (Score:4)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Saturday May 27, 2000 @02:46AM (#1043956)
    I would not go as far as saying that Gibson propsed an idea of a network that was open to all (though that might have been the way I read the question, not what the original author met). Gibson's cyberspace was accessible to people via a number of means, but to get to the information/content, that was tightly controlled via the use of ICE and was mostly held by corporate interests.

    Unfortunately, right now, we are headed that way, with various bills in the US and abroad which gives commercial copyright holders much stronger protection for their works in cyberspace than any other medium. And while most of the internet backbone and basics were developed by non-commercial interests, it's now nearly all in the hands of commercial developers, so they will have a say in what is done on *their* net assuming that nothing changes the way it's going. The Lars interview yesterday also suggested that while we're free to go out and create content that is our own, it's very hard to get people to see that content in the first place. Even nowadays, as the number of commercial 'content' sites on the web flourish, it is very hard to get a non-commercial content site up and running from scratch without a good starting base for the users.

    Thus, if things keep going the way they are, we head towards the information kiosk; information and content controlled by a select few, pay-per-view or -use type pricing. The only people this benefits is the commercial business.

    However, there are some major lawsuits and cases that are going to help decide if this is the direction that we will go. RIAA vs MP3 (in genenal), arguements against the DCMA, providing ISPs with no content liability, the legalities of linking, etc. There's a lot of cases that slashdot covers in YRO that if you don't follow and watch what happens, the free and open internet becomes the bleak future that Gibson descibed.

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