The Web's Creator Thinks We Need a New One That Governments Can't Control (thenextweb.com) 240
The web has created millions of jobs, impacted nearly every industry, connected people, and arguably made the world a better place. But the person who started it all isn't exactly pleased with the way things have turned out to be. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, believes that the way it works in the present day "completely undermines the spirit of helping people create." The Next Web reports: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," said Brewster Kahle, who heads up Internet Archive. And he's not wrong: governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think. To that end, Berners-Lee, Kahle and other pioneers of the modern Web are brainstorming ideas for a new kind of information network that can't be controlled by governments or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.The New York Times originally reported on this and has more details. (But it is also paywalled.)
Oh yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's hilarious. You go right ahead and then come back and tell us your cool idea about a global infrastructure that can't be controlled by the organizations who build and maintain said infrastructure.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hrm - how long have governments, corporations, and cartels been trying to kill Bittorrent off again?
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TOR and Bitcoin both seem to be doing okay too. It's a technical problem, and there is probably a solution.
In fact we could base it on the existing web, just designed from the ground up to resist surveillance and tracking. Like requiring encryption for everything, replacing the centralised trust model, limiting sites to material served from the primary domain etc.
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Don't kid yourself. Your ISP can block it all with the flip of a switch. They are just waiting for the order.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hrm - how long have governments, corporations, and cartels been trying to kill Bittorrent off again?
The government doesn't care that you download Game of Thrones or Justin Bieber, really they don't. It's half of "bread and circus" and a huge tech industry driver, despite the lip service they give the content industry. Share something really illegal on BitTorrent and you'll soon have cops knocking at your door. Or in your door. I'm sure you've heard of the four boxes of liberty, the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box. Conversely, those who seek to oppress don't really care unless one of those is threatened. If most people listen to mainstream media, they own the soap box. The first past the post system locks down the ballot box. The legal system keeps the jury's power a guarded secret. As for the ammo box, a few guns are no match for a para-military police.
Look at modern day authoritarian states, it's not the Soviet Union anymore where they try to keep totalitarian control. They've found it's completely pointless, for the most part the average person in China cares about the same things as in the US as they did in the Roman Empire, if they have a decent paycheck and having a good time they're not going to topple the government. Both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union came because life had turned to shit, while China's government seems rock solid and Tiananmen Square is now 25+ years ago. The individuals are like ants compared to the government, you don't really care what they do unless they're ganging up to threaten you.
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You don't build a new infrastructure, you piggyback on-top of the existing one. Take pieces from dark web, Tor, p2p, etc, and sit on-top of the existing internet without creating a new internet. This is part of why we need to fight so hard to keep encryption strong and legal.
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)
You think the government doesn't monitor the dark web? I think they would allocate sufficient resources to monitoring the dark web out of the belief that anything going on there has a good chance of being illegal. And the US Naval Research laboratories created TOR looking for a secure way of transmitting highly encrypted military communications. They released their work to the general public because it did not meet their stated goals. Just like DARPA did the initial research to create a distributed network that could continue to operate if pieces of the network was destroyed. This little project was also released into the public domain and was eventually called the internet. Anyone, and I mean anyone can build their own version of the internet any time they want. All they would need is billions of dollars, some how create the mythical secure network, and then get anyone to actually use it. If want to save some time and money by piggybacking on the existing infrastructure they would still be susceptible to the same security problem the internet has to deal with. And think about this. The general public may be susceptible to government misuse but the government is even more susceptible to having the Internet used against them. It's painfully evident that the government has no clue on how to build a secure system but no one in the public domain can do it either.
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No, the discussion was about building a more secure Internet alternative than exists today. It doesn't matter what protocol you use because any protocol can be compromised just like the protocols used today. And I never said Arpanet was being built to survive a war it was network package switching technology that was used in the first generation of routers that could continue to process data traffic if some of it's nodes went down. War could possibly cause this but natural disasters, sabotage, equipment fai
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The same IPSec that the NSA systematically undermined?
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:5, Insightful)
idea about a global infrastructure that can't be controlled by the organizations who build and maintain said infrastructure.
I think the idea is to render it all Opaque to the entities that control the infrastructure, so their ability to see and "Control" what happens is Reduced to Two options: Have everything Turned on, Or Turn everything Off.
The option of "Have everything turned on, but Delete or block access to data item X" will no longer exist.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
As another poster already pointed out, radio is controlled by the FCC. More importantly, the FCC maintains a fleet of vans dedicated to finding pirate radio stations, and the USAF and USN have assets dedicated to jamming radios. Try again.
"Julius Ceaser", on an Aldis lamp (Score:2)
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wrong, the FCC only controls a portion of the spectrum over a very small portion of the earth's surface
Re:Oh yeah? (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory, you could run a red light bulb on your porch, and eventually, the government, with guns, could conceivably arrive to stop you.
Oh, sure, it'll take a while. You'll get HOA letters, lawyer letters, eventually subpeonas to appear in court for flagrantly disregarding the HOA bylaws.... All said, eventually, your little red light bulb will be shut down by the government. Even if you plugged it in before the by-law was written.
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While I don't imagine most govt's giving a thought to a red light or not, they are, typically, rather strict on following contracts. This is a normal and expected role of govt.
20 Minutes into the Future! (Score:4, Informative)
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> Actual terrorists have specific aims and tactics which the US does not practice.
Noam Chomsky wrote an excellent analysis on this -and proved that the US government both domestically and in foreign military action CONSISTENTLY and WITHOUT EXCEPTION do exactly that. Oh, the exact definition he used for "terrorism" and measured them against... is their own, as published in the FBI handbook on terrorism.
The US is guilty of terrorism by it's very own definition of what terrorism is, constantly and repeated
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you are wrong and naive, and completely ignorant of the well-known activities of for example the CIA. Or of the armed forces in for example viet nam. They really have executed and tortured people for the purpose of inciting fear to advance political agenda, the very definition of terrorism. pry your head out of your ass
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Great counter-argument, bro. Do you have a newsletter?
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No, I'm old and know of what the USA did for example in viet nam. you apparently are ignorant of history
While you're at it, build in crime prevention (Score:5, Funny)
Re:While you're at it, build in crime prevention (Score:4, Insightful)
Small problem with that... those controls to prevent crime/abuse/etc would be the same controls that governments would happily put to use in censoring whatever they don't like.
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Re:While you're at it, build in crime prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. This argument is the same one that's always used when establishing a police state: "We need to violate your liberties in order to keep you safe from ."
The government can't keep you safe from hackers or terrorists, they just won't tell you that because they are stupid, liars, or stupid liars. Not only that, but if you look at history you are far more likely to be killed by a government than a terrorist.
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The government can't keep you safe from hackers or terrorists... Not only that, but if you look at history you are far more likely to be killed by a government than a terrorist.
But the government DOES keep you safe from thieves, gangs, swindlers, home-invaders, pick-pockets, kidnappers, extortionists, burglars, muggers, con-artists, drunks driving the wrong way down the road, your crazy homicidal ex who swears the baby's yours, and even corporations who once enjoyed putting lead in your gasoline and in the paint on your kid's toys (but now they can't, because government).
And most important, if any of those unfortunate things actually happen to you, you can call 911 and (holy shit)
Re:While you're at it, build in crime prevention (Score:5, Insightful)
People get robbed, scammed, kidnapped, and killed by drunk drivers all the time. The government only helps after the fact when it comes time to punish someone. But that's not what we're talking about here, we're talking about crime prevention.
Did the government prevent the Boston Bombing? No.
Did they need access to all of our browser history without warrants to catch the guys who did it? No.
Would access to all of our browser history have helped them prevent it? I doubt it.
Is it worth the price of giving up that much of our liberty and privacy? Absolutely not.
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A terrorist will manage to communicate one way or another. Money is ostensibly a tangible thing but I expect my bank with be secure enough to get insurance to cover any losses.
The government does not need a stranglehold on information to effectivly deal with either issue or any issue for that matter. Having dealt with them fighting kiddie porn they are not interested in anything thats not a slam dunk with 10 minutes work.
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That's not an invalid point, but there is a balance that has to be reached. We can be critical of the balance that has been reached between security and liberty without suggesting that there can be no security. Particularly if the steps being taken are not only intrusive, but actually ineffective.
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Governments are the only ones who censor. (Score:3, Interesting)
We need to remember that governments aren't the only ones who censor others. We see private entities do it all of the time, too. Heck, even Slashdot's moderation system is a great example of this. A small number of people can easily manipulate what content others will see. Remember, censorship doesn't need to involve the complete removal of information. Even just obscuring it, by say downmodding a perfectly fine comment to -1 so it isn't shown to most users by default, is a form of censorship.
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A logical conclusion to draw from that is "Censorship isn't always bad."
For example, I don't need to spend time reading off-topic slashdot posts containing whatever racist/sexist screed the author has bouncing around their brain that day.
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Yes, filtering what you receive at your end is not censorship. Filtering or blocking a transmission or post is. Slashdot moderation is not censorship. In fact it is one of the fairest systems out there. The reader does his own filtering. That is as it should be.
Whether or not censorship is always bad is always subjective, based purely on personal benefit. Its purpose is singular... the rationalizations, familiar and banal.
Re:Governments are the only ones who censor. (Score:4, Insightful)
Moderation is not censorship. The content is still there and viewable at the lowest setting, for those that are interested in seeing "it all".
Just because you have the right to speak, that does not compel met to listen.
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Perhaps the single best thing about Slashdot is its filtering system. I almost always read /. at -1, because I like reading even the unpopular comments. It's hugely better than sites where unpopular content is just removed, with or without notice.
Does it have blackjack? (Score:5, Funny)
And hookers?
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On second thought, forget the blackjack.
Only an academic... (Score:5, Insightful)
...could look at something that was conceived, paid for, and built by the US defense department and sigh "Don't you wish we could have this without all that pesky GOVERNMENT involvement?"
Re:Only an academic... (Score:4, Insightful)
How about TOR? Developed by the US Navy [wikipedia.org]...
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How about TOR? Developed by the US Navy [wikipedia.org]...
Wait a minute... Navy... torpedoes.. tor... pedos!
Half Life 3 confirmed!
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Packet switching - aka ARPANET- was US funded. The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
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The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
HTTP and HTML are a "stack"?
Berners-Lee is the "creator" of "the web", not "the Internet". And many other people have turned it into the more functional system that it is today. How many people remember running the original CERN web server and accessing it with Mosaic? Or better, how many people never realize what it was like when Berners-Lee created it?
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Packet switching - aka ARPANET- was US funded. The IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack was developed at CERN, EU.
To be clear - The foundation of the Internet as we know it today, the IP protocol stack, including IP (the Internet Protocol) https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791 [ietf.org] and TCP (the Transmission Control Protocol) https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc793.txt [ietf.org], were most emphatically *not* developed at CERN or by any entity in Europe. Europe was busy working on the International Standards Organization (ISO) Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) protocol stack while the US was whipping up IP, TCP, UDP (et al.) as a follow-on to the
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The claim that I was refuting was the narrow one that CERN and the EU developed the "IP/TCP/HTTP/HTML stack", not the broader idea that Europeans were involved in the network research that contributed to the knowledge used by the people who defined the IP protocol. I provided citations to the Request For Comments that define the IP and TCP protocols, both of which emanated from US institutions being funded by the US government. Those RFCs clearly identify the source of the IP and TCP protocols that are in
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It's a good thing no one writes these [ietf.org] things [ietf.org] down
Re:Only an academic... (Score:5, Informative)
ARPANET was US funded as well was TCP/IP (made at Berkeley or MIT can't remember which),
If you mean the TCP and IP protocols, RFC 791, "INTERNET PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" [ietf.org] and RFC 793, "TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" [ietf.org] were "Developed ... by Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California". TCP was, to quote that RFC, "based on concepts first described by Cerf and Kahn in {Cerf, V., and R. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-22, No. 5, pp 637-648, May 1974}".
If you mean implementations of those protocols, a very important implementation was done at Berkeley.
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ARPANET was US funded as well was TCP/IP (made at Berkeley or MIT can't remember which),
If you mean the TCP and IP protocols, RFC 791, "INTERNET PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" [ietf.org] and RFC 793, "TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROTOCOL/DARPA INTERNET PROGRAM/PROTOCOL SPECIFICATION" [ietf.org] were "Developed ... by Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California". TCP was, to quote that RFC, "based on concepts first described by Cerf and Kahn in {Cerf, V., and R. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", IEEE Transactions on Communications, Vol. COM-22, No. 5, pp 637-648, May 1974}".
If you mean implementations of those protocols, a very important implementation was done at Berkeley.
Time to get schooled:
Nope, no schooling involved; I already knew about CYCLADES.
However, the Internet Protocol and the Transmission Control Protocol, in particular - which are, respectively, one of the network layers and transport layers of the stack to which the person who started this thread was referring - were developed as part of a DARPA project; the original poster wasn't referring to the entire concept of packet switching, but was referring to the protocols on the Internet. That doesn't mean that every single idea invo
Re: Only an academic... (Score:2)
There was a world wide Web before that 1990s CERN stuff. It did not use tcpip, parts of it used uucp and DECnet
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To be honest, the packet switching invented for ARPA was atrocious.
So something that significantly progressed the state of the art 50+ years ago (I'm gonna guess before you were born) was "atrocious"? Yeah...
Far superior protocols exist, including generic protocols. Fuck, UDP with error-correction is still better than TCP is!
No, it's not. As to why don't care to elaborate since you didn't (and I assume can't).
For a brief moment I thought I might completely trash all of your other points. But they were mostly so stupid or dismissively second-guessing things that were revolutionary years ago that it wasn't worth it...
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Might want to quick google what CERN is?
Not sure about this part (Score:2)
governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think.
No matter how great your firewall is, I don't see how a country with the Web is more prone to being controlled than a country without it.
Neutrino networking (Score:5, Funny)
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I was kind of hoping for a commercially viable (and working!) Ansible Set [wikipedia.org]...
Who cares what Al Gore says? (Score:2)
Guy should go back to making movies.
The problem is not the technology (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is people.
If it's built and operated by human beings, those human beings can be co-opted to turn control over to other human beings in a position of power. Muscle, punitive, fiscal, whatever. Given a large enough operation (and world-wide is pretty large), there is zero chance The Powers That Be will be kept out.
And, if by some fantasy miracle TPTB can be kept out, they can't be prevented from destroying what they can't control.
Poor deluded Berners-Lee, finally giving in to the libertarian pipe-dream of benevolent crypto-anarchy. Kind of sad, really. I mean, it's a nice dream, but like most dreams a complete impossibility to implement. Again, not for technological reasons, but because (quoting DNA) "To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
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The problem is people.
Indeed. One only needs to take a brief glance at Freenet to see what happens when people are given complete anonymity. There's good, bad, and holy crap uninstall!
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The problem is people.
Yes, but that doesn't mean that systems can't be built that amplify some behaviors and attenuate others. That is the nature of governance whether that governance be the rules/mores structuring the dynamics of a book club, Slashdot, a nation, or the web.
The "libertarian pipe-dream of benevolent crypto-anarchy" isn't as unrealistic as you've made it out to be. It did exist, briefly, for some time in 1994-95. I was there with servers in my basement and a T1 line to my house. I am still surprised at how well it
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Remember when it used to be easy to run your own email server? Before the spam pestilence made it necessary for software to read, analyze, and filter every email message.
First ran my own email server in college. It ran on a craptastic 386 sitting under my desk connected to a cable modem. DynDNS or such to make it reachable despite the dynamic IP. It performed just as well as the university's email system, at least for me and a few friends.
Then the spam began. Started having to add layer upon layer of a
Control vs Use (Score:3)
Ravens (Score:2)
Corporations == Facism (Score:5, Insightful)
or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.
This.
Because while our governments are slowly turning fascist, corporations are facists. Think about it. Strict top-down control. No democracy or participation at any level (I'm talking about real participation, not token "we listen to your ideas" events). All in the name of superiority and expansionism.
If we want to have a free Internet, corporations are the real enemy.
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No, sorry, I'm afraid you need to go back to school and learn what "fascism" means. It's not the absence of democracy or participation (a "tyranny of the majority" is both democratic and fascist). It's not even strict top-down control (you can have a fascist oligarchy, for instance). It's the fact that individuals surrender their freedom in order to make the collective stronger. The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
An employee of a corporation (however hierarchical its or
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The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
That is bullshit. In all real fascist governments so far, people quite willingly brought them to power. They were the choice of their generation.
An employee of a corporation (however hierarchical its organisation structure), has not surrendered their freedom.
Yes, you have the freedom to leave the company. But the internal workings of a corporation are very similar to the internal workings of a fascist government. That you can get out is meaningless to the definition of the system.
Try telling even a non-fascist government that you no longer wish to receive government services and will therefore cease paying taxes, and see how that goes...
Bad comparison. When you leave a company, they expect you to abandon your desk and give back the company car. The comparison would have to be
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The key thing about a fascist society is that its members have no choice.
In all real fascist governments so far, people quite willingly brought them to power. They were the choice of their generation.
And here we have the collectivist mindset. Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone; and even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice. Those who did have only themselves to blame, of course, but the remainder who opposed it and were overruled were not given a choice.
Bad comparison. When you leave a company, they expect you to abandon your desk and give back the company car. The comparison would have to be leaving a country - which you can do and then you don't have to pay taxes there anymore.
First, that doesn't always work. The US government, for example, continues to claim incomes taxes for some time after you've renounced your
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Some people chose those fascist governments. Perhaps a majority, perhaps merely a vocal minority, but not everyone;
That is true. The nature of our election systems - majority rule.
even out of those who did support it many were not making an informed choice.
You think so? You have evidence to back up that claim? Because it's so silly to always say that people who made decisions we don't like did so because they were stupid, or misinformed, or tricked. Maybe they weren't?
The government cannot claim ownership of the land either by homesteading or contract, and consequently is not in a position to demand that anyone leave.
True, all analogies break down somewhere. But the point is that in both cases, as long as you are inside of the system, those who run the system can tell you what to do. The GP claimed that corporations are totally different becaus
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In all real fascist governments so far, people quite willingly brought them to power. They were the choice of their generation.
That's just more nonsense.
The people "quite willingly" brought to power people when there were free elections, prior to the government turning fascist. After the government changed, the "willingly" part was gone.
That you can get out is meaningless to the definition of the system.
That you can get out is CRITICAL to the definition of the system.
When you leave a company, they expect you to abandon your desk and give back the company car.
OF COURSE THEY DO. The desk and the car belong to the company. Why do you have such a big problem with the idea of property rights? Do you REALLY think that when you buy a computer and attach it to the Internet that you give up contro
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Yeah, companies are "fascist". They have every right to be.
There is your problem right there. You think property rights are absolute and everything is fine as long as it can be justified by property rights. And that, exactly, is fascist thinking. When you think that you have an absolute right that trumps other rights.
In the real world, property rights are not absolute. There are limitations what you can do with your property, and rightly so.
This is the neocon poison at its purest. Thinking that a corporation can do anything because it owns its stuff. But the stuff
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There is your problem right there. You think property rights are absolute
Don't tell me what I think when you so obviously have no clue whatsoever.
Thinking that a corporation can do anything because it owns its stuff.
The "poison" here is your repeated attempts at deliberately misinterpreting what I've said. You know very well I've never said anything even close to this. It's pretty clear you just want to vent your hate at corporations because they don't give you what you want for free, or they're somehow destroying your "free Internet" because they sell services to people who want to pay for them, but it's over as far as I'm concerned.
Amazon wants to be a monopoly.
So what? It
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So what? It they want to try, go for it.
You are stupid or what? We make trying to become the next Hitler illegal because even the chance that someone could succeed is too bad to allow it to happen.
Monopolies are the same. The reason we have anti-trust legislation in all civilized countries is precisely to stop companies from trying.
Control of one market is not the enemy of "freedom" in an entirely different market.
All law-makers of all civilized countries disagree with you. Which is why anti-trust legislation makes it illegal to leverage dominance in one market into a different one.
But hey, don't let facts get into your way.
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They need to eat, and so have resignedly signed a one-sided indenture of employment, agreeing to give up their freedom and humanity in exchange for the privilege of continuing to live.
FTFY ;-)
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Wow. You mean the corporations that people are paying to provide web servers so everyone and their brother can have their own website or blog? Those evil corporations that are stepping in to fill the demand for services that people are willing to pay for?
Those exactly, and that you take a page out of the neocon marketing textbook doesn't change the facts.
Amazon has a stated desire and goal: To be the delivery service for anything that can be delivered. Bezos has more than once stated clearly that he intends to be the only kid on the block.
It's THEIR HARDWARE and THEIR SYSTEM. You don't get to tell them how to run their company, and I don't see why you should think you do.
You are completely trapped inside extremist capitalist thinking. So it's their stuff, but who makes it run? Who invents, designs, builds and runs those systems? It is absolutely possible to imagine a system where the peopl
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Amazon has a stated desire and goal: To be the delivery service for anything that can be delivered.
Of course they do. They are a COMPANY. You don't have to buy from them, and being a company doesn't make them a fascist.
You are completely trapped inside extremist capitalist thinking. So it's their stuff, but who makes it run?
Believing in private property is "extremist capitalist thinking", so I guess we have so little overlap in world view that I doubt anything I say will make any impact on you. Yes, you go on about how the world could be and all, but that doesn't change the world as it is, nor does it mean that existing companies are fascist thugs stealing your public internet.
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Of course they do.
When did the world go to shit so much that the desire to not compete in a market, but control it completely isn't raising eyebrows even? When a company says that it wants to dominate a market, that's the same as some politician saying he wants to replace democracy with monarchy.
You don't have to buy from them
but that is exactly what they want to change. Corporations today don't want to be a competitor in a marketplace anymore. I've listened to CEOs talk in closed circles how there is only space for 3 companies in their market and everyon
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When did the world go to shit so much that the desire to not compete in a market, but control it completely isn't raising eyebrows even?
I really don't know how you can ask such a thing. It's always been that way. It hasn't always been as easy to control a market as it is today, but if you think that almost every company ever created didn't want to be a controlling player in their market from the beginning, you just aren't paying attention.
When a company says that it wants to dominate a market, that's the same as some politician saying he wants to replace democracy with monarchy.
Nonsense. Absolute malarky.
but that is exactly what they want to change.
No, that is not what they want to change. They cannot force you to buy from them, period, end of sentence.
No, believing that property rights are the only rights that matter is.
First, I didn't say that, so stuff it.
Second, your "rights" to contr
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No, that is not what they want to change. They cannot force you to buy from them, period, end of sentence.
Because that never happened in the history of the world. It's not like there was a time when you didn't have a choice in which operating system to buy, for example. Not that they forced you to buy one specific operating system when you bought a new computer or something. Unimaginable, such things.
Second, your "rights" to control other people's property don't matter. They don't exist.
As a matter of fact, they do exist. The constitution of my country says that property also brings with it duties and that having property also should serve the greater good. More specific laws then detail under whi
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A rasberry pi zero I imagine can adequately serve 90% of people's blogs.
You mean the $5 device that has no network capability? Yes, that device can handle all of the blog capabilities for all the people who don't have a blog, but serves none of the people who actually have one. And it requires the blogger to have admin knowledge, which most of them don't.
I'm not crying a river for the altruistic cloud monopolists.
I'm not saying you should cry a river for anything. I pointed out that calling those 'fascist corporations' the death of the free Internet is stupid.
And I hate to correct you on this point, but running "the cloud" isn't a mon
prior art (Score:2)
Inadvertenty? Yeah right. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network..."
Uh, inadvertently...??
Let's pretend the government doesn't exist for a moment. Yes, that's right. No NSA. No FISA courts. No NSLs. No secret data centers. Nothing.
The entities that have robbed us of our privacy and the power they wield today are legally titled under the words I AGREE, and are contained within every EULA that drives every damn app or service that this generation loves to call "free".
Sorry, but I'm not really buying "inadvertently" right now, as if it wasn't obvious enough that our government currently collects or buys most of this data from the very service providers we use every day. Government surveillance today is nothing more than an outsourced arm of corporate data collecting.
And you AGREED to pretty much ALL of it.
Silly idea (Score:4, Interesting)
It's based on the faulty idea that the government must be evil so you can't give them control over it.
The government is made of people - some good and some bad. As such, ALL governments do some good as well as some bad.
There is no way to have an internet with significantly less government control without a shit load more doxing, Blackmail, identity theft, sale of dangerous drugs, pedophilie videos, viruses, hacking and tons of other crimes.
Hell, the government can barely contain the crime on the internet now.
Which means any significantly 'freer' internet would end up being banned.
The BEST they could hope for is to create a specific libertarian UN empowered organization in charge of the free-web, giving it massive enforcement powers but only related to the free-web.
That libertarian organization could possibly maintain enough control over the internet to reign in mankind's darker side, and at the same time preventing regular governments from over-regulating and controlling it.
But make no mistake, it can only be done by ADDING a new layer of government to the internet, not by creating a new internet.
Re: (Score:2)
The BEST they could hope for is to create a specific libertarian UN empowered organization in charge of the free-web, giving it massive enforcement powers but only related to the free-web.
Who decides what they enforce? Who elects the people who decide what they enforce?
That libertarian organization could possibly maintain enough control over the internet to reign in mankind's darker side,
Who decides what is "mankind's darker side" and what is "unusual"?
But make no mistake, it can only be done by ADDING a new layer of government to the internet,
Adding a layer doesn't remove the other layers. How does adding an unelected government's control reduce the existing ones'?
The news media control (Score:2)
Who elects the people who decide what they enforce?
The major news media decide which candidates for public office get name recognition [pineight.com].
How to do it? (Score:2)
The only thing I can think of gets rid of everything since the hosts file, and then builds a mesh system on top of that underlying structure. But I can't think of a way to make that scale.
Clearly the original problem was centralizing control in ICANN, but what alternative can you think of? If you allow different groups to claim the same address you need a decidable way to resolve collisions.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm a bit dubious about identifying everything by a hash. Hashes have collisions, so you need a way to resolve collisions. Still, it looks interesting, even though the current design says that it operates on top of the web. (They might mean on top of IP, which is reasonable.)
The problem with identifying things by their hash is that a system will appear to be working fine, but then when you scale it up the percentage of collisions will start escalating. I didn't dig into it, but presumably they have a wa
The problem isn't the web (Score:2)
It's the biggest "surveillance network" not because of what it is, but because of how it's used. If you only read facebook, and everyone reads facebook, then the facebook node is a great point of surveillance. If you read 100+ resources, and everyone reads a different 100+ resources, then there is no good node for surveillance.
Surveillance was always easy. Your government could always stand at your driveway, or at your grocery store, and watch. But with so many driveways, and so many stores, it wasn't c
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...It's tough[er] to track down the last 1%. It's not worth the effort, purely because 99% is enough.
I am the 1%.
This is an illusion that will become more obvious to you as you realize you're not the 1%, but the 0.0001%.
When Big Brother starts to notice that you are no longer the proverbial "one-in-a-million", but more like the actual one-in-a-million, you will stick out like a sore thumb.
It's not an anti-movement that will maintain your privacy. It's the fact that you are not a part of the collective that do not care to even think or act differently than anyone else. Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google, YouTube, and
Problem solved! (Score:2)
Everybody just VPN into Facebook, they have our back!
Problem solved!
Kill me now.
Then corporations will control it (Score:2)
Even if you managed to build Internet 2.0 without any corporate or government
upside down? (Score:2)
Wait - snowden did post stuff that nobody wanted him to post. Right? So... victory?
There's an easy way to test this idea (Score:2)
Design a Free Web that can be accessed censorship-free in China, and I'll believe you.
Serious question (Score:2)
Is it feasible in any way to build any kind of worldwide thing without involving companies or governments? Even if it were possible to get everyone to cooperate (read: pay), some yutz would get in near the top and steal all the money anyway.
Furthermore, if it did exist and were open, there would be no way to keep companies and governments off of it. Right?
If people can participate, and control can be had, bad people will figure out how to put themselves into control. Period. There is no way to enforce fairn
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Sure. Use their infrastructure in such a way that they don't know you're using it.
Once we built a beautiful garden (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple of people, not many, we decided that, well, wouldn't it be really swell if we planted a few gardens. We're gardeners after all. Why not come together and show each other what we know about gardening? We could connect our gardens to each other, have our plants grow together, maybe we'll find some awesome symbiosis happening! And we did. And others came and looked at our garden. It was just a little garden, mind you, there was nobody to hold your hands when you tried to only walk around in them, there were few trails and most of the time you had to carve your own, carrying a machete with you was advisable. Most people turned away when they noticed that it's going to be a bit of work to just look at our flowers. Let alone plant their own garden. Because back then, if you wanted to be part of that gardening experience, you better learned a thing or two about gardening, and fast!
Yes, there was the occasional bully who jumped into our flowerbeds and trampled over them, but we knew how to deal with them. And deal with them we did, swiftly and with lasting effect. We were, after all, gardeners. And we were good at that.
More people came along and we were overjoyed. They're really interested in our stuff! You see, nobody really cared about our plants and everyone we showed any of them called us names because, well, it was not "cool" to plant flowers. But suddenly this was the next big thing, everyone wanted flowers! And we were only too eager to share all the knowledge. Hey, the more the merrier! Knowledge multiplies if you share it!
Well, to be honest... we shared more than just knowledge. There were a few flowerbeds that had those camo nets above them, but hey, ya know, who cares what you do in your spare time, amirite? Just pass it and don't bogard the spliff.
Then people came who said they wanted to build some roads through our gardens so people could walk more easily. We agreed, it was a good idea. After all, most people by now weren't really hard core gardeners anymore. Many just wanted to wander about and smell the flowers. And those that joined were... well, let's say they were happy if we gave them a few saplings because they had no clue at all how to grow plants but wanted some good looking flowerbeds too. We didn't mind. After all, hey, it's not like I don't have that flower anymore just because I give you a sapling of it, right? And we get roads across our garden.
A seed shop opened at the corner. We thought it's cool. Hey, that makes it easier to get seeds initially. Someone's gonna buy, and then we pass 'em around and ... so we thought. But suddenly passing seeds and saplings around wasn't "allowed" anymore. The cornerstone of what we built was considered "bad" now. By whom the fuck and who died and made you king, we asked. We dealt with it the way we knew how to deal with it. The same way we dealt with the bullies, or with others that broke the rules. Only to learn that the rules have changed. We no longer make them.
Long story short, our garden is now walled in. Most of the plots have been sold, or rather, "reappropriated". We're sitting in some corners, tucked away from the busy streets where vendors peddle boring, uninspired hybrid plants (that are of course patented and don't you DARE to as much as SHOW it to anyone, let alone hand him a sapling!) where the masses stumble about, not even knowing what gardening is, for it has been turned into a huge amusement park. Allegedly there is still a tree standing somewhere in what used to be our garden, I haven't seen one in a long time, though.
So we moved on. And we learned.
We built another garden.
And this time, we will not make the mistake to invite the masses in. Leave them their amusement park, and leave them in the blissful ignorance that they don't even know what they're missing.
They most likely even wouldn't want to know.
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The internet you mean still exists, but you have to leave the main roads and do without someone pointing the way.
Take a machete with you when you try to find it.
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And these changes meant you could not make music anymore the way you did? You could not gather some friends just like you used to back when jazz was born and play? Did they close your jazz club and forbid you to open a new one because jazz clubs now belong to some corporation and you're no longer allowed to have your own? Did someone take your jazz song, record it, claim it as his own and forbid you from playing your own song?
Well, yes, actually that did happen. It didn't become the norm, though.
Fork It (Score:2)
Re: Fork It (Score:2)
Government? (Score:3)
Government isn't the problem - financial interests are. Government is, if anything, the solution: a governance that can make sure the playing field is level, that the rules apply in the same way to everybody etc. Looking back to history, we see that powerful people have always grabbed as much as they can for themselves with little to no regard for the vast majority of the population - this has been the case as far back as we have written records. The laws and regulations that protect ordinary people - the mythical 99% - are there because we have fought hard for them and got the government to change the rules in ouor favour. We have seen this happen over and over, every time some new technology opens up opportunities - in the beginning there are no rules, so those that are strong and ruthless enough move in, take over and push out everybody else; and then we get Government in some form to set the rules more in favour of the rest of us.
The industry - whatever industry - has always felt entitled to use any means at all to maximise their own profits; if not for government regulations, we would not have any kind of food labeling, just as an example. The producers have fought bitterly against having to tell what kind of crap they put in food, cosmetics etc - they still try to hide artificial additives behind meaningless gibberish and deceptive labeling. They hate the fact that they can't put anything they please into any product and lie about it to their customers - we would all be drinking milk "enriched" with melamine, were it not for the government. So why do people still keep talking about government as the only evil thing in the world? Government is, by and large, good for the people - yes, it is annoying that we have to pay tax, but come on. I'm not saying we should just roll over and trust them uncritically, but let us at least be intelligent in our criticism.
So, about the internet: it is again the big players, the Googles, Facebooks, etc, that want to manipulate and spy on what goes on there. Everybody on /. knows this - it is discussed regularly, it is commonly agreed that we don't like it. And then people go back to reviling "The Government" - why? No doubt one element in this is that the big players have an interest in obfuscating the issue, so have ways of ensuring that there are large numbers of anti-government muck-spreaders around, but another essential part is the sheer idiocy of the people who frequent forums on the net and never even stop to ask simple, critical questions.
We had that already before the Web. (Score:2)
It was run by citizens and was called "FidoNet". Given, that could use an update, sort of like end-to-end encryption and perhaps some virtual crypto-currency for the Sysops help maintain the bigger network but to me it's a cold hard fact: In terms of quality, independance, hardware requirements and resilience FidoNet and not the Web is the pinnacle of international digital networks IMHO.
Build a mesh-network with the concept of FidoNet in mind using todays technologies and protocols such as abstracted name s
Dear Tim Berners-Lee (Score:2)
You are welcome to use any of this that you think may be helpful:
http://www.ideationizing.com/2... [ideationizing.com]
It is not designed to resist monitoring as much as it is designed to get information in and out of remote areas. Though, it could be modified to fly under the radar, so to speak, pretty well.
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Nope - at least not until mesh networking is a thing, and universally accessible. Until each 'node' (that would be the end-users) can automagically and wirelessly do all the routing and TX/RX with only a minimum of completely neutral minimal-infrastructure relays, someone's gonna own the pipes, the routers, the peering, the etc.
It's technically doable in sufficiently population-dense areas, but it would be so slow that gamers and movie addicts everywhere would avoid it like it were Space Herpes.
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Until each 'node' (that would be the end-users) can automagically and wirelessly do all the routing and TX/RX with only a minimum of completely neutral minimal-infrastructure relays,
Who is going, as a user, to want to pay the money it will cost to be able to route other people's stuff at multi-gigabit speeds? That's the problem with "mesh networking". If you don't hub-and-spoke to concentrate bandwidth needs where they can be paid for, you're stuck at the speed of the "mesh". And since all the hops are short distance, you add huge delays to the system if you're going any distance at all.
but it would be so slow that gamers and movie addicts everywhere would avoid it like it were Space Herpes.
Both slow and high-latency as every packet needs to find the route to the destination.