We have won one or two Internets before in our lifetime and now we can finally claim our hitherto figurative prize.

The entire hosted content of the defunct Geocities free hosting service will be released as a 900-gigabyte torrent file by a group called Archive Team. I’m sure we all have fond childhood memories and traumas associated with the pop-ups-with-flashing-cursors monster that was Geocities. Here’s the chance to relive it.

From Techradar.

The entire contents of Geocities is to be released as a torrent – granting people access to a database of websites and content that should be considered a huge part of the internet’s history.

Geocities was shut down with little fanfare by Yahoo back at the tail end of 2009, but the speed with which it cleared out the data shocked many.

However, the self-styled Archive Team has now gathered up that data and has announced that it will release the whole lot as a torrent.

Geocities existed in a simpler time when the Internet had not yet hit major meme status and websites in general were far less polished and sanitized. Awkward HTML tables, Times New Roman, animated GIFs and primitive Javascript message boxes were the state of the art and we hated it all. But we had a great time.

With shiny and smooth Web 2.0 designs still far off and Ajax still just a hero in the Trojan War, surfing on the information superhighway then felt like a second great westward expansion full of exploration and adventure. This unbridled experience that has since evolved into something closer to cable TV. And in that analogy, Geocities was the hive of villains and outcasts that thrived in the lawless frontiers of the West.

The group releasing the torrent explained their intentions in a blog post.

Who will want this? Anyone who feels like browsing among the artifacts of yesterday, who wants some data to play with, who is doing research into history, who wants to get some mileage out of a few weblog postings of crazy glittery animated GIFs and MIDI music. Itâ€s not for everyone. Some people will probably grab a few files out of the thousands of archives in the torrent, unhook and call it a day. Others will want all of it, every last bit, to put onto their $80 1TB hard drive they bought down at the local computer mart.

When you think about it, it’s kind of amazing that Geocities’ archive fits on a consumer-grade hard disk that you can get for under a hundred bucks today. Downloading the Internet has never been more literal.

I can only imagine the vast amount of raw data that future historians will have access to.

Today, our archaeologists can extrapolate so much information about ancient civilizations from a few mud bowls and skeletons.

Tomorrow, there will be a whole new class of historians called web historians who will create massive statistical computer programmes to analyse the significant events and social developments of the past. There will be archaeologists who specialize in ancient digital protocols and hardware manufacturing.

And, I suspect, there still be people waiting for the Year of the Linux on the Desktop. (Except that desktops will have long been replaced by personal computers embedded in our bodies.)

Futurist reveries aside, I suspect the short-term implication of the Geocities torrent is actually copyright. After all, Geocities may be ancient in Internet years, but its entire life span is but a blip in the outrageously-long copyright terms we have today. A torrent of its entire archive probably steps over more imaginary property rights than the entire 4chan image board.

And yet, it’s hard to argue why anyone should care about the potential infringement. It’s painfully clear that the copyright laws we inherited from the Industrial Revolution are severely ill-equipped to deal with the digital world. The fact that advancements in the techniques of information dissemination have always been followed by extensions of copyright terms greatly amuses this writer.

I cannot even being to fathom how we can hope to legally study history in the future, should perpetual copyright terms ever come to pass, as some crazy people with ill-placed good intentions desire. Once we begin to accept that people can own ideas, it’s a straight path down to thoughtcrime hell. There is a cyberpunk dystopia novel somewhere in that.

Geocities, the site that just keeps giving (ad-infested pop-ups). Rest in peace, gentle abomination of our childhood.

P.S. I think I used to have a Pokemon fan site hosted on Geocities back when I was ten (complete with animated GIFs and Comet Cusor). Maybe I’ll try looking for it when the torrent is released…

P.P.S. Here’s an awesome collection of animated “Under Construction” GIFs archived from Geocities sites.

I have some things that I want to talk about and I have no other platform to say it. Therefore I shall be spending this blog post on a topic that holds next to zero relevance to what you are probably here for. If you are here just for the cynical Gundam humour or the pretty cosplay pictures, then feel free to ignore this entry because you will not find anything missed. But if you found that my previous rants offer you something new and worthy, then please read on.

Hope for a better world

It is not often that one senses history being written. History is only such because it is the past, and often the greatest achievements made in humanity’s past were acknowledged only in their distant future. Perhaps the figures of our previous generations were simply larger in death than in life, and perhaps a degree of mysticism gets caught in the passing down of their stories, but somehow one gets the feeling that there are too few public leaders who can inspire and unite like those from before our time.

But today I felt something, a feeling which one only gets to experience a few times in his entire lifetime. I felt that I was watching history being made in a single moment. Though our collective mundane routines gradually build up over time to give birth to what will be one day called heritage, the awe-inspiring sensational of history being made can only come from great deeds and great people of colossal impact. I have only felt this once before in my lfe thus far, and that was the night* I stood in front of my television as I watched the live CNN broadcast of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center. * I live in GMT+8

And today it was Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia.

Now before you groan, I acknowledge that the fact that because tech-savvy Americans are overwhelmingly Democrats and that political popularity on the internet tends to create a mindless legion of fans that turns off moderate/neutral parties with its incessant praise for the candidate (just take a look at the number of Obama articles showing up on the Digg front page), the pro-Obama message is getting somewhat old and diluted.

But I honestly believe that Barack Obama has done much to deserve it and I will try my best not to let this article degenerate into another groupthink exercise.

Of course, I am in no way suggesting that Obama’s speech will have as much historical impact on the world as the 9/11 attack. In fact, while I do believe that he has a very good chance of becoming the next president, I am under no delusion and I know very well that his speech will ultimately amount to nothing but a footnote in history if he fails to clinch the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

All I am saying is that his speech invoked within me a sense of hope for change, that perhaps this may just be deem as the starting point of a revolution in the history textbooks of generations down.

A deficit of empathy and a surplus of apathy

While the main theme of Obama’s speech from Tuesday dealt with racism in America and its pervasive influence on a society that does its best to pretend it doesn’t exist, the underlying message is one that can be found in his book The Audacity of Hope: It is a criticism against the senseless polarization of ideological groups and a lack of common ground between opposing world views.

Partly, the media and its corporate agendas are to be blamed for this. It is often simpler and more profitable for news network to filter issues down to their core slogans and define entire public personalities with a few lines of soundbite.

But the real reason why people are so susceptible to such over-simplifications is due to ignorance and apathy. Apathy is not fixable as far as I see it, for there will always be people who do not feel compelled to know beyond their immediate surroundings. On the other hand, I feel that ignorance is curable and the way to do it is to make information so easily obtainable and experiences so widely accessible that apathy will not be enough to keep a person ignorant.

This issue has been at the back of my mind for a while, and occasionally something comes along to remind me of it, the most recent example being Tibet.

Tibet

While most Westerners, after decades of Hollywood activism, are convinced that the Chinese government is an evil monolith and Tibetans are being repressed on a daily basis, most ordinary Chinese people are equally convinced that Tibet rightfully belongs to China and the central government is spending a huge amount of their tax money in bringing modernity and wealth to the remote region.

The language barrier prevents the two group of exchanging ideas meaningfully and you end up with two ideological groups who engage in massive groupthink within their own ranks. There is zero effort made to understand the other side, because the other side is simply “wrong” or “evil”.

The truth is somewhere in between. While Tibetan grievances with regards to the preservation of their culture should be addressed by the central government, pro-Tibet actvists should also reconsider their unquestioning support of the acts of violence being committed by the rioters in Lhasa.

I find it baffling how Western commentators refuse to acknowledge any wrongdoings on the Tibetan side while not missing a single chance to slam China. As pictures of destroyed shops owned by Han Chinese streamed out of Lhasa, I did not see a single English comment condemning these acts of violence against innocent civilians. Instead, the all the self-righteous indignation was being directed at China for sending in troops to suppress what was essentially anarchy with angry mobs.

The fact is that Free Tibet activists look like hypocrites when they ignore the elephant in the room and overlook any misdoings by the rioters. This prevents ordinary Chinese from paying any serious attention of their message. At the same time, ordinary Chinese do not seem to comprehend just how negatively their nation’s actions are being perceived by foreign spectators.

The same two-way bigotry and ignorance are corrupting Sino-Japanese relationship, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Serbian-Kosovar issue, the whaling confrontations between Australia and Japan, and even US politics.

Yes we can

The message Obama brings is one of change, but not many people understand just what kind of change he is talking about. Most politicians promise change in one form or another but ultimately fail to deliver, and because of that many feel that Obama’s campaign lacks substance. I disagree.

The change he talks about is very specific: he wants to create a less polarizing government. He recognizes the stupidity of how politicians rather stick to party lines than weigh the pros and cons when handling issues, and he has made reconciliation, both domestic and foreign, a core part of his message.

Can he really accomplish that even as president? That’s hard to say, but the fact is that he is one of the few politicians who has even identified it as a problem. There is a natural tendency for people who feel they are in the right to simply dismiss or even smother the opposition’s message, but ultimately that fails to address the real issue.

Cuba is a very extreme example of this, almost to the point of being comical. If US seriously intends to bring democratic change to the government, then lifting the sanctions would be the best way to do it. But the current president seems to treat this issue as a matter of personal pride, and refuses to “give in” as long as Cuba does not get down on its knees and beg for forgiveness.

The ideological differences that were the cause of this divide have long ceased to matter: Communism is beyond dead. The standoff today is nothing more than the result of chauvinistic pride. The fact that Obama has said that he is willing to engage in unconditional dialogues with Cuba is a huge plus in my book.

A better world tomorrow

Now while I am unmistakably pro-Obama (and which non-American isn’t?), and this post was indeed sparked off by the speech he made, the purpose of my post is not to convince you to vote for him (if you are American).

I strongly believe that the next generation of people will be more and more like Obama, as technology overrides geographical divides and people grow to be more accepting of differences. The WW2 and Cold War generations may be stucked in perceiving the world through a “them vs. us” mentality, but perhaps one day that will not have to be the case.

Empathy is derived through shared experiences. Since the dawn of time, this has always referred to geographical location, race, religion, culture and language. It is difficult to empathize with the unknown, and it is all to easy to fear and hate it. At the time of WW2, coming into regular contact with foreigners was a rarity and most people saw the world beyond their own as whatever their government propaganda had depicted it as.

This is still very much true in many parts of the world today, but at least it’s improving. Internet has made it possible for the ordinary person to at least have some idea as to what the other side feels. If virtual reality were to reach the level seen in Matrix someday, then perhaps we will finally be able to empathize with a person on the other side of the globe just as we empathize for the friends physically next to us.

Primitive tribes consolidated into towns, cities and ultimately nations because improvements in technology and bureaucracy allowed people to empathize and understand each other over a greater geographical area. As such, I see nationalism as an issue that has to be resolved through technology.

Then again, maybe I am being too optimistic about technology as usual because I love it so much. Perhaps a mature global information network will not result in more world-savvy individuals like Obama, but rather polarize people in different ways than before. Still, at the very least, I don’t see anti-Apple radicals bombing Cupertino.

Either way, I think we can all do with a lot less ignorance and a bit more empathy. It makes me cringe when people dismiss entire nations or races due to an uninformed self-righteous opinion, but at the same time I wish people paid more attentions to the social background and disenfranchisement that produce such distorted world views in the first place.

P.S. I just watched Evangelion 1.0… It’s the same show as before! What a money-milker. >_<

Before Akismet was added to WordPress as a default plugin, I manually moderated all comments. Those were the days when I was lucky to get a single comment for any post. After that Akismet took over and it worked fine for a while. I would still go through all the spam comments to check for false positives but at least Akismet ensured that comments from trusted sources (well, most of them anyway) appeared immediately without having to wait for my moderation.

Staring into the face of evil

Well, recently the increasing spam volume has made it impossible for me to check through them for valid comments. I’ve been getting nearly 1000 spam comments a day and I’m very, very certain that some of your comments have been eaten up by Akismet as false positives in the process.

So I have finally implemented an image verification system for commenting. I hate image verification systems, especially since half the time I can’t tell apart a capital “i” from a lower case “L”. But it’s the lesser of the many evils. An e-mail verification system is even more annoying, Akismet eats comments like Cookie Monster eats cookies and a forced registration policy will just turn lazy people like me off.

The good thing is that if you register an account and remain logged in, you won’t have to enter a security code when commenting. Hurray!

Oh well, hopefully this is enough to stop the spamage. Please tell me if you find any bugs with the verification system.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama spoke to a crowd of teenagers at a political rally and encouraged them to tell their friends to participate in the political process. (via Kotaku)

“I want you to tell them, ‘It’s time for you to turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy,'” Obama said. “We’ve got work to do.”

GameBoy? LOL. Sure, it’s only a game console and this doesn’t make him any less of a candidate than the next guy (or gal), but little things like this really show us the kind of generation gap that exists between a generation that grew up with the Internet and feels more than comfortable being part of it and a generation that is just learning to deal with it and thinks of it as nothing more than an improved telephone network with Google.

Ah, yes. It’s rant time. ひさしぶり～

For my generation, it has been an accepted truth since forever that politicians high up the ladder just don’t understand technology. Technology to them is a scary and unpredictable wild card that has to be controlled and legislated or all hell will break loose. They all know how to Google for dirt on their political opponents and set up lunch appointments using their BlackBerry, but as far as they are concern, the Internet runs on voodoo magic and faerie dust.

Ruri for President!

In a way, this has always been true for every generation. The younger generation adapts to advancements in technology and science faster but the government has always been full of old suits. But the Internet is different the car, radio, plane, microwave oven or even television. While every new invention in the last century or two builds upon its predecessor to create something faster, better or more efficient, the Internet is almost completely new and self-advancing. A car is just a faster horse carriage. A plane allows us to delivery goods faster than ships. The television comes from the radio. They require a change in mindset for the people and the government, but on a very manageable scale. Roads need to be wider, more variety of goods can now be exported, new forms of entertainment can be produced.

But the Internet is all that and more. It is also growing a lot faster and changing a lot more than anyone had anticipated just a decade ago.

Just ten years ago, you needed to be somebody to be heard. You had to make a name for yourself before someone even gave you the chance to be published or to go on TV. And then you worried about what to say. Today, anyone with a message can post it and if it resonates with enough people, it will be heard. This kind of democratic force is hard to understand for the baby-boomer generation. To them, Internet discussion is nothing more than teenage chatrooms and trivial entertainment. That is until one of them gets brought down by blogs. As more and more people get connected, the power that a well-targeted website can have over the political process will become enormous.

Motoko for President!

Of course, I’m not deluding myself; we are still a long way off from that. Right now, we are at a transitional phase between the old and the new, and this is where it gets really frustrating for a lot of people and confusing for the others.

Take file-sharing and DRM issues for example. The politicians, the judges, the CEOs and the self-proclaimed legal experts: an overwhelming majority of them are old and male. There is nothing ambiguous about digital copyrights in their minds: file-sharing is bootlegging which is like fake Chinese products which is really stealing money. And naturally, they take steps to legislate and suppress file-sharing. But what they don’t realize is that file-sharing is a very different thing from traditional piracy which is mostly profit-oriented and organized. File-sharing is completely unrestricted and the tools are available to anyone and everyone. It’s an inherent part of the Internet that will never go away. It’s impossible to stamp out file-sharing without destroying the freedom and democratic forces at work that make the Internet what it is today. File-sharing is a Pandora’s Box that cannot be unopened and trying only makes you look like a huge joke.

Tama-nee for President!

Instead of trying to legislate the Internet into oblivion, maybe it’s time for the people and the legislature to re-examine the relevance of our concepts of creator rights and the centuries-old system that fails to account for present-day realities.

Instead of whining about how digital piracy has destroyed company profits and trying to sue the world back to its 1990s status quo, maybe it’s time for the entertainment industry to open its eyes, rethink its revenue model and reinvent itself to stay relevant in the new paradigm.

But of course that is all wishful thinking. The reality is that the people who matter in the grand scheme today did not grow up with the Internet. I doubt Mr. Bush even knows how to load songs into his own iPod without his personal aide doing it for him. People fear what they do not understand and decisions made on irrational fear are often bad ones. Just take a look at Jack Thompson. Now, I’m not blaming them or looking down on them; it’s just a sad, sad reality that cannot be helped. Politicians may hire tech consultants to keep themselves “updated” on the latest web crazes but it’s a completely different thing to learn about something than to know about something.

Yuki for Vice President (under Haruhi)!

Judges and politicians are, in theory, selected from smart and capable people who can make sound moral decisions. But even if assuming that was true, can they make the correct decision about things like DRM and net neutrality if they aren’t even sure what those things mean? Maybe. But it can be a lot better.

Some cynics might say that this phenomenon will always be true, that the government and the influential will always be nothing but greying heads who lag behind technology. I agree to a small extent, but I personally think that the current difference is a lot more pronounced because the birth and growth of the Internet was too sudden for its level of impact on society. I think when the day comes when a new generation of leaders born after the Internet takes over, we will have a much less polarized society and a much smaller gap between our generation and the next. Because somehow, I just don’t think that it’s very likely for those of us who grew up with the Internet with all its limitless information at our fingertips to one day stop keeping up with its progress. At least I personally don’t intend to ever stop reading Slashdot (and its eventual successors) until I get Alzheimer’s or drop dead.

Perhaps I’m just being overly optimistic and perhaps political technophobia will continue well into our own generation when neutral interconnects are perfected and full virtual reality takes over the keyboard and LCD, making our generation look as outdated and irrelevant to the next as Hillary Clinton is to us today. (Damn it, I want a cyberbrain.)

Whatever the case is, I will bet that within 10 years, digital copyright laws will have to be radically revamped. I will bet 100 USD which, at the current rate of inflation and US currency devaluation, should be just enough for a can of Pepsi by then. :P

It’s a wonder how I drifted so far off-topic to come up with this rant just from reading a single line mentioning GameBoys in Obama’s speech. The unpredictable power of association that drives our logical mind.