'The Internet Needs More Friction' (vice.com) 155
Justin Kosslyn, who leads product management at Jigsaw, a unit within Alphabet that builds technology to address global security challenges, writes: The Internet's lack of friction made it great, but now our devotion to minimizing friction is perhaps the internet's weakest link for security. Friction -- delays and hurdles to speed and growth -- can be a win-win-win for users, companies, and security. It is time to abandon our groupthink bias against friction as a design principle. Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions -- rules that limit how fast you can drive a vehicle or access a controlled substance -- yet digital information moves limitlessly. The same design philosophy that accelerated the flow of correspondence, news, and commerce also accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware, and disinformation.
In the old days, it took time and work to steal secrets, blackmail people, and meddle across borders. Then came the internet. From the beginning, it was designed as a frictionless communication platform across countries, companies, and computers. Reducing friction is generally considered a good thing: it saves time and effort, and in many genuine ways makes our world smaller. There are also often financial incentives: more engagement, more ads, more dollars. But the internet's lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a "bad actor" can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.
In the old days, it took time and work to steal secrets, blackmail people, and meddle across borders. Then came the internet. From the beginning, it was designed as a frictionless communication platform across countries, companies, and computers. Reducing friction is generally considered a good thing: it saves time and effort, and in many genuine ways makes our world smaller. There are also often financial incentives: more engagement, more ads, more dollars. But the internet's lack of friction has been a boon to the dark side, too. Now, in a matter of hours a "bad actor" can steal corporate secrets or use ransomware to blackmail thousands of people. Governments can influence foreign populations remotely and at relatively low cost. Whether the threat is malware, phishing, or disinformation, they all exploit high-velocity networks of computers and people.
no (Score:2, Insightful)
just no
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"We already made it big. There's no need to keep the part of the internet that let that happen. It's just trouble all around if we keep allowing other companies to get big - heck, one of them might compete with us."
Perhaps we need a new internet, or at least a new web. Of course, there's a tough problem to solve: if there's no way for authoritarians to take down content they don't like, or identify uploaders of such content (e.g. Freenet), how do you deal with spam? P2P is great for popular content, but
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With blackjack, and hookers!
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"We already made it big. There's no need to keep the part of the internet that let that happen. It's just trouble all around if we keep allowing other companies to get big - heck, one of them might compete with us."
You've got it half-right but you left out a key part; the other half of that conversation. Who are they saying this *to*?
Corrupt and too-powerful governments and their politicians, that's who. Also missing is the reply.
"We agree, as now the internet has become a means for those who oppose us and our ideology(ies) & agenda(s) to communicate, organize, and spread their messages to the world. We can't have that. We'll work together as it's in both our interests."
You'll not solve the problem until and unles
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Simple. Paid transactions.
Bitcoins are stupid, but something similar would be fantastic if required to send an email or request, with the recipient getting it. I'd feel great about getting 1,000 spam mails per day if each was a deposit in my wallet. I'd also openly invite a ddos if each request was worth a tenth of a penny.
That could also be an interesting solution to forum spam and pop-up ads!
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If it were hey, if it were feasible for me to git paid 5 cents each time I encountered on of those, it would make things a little better.
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Programming languages and frameworks need to regulated. They need to maintain minimum levels of stability, reliablility and security.
By whom and how would this be measured?
For example, anyone that wants to send email needs to register their server with a central authority.
Under which country's jurisdiction would this "central authority" operate?
And then if outbound email was taxed at even as little as 0.0001% per message, that would be nothing to the average person or company
Unless, say, you operate the volunteer-run mailing list for a popular free software project.
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You're right. I was in a mood and didn't think through what I was writing.
I am, however, convinced that software developers need to be regulated in the same way that Engineers are. They need to be certified that they understand basic software development principals. They need to understand security.
And I missed the single most important one: Companies need to be held liable for their bugs. Computers are now so entrenched in every aspect of our daily lives that having a lassez-faire attitude to developm
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I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. The irony is that I *didn't* fully think it through or I wouldn't have made half those suggestions. A lot of them have a very dangerous slippery slope that won't end well.
However, I do believe that software developers need to be regulated in the same way Engineers are. Developers need to prove they understand basic principals. That they understand security.
And companies need to start being held accountable for the products they produce. We are seeing on an
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Article: "High frequency trading has taken finance outside of what humans are capable of analyzing or responding to, and the result is a system which places a higher value on microsecond latency than on careful investment."
Slashdot response: "We should introduce mandatory transaction times, to put trading back into the hands of humans."
Article: "The internet has so eff
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Ah I see. Without going back to the article (because that would be against Slashdot's most cherished values...), I can definitely agree with the quoted statement and what you're saying.
HFT is a parasite on an already questionable system. It provides nothing of value to anyone except the people using it, and in fact it costs the entire system money by raising costs for everyone trading legitimately.
Too many slashdot'ers subscribe to the technocratic believe that unrestrained technology is always good, with
authoritarian bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
The true sign /. has jumped the shark when it starts pushing this kind of authoritarian bullshit.
Re:authoritarian bullshit (Score:4, Funny)
This is the kind of overreaction porn I come to slashdot for.
Over reaction? (Score:2)
This is the kind of overreaction porn I come to slashdot for.
Is this an overreaction though? You could make exactly the same claim about the postal service. It sped up the interaction between people and allowed for mail-order scams etc. too. However, that same service was also used by law enforcement to transmit information about crooks rapidly e.g by sending fingerprints, crime reports and arrest warrants between jurisdictions. The same applied when the telephone came along.
In all these cases the solution has always been that you use that same reduction in frict
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Probably the thing that reflects poorest on the USA in my decades of living is that that enough Americans elected that sentient As Seen on TV sticker to office. *sad trombone*
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The unidicted felon ghoul, remember? Though to be fair they did crush the unabashed socialist candidate, the one who could not take the oath of office without violating his well known personal beliefs... THAT would have been a fabulous choice, right?
The TDS is so deep.
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Context. One group uses TDS to describe what they see as irrational and deliberate refusal of and opposition to the most recent presidential election results, based on any of several factors and beliefs, based on the perceived and claimed the moral turpitude of the winner, among other things. Another group uses it to describe those who turn a blind eye to the claimed failures and crimes of that election winner. Some use it as commentary on the actions of all others.
I use it exclusively in one of those ways
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That would be a much better post if you actually had a list of crimes. Of course that's pretty hard to do when you don't have anything that's actually a crime.
Oh and no, not being liked by the DC bureaucracy isn't actually a crime. When it does become one it's probably going to be worse for you than you think.
Re: authoritarian bullshit (Score:2)
18USC2232
18USC1519
18USC2017
18USC793
18USC1924
The only controversy regarding these accusations is whether the actions satisfy the definition of 'gross negligence', or are merely 'extremely careless', as the FBI Director characterized them, bearing in mind that his assessment was neither binding nor required.
Also the Federal Records Act, FOIA, NARA
My assertions are based on public statements of, among other officials', the Director of the FBI. If your commenting on that these assertions are baseless, I recomme
Re: authoritarian bullshit (Score:2)
PS- you may by confused about who I think committed crimes. My response should help clear up any confusion.
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How is antivirus software and DDOS protection "authoritarian bullshit"?
Do you read every spam email carefully just to respect the author's freedom of speech? Did you disable the corporate firewall so that information and ideas can be exchanged freely?
My firewall creates a lot more friction for apps wanting to access the internet. Most of the time when they try I say "no".
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Authoritarian has nothing to do with it. It's an awful idea on a purely utilitarian level.
Look at credit cards. Say you introduce an artificial 5 minute delay. Might you reduce some types of fraud that way? Sure. But what about the million-fold more legitimate transactions that are unnecessarily delayed? What about uses requiring instant purchases that suddenly become impossible? Paying a toll booth or a bus ticket or any number of on-the-spot purchases becomes impractical.
Likewise with the inter
Authorize the sale in advance (Score:2)
[With a 5-minute delay on payment cards,] Paying a toll booth or a bus ticket or any number of on-the-spot purchases becomes impractical.
Not if the cardholder asked the issuing bank to authorize a particular (merchant, maximum amount) pair more than 5 minutes in advance.
Artificial delays will kill things like media streaming
Unless it's a live stream of a sporting event or whatever, I don't see how a 5-minute delay to buffer up the start of a stream would hurt.
gaming
Video games can be downloaded to a suitable computer in advance of play. Multiplayer video games can run on a split* screen or over a local area network (LAN).
and VOIP
Even if a low-latency channel can provide only 2400 bps each way, Codec 2 [rowetel.com] squeeze
Toll preauth; Elsagate; local multiplayer (Score:2)
You try that approaching a toll booth on an unfamiliar road at night. Tell me how it goes.
When you obtain directions through TomTom, Google Maps, or another navigation application, you could have the app notify the banks to authorize payment for tolls along your route. Apps lack this feature now but are likely to add it should banks introduce friction measures against unauthorized use of payment credentials.
Live stream is one.
Attending ball games in person rather than watching some out-of-market game through IPTV would fulfill "Third, favor local content" in Kosslyn's editorial.
Short videos a la Youtube is another. Can't stream hop when it takes awhile to start a new stream.
A counterpart to YouTube on a high-l
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For both of these things low-latency communication would be needed.
But not low-latency, high-throughput communication. A separate channel, limited to maybe 9600 bps per household down and 9600 bps up, could be made available for SSH and other interactive communications.
For spotify.. Looking around for a specific song? Well lets say you have a 30 second delay per song
The essay does mention that local transfers (those in the same city) could complete faster. This would give recordings by local bands the advantage of coming back in 3 seconds instead of 30.
So this would not only reduce the video-game industry to a tiny fraction of what it is today.. People could not play with friends unless they bring their computer over
Prior to Xbox Live, bringing your computer or console over or bringing a controller for split-screen play was the domin
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what exactly does jump the shark mean? Jumping the gun had a real-world image of a false start during the race, where a racer took off before the starting pistol fired. Hence jumping before the gun. Jumping the shark draws some really fucking perverse jack-be-nimble fairy tail images in my head. Do these sharks have freaking laser beams??
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what exactly does jump the shark mean?
Are you serious? You don't know that expression, but you know sharks with frickin' leaser beams on their heads?
smh
Too damn lazy to give you the link. Just google "jump the shark" and ye shall be educated on where the expression came from, and what it means.
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what exactly does jump the shark mean? Jumping the gun had a real-world image of a false start during the race, where a racer took off before the starting pistol fired. Hence jumping before the gun. Jumping the shark draws some really fucking perverse jack-be-nimble fairy tail images in my head. Do these sharks have freaking laser beams??
It means you don't understand an old meme from before the Internet. Jumping the shark [wikipedia.org] is a reference to an episode of a TV sitcom called Happy Days [wikipedia.org]. All you need to know is that 'jumping the shark' means doing something 1 time too many and something that worked before no longer will work. Basically, its the end of a meme's effectiveness in a given culture.
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The true sign /. has jumped the shark when it starts pushing this kind of authoritarian bullshit.
Um, posting it on /. makes it so /. is pushing it? Um... dude, not to point out the obvious, but it's someone in Alphabet pushing it. They've jumped the shark. I could argue they jumped it as soon as they started selling ads.
Re:Utter stupidity (Score:5, Interesting)
By abolishing net neutrality?
Re:Utter stupidity (Score:5, Informative)
This is dumb. The abolition explicitly reduced the government's role in the Internet. Reduced — while the TFA argues for an increase: all of the analogies mentioned (speed-limits, prescription- and licensing-requirements) are enforced by government.
Like the early US, Internet was Libertarian — treating censorship as damage and routing around it [wikiquote.org], remember? The same unfortunate tendencies [monticello.org], which make the countries increasingly authoritarian, can now be observed online...
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It appears you don't understand how privatisation can deregulate the restraints to power. Where social media used to be treated as public speech where there were restraints to censorship Facebook is now free to censor whatever they want, and they outsource that job to whatever interest group wants control, including the Atlantic Council , the neoconservative Weekly Standard and the state itself. Without restraints.
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What I don't understand is the above sentence...
Well, as they ought to be — they aren't a governmental institution...
As long as government can not tell them, whom to censor....
This would be against the First Amendment — do you have citations?
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and the state itself
This would be against the First Amendment — do you have citations?
Under the authority of the Communications Act, the U.S. federal government bans the broadcast of profanity. It also issues exclusive nationwide spectrum licenses to carriers that have since formed a cartel. At the local level, cities can require incoming wired service providers to agree to an unreasonably rapid buildout schedule in order to qualify for right-of-way access.
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So, nothing about the likes of Facebook, yet, right?
It alreay has artificial delays (Score:1)
By abolishing net neutrality?
By abolishing net neutrality?
It's called ads. And also your general confusion over the content you are drowning in.
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For smarter people, they will KNOW whether it's actually dangerous or not.
I see this time and time again, the notion that dumber people will get what's coming to them, but everyone affects everyone else. We all vote, we share the same civic spaces, we share infrastructure, tax base, etc. You want protections in place that protect the dumber people, not the smarter people. By the very nature of the definition of smarter people, they don't need protection. But that protection isn't for the sake of the individ
Crazy.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the speed of the internet that is the problem- it's humans adapting to it.
Whether it's behavior or security practices it is all about adaptation. Adding "friction" is corporate weasel terminology for "I'm an MBA and can't understand this".
There's nothing like getting a blank stare from an MBA, who is your boss, who either refuses, or cannot, understand technology or it's social consequences.
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This would be an example of the type of friction the article talks a
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Of course that kind of rate-limiting was dependent on one of the parties - the recipient - wanting to add cost so they only got "serious" email. It wouldn't do anything to a Twitter flash mob where people want to read each other's posts, unless you want to take Internet response time down from milliseconds to the days a mailman took for a letter. That's not going to happen so I assume this is about control, if you're like an "influencer" with a large number of daily readers we're going to clamp down on your
This makes little sense. (Score:3)
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now that we are BIG!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Lets NOW get regulations put it, while WE have a lot of say and clout and while we have a lot of politicians we can buy off to help make sure that regulations benefit US more AND in a way that hurts other startups.
This business is as wrote as history. When you are small, you hate regs because they cause you pain... when you are BIG, you like regs because you can buy a few of them that help keep your business either directly or at least quasi blessed by one or more of the government agencies. And what is wrong with having the ear of government? And like the TARP bailouts... getting to big to fail is an insurance policy all its own! Government will happily put businesses on welfare too!
Is this A Modest Proposal? (Score:1)
I can't tell if the author is a raging dumb-ass or very, very snarky.
So... (Score:2)
Bourgeoisie internet = 2 x regular Internet (Score:1)
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But that's not a 'parallel Internet'. It's a VAN, or whatever other acronym you like for a private network. Like, for instance, 'network'.
Not parallel anything. And it doesn't matter a bit in the context of this discussion.
10/8 is a "private internet" (Score:2)
Anything using 10/8, 172.16/12, or 192.168/16 is a "private internet" according to RFC 1918 - Address Allocation for Private Internets (1996) [ietf.org].
Re: 10/8 is a "private internet" (Score:2)
Private address spaces are not a "private internet". However, they also are not useful in the public, actual Internet.
Fewer bastards (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on (Score:3)
Everyone with a technical mind here will think that "adding friction" is about inserting delays in transfer protocols, which is a stupid idea.
But the article is not about technical bandwidth, but about social conventions. It *is* a good idea to reduce the amount of exposure to bad actors, as every security specialist can tell you. Spam filters, white lists and ad blockers add friction to transmission, and we all consider those a good thing, even if sometimes you need to recover false positives from within the filters.
Similarly, closed group-based social networks like Whatsapp are less prone than Twitter to focusing noise onto a single spot. Twitter is known for destroying the life of people in a few hours, and it happens because of the speed with which information on a topic can propagate through the network and concentrate the discussion of the whole internet on the timeline of a single person or reduced group. If the topic needs to propagate slowly through several closed groups, it is less prone to produce the same burning effect.
Pursuing those objectives - isolating one from bad content, reducing speed of propagation, distributing replicated info through several smaller channels - is a good use for social friction in the net.
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So ironic that a Google peon is writing this (Score:2)
Google peon (Score:2)
The preferred term is "Googledouche".
how to use internet safely (Score:1)
Dumbest Article Ever (Score:2)
That this fluff piece got published is a testament to no one reviews articles before they are published.
If we take a our way back machine, we would learn that security was an after thought to software design. Largely because computers were non-networked, single user (as opposed to multi-user) machines. Then computers started to be multi user machines, more than one person working on the the same machine and then they started
the heart of the article.... (Score:2)
Gee, I wonder where we might get some service to scan, parse, examine, study and commercialize our digital correspondence?
Hopefully a friction-less computer can do it so I can hurry up and wait for my communications to be approved!
China has friction (Score:5, Informative)
This person is pushing towards totalitarianism like they have in China. Someone (or something) checking what you are doing every step of the way.
This is great for the powerful, bad for the people. Good for the copyright holders, bad for spreading culture. Good for dictators and spies (ie. hacking team), bad for Wikileaks.
The hackability and "lack of friction" is a feature, it gives the people a fighting chance. Good days when the engineers of the internet had good ideology on their code.
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Not quite (Score:3)
"Highways have speed limits and drugs require prescriptions"
Both are just suggestions that you can ignore whenever you want or need it.
I have no problem with the friction (Score:2)
I once have driven a car with a broken clutch for 20 km to reack the nearest car mechanic and was a bit tricky to drive witout friction, especially stating
Lube (Score:1)
It's something to think about (Score:2)
My immediate reaction is that the article is nonsense, but I'm willing to withhold judgement unless there's some concrete proposals. For example, it's not uncommon for people to greylist email or have a timeout after a number of failed login attempts. Both of those could be considered "friction" of the sort the author is talking about, and I don't have a problem with those.
But I think we should also be thinking about the opposite: What happens if everything is open and virtually frictionless? What if co
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However, Moore's law has given a constant and significant increase in speed, it could be that we are starting to notice downsides. Having to move to a 5-year upgrade cycle to maintain
Move fast and break things (Score:2)
So the morons who wanted to move fast and break things suddenly realize they broke everything. No shit. You broke democracy through one social network that is a spying platform and another that has never made a dime.
On it... (Score:1)
wow! Unabashed arrogance who would have though??? (Score:1)
Want friction Mr Advertisement Company(google)? (Score:2)
He is just reqalizing this now? (Score:2)
This is so incredible wrong, where do I start? (Score:2)
First, this does not even identify the right problem: The problem is in the end-points, not the network. Second, "friction" will not solve it. It is the wrong idea in the wrong place. Third, does this person even know how the technology works he is talking about? Apparently not. Next: Even adding minutes of "friction" to software (malware) distribution, that would not help. I did some research in this area about 2 decades ago, you still can saturate the whole net and reach all vulnerable targets with signi
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Friction is not a blanket time delay.
Friction is your spam filter. Or your ad-block in your browser. Or noscript. All of these create friction in people getting their message to you. (And yes, most of those people are shitbags).
What could similar friction look like on social media or the other topics of this article? No idea, and the author doesn't seem to have any good implementation ideas either. But a completely false Facebook post getting in front of a ton of people to influence those people with
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I do understand that. But I somewhat doubt the Google-Person does. It also does not help.
Friction is easy. (Score:2)
Just come and propose that BSD adopt systemd on Slashdot and you'll see just how much friction the internet can generate.
Not quite obligatory xkcd (Score:2)
I prefer that I control the filter (Score:2)
Corrupt (Score:1)
Must be great to limit growth (Score:2)
Especially if you are already big yourself and don't want to face any competition.
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tradeoffs (Score:2)
The same design philosophy that accelerated the flow of correspondence, news, and commerce also accelerates the flow of phishing, ransomware, and disinformation.
Well, yes. These are called "tradeoffs".
I don't see anything in the summary (and the stupid hurts, I am not reading the article) about what we would lose with "more friction".
Anyway, there's plenty of friction on the internet, where it matters. Have to login to any site that matters, have to prove identity to things like tax services and (at least initially) banks, etc.
What Facebook and Google have proved lately is that the kind of "friction" they want is against people and ideas that they don't like. #%
Another excuse for censorship? (Score:2)
Could a "bad actor" be somebody you don't agree with?
Maybe that person's views could cause sociality harm, or make you feel that you're not safe.
For example: maybe somebody could insist that there are only two genders.
Dear Vice (Score:2)
Dear Vice,
Go away.
Thank you.
I don't necessarily disagree with this.. HOWEVER: (Score:2)
Turn transport layer over to AT&T (Score:2)
Bad analogy (Score:2)
Comparing the internet to highway speed limits or pharmaceuticals makes no sense. Sometimes a prescription requirement is there for the sole purpose of lining the pockets of drug manufacturers. This is why different countries have different cutoffs for over-the-counter vs prescription only. Comparing drug restrictions to the internet amounts to making restrictions deliberately to make Zuckerfuck even richer. Likewise I am probably one of the few /. members who remember when the federal government capped the
Re:I'm sad to see... (Score:4, Insightful)
That Slashdot has gone so much downhill as to post stuff like this.
The idea behind this article is probably the stupidest thing I've ever read. And I've read two Ayn Rand novels.
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Soft of, and I've read those novels also. There's a nasty coincidence between her expression of Objectivism and Socialist theology, but another topic, another time...
No, the idea that the Internet make 'easy' what is better left to be 'difficult' is the lament of the powerful. They loathe their opposition, of course, and often consider much if the opposition to be inadequate, uneducated, common, and beneath respect or inclusion. There is no particular political movement more or less guilty of this I suspec
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The person behind the idea that caused the article to be written, is pretty seriously misunderstanding reality at it's present state, for sure. However, I feel like the reason that it's posted here on slashdot is because it exposes what sort of ideas are being kicked around by those that can make shit happen. It allows some of us to read between the lines.
Oh, I feel it is absolutely to know what kinds of things people are thinking. Even this ridiculous "give the internet friction" idea. It's important to know what stupid ideas people have, so that you know to oppose them.
People who only read "The Huffington Post and Buzzfeed" or, on the other side, people who only listen to "Fox News and Breitbart", are really not doing themselves any favours. It is important to see all sides of an issue. Even the stupid side.
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No, they're not a big company like Google.
They own Google.
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