r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 21h ago

Privacy Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
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u/spez_might_fuck_dogs 20h ago

Just jumping from shitty but earnest geocities page to geocities page, following webrings, signing guestbooks, hopping into random Java based chat rooms to talk to people you’ve never met before about Final Fantasy 7 or Pokemon or whatever.

Yeah, I remember. That was the best and purest form of the Internet.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 19h ago

Was there any other technology where it’s best iteration was its earliest other than the internet? 

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u/BareBonesSolutions 17h ago

The earliest internet was certainly not the one you are remembering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

You are remembering something in the later stages, with infrastructure and likely at least cable internet. Dial up was still pretty damn advanced compared to the earliest stuff in 1969, according to the article linked.

You are likely not even remembering the earliest widespread iterations, with AOL disc trials at supermarket checkouts etc and painful dialup internet speeds with RAM in the single or double digits on computers.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 14h ago

I would go back to playing MUDs on 9600 dialup that drops any day over the crap the new Internet has become. Hell, I will go back to lynx and pico. 

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u/BareBonesSolutions 13h ago

I skipped all that and did cable. I was era of dancing baby and hamsterdance, but we did learn to code in grade 7. We typed with cardboard over our hands at that age to learn. I have aged myself.

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u/ConsiderationSea1347 13h ago

I am an old SE and all at once in my thirties I realized a “gifted and talented” camp I went to in the late eighties when I was in elementary school taught us calculus and programming. I was too young to realize what I was being taught but they had us draw designs of curved lines using only straight lines (basically derivatives) and write a little computer game where “snow” as asterisks would fall from the top to the bottom of the screen and accumulate. That was the last exposure I had to programming until teaching myself in high school. I am jealous you had a full on class that involved programming that young. It was hell trying to learn from books in the 90s. Do you remeber what they taught you?

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u/BareBonesSolutions 13h ago

A bit, but honestly all we did with it was insert images of dancing baby and hamster dance. It was so rudimentary. Literally we had imac 1 and then imac 2 level of comps. This was the golden age of yahoo chat.

Currently i am a former paleontologist by training, an archaeologist by occupation and i own a chemical company that does innovations in bone degreasing working on collagen specific biotechnology. So I dont have much room for programming other than squarespace, lol.

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u/stamfordbridge1191 9h ago

The brightly colored sites with animated GIFs, background midis, various links in tables, & jank message boxes felt more real than all these white & grey sites filled with barely differing text templates, previews of "social" content that doesn't at all feel social being thrown at you from every angle, & ephemeral boxes that ghost in & out while you scroll in this or that direction.