User blog:IEmbargo/The Myth of Internet Privacy - It Is Fappening

As you know, I have been on the internet since 1983. That means I come from the era of ARPANET, text-only browsers, UUCP, Usenet, 100 baud modems, and NSFNET.

The most important thing I learnt about the internet in this era is that it was built initially by very few things: The Department of Defense of the United States' Military establishment, the US DoD scientific and engineering researchers, the US DoD civilian contractors, and US University researchers. This was followed up by the Government communication, academia in general, Corporate America, and European followed by world-wide scientific concerns. In 1990, the US DoD handed control of the internet backbone in the United States to the National Science Foundation.

Note that what we use is largely built by the US and its military allies. In my era, it was tacitly assumed that the DoD could read all our communications if it really wanted to. Most of us used to joke that they still monitored everything even after "handing control" over to the NSF. Because the main internet nodes still contain the old backbone, I always assume that the DoD can read everything I put out there. That's why the whole Eric Snowden flap didn't faze me at all - I already knew they were collecting information.

The growth of the internet in the 1990's was largely by geeks like me who didn't have GFs, liked Science Fiction, had social lives that revolved around our limited interests and worked at governmental institutions that had internet access. That meant we were almost exclusively male. The early internet was built up due to an interest in SF, science, technology, and pornography.

Which brings us to "the fappening." Now you know why these pictures are almost always of females. Because of the 80-20 rule, you can expect breaches like this to happen every now and then. /* expand this */