baxtrr wrote:
My personal death knell for the Old Ways was when the anonymous server in Finland got shut down by the Powers That Be. That box was the last even remotely-reliable way for anyone in the world to take part in the Internet with some degree of privacy. When it was killed, we lost, not our innocence, but that fundamental sense of safety that some of us needed for some dealings on the Internet. And it will never be replaced...the closest thing is the Yahoo account, which has too many ways to trace the originator.
"Things is not what they used ta." --Ruthless the Brigand, The Thief And The Cobbler
bax
(blowing dust and brushing cobwebs out of the attic) Thinks... anon.petit.fi wasn't it??? God I'd totally forgotten about that, it was massively .gov control-versial....
Ya know, I'm thinking that was within 6 months of Postel's death. I'm too lazy to look it up, but certainly the events are chronologically close in whatever part of my memory is still functioning after being up all night.
Kellog wrote:Well, there are a few corners where people try to add content to the whole business. They're small, and surrounded by billboards, but they're there.
And for which I am very grateful indeed , however Content (rare and gemlike that it is now adays)is not the issue I'm pointing my sword at, rather it was the network itself being ripped from it's un-numbered birth parents arms and given over to be fostered by those economically inspired as opposed to engineering and community inspired.
The entire internet at one time was at it's core, not a bunch of machines and wires and blinking LEDs, instead it was a library of ASCII text files called Request For Comments, aka RFCs. The RFC's are the genetic code that specified in the minutest detail how every singe bit of data was to flow from machine to machine over the 'net.
<a href="
http://www.isoc.org/postel/">Jon Postel</a> created, among many other core concepts, the entire RFC system. He was the RNA that keep the 'net's DNA from falling to a tangled, chaotic, functionless mess.
He also was the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. All IP address requests went through his office. The power of that postion can not be underestimated. I got my /24 from his organisation using an Email form taken from, you got it, an RFC.
Back then <i>anyone</i> could get a class C for the price of a single Email message. Today no individual can get a /24. Only ISPs can get them and at last check they were at least $5000 up front and $500 per year, assuming you could plead on bended knee to get one.
That /24 of mine is grandfathered by the RFC policies in place on the day it was issued. That policy was written by Jon Postel. An ephemeral connection, but it's very much real to me.
I'm rather backwards proud of this - Go here:
http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl and enter mlkbbs in the search field. A telling fact about this: I sent the rfc template to ARIN/IANA by email. From my AOL account.
I had the netblock the next day despite having the most poisonous return Email address known to man. The net was for everyone and Jon and his organization made certain it stayed that way.
That fuction has now been taken over by multiple organizations.with several *hundred* persons running their continents IP space databases in a very politicized atmosphere heavy with the scent of money and lawyers.
It gets very geeky very quickly from here on in, but suffice it to say his hand was not only on the tiller, but he built the tiller itself. That tiller is what allowed the RFC process to create the internet one document at a time.
He certainly didn't do all that in a vacuum, nor was he some angel sent from on high. He could be heavy handed at times, had plenty of backbone to share and was very much a human being.
So history flows. Someday in the future, the last TCP/IP packet will be transmitted and received between two hosts and the internet as we know it will finally go dark forever.
When that happens, only the RFC's will remain behind. But in them you will still be able to find Vince Serf's and countless other people's light because of Jon Postel.
CYa!
Mako
ROFL