Gopher's Rise and Fall Shows How Much We Lost When Monopolists Stole the Net (eff.org) 69
Science-fiction writer, journalist and longtime Slashdot reader, Cory Doctorow, a.k.a. mouthbeef, writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) just published the latest installment in my case histories of "adversarial interoperability" -- once the main force that kept tech competitive. Today, I tell the story of Gopher, the web's immediate predecessor, which burrowed under the mainframe systems' guardians and created a menu-driven interface to campus resources, then the whole internet. Gopher ruled until browser vendors swallowed Gopherspace whole, incorporating it by turning gopher:// into a way to access anything on any Gopher server. Gopher served as the booster rocket that helped the web attain a stable orbit. But the tools that Gopher used to crack open the silos, and the moves that the web pulled to crack open Gopher, are radioactively illegal today.
If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames "network effects" for its monopolies -- but that's a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there's no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech's critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct -- duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.
If you wanted do to Facebook what Gopher did to the mainframes, you would be pulverized by the relentless grinding of software patents, terms of service, anticircumvention law, bullshit theories about APIs being copyrightable. Big Tech blames "network effects" for its monopolies -- but that's a counsel of despair. If impersonal forces (and not anticompetitive bullying) are what keeps tech big then there's no point in trying to make it small. Big Tech's critics swallow this line, demanding that Big Tech be given state-like duties to police user conduct -- duties that require billions and total control to perform, guaranteeing tech monopolists perpetual dominance. But the lesson of Gopher is that adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects.
Gopher was shit (Score:3, Informative)
I have no idea why they are trying to rewrite history and define gopher as what the free internet was.
It was terrible to navigate, everything was controlled by the gopher system in question and you could really only navigate to other gophers from your current gopher. There was no great index.
You could do a few more silly things which I exploited when I was kid, but it wasn't a mecha of any kind.
There is a reason it died.
Maybe it is appealing to a bunch of fascists who want to control the media. Wouldn't that be grand... dictating what information others have access too... then no one would ever be guilty of wrong think.
I'm glad I stopped giving money to the fuck up's a the EFF. You did about two things right in your lifetime and now you have gone way beyond stupidity and into plaid.
Re: (Score:3)
Jesus Christ Cory Doctorow is an annoying twit.
Re:Gopher was shit (Score:4, Funny)
Jesus Christ Cory Doctorow is an annoying twit.
Thanks for reminding me!
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Do we say "username checks out" here, or is that only a Reddit thing?
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He dropped out of the University of Waterloo (Canada's MIT.) He was in the "Independent Studies" faculty, which no longer even exists.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:1)
I was thinking the same thing. Gopher? It was terrible. Not sure what it has to do with Facebook
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that you could only access mainframes through a proprietary interface until Gopher came around. If someone tried to do the same thing to Facebook, and create a 3rd-party interface that gives you all the content on Facebook, but better, they'd get sued into oblivion. Imagine if you could create a 3rd-party interface that tied all the social media networks into one, and presents it to you in a sane UI. I'm sure it would be popular, but it's never gonna happen due to legal standards that didn't exist when Gopher was around.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:2)
Ummmmm but that is not true. Gopher was not the first. Plus gopher was terrible and Facebook is just a crappy website that no one will use in 5 years
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:5, Informative)
The point is that you can't create apps that offer interoperability between 3rd party services without getting sued.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:4, Informative)
Sure you can. Zapier, ifttt, basically anything with a REST API.
It's not like gopher would allow unfettered access into mainframe records. You saw what you were allowed to see. No different from today.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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1. Yes you can.
Not really, all you can do is develop an app that interfaces to FB for the services that it allows you to use.
2. Gopher wasn't a way to create apps that offer interoperability between 3rd party services.
Gopher is a protocol that allows any content to be presented in a menu and to be exchanged between nodes. So, it allowed full interoperability of file sharing service, that were 100% of Internet services at the time.
3. Gopher was proprietary;
No, it was not. The protocol's specification wer freely available and third party servers and clients were implementable without even notifying UoM. Which in fact happened many times.
What was the new gopher interface again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article argues that:
Gopher went away after you can could use it from a web browser.
You'd be sued to oblivion if you did the same thing wirh Facebook.
In between are a few inflammatory sentences designed to make you forget that "the same thing" means "make it accessible via a web browser". He's actually arguing that Facebook would sue you if you made a browser that can access Facebook! Um, dude ....
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:4)
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You can get all the content on Facebook on a variety of interfaces. There are various browsers, various apps, Facebook themselves provide various API's.
Gopher was just a different method of getting data in and out. There was nothing there that magically made the information free.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:2)
...you just described the entirety of Doctorow's point succinctly, without a hint of smug, condescension, or snark.
Thank you. I'll use your explanation for others then, thank you!
RSS aggregators (Score:2)
Within the domain of daily news, isn't this called an 'RSS aggregator'?
Personally I don't really understand why those seem to be not so successful...
(of course I use 'aggregator' in the sense of a local app, not something away 'in da kloud' that one cannot master)
Re:Gopher was shit (Score:4, Informative)
I have no idea why they are trying to rewrite history and define gopher as what the free internet was.
They're not saying it was. They're saying that being able to access it through an ordinary web browser with gopher:// [gopher] was a huge factor in boosting competition.
Re:Gopher was shit (Score:5, Interesting)
Gopher was hard to navigate? Sure and MP3s are boring to watch.
Gopher was more like an annotated ftp service than the world wide web.
Re:Gopher was shit (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea why they are trying to rewrite history and define gopher as what the free internet was.
It was terrible to navigate, everything was controlled by the gopher system in question and you could really only navigate to other gophers from your current gopher. There was no great index.
Admittedly, Gopher was a bit before my time, but I've recently been on a bit of an 'early internet' kick of late, and even downloaded Netscape Communicator to take a look at some of the Gopher servers still online [meulie.net].
I think that a lot of your issues with Gopher stem from their fundamentally decentralized nature and the lack of a search engine to help sift through content. I'd agree with you, but to a certain extent, I submit that there's no reason why gopher couldn't have also been indexed by Google, had it existed in its current form at the time (admittedly a paradox). It's not just Gopher that suffered from the absence of a Google-like search engine (Webcrawler and Altavista were very, very primitive and had a metric ton of their own issues with HTTP content even five years later). IRC, Usenet, BBSes, and other protocols were equally subject to those same limitations.
I pose a more fundamental question, to your point: is the internet truly better in the absence of most protocols other than HTTP(S)?
SMTP is probbably the runner-up protocol of things that survived, but the majority of SMTP traffic only really exists between mail servers, rather than being a user-facing protocol. While there are still a good number of people who use POP or IMAP with SMTP, a good majority of people use a browser-based frontend for Gmail or Office365/Outlook/Hotmail, and basically anything that uses Activesync delivers as HTTPS traffic now.
Other pockets of protocols exist in their own niches....
(S)FTP(S) still has pockets here and there but is basically gone now that Amazon S3 is its own open protocol that delivers files over HTTPS ultimately.
IRC still has its tiny pockets, but even those are being replaced by Discord, which is HTTPS. Mobile app communities like Kik and QQ are also HTTPS.
Usenet is basically supplanted by Reddit...again, HTTPS.
RSTP is occasionally used for upload streams to a CDN, but end users watch video streams in a browser or mobile app, or on Youtube...once again, all HTTPS.
So, while Gopher specifically might have been a good protocol to replace, I pose the question of whether the internet as a whole is better off with everything-over-HTTPS, or if the absence of other application and transport protocols is something the internet is better off having.
Re:Gopher was shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the internet better with IRC replaced by Discord, RSTP replaced by YouTube, SFTP replaced by Amazon S3, and Usenet replaced by reddit? No. That wasn't hard.
Replacing open standardas with corporate monopolies leads to higher cost for the user, less freedom (as in speech) if they decide to censor you, and more corporate control. It's bad.
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Is the internet better with IRC replaced by Discord, RSTP replaced by YouTube, SFTP replaced by Amazon S3, and Usenet replaced by reddit?
But all of those services are still available if you want to use them!
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Freedom/convenience tradeoff. It's why governments exist. Just like settlers on the frontier could dispense quite well with no government (often fleeing oppressive governments in the first place), it was the same on the frontier internet.
Except the internet ain't goatse anymore. Consumer mass elects few strongmen, and otherwise despise DIY approach to everything as giving up power is certainly a path of least resistance from the per
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And yet those services have all become successful because, to the end user, they offer a superior service that does what they want. Open standards get replaced with corporate monopolies because corporations are the ones willing to invest money into actually improving the base product with features users actually want. If you look at the features e.g.
Usenet is a long way from dead (Score:2)
All that's happened is that the teen trolls and other idiots have cleared off to web services leaving behind - mostly - people who actually want intelligent uncensored conversation.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:1)
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I think that a lot of your issues with Gopher stem from their fundamentally decentralized nature
This was one of it's strong points, actually. Being decentralized made it less susceptible to major downtimes and widespread distuption. The Internet was designed as a decentralized network service for the same reason.
and the lack of a search engine to help sift through content.
There were two, actually: Veronica2 and Archie. I don't have metrics to compare the percentage of the Gopherspace they covered compared to Google, but the Gopherspace definetly was not without a search enigne, even though it prospered for a few years before http took over.
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Agree with the Gopher thoughts; EFF I’m still mixed on.
But, I still use Lynx as my web browser when a website is too obnoxious... and sometimes just curl|grep.
Gopher made finding information on a homogenous set of information possible, although not easy. It reminds me of a bad sharepoint implementation... without a search function.
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I don't ever recall a mainframe running Gopher. Most weren't (and still aren't) internet facing.
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I have a backup of it somewhere. The totality of it was really quite small by today's standards. People jumped ship for a reason. The commercial aspect really started to alter the net five or so more years after the webs creation.
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Re: Gopher was shit (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s okay Cory, you can log in to reply.
Re: Gopher was shit (Score:2)
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There was no great index.
There was Veronica. You had to use a separate client to use it. But basically gopher was nothing more than FTP with indexes that could link to other servers.
you may use Gopher too (Score:1)
Not sure of the point here (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, in '94, consultant me took a job that introduced me to both Linux and WWW. I'd never heard of either of them up until then. Overnight my expertise at searching FTP archives became irrelevant.
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The point is that you can't create a program that offers interoperability between third-party services without being sued.
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FTP archives remained relevant throughout the nineties. There used to be a great FTP search engine at ftpsearch.ntnu.no. I used it so much I still remember the hostname. FTP is all but dead today, but it continued to be extremely useful for years after the web gained dominance.
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The thing is that FTP wasnt really replaced by HTTP as it was actually replaced by the more general notion of Repositories and App Stores.
Lots of FTP archives existed and there were a few search engines for them, but take note that the key word is archive. While many FTP sites only served a few files, they in general werent important. The big archives were important. Most of th
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"Lots of FTP archives existed and there were a few search engines for them, but take note that the key word is archive."
I do not think that word means what you think it means. Archives can be active. These days though the only communities still using a lot of FTP are ones where using a browser is often problematic. For example, Aminet is still often accessed via FTP, because most Amigas struggle to run a browser.
Gopher was amazing for it's time (Score:5, Interesting)
But so limited, and useless so quickly. It was a pain to use.
There were other technologies that died a justified death around then, gopher was just one of them.
I can vaguely remember WAIS, Z39.50 in general, Hyper-G, telnet, rlogin, rcp, and according to current web browser rumor, ftp, flash, and java in the browser.
HTTP/Mosaic/Netscape were probably never any better in any way, it was just easier to implement and access, once there were browsers and a decent search index.
Re: Gopher was amazing for it's time (Score:2)
Telnet is dead? Are you for real? The server side maybe but the client is an extremely useful tool in any net admins kit to test whether various TCP services are live.
Re: Gopher was amazing for it's time (Score:1)
Re: Gopher was amazing for it's time (Score:2)
It's an easy way to check for open ports and talk to text based servers, eg smtp
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I can vaguely remember .. telnet, rlogin, rcp
I use ssh and scp all the time for real work. These are to telnet/rlogin and rcp what https is to http. I guess the same functionality could be re-implemented over https, in the same way that other traditional unix utilities can be replaced by heavy GUI applications on Windows, if you really wanted to do things the hard way.
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I can vaguely remember .. telnet, rlogin, rcp
I use ssh and scp all the time for real work. These are to telnet/rlogin and rcp what https is to http. I guess the same functionality could be re-implemented over https, in the same way that other traditional unix utilities can be replaced by heavy GUI applications on Windows, if you really wanted to do things the hard way.
I had some https to ssh gateways in place over umm 15 years ago. It was handy (vi even worked) but ponderous as it was implemented on the apache server.
Foul! (Score:1)
Foul - Metaphor Overuse - Two penalty shots served to readers.
Access to Information (Score:4, Interesting)
Gopher provided access to information. The web provides access to information. The web adds the ability to use applications over the internet. Some are free as in free beer. Some are free as in free speech. Some you have to pay for. Some are open to use by anyone and some aren't.
I would wager that there is a *lot* more open content on the web than there ever was on Gopher. Or Gopher and FTP and NNTP combined.
Just because Facebook and Google are popular doesn't mean you can't use any other web site. The comparison doesn't make a lot of sense.
Re: THANX BUT NO THANX EFF!!! (Score:1)
MOAR CENSORSHIP NOW!!?!?!
The Shittiest Post in a LONG Time (Score:2)
As the first post noted Gopher was shit. Very very true.
Secondly, as noted by others, apparently some argument has been made that it's "illegal", or some facsimile thereof with the law, to write a service to access Facebook.
Is this "Doctorow" smoking crack? Facebook is a private company. There is a good reason you can't just write a quick python script to access their backend.
Let's just put it this way, back in the glory days of Gopher, what 1991? Did Microsoft, Apple, Norton, IBM, Boeing, Merril Lynch
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I think the idea is that companies like Facebook won't let you access public information stored in their private backend.
Re: The Shittiest Post in a LONG Time (Score:2)
Perhaps, and Iâ(TM)m just spitballing here, thatâ(TM)s because it fundamentally isnâ(TM)t actually public information even if a massively complex computational expression of it happens to be accessible as that companyâ(TM)s product/service.
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Well, when you post pictures of yourself with the intention of letting anyone on the Internet see it, to the end-user, it's public. Facebook has all kinds of terms and conditions that permits Facebook to restrict that condition. And that's the core complaint of the EFF.
Re: The Shittiest Post in a LONG Time (Score:2)
Have you considered the possibility the end user is wrong and should maybe just look elsewhere?
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Only explaining the EFF's position, since people seem to be hung up on Gopher.
As to "elsewhere", there isn't really an elsewhere? At least not one that's as hugely-popular as Facebook. There's stuff like this:
https://alternativeto.net/soft... [alternativeto.net]
but whether or not any of them would make the EFF happier is anyone's guess.
Bottom line is, the EFF is trying to say that we live with a Web where people try to publish public content online, only to find it locked up behind proprietary interfaces and suchlike. They d
Why was this allowed to be posted? (Score:1)
Yelling at the Cloud (Score:2)
It seems like the old Simpsons joke about an old man yelling at a cloud has taken on a new meaning.
Gopher was good (Score:2)
...but what replaced it was better.
Gopher was old internet: developed and maintained by altruist hobbyist/students whose goal was "cool" and "clever". It was probably about as far as we were going to get with something that wasn't proprietary and profitable somehow to someone.
If we had stopped at gopher, you wouldn't be able to be posting here on slashdot.
You'd be posting into essentially a bbs.
The internet is still there, not stolen (Score:2)
Facebook, Twitter, Gmail etc. are popular now, a temporary condition. Nothing prevents them being replaced except for transition costs. People are willing to pay those costs, provided the replacement is about twice as useful.
The useful screen real estate offered by Facebook on a web browser keeps decreasing... once it gets too small, or to cumbersome, something will replace it. Same with Twitter, YouTube, etc.
Cory says things well, and passionately, but he's catastrophizing things. This seems to be his br
ISP-Consolidation Alone is Manifest Disaster (Score:3)
In hind sight really, why do you allow these unknown and very untrustable entities come into your computer, use you computer CPU, Memory, (with localStore even disk space), a Window, and your speakers to do anything they want?
It all began with trust and comradery. Today, strangers are mining bitcoin in your browser and spying on you in so many ways.. selling everything they can get from you. It annoys me to no end just that sites like CNN can auto-start videos and I have no way to stop them other than not visiting the site. Many other web sites do so it's becomes something you just have to tolerate.. and when on low bandwidth, it just destroys your ability to anything sometimes.
I think the WWW must fundamentally change to put power back into the hands of users. Even things like Alexa and Google Home need to be devices that operate disconnected from the cloud. Yes, the AI hardware is needed. Sadly, you cannot just buy a computer board with an AI chip in it..
We need a new protocol to take back control..
--Matthew C. Tedder
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I remember browsers subsumed Gopher (Score:2)
Some neckbeard wrote a screed and published it to Usenet calling it the day the internet died, promising that system administrators would go into open revolt against this travesty.
lefitist and their "terms" (Score:2)
Yeah, thats *exactly* what happened, comrade. And the solution then, is for govt to steal it back, right? Then, whats next? Workers of the world unite?
USENET, not gopher (Score:2)
Play solitaire over gopher (Score:2)
You can play solitaire over gopher here: gopher://worldofsolitaire.com/
What more does one really need from an internet protocol?
In the end (Score:1)
the hunt for the last dreamer , the poet and ars gratia artis will begin
since no one really knows what they're supposed to do, but they are EXCELLENT at doing it
no catalysts
Lack of Pron (Score:1)
Not that I would know anything about the subject though.