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by georgia_peach 1576 days ago
If you closely study Twitter's actions (How did that Arab Spring turn out for everybody?), or read about the InQtel origins of google (Assange's "Google Is Not What It Seems"), or how the Israelis blasted the Palestinians with porn during a siege (the OnlyFans economy!), you will see that it is still very much a weapon.

Of the actual innovations in this field, how many came from defense (DOD, CIA, NSA, ARPA, & their contractors), and how many came from pornography?
1 comments
nix23 1576 days ago
I never said secret-services...governments etc have nothing to-do with the Internet, and it would be stupid not to use it for psyop's, but the money comes from private sectors and not the "military" anymore.
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georgia_peach 1575 days ago
What innovation in computing, hardware or software, has the porn industry made?
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AussieWog93 1575 days ago
Back in the day, RedTube had incredibly high quality, low bandwidth video compared to YouTube (which at that stage had been owned by Google for a couple of years). They also had mouse-over previews on the seek bar years before anywhere else did.
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samhw 1575 days ago
Yeah, I often read about porn sites for their engineering (I'm not being sarcastic, I mean that 100% sincerely). It's a shadow world that counts among it some of the most highly-trafficked sites on the internet - and then bear in mind that most of the few sites above them are not devoted to serving high-quality long-duration videos. These sites are phenomenal feats of engineering. Anyone who discounts them just because of some silly pudeur about their content is not an engineer in my eyes.
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georgia_peach 1575 days ago
I don't really see mouseover previews as being in the same league as ethernet, GUI, laser printers, cryptography, TOR, supercomputing, LISP, Ada, etc, etc...
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nix23 1574 days ago
>ethernet

Xerox

>GUI

Xerox

>laser printers

Xerox

>cryptography

Maybe the Babylonian empire?

Look i stop here..super-computing , TOR, LISP or Ada is not a driving force, they are a product...you could have said WWW made at cern...but hey

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georgia_peach 1574 days ago
Xerox, under a fat DARPA grant. If you read Kay's "Early History of Smalltalk", or any of the other writeups on PARC projects, it's a genealogy of DARPA projects:

http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

As for actual innovations, porn still scores bupkis.

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