If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You (cnet.com) 127
Mozilla and the National Science Foundation want a new internet. And they want it to be free and accessible for everybody. From a report: They'll pay $2 million for it. On Wednesday, the two organizations issued a call to action for "big ideas that decentralize the web" as part of the "Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society" challenges. The challenges include getting the internet to communities off the grid, with proposals like a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside.
In this thread: (Score:5, Funny)
-Need more money
-Brendan Eich! ahahgfhahadgdaha!
new internet? (Score:3)
Incidentally, whatever happened to Internet2? The very high speed internet that colleges & such institutions were working on?
Anyway, my suggestion: for such a thing, deprecate IPv4 and use only IPv6, and that too, using a 96:32 split instead of 64:64. And make this hierarchichal, so that the uppermost blocks drill down from IANA -> RIR -> Nation -> Organizations. And instead of having provider independent IP addresses, which tends to break that, encourage them to use multicast addresses t
Re: new internet? (Score:2)
So in other words, get rid of national TLDs, and have only addresses based on .com, .org, .net & .gov? Could be a solution, except that multiple English speaking countries could have a 'National Bank', in which case, which one gets the nationalbank.com domain name?
Random IPs are not the solution, particularly if they are static. If they were dynamic, your idea would make sense. But organizations need static IPs as well, and as IoT grows, even people will need it. Maybe 1 solution to your issue co
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Re: new internet? (Score:2)
No, that's what my multicast (or even anycast) suggestion was about: when you add a new ISP, just add that ISP's allocated addresses to the multicast address mapping, and you're good to go. So that an organization just needs to add that, and then all the sites serviced by the new ISP get the same content as before w/o having to update things on all the nodes
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Interesting thing is that malware can do a decentralized internet because its usage patterns are different. Malware spreads out traffic (more or less) randomly, whereas normal human traffic tends to go to the same few places, thus creating huge bottlenecks.
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what airline would allow that? (Score:2)
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how so? isn't most of the Earth still accessible by foot, boat or pack mule? Unless you have some particular limitation on travel time, it seems that commercial airlines are not necessary. And if you have the budget, flying as a private pilot will get you lots of places if you don't mind multiple stops for refuel and pilot breaks.
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Implement standalone Access Points to each smartphone, they should be enabled by default and become active either on request or when no other type of Internet Access is available.
I only accept payments in Ethereum.
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use packet over shortwave, sure its only like 9600bps but it will go for (lots and lots and lots of) miles
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You'll want an 20-80 meter antenna if you are transmitting on shortwave to get good coupling to the air. If you try to use a cheap little antenna that works for receiving SW then you'll end up burning up your transmit stage uselessly trying to heat the air instead of making effective radio waves.
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you'll end up burning up your transmit stage
You can use any conductor as an antenna without burning up your transmitter... just have to impedance match it. Damp trees have been resonated. Now, whether anyone will hear you is another question: your crap antenna is likely to be down a few db.
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Sorry, but shortwave isn't going to get you 9600bps. Shortwave gets you 1200.
Freent (Score:5, Interesting)
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Content undesired by some is the reason for decentral and censorship resistant networks.
You may object some content and find it reasonable. Other people restrict content, you want to have. Legal rights, morale and related things are relative.
Freedom of speech is allowing people to say (or in case of digital media distribute content) you DO NOT agree with. Freedom of speech is a right you grant to others. And you can only have total freedom for everything or for nothing.
But don't worry too much. Digital cont
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That's the way block storage networks work. The only way you can guarantee to host something, which isn't dependend on services you provide or you pay to stay available.
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Freenet is a distributed block storage. Your content stays in there as long as it's wanted or as long as you reinsert it. Its a bit like torrents with DHT, but you're guaranteeds some distribution, even when nobody downloaded from you, yet. Still it dies, when you stop seeding and everyone else stops seeding/loading.
> I'd rather just run my own server, which would cost me the same except my content will be available for as long as I want it to be, not when Freenet decides to drop it.
On the other hand, i
The Freenet Delusion (Score:2)
Freenet has been around for seventeen years.
It has never been clear how many people actually use the thing, but the numbers are most probably quite small.
Think closer to ten thousand than ten million.
The user In 2017 expects agility and speed, all sorts of content accessed adeptly and interactively, not the static web pages of GeoCities and dial-up AOL.
It also seems fair to suggest that most users are not interested in installing software that links them directly to the dark underside of the net. Freenet is
Yea.... Nope. (Score:1)
It will be filed with nothing but porn and racist sites.
Re:Yea.... Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fortunately, anyone who doesn't want to look at 4chan (or whatever else), doesn't have to.
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Then the answer is: nobody listens.
A decentral network must be resistant to attacks like this one.
Re: Yea.... Nope. (Score:1)
We indeed need much more Nazi / fasc porn.
Re: Yea.... Nope. (Score:2)
Now it's all black cock for white girl and no baby-making since its all in the ass anyway.
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And government approved "news".
Re: Yea.... Nope. (Score:1)
Add warez and what else would be needed?
The porn are boring though.
THIS IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED! (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet was designed to be distributed so that it had no central point of attack/vulnerability. Was NOBODY paying attention for the last 20 years while money-grubbing businesses jockeyed for control, thus creating the very problem that it was designed to circumvent??!!
HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE??!!
Re:THIS IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED! (Score:4, Insightful)
Different operators, different requirements. For the military, decentralisation and redundancy was a core goal - they needed a network that would continue to function even if large parts of it were being bombed. But a commercial operator just doesn't have that requirement, and is more concerned about cost.
Its the DNS system and the SSL racket (Score:4, Insightful)
If they want to decentralize the web, DNS and the SSL racket has to change. Domains have been completely compromised by both business interests, particularly the .com domains which have been squatted to hell and back, and government interests that can take away those names just because your politically inconvenient (See: Torrent sites).. And the SSL racket has to go, why the hell should we have to pay huge sums of cash to companys that *clearly* can not guarantee the integrity of the trust chain for certificates and have let us down again and again.
To my thinking, whatever must come next must be decentralized and let *US* choose who we trust and who we don't, both for domains, and for encryption.
Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit (Score:5, Interesting)
SSL is now completely free via let's encrypt.
Let's Encrypt requires a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) under a well-known top-level domain (TLD), not an IP address in RFC 1918 space or a name under a made-up TLD such as .local or .internal. So do all other CAs whose root certificates are included in Mozilla NSS, as a FQDN is one of the Baseline Requirements adopted by the CA/Browser Forum.
Domains are cheap.
Cheap enough for every head of household to buy and to continue to renew in perpetuity? Because buying a domain is the only way to get a certificate for hosts on your LAN that visitors' devices will trust, and a certificate is the only way you're going to satisfy the "Secure Contexts" requirement for recently introduced JavaScript APIs [pineight.com].
Free ones are available.
Namely?
If you're referring to subdomains offered by dynamic DNS providers, these providers have to be on Mozilla's Public Suffix List (PSL) [publicsuffix.org]. If a domain isn't already on the PSL, and 20 other users of subdomains under the same domain have obtained certificates in the past week, Let's Encrypt will deny you a certificate, citing its rate limit policy [letsencrypt.org]. If a domain is on the PSL, each subdomain gets its own separate rate limiting bucket of 20 certificates per subdomain per week. In addition, submissions to the PSL must be made by the dynamic DNS provider as a pull request through GitHub.com [github.com], and use of GitHub.com requires running proprietary software written in JavaScript on your computer [gnu.org].
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The FSF considers the javascript required to access github "non-free" but that is not the same as proprietary I think. It's not closed source
Then where's the source code? The script file that GitHub serves is minified, and minified JavaScript is not "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", which is how both GPLv2 and GPLv3 define a work's "source code".
In addition, the requirement to run non-free JavaScript [gnu.org] is not the only thing that prevents a manufacturer of networked appliances from just starting its own dynamic DNS service for use by its appliances' firmware. I have read reports that the people who handle PSL pull req
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A cheap domain is less than a dollar a month.
Times hundreds of millions of households. This is a windfall to the registrar industry just to satisfy the mixed content blocking and Secure Contexts spec.
Free ones are available.
Namely?
There are even TLDs offering free domains if you aren't fussy.
Again, which TLDs are these? And do they bundle DNS service that Let's Encrypt can reach and that an ACME client can programmatically configure? If not, then the user will have to run a DNS server on his home computer or server appliance and forward port 53 inbound to that device. This not only requires technical expertise to configure the gateway device
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Every browser allows self-signed certificates.
I was under the impression that the developer of an application for Android 7 had to explicitly opt in to trusting user-installed root certificates [googleblog.com]. Does Chrome for Android 7 opt in?
What's the problem?
Even apart from the Chrome for Android 7 issue, it might not be so trivial to install your home NAS's private root certificate on laptops, tablets, and smartphones carried by friends and family visiting your LAN.
Too late (Score:2)
...And they want it to be free and accessible for everybody. ...
The mega-corporations already control all the on ramps. Of course, if Mozilla intends to rewire every household in the United States, then they might have a chance of hitting their goal.
RTFA: the title is misleading (Score:5, Interesting)
NEITHER OF THOSE IS "DECENTRALIZATION."
Re:RTFA: the title is misleading (Score:5, Insightful)
Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.
I never understood these types of projects that are trying to create a super-low cost alternative in an established market they have no clue about and have no intention of becoming a commercial player in. Whether it's to build a $100 laptop (hello OLPC), $10 tablet (hello Aakash), $3 smartphone (hello Freedom 251), deliver Internet with donkeys or some other flop/scam. Usually they start with some hilariously optimistic plan that a billion people need their product, do cost estimates based on the sum of the BoM and burn ridiculous amounts of investor/charity/government money re-discovering that industrial design, mass production, QA, distribution and support is not free. Meanwhile the traditional players operate on fairly razor-thin margins knowing that if you get them hooked on your brand there's a good chance you'll buy another, more profitable model if you get more money so if the project was feasible they steal your market and if it wasn't you're never able to deliver.
My guess is that whoever wins this will create a boondoggle of a solution for a thousand people that in a few years will be replaced by another 100 million people getting electricity, cellphones and mobile internet. Or at the very least a satellite uplink for the village/island driven by generator/battery. Maybe Mozilla should get back to producing some software people want to use, once they get online? Just saying that despite the goals seeming noble, this is pretty much pissing away money in the wind.
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It's bitztream, the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating and Qualcomm-hating Slashdot troll!
So... (Score:2)
Score:-5, Pwned (Score:1)
Witness BitZtream getting pwned! [slashdot.org]
So a price is set for Mark Zuckerberg's head... (Score:2)
" "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone." https://politics.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
Simply you cannot (Score:2)
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I call it the electromechanical superhighway (or, colloquially, the Interstate).
Start the Pied Piper jokes in 3...2...1... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not sure how to do it, but I know it'll involve middle-out compression.
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Freifunk (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Freifunk (German for: "free radio") is a non-commercial open grassroots initiative to support free computer networks in the German region. The main goals of Freifunk are to build a large scale free wireless Wi-Fi network that is decentralized, owned by those who run it and to support local communication.
The initiative counts about 400 local communities with over 41,000 access points. Freifunk uses mesh technology to bring up ad hoc networks by interconnecting multiple Wireless LANs
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And slow it to a standstill while wasting MW of electricity and processing power..
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If I'm not mistaken, ARPA originally designed to internet to be decentralized by its nature, allowing for continued C&C in the event that a nuclear war took out our major telephone exchange nodes. Big ISP's then pretty much trashed that idea, and we're now in the same boat again, but with less urgency.
I beleive decentralized at the time meant many routes to the same address.
Proposal (Score:1)
Oh, I misread that bad (Score:2)
For some reason I read that as "$2M to deSTABILIZE" the internet.
I had just about worked through the arrangements to film a video with a Kardassian and about forty cats, good thing I re-read the headline before I signed the contracts!
already done (Score:2)
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That looks a lot like a piratebox.
Off the grid? (Score:2)
Build more towers as needed to get some network to the off grid site.
Think of security and power needs too.
"How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service" (11/2/2015,)
https://arstechnica.com/inform... [arstechnica.com]
look to the US military (Score:2)
The ham radio is already there. (Score:2)
YouTube Ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMUGQQ2Pn4 [youtube.com]
D-STAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR [wikipedia.org]
Routing BGP (Score:2)
Thanks to it's core protocols it's mostly decentralized now. BGP routing protocol that keeps your IP addresses routable across the global Internet does not have any center. Nor do any of the thousands of routers have any central requirements to operate. Really only DNS requires centralized servers.
Existing solutions. (Score:2)
We don't need another piece of technology. There are already several possibilities in play which are in desperate need of resources and support. If Mozilla really wants to decentralise the internet, why don't they start supporting something like IPFS? That project does exactly what they want, but like many others is stuck in the chicken-and-egg stage: No-one will make a website that needs a protocol very few people can access, and no browser or OS vendor will bother to support a protocol that no-one is usin
Nigerian prince letter (Score:1)
Now it's not just from Nigeria. They want it so it could be from anywhere on the globe.