@hedders Back in the early to mid 90’s, I used to hang out on IRC — and those folks truly ran the Internet.

Programmers who worked on things like DNS server daemons, authors of RFCs, multiple members of the IETF, people from Cisco Systems, telco managers, ISP support folks, management at some of the largest (public) data centres in the world…

Many of them were affected by MCI Worldcom, Global Crossing, and other dot-bomb implosions years later.

I remember hanging out for Y2K, talking to people in Europe to find out if everything was still working…. Sharing our panic when planes hit the world trade centre — we knew multiple people who worked there.

Many ended up at big-name Internet companies, and either ended up as much smaller parts of huge organizations, or moved into business as CIOs or CISOs.

It’s crazy how a bunch of kids helped shape the world.

@JustinDerrick @hedders yeah, but why were they so complicit in creating these business models based on invading peoples privacy - or the algorithmic feeds that manipulate people, or the exploitation, or or or...

I really wonder why there was not a bigger outcry.

Yes, wild times and of course I know the "good" people as well, but it's that generation that laid the foundation of what's wrong now with this sector.

@wonshu @hedders To the best of my knowledge, none of the folks I knew had ventured to the dark side -- we all understood the benefits of anonimity, because it was trivially easy to identify people in the early days...

Back in the day, your IP usually gave away your location or the name of the organization you worked for (or the school you attended).

Your UNIX login name was closely related to your real name. Services like 'whois' and 'finger' and 'ident' made it trivially easy to geolocate networks, or definitively identify folks. Hell, the phone number and names of network admins was (and still is to a lesser degree) listed in WHOIS records -- getting someone in trouble was as easy as picking up the phone and tattling.