Subject: Re: ?This Is Not a Drill?: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire

On Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:39:12 -0400, Arne Vajh?j wrote:

The start of WWW was very much text. Lynx browser and various Gopher
clients.

Gopher was not WWW.

WWW was pretty much the ?killer app? of the Internet, as far as the
general public was concerned. And by WWW they meant web pages that
looked good in a GUI.

NeXT was not widely used.

But the GUI browsers did hid the mass market pretty soon.

Mosaic 1993
NetScape 1994
Internet Explorer 1995

Lots of proprietary companies were very dismissive of the WWW in the
early days.

On the one hand, you had Microsoft trying to take control of it by
imposing proprietary architectures. Does anyone remember ?Project
Blackbird?, or the original concept for MSN? Nowdays nothing is left
of the original ?MSN? other than a domain name.

Quark, the well-known desktop publishing solutions vendor, also had a
try, with its ?Immedia? product line. And I think Autodesk made a play
for proprietariness as well. All disappeared without a trace.

And on the content side, existing services like Compuserve, Prodigy,
AOL etc felt that the open Internet could never offer the quality of
content available (at a price) on their proprietary platforms. In the
end, connectivity won out over content, and they had to abandon their proprietary connections and embrace the Internet to survive.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Subject: 'Quality' of commercial Internet services (was: Re: ?This Is Not a Drill?: Critical PHP Vulnerabilities Are Setting the Internet on Fire)

[ Instead of removing the vms group, I'll set Followup-To alt.unix.geeks
and crosspost to there too. ]

On 2026-10-26, Lawrence D?Oliveiro wrote:

And on the content side, existing services like Compuserve, Prodigy,
AOL etc felt that the open Internet could never offer the quality of
content available (at a price) on their proprietary platforms. In the
end, connectivity won out over content, and they had to abandon their proprietary connections and embrace the Internet to survive.

Yeah, that has got to be bold coming from the people who made Eternal
September happen :-P

And nowadays we have a bunch of companies actively ruining the
Internet. Say, search engines are getting ruined on purpose, GenAI
outfits are actively hammering servers making it possibly expensive or exhausting to actually serve relevant content on the web, some companies
now insist on mandatory ID upload masquerading as age verification (can
one even watch e.g. "It's not porn, it's HBO" without an age-verified
account nowadays? I think last I checked all links led to
Youtube...). And this on top of some already requiring phone numbers.

And the whole mess that is corporate players imposing rules and
filtering that just makes it impossible to do e-mail normally
(e.g. Microsoft reportedly requires your server to send spam-levels
amount of messages to gain reputation, which does sound somehow
wrong...).

And then you have politicians which enjoy only hanging in commercial
social media and commercial communication systems, limiting their
reachability, ensuring they get a biased view of the room they're in,
and possibly even costing them elections or at least actively hampering campaigns (there were reports of Twitter censoring left-wing links in
France a couple years ago, and I think also reports of social media
hampering left-wing political communications in Brasil).

And I get the feeling these are all problems that have been expected or
known *in the 90s*...

--
Nuno Silva

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.19
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)