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The Internet Mozilla

If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You (cnet.com) 127

Posted by msmash from the call-pied-piper dept.
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.
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If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You More

If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You

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  • -Can't do it, it's too late
    -Need more money
    -Brendan Eich! ahahgfhahadgdaha!

    • 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: (Score:1)

        by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
        Oh lovrly so organisations with significsnt infra structure needs to renumber everythong when they change isps, or even hevs 2 or more ips for dverything if they hsve multiple isps (bcp and all that) , what a good idea, intead of just advertising the same condistsnt prefix to a frw upstreams, I know tcam isn't cheap but I think all in all it will turn out cheaper, and sith ipv6 ypu arblightly tonsee only one prefix/sight snyway due to generous allocation from rirs

        • 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

    • It will destroy us all. With the IoT, and a wifi server plugged into every street-lamp, malware will make its own decentralized internet [mailchi.mp]. But at least we'll have a decentralized internet.

      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.
      • Huh, I hadn't thought about it that way. I could also see the IoT adding so many nodes, it makes trying to control the internet too expensive to do properly, and that's even before we get to the more interesting stuff you brought up. Thanks!
  • got to get there to get off the grid. and in some cases, commercial air travel is necessary.

    • 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.

  • Freent (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Powys ( 1274816 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:07PM (#54677753)
    https://freenetproject.org/ [freenetproject.org] Those guys are already trying to do it. It is fully decentralized and private. It is very slow, and consumes huge bandwidth, but it works. The real concern here is the lack of choice when it comes to ISPs. They control the last mile, which almost everyone MUST lean on if they want to be on the internet. Break up the monopolies/duopolies and most the problems Mozilla wants to solve evaporates.

    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It will be filed with nothing but porn and racist sites.

    • Re:Yea.... Nope. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Powys ( 1274816 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:13PM (#54677779)
      The problem with this mentality is it defeats the entire purpose of decentralization and non-censorship. If you want a fully free and uncensored internet, you will always have to put up with sites/opinions/ideas you don't like. That is part of FULLY free speech. The left and the right both cry foul about censorship when their ideas are being squashed, but are very will to squash others ideas they don't agree with. If you want an open internet, you get 4chan (and worse) in the mix.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Fortunately, anyone who doesn't want to look at 4chan (or whatever else), doesn't have to.

    • And government approved "news".

    • Add warez and what else would be needed?
      The porn are boring though.

  • THIS IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by FrankHaynes ( 467244 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:09PM (#54677763)

    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??!!

  • Its the DNS system and the SSL racket (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:12PM (#54677765)

    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.

  • ...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)

    by Jody Bruchon ( 3404363 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:17PM (#54677795)
    Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved [mozilla.org] is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.

    NEITHER OF THOSE IS "DECENTRALIZATION."

    • Re:RTFA: the title is misleading (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @04:13PM (#54678093) Homepage

      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.

  • " "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]

  • Not the internet, which is strongly polarized towards the connectivity providers. The "inter" part of internet mostly pertains the ISPs and the carriers. A decentralized solution would require the total kill of the concept of ISP. It would take seconds or even minutes to reach a site (or whatever you call it).
    • Ahhh you just want the loot for yourself dont you. :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 )

      It would take seconds or even minutes to reach a site (or whatever you call it).

      I call it the electromechanical superhighway (or, colloquially, the Interstate).

  • Start the Pied Piper jokes in 3...2...1... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 23, 2017 @03:54PM (#54678003)

    I'm not sure how to do it, but I know it'll involve middle-out compression.

  • Freifunk (Score:3)

    by xororand ( 860319 ) on Friday June 23, 2017 @04:11PM (#54678081)

    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

  • I propose a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside. Now give me my $2M !

  • 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!

  • Then just build a series of wireless towers to the site. At some location with good optical and a selection of providers, build a tower.
    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]
  • US military has been working on this for a long time and a lot of the research is freely available. For example, multi-hop wireless networking has known scalability limits (you can't connect everybody to everybody because the system slows to a halt, a few hundred nodes is probably the limit) so you need a certain percentage of basestations that are better connected via microwave links or wire lines. Store-and-forward helps with disconnection but is very slow and how do you secure such a persistent connect
  • These geeks are driving around in their cars, surfing the WEB and talking to each other with technology straight off the amateur radio shelf. Relay stations allow for service virtually worldwide. You just need the hardware, the software and the license. D-Star is a digital voice and data protocol specification for amateur radio. There are open source alternatives to D-Star, but I don't know much about them.

    YouTube Ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMUGQQ2Pn4 [youtube.com]

    D-STAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR [wikipedia.org]

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Now it's not just from Nigeria. They want it so it could be from anywhere on the globe.

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