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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.

Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 3d ago

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:

Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 4d ago

ai — dr

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 5d ago

(version 2.0 could triple your RAM)

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 5d ago

signal's claimed inability to collect metadata being an obvious albeit elaborate lie is a strong indicator

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 6d ago

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...)

Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 6d ago

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

(i have used ed though...)

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 6d ago

i use QED, btw

it's the predecessor to ed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED_(text_editor)
https://gunkies.org/wiki/QED_(text_editor)
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/qed.html
https://github.com/arnoldrobbins/qed-archive
https://github.com/phonologus/qed-new is a version with utf8 support which can be built on a modern system

Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 7d ago

(based on The Onion's original version)

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 7d ago

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 7d ago

Sparkles? (bookmark groups?)

Sparkles icon means stochastic parrot (already in current Firefox)

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Arthur Besse @lemmy.ml 1w ago

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) :/