Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake 270
snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"
Achilles Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
Any alternative internet technology relies on encryption, and as long as courts have to ability to require you to decrypt data upon request, any discussion of workarounds is pointless.
To really address the real problem, the laws themselves must be the focus.
desired outcome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense.
"Upon request", as you say. "Courts". Ie. within a legal framework, subject to rights, seizure and eventually your own compliance.
The danger we are trying to avert, is the disappearance of the need for those things. Of course the evildoers can always get a death squad or a court order - but they cannot automatically spy on everyone and aggregate the results, nor keep us from doing and saying what we want.
That, not immunity from due process, is what we are looking for.
Re:it's not about connectivity, it's about accessi (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
courts have to ability to require you to decrypt data upon request
True, but irrelevant. First, caching aside, how many people store their communications? The courts can't force you to do something you can't do. Second, the endpoints are (currently, typically) not encrypted anyway. Third, under SOPA it's not illegal to access the sites, just for DNS to return their IP and for Google (and who?) to list them in search results.
The biggest hurdle is that Tor sucks and most people won't want to use their bandwidth to act as a router for anonymous traffic.
I do agree with your conclusion though: laws should be the focus.
Re:Why cross-platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!
No; it's just that you've made the same ignorant mistake that many folks here on /. seem to: assuming that the majority of internet users are technically educated.
FYI, it's not 1993 anymore; thanks to commercialization and social networking, everyone from your mailman to your granny are accessing the internet these days. Many internet users are specialized in non technical fields, such as nursing or architecture. Your statement is akin to a doctor saying, "If you're too dumb to perform gastrointestinal surgery on yourself, why should I bother doing it for you?"
Yes, there are many, many people online these days who have little to no idea how the internet works, outside the knowledge that typing "www.google.com" will take them to Google's search page. Maybe if you tried educating the noobs, instead of responding to their ignorance with your own, you wouldn't find them so loathsome.
Just my 2 pennies.
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:4, Insightful)
That is very true but the problem is the general populace doesn't give a shit. As long as they have access to FaceBook, Twitter, etc. they remain clueless on what virtual freedom means. They are too busy watching the Super Bow going apeshit over juvenile humor as nipplegate.
It is only the geeks that see the laws out of sync with the "moral compass" of society. Even an idiot can see that it absurd that you can't copy / share a number -- yet this is precisely what the laws says you can't do! Share a number which is a representation of reality (audio, video, text, algorithm) because somebody has asserted their "copyright" -- people don't want to talk about digital ownership being an artificial right based on the false belief of "scarcity."
People won't do something -- change the laws -- until they perceive somebody else's "rights" are stopping their privileges. Until then, a small majority will keep on exercising their civil disobedience by ignoring copyright.
Re:Mod Parent up! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, they can. And no matter how much you try to prove you can't, they can still charge you for noncompliance to their orders. It's called contempt of court, and the judge can make you rot in a cell until you do comply. No jury, no bail, no nothing.
Re:YES! (Score:5, Insightful)
In a free society, piracy can happen.
In a society where no piracy can happen, it cannot possibly be free.
I leave it up to you to figure out how to reconcile a free society with one where piracy cannot happen.
Whiskey rebellion all over again (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet we have people running covert operations to let corn rot and then distill the runoffs. They have to hideout in the woods to perform one of the simplest operations you can do with fire and liquid. The laws are justified and sold, claiming that they protect people from bad alcohol, when we all know it is about tax revenue.
In 1914, the federal government went on record outlawing a weed that covered the banks of the Potomac. A huge cadre of policemen have since been converted to an army to prevent people from talking stupid and getting the munchies. The claim is that marijuana is a "gateway" drug, when we all know that the taxed alcohol the authorities allow is the real gateway drug.
Anyone that calls these regimes into question is labeled with an outlaw, rebel, or some other less than "proper society" title. Any politician that claims that it is a matter of personal liberty is called "bat shit crazy" when they aren't being completely ignored.
Why, oh why, would anyone think that the powers that be would allow an alternative internet? "If you're on the alternative internet, it must be because of child pornography!!! Or you might be a terrorist! THINK OF THE CHILDREN!" The excuse to bust down doors to lock people up for talking in chatrooms is prepared already, and the people have been conditioned to swallow it already.
You can't run forever (Score:4, Insightful)
While circumventing censorship is better than nothing this is not technical problem but a legal one. We need to stand up against censorship on the streets, not on some dark unknown meshnet.
Hard drive companies should fund this (Score:3, Insightful)
If it weren't for pirated content, few people would need big hard drives. I mean, really, a terabyte on the desktop?
It's really hard to fill a big hard drive without pirating stuff. I was just looking at my hard drive space consumption. I have on it:
This all adds up to about 200GB.
If it weren't for piracy, the hard drive industry would be a lot smaller.
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:3, Insightful)
Well said. Unfortunately, the lot who are busy beating the broken drum of scarcity are making it difficult for the rest of us who are honestly interested in fair laws around IP.
Should IP be protected? Absolutely. I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment. If we don't protect it and pay the people who created it (and yes, when necessary, distributed it), then we'll not have it anymore. To do that, the laws have to, and had to, change. And those laws must be enforced.
Piracy is out of hand today. As 'geeks', we've provided the public with the ability to break IP protection laws with impunity. It's not acceptable to the creators of such content, and it is not sustainable.
Now, that said, I'm fine with why it happened. It happened because of improved technology, and to be sure there are companies that reject the model on that basis alone. While I want to see legislation that will protect content owners, I would hate to see them protect and prop up those who fail to adopt their business models to match the new technology. But as long as people focus on something as stupid as the "scarcity" defense, we're not going to convince the lawmakers, content owners, or even the general public that a fair version of these laws would do good. They will see us as thieves, looking to use a loophole to rationalize our theft.
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:5, Insightful)
I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.
The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.
As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" [techspot.com] while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.
Hell, Steve King (R-Iowa) was sitting in a SOPA hearing and tweets "We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet." [cbsnews.com] What did he find boring? From her remarks:
But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"
Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA [house.gov] and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.
The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.
All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.
Re:Achilles Heel (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah the false notion that IP requires any kind of protection to be profitable. The times before IP laws when no one was able to turn a profit from their ideas really must have been rough.
Re:Freedom's Sake? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the argument that corporations threaten free speech holds water.
We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.
I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.
I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.
In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.
And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.
Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.
I think they're exactly the same thing.
I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.
Re:Freedom's Sake? (Score:3, Insightful)