* * * * *
                                        
       I think there's a quote by Martin Niemöller that also might apply
                                        
> Twenty years from now,
> 
> * You won’t necessarily know anything about the decisions that affect your
>   rights, like whether you get a loan, a job, or if a car runs over you.
>   Things will get decided by data-crunching computer algorithms and no
>   human will really be able to understand why.
> * The Internet will become a lot more like TV and a lot less like the
>   global conversation we envisioned 20 years ago.
> * Rather than being overturned, existing power structures will be
>   reinforced and replicated, and this will be particularly true for
>   security.
> * Internet technology design increasingly facilitates rather than defeats
>   censorship and control.
> 
> It doesn’t have to be this way. But to change course, we need to ask some
> hard questions and make some difficult decisions.
> 
> …
> 
> Here, too, the message was clear. You need our permission to operate in
> this world. If you step over the line we draw, if you automate, if you
> download too fast, if you type something weird in the URL bar on your
> browser, and we don’t like it, or we don’t like you, then we will get you.
> 
> In the future will we re-secure the Freedom to Tinker? That means Congress
> forgoing the tough-on-cybercrime hand waving it engages in every year —
> annual proposals, to make prison sentences more severe under the CFAA, as
> if any of the suspected perpetrators of the scores of major breaches of the
> past two or three years — China, North Korea, who knows who else — would be
> deterred by such a thing. These proposals just scare the good guys, they
> don’t stop the attackers.
> 
> We’d have to declare that users own and can modify the software we buy and
> download — despite software licenses and the Digital Millennium Copyright
> Act (DMCA).
> 
> This is going to be increasingly important. Over the next 20 years software
> will be embedded in everything, from refrigerators to cars to medical
> devices.
> 
> Without the Freedom to Tinker, the right to reverse engineer these
> products, we will be living in a world of opaque black boxes. We don’t know
> what they do, and you’ll be punished for peeking inside.
> 

Via Lobsters [1], “The End of the Internet Dream? — Backchannel — Medium [2]”

The general public just don't care about this stuff [3]. And for some reason,
this thought keeps going through my head: you can lead a horse to water, but
you can't make it drink.

[1] https://lobste.rs/s/tgin56/the_end_of_the_internet_dream/comments/qrt3s
[2] https://medium.com/backchannel/the-end-of-the-internet-dream-
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2015/02/25.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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