the countrification of cyberspace (and the web)

05.viiI.MCDXXX

The firewall of china's so big you can see it from cyberspace. Cant get a day pass at Spotify - sucks to be in your country 'cause it's not available there. you got 3 out of 245 chances of being in the right country to enjoy last.fm. google blocks TOR and other anonymization services.



One of the exciting things about early Internet social media (the early ones included BBS, NNTP, IRC, mailing lists) and of the web was the nationlessness of communication. You could enter into communication with random strangers in far flung lands and not have to worry what you think of their place or what they think of yours. This gave a temporary respite from int'n or racial or cultural prejudice.

Then someone invented geolocation by IANA lookups, or geoIP. As a result one again gets hemmed in by geographically-based presumptions. (See for instance this post serve it in english svp)

It sucks but many will argue we had it coming due to a myriad legal and financial issues - namely every one of humanity's vices - freeloading entertainment media, politics, e-commerce trade regulations, the unsolicited shoving of things down your vision nerves known as advertising or marketing, etc.

The problem isn't with the law enforcement part. The trouble is that every big party uncritically and eagerly embraced and exploited this break-up of the Pangeaic cyberspace into country ip ranges, for pigeon-holing and exclusivism as the chief uses for geo IP location.

It reeks. ... Read more

collective unconscious wants gopher

My first encounter with the Internet was via Gopher ca. '91 - '93. I noticed its yielding of relevance to HTTP even before the Internet Commercialization Act of 1995, and more assuredly so afterward. Nostalgia however kept "gopher" hovering in the cloud way in the back of the mind. A couple months ago, I started getting an itch to look up gopher on Wikipedia in anticipation of finding where there is still access.**

Well, after zoning out of the idea every time it hit me when i'm busy over the past two months or so, I looked up gopher at wikipedia.

** There was anticipation because of course there must be access to Gopher still (it's been made GNU GPL anyway, i thought it had always been "open"! but it wasn't) as there are NNTP servers. Because there always should be NNTP servers and every TCP/IP App layer protocol should be kept. This must be contentious for a lot of design thinking where comprehensive backward compability is irrelevant, costly and therefore ridiculous. But I mean we're talking client server protocol implementations that should be tiny (in text and data (mem) complexity), not hulking 3.5'' drives (not to mention 5.25's and tape readers :)), right?

So keeping as many of the useful proven RFC's (ie their protocols) alive is historically cool, maintains diversity in the design idea pool and the variety of media for the choosy / nostalgic users who choose nothing better to do than to write about it like this.

In any case, looking gopher up , I read (this being a recurrent pattern btw) that it so happens there is at present increased interest in gopher: "As of 2008, there are approximately 125 gopher servers indexed by Veronica-2,[8] a slow growth from 2007 when there were fewer than 100." (ibid.)

So once again, it seems that an idea (in this case the rekindling of interest in gopher) was not just appear here only but instead it was non local, generalized, occuring in several instances more or less in a short interval of time (say the span of 2008 - in my case through late summer and fall). ... Read more