![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eThis makes worrying reading. John Walker is not some newcomer with paranoiac fantasies. He is technologically very capable and has many years of programming for the internet under his belt. One of his coolest creations is SpeakFreely, a free internet telephony program. He has become worried about recent stealthy trends among large corporate ISPs to demote users to becoming just consumers instead of network peers.
Read his article about it: The Digital Imprimateur
...Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past....
This is not just theoretical -- sadly it has already begun. Read it and see if we can't reverse this trend.
I should mention that the first two thirds of the article is written the way the proponents of these restrictive technologies would describe them. The last part of the article talks about the implications, though I have to say he didn't dwell as much on the disadvantages as I'd have liked. You really do need to read the long pro- section to gain an understanding of what the problems are. Jumping to the summation won't really give you much insight into what the technologies will do.
Read his article about it: The Digital Imprimateur
...Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past....
This is not just theoretical -- sadly it has already begun. Read it and see if we can't reverse this trend.
I should mention that the first two thirds of the article is written the way the proponents of these restrictive technologies would describe them. The last part of the article talks about the implications, though I have to say he didn't dwell as much on the disadvantages as I'd have liked. You really do need to read the long pro- section to gain an understanding of what the problems are. Jumping to the summation won't really give you much insight into what the technologies will do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-12-07 08:00 pm (UTC)Actually, I believe I do remember you. :)
Glad to hear you have been working on new possibilities for VR. I have become a little disillusioned with VRML (and its ugly twin X3D).
If you have a better engine then I am all ears. I've been working on a better language for making VR. I have come to believe VRML is kinda a deadend -- it is very hard to extend it (mostly because of one unfortunate little decision made in the DEF keyword). Compare it with POVRay scene description language and it is easy to see VRML's limitations. POVRay has built up enormous libraries of standard shapes, objects, textures, etc. VRML will never do that. There have been attempts to create libraries of VRML PROTOs, but they never really succeeded.
My email address is the same as it was when I met you.
miriam(at)werple.net.au
(at)=@ of course, to confound spammer address-harvesting robots. I now receive about 10 times as much spam as genuine email. Please don't include any images in your email body as any email with images inlined gets automatically filtered to the trash. It gets rid of about three quarters of my spam and avoids a recent spammer technique that uses the email viewer's request for the image to verify that the address is a valid one. I'm actually considering adding a filter to get rid of all html-ized email too as the bulk of spam that slips through my filters uses html.
Best wishes, and hope to hear all about your adventures.