The future of the internet according to CmdrTaco

MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey interviews Slashdot founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, who is not optimistic about the future of the internet:

Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.

On the other hand, there’s the experience of MetaFilter commenter dreamyshade of working on the Ipad/Iphone hacking scene:

One of my favorite parts of working on Cydia is when I meet young kids who know exactly what jailbreaking is and how to do it. (Like at Thanksgiving, telling acquaintances what I work on — the 12-year-old boy grinning in surprised recognition while the grown-ups carefully listened to an explanation of the concept.) There are lots of kids splashing around on their hand-me-down iPod touches jailbroken in one way or anoher: installing goofy homebrew software, crafting custom icon themes with terrifically ugly icons, installing OpenSSH and forgetting to change the default password but learning to SSH in and paste intriguing commands from the internet, editing plists to enable hidden features, figuring out how to restore the device when things inevitably go wrong, and generally making a lively mess of the device they get to totally play with. They cause some support burden for Cydia and App Store developers alike, but this is one way to learn to feel comfortable with poking around at the internals of things, to gain the confidence to break stuff because you know you can figure out how to fix it, to self-identify as a person good with technical stuff, to take an interest in AP Computer Science class later. This makes me happy. Each new generation of devices gets harder to jailbreak, but for now there’s still some good stuff happening.

I hope dreamyshade is right but I fear CmdrTaco is closer to the truth. Internet has long ago ceased to be the domain of hardcore geeks — nothing wrong with that — but with it has come the Facebooking of the internet, where you sacrifise your freedom and privacy for ease of use and comfort.