You're correct on both points (🤦‍♂️ indeed).

I've now edited this post to link to their advisory text file instead of their advertising-heavy blog post about it which I had initially linked when the above comment was posted. Thanks.

Snippet here; can’t find a scan of the entire article.

I went digging and found it, it's split across two pages (which was the style at the time) here and here.

here is the full text to save you a click:

The Golden Age of the Internet

06.21.06

By John C. Dvorak

How many people realize that we're living in a golden age, the Golden Age of the Internet? It won't last; golden ages never do. Some of it will remain, but there's evidence that much of it is headed for the trash heap of history.

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Radio days. The golden age of radio lasted from about 1930 to 1950. It was nothing like radio today. Money was thrown at it. Thousands of great dramas and variety shows were made. Huge news organizations were built. Today, radio consists of rightwingers ranting about liberals, psychologists analyzing moaners-and-groaners, and mediocre music from CDs. We do get all-news stations with erroneous traffic reports, and public broadcasting stations with thoughtful shows on fascinating topics like the art of Gebel Barkel from the first millennium BC.

Every new technology that widely affects society has a golden age, and we give things a lot of slack. Porn on the Net symbolizes this leeway. But so do podcasting, blogging, free video servers, chat rooms, P2P, free e-mail, and other flourishing services.

A proprietary, closed Net is coming. A golden age ends either when something new comes along (as with radio's golden age, killed by the advent of TV), the government gets involved, or entropy sets in—usually a mix of these elements. In the case of the Internet, we are already seeing a combination of government, carrier, and business interactions that will eventually turn the Net into a restricted and somewhat proprietary network, with much of its content restricted or blocked. Only a diligent few will actually have access to the restricted data, and in some parts of the world even trying to view the restricted information on the Net will be a crime.

It's already a crime to post intellectual discussions about copy-protection schemes that are protected by the DMCA. If the American public tolerates that sort of onerous restriction, then it will tolerate anything.

Continue reading... (page 2)

Filtering and blacklists now common. Most U.S. government agencies now use filtering mechanisms to keep their own computers from accessing blacklisted Web sites. Third parties maintain these blacklists, and they put whatever they want on the lists. For example, my blog was blacklisted for a while, with no explanation.

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Most companies go much further and carefully monitor all network traffic. They can then pinpoint the use of streaming media and other verboten uses of corporate computers and simply block such usages and blacklist the sites involved.

Even e-mail is lost in the shuffle. The New York Times has a system in place that prevents certain press releases from getting to the reporters.

Blame spam and porn. Spam, porn, and other forms of questionable content are the reasons for filtering and blacklisting. But increasingly, content that mentions birth control or evolution is blocked. Nazi memorabilia sales and hate sites are also banned. It is folly to think that any government, no matter how progressive, won't be tempted to choke off certain content of which it does not approve.

This sort of intervention becomes ever easier with the consolidation of the Internet. It's all headed to AT&T; and Comcast. AT&T; has already sold the public down the river by turning over phone records to the government without blinking an eye. Ask it to filter Google results? No problemo!

Is there anything the public can do about this? Yes—enjoy the Golden Age, while you can.

Discuss this article in the forums.

More articles from John Dvorak:

See John get cranky about technology in his new Cranky Geeks IPTV Show.

Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak here.

FYI, the day after you published this blog post, a spam blog posted... their AI reimplementation of it 🤦

details:

here is a snapshot of (maybe?) the "original" slop post borrowing from your title; i first saw it reposted on this slightly-more-credible-looking (at least if you haven't seen it in previous search results and already realized it is spam) page:

i tried to archive that page with the repost of it, to avoid directly linking to spam from this comment, but it crashes archive.org's browser:

i also was curious to see if this spam is in search engines, so i searched for AI reimplementation, and... well, the good news is that your blog post is the first hit and the above-linked spam blog is pretty far down in the results list.

The bad news is that the second hit is to yet another piece of slop/spam evidently also "inspired" by your post:

Nice post. Relatedly, see also malus.sh and this talk by the people that made it (both of which I posted in this lemmy community here).

A couple of minor corrections to your text:

Blanchard's account is that he never looked at the existing source code directly.

Blanchard doesn't say that he never looked at the existing code; on the contrary, he has been the maintainer (and primary contributor) to it for over a decade so he is probably the person who is most familiar with the pre-Claude version's implementation details. Rather, he says that he didn't prompt Claude with the source code while reimplementing it. iirc he does not acknowledge that it is extremely likely that multiple prior versions of it were included in Claude's training corpus (which is non-public, so this can only be conclusively verified easily by Anthropic).

The GPL's conditions are triggered only by distribution. If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms.

The GPL does not require you to offer GPL-licensed source code when using the program to provide a network service; because it is solely a copyright license, the GPL's obligations are only triggered by distribution. (It's the AGPL which goes beyond copyright and imposes these obligations on people running a program as a network service...)

tbh, no, i have never actually used QED. 😢

(i have used ed though...)

(based on The Onion's original version)

Sparkles? (bookmark groups?)

Sparkles icon means stochastic parrot (already in current Firefox)

Nice, thanks.

It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don't have yet.

re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian's package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.

are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?

Full-page machine translations are disabled

Firefox translations are done offline (after downloading the model for a langauge pair).

Does anybody know why Konform decided to disable this very useful feature?

Reality is now officially just a series of popular misconceptions

That is a misconception, but not (yet) a common enough one to be listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

proton does not advertise themselves as anonymous email.

So, i just checked, and they actually do (albeit with caveats, including not using your name when signing up, but no mention of when paying) here and here among other places.

I see also that those pages are promulgating exactly the "anonymity vs. privacy" false dichotomy that you are. Proton writes (emphasis mine):

Privacy means controlling who receives specific information. In the email context, this means encrypting your message so no one besides its intended recipient and you can read it — not even the service provider.

Their very narrowly-scoped definition of the word privacy is inconsistent with how most of the world uses the word. Proton is defining email privacy to mean solely the confidentiality of the body of the message (which they also provide a trivial-for-them-to-circumvent protection of, incidentally) but the word "privacy" elsewhere (eg, in law, technology, academia, and colloquially) has a much broader meaning.

Or, to put it more simply: Category:Anonymity is (literally) a subcategory of Category:Privacy.

Proton isn't even consistent in their own usage of their absurdly-narrow definition of privacy: in their How to send an anonymous email guide they write:

Where your email provider is based affects your privacy. Privacy laws can vary dramatically, and some countries have data retention laws that require companies to store and hand over sensitive user data. Email services based in a privacy-friendly countries, like Switzerland, can offer stronger protections.

Do you think by "privacy" and "sensitive user data" they're only talking about the body of email messages here, as per their earlier definition?

And, regardless of whether or not a company advertises its services for anonymity (as Proton does, it turns out): after clicking the above links and thinking about it a little more, do you still think that retaining and revealing links between users' pseudonyms and legal identities is really not a privacy issue?

this post links to an article in (checks notes) ***The Washington Post***

given that Swiss law means complying with MLAT requests from many countries including the US, why do you think Proton chooses to retain data linking user accounts with payment identities?

if you stick a privacy fence up around your house, does it make you anonymous? of course not, because privacy does not mean anonymous. you should not blame someone else because you are confused on the difference between privacy and anonymity.

i am not confused at all about "the difference between privacy and anonymity"; the former is a broader concept which includes the latter. Privacy regarding one's identity (or avoiding revealing the link between related identities, which is what is usually meant by "anonymity") is one of many types of privacy.

Proton mail advertises that their service is designed for "privacy", not "privacy except not with regards to your legal identity which we decided to needlessly retain information about and which you should obviously expect us to give to the authorities upon request".

where did you get the notion that "privacy" excludes "anonymity"? this is not a rhetorical question, i am interested to know because I see these "difference between privacy and anonymity" comments frequently lately and i wonder where this meme originated.