There has been a marked decline in the amount of complexity/detail you get in a mainstream publication about many topics, they've moved to a thoughts/feelings/opinion style of reporting over drier "just the facts" style, I don't know why but I imagine engagement online is better and that's bled into print but not a journalist.
I do know that I find print journalism (generally) far less useful because I like detail.
I think there's been a large difference in the tech-literacy of people since 1997. If you ask an average person what a "byte" is or what an "IP address" is, they'll have no idea. Sure, its not something that everyone would know about back then, but I think it's more likely the layperson would be able to understand that article
Before I was a programmer I trained as an industrial electrician - I don't really understand how truly complex the power grid is or the transport network or the global financial system or hundreds of other networks, my partner works in logistics (shipping i.e. boats on the water) - the complexity there is insane as well, on a surface level those networks are sorta understandable but the detail is fractal, the closer you look the more detail there is, there has to be a fundamental limit but no one human could master one of them in a life time never mind more than one.
So do I expect the person in the street to understand that the internet is composed of bailing wire, gaffer tape and RFC's dating back to the late 60's, not really, it would be unfair to expect them to understand it when I don't understand other networks (or even the internet if I'm truly honest - not all of it or even most of it, it is vast).
Reading this is a truly weird experience - the idea of a single source of truth for domain names seems foreign now, though in truth it's probably not as far removed from the current practice as anyone would like to think.
Registries main purpose of existence is to be a single source of truth for the zone(s) they are responsible for...
That hasn't changed, though Network Solutions is now just a registrar, not a registry after Verisign sold it off. Verisign, however, held on to and still operates the registry for most of the TLDs NSI did, and a few new ones, as well as 2 out of 13 root servers (up from 1 out of 9)
When I was an undergrad you still had to write a letter to Jon Postel explaining why you thought you deserved a given domain name and what you planned to do with it.
Ooh I was peripherally involved in that error as a fresh-faced datacenter intern and I still get nightmares about it!
Any specific details stand out?
(Of the event, or the nightmares, at your discretion.)
Network solutions... Where have I heard that name before?
They’re the folks who have stuck to their guns and kept domain fees +2x
I might have missed it, but didn't see anything on HN about this oops: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptocurrency/pa...
The amount of technical details in the article stands out quite a lot compared to modern mainstream reporting.
(I remember this outage.)
There has been a marked decline in the amount of complexity/detail you get in a mainstream publication about many topics, they've moved to a thoughts/feelings/opinion style of reporting over drier "just the facts" style, I don't know why but I imagine engagement online is better and that's bled into print but not a journalist.
I do know that I find print journalism (generally) far less useful because I like detail.
Mainstream media has to compete for attention with dozens of new classes of entertainment, much more than we used to have in the 20th century.
I find it human that attention span, and willingness to engage deeply with a topic, has declined in such an environment.
I think there's been a large difference in the tech-literacy of people since 1997. If you ask an average person what a "byte" is or what an "IP address" is, they'll have no idea. Sure, its not something that everyone would know about back then, but I think it's more likely the layperson would be able to understand that article
I disagree, I think we get that impression because the Internet used to have only tech-savvy people on it but now we hear from everybody and their dog
“Tens of millions of people are using the Internet, and very few of them know how truly complex it is.”
aged well.
On the one hand yes.
On the other isn't that just how humans are?
Before I was a programmer I trained as an industrial electrician - I don't really understand how truly complex the power grid is or the transport network or the global financial system or hundreds of other networks, my partner works in logistics (shipping i.e. boats on the water) - the complexity there is insane as well, on a surface level those networks are sorta understandable but the detail is fractal, the closer you look the more detail there is, there has to be a fundamental limit but no one human could master one of them in a life time never mind more than one.
So do I expect the person in the street to understand that the internet is composed of bailing wire, gaffer tape and RFC's dating back to the late 60's, not really, it would be unfair to expect them to understand it when I don't understand other networks (or even the internet if I'm truly honest - not all of it or even most of it, it is vast).
It doesn't mean I'm not interested though.
Reading this is a truly weird experience - the idea of a single source of truth for domain names seems foreign now, though in truth it's probably not as far removed from the current practice as anyone would like to think.
Registries main purpose of existence is to be a single source of truth for the zone(s) they are responsible for...
That hasn't changed, though Network Solutions is now just a registrar, not a registry after Verisign sold it off. Verisign, however, held on to and still operates the registry for most of the TLDs NSI did, and a few new ones, as well as 2 out of 13 root servers (up from 1 out of 9)
When I was an undergrad you still had to write a letter to Jon Postel explaining why you thought you deserved a given domain name and what you planned to do with it.
Thank god, we just trained our LLMs on decades of "human error"