EFF Launches New Podcast: How to Fix the Internet (eff.org) 76
"EFF is launching How to Fix the Internet, a new podcast mini-series to examine potential solutions to six ills facing the modern digital landscape," announces EFF.org:
Over the course of 6 episodes, we'll consider how current tech policy isn't working well for users and invite experts to join us in imagining a better future... It's easy to see all the things wrong with the modern Internet, and how the reality of most peoples' experience online doesn't align with the dreams of its early creators. How did we go astray and what should we do now? And what would our world look like if we got it right...?
In each episode, we are joined by a guest to examine how the current system is failing, consider different possibilities for solutions, and imagine a better future. After all, we can't build a better world unless we can imagine it.
We are launching the podcast with two episodes: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance, featuring the Cato Institute's specialist in surveillance legal policy Julian Sanchez; and Why Does My Internet Suck?, featuring Gigi Sohn, one of the nation's leading advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks. Future episodes will be released on Tuesdays.
Other topics to be covered by the podcast mini-series:
In each episode, we are joined by a guest to examine how the current system is failing, consider different possibilities for solutions, and imagine a better future. After all, we can't build a better world unless we can imagine it.
We are launching the podcast with two episodes: The Secret Court Approving Secret Surveillance, featuring the Cato Institute's specialist in surveillance legal policy Julian Sanchez; and Why Does My Internet Suck?, featuring Gigi Sohn, one of the nation's leading advocates for open, affordable, and democratic communications networks. Future episodes will be released on Tuesdays.
Other topics to be covered by the podcast mini-series:
- The third-party doctrine [which asserts "no reasonable expectation of privacy"]
- Barriers to interoperable technology
- Law enforcement's use of face recognition technology
- Digital first sale and the resale of intellectual property
Re: Astroturfed, compromised EFF (Score:2)
How to fix the internet
Yes, today's Internet is useless. (Score:3)
You give us this copypasta in dozens of unrelated articles. Today is your time to shine. Got anything more? Care to elaborate? Don't waste this chance to finally be on topic.
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I'm guessing he's never reading the articles and that he's not even aware that for once, he's 100% on-topic.
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The topic is so fuzzy that anything can be on target this time. The Internet is all over our lives now.
I still think OrangeTide was feeding an AC troll, and I wouldn't have seen the trollage except that he piqued my interest with "copypasta". One of the few remaining good things about Slashdot is that AC can be rendered almost invisible (though I would prefer it were done the other way around, by rendering the good content more visible).
What interested me about this story was how the EFF approaches the prob
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If your at all worried about your privacy stand up your own email server/domain. A number of vm providers will happily take bitcoin.
Similar for phone get a voip setup, again services will take bitcoin.
As far as two factor auth, there are a few places that use standard tech so you can use use an app/hardware you trust rather than their junk spyware. Generally viewed as to complex for end users because a QR code is hard apparently. A SMS/email is a shitty 2nd factor far worse than public keys that have bee
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If your at all worried about your privacy stand up your own email server/domain.
I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approve this message.
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Do it from orbit though, otherwise you won't be sure.
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Says a far-right nutjob screaming at people.
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Fortunately for public health, not nearly as many people showed up as they intended.
Somewhat interesting. (Score:3)
That's a somewhat presumptuous statement in implications -- that the dreams of the early creators are the correct ones for the modern Internet. Perhaps they are, perhaps they aren't. If this is just going to be a "You young folks should listen to your elders and do things the way we intended! You should follow our dreams, not yours!", that's going to be fairly weak sauce. (Proof by authority.)
It's entirely possible that the reason why 'all the things wrong with the modern Internet' happened is because the original dreams weren't necessarily good or practical ideas. It ought to start with a critique of those first to establish whether or not in hindsight all those 'original dreams' were a good idea -- whether or not all the 'wrong' things that happened were in spite of, or because of those dreams, then it can argue about "Getting it right" rather than waving a cane and shouting "You kids get off my lawn!"
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For the most part they wanted to democratize info instead of have gov't and corporations control most of it.
To me that's still a great goal. Whether the standards have to be tweaked or reworked to achieve it is another matter.
For one, I'd like to see a standard for social network and blog-like content so that one can change vendors and
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"For one, I'd like to see a standard for social network and blog-like content so that one can change vendors and download own content as desired. It would be a kind of personal CMS data structure."
That's called having your own web page with standard html/javascript that can be hosted on any web server. It's your choice if you decide to use a social media site rather than just roll your own web site.
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That's asking too much for a typical consumer. Styles, devices, and formatting fads will change too often.
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1) Economics hamper it.
It appears to be cheaper to centralize everything. I say appears because since we never tried any other way (after web 2.0) , we won't know.
When you have everyone on one platform, you can generate targeting advertisement revenue. An instance with one or two people could never pay for itself using ads.
2) Technical debt:
repeat after me: NAT is the root of all centralization we see now.
Everyone is hidden behind a NAT, running your own IP service @home is a nearly impossible task.
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Also Matrix (.org). Open standard for federated communication. With plugins to other networks (like Facebook).
Re:Somewhat interesting. (Score:4, Informative)
Probably should look at: https://solidproject.org/ [solidproject.org]
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The reversal is also true "you old folks should listen to us and do things we want because".
I'm not dead yet.
And at least seeing how the internet has evolved beyond those early aspirations, my schadenfreude is at some point there won't be geezers around to blame anymore.
They need to clean their house first (Score:1)
Authentication (Score:2)
Really, the main problem with the internet is the lack of authentication; almost all the security problems today come from the fact that it's difficult to authenticate anyone.
Really, privacy concerns are overrated; they can track people down today who are anonymous, and an authenticated internet wouldn't change that. What needs to happen is that there''s an "authenticated internet" and a freeness. The authenticated internet supports end-to-end authentication; you sign into a device and you're authenticated,
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> Really, the main problem with the internet is the lack of authentication; almost all the security problems today come from the fact that it's difficult to authenticate anyone.
Authentication technologies are so deeply interwoven with encryption that providing robust, safe authentication also means providing robust, reliable encryption technologies. Sadly, most encryption and authentication technologies are bound by federal policy to leave loopholes for access to private and business data. The authentica
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What I'm unclear on is why the government hasn't stepped in and declared that you prove your identity online with an official crypto key assigned by your state, just like they do with your identity in meatspace by assigning you an ID. If you think your key is compromised then you stop by some official location (like the DMV) and prove your identity, and they issue you a new one.
There are obviously a lot of problems with such a proposal, and it's hard to imagine them not wanting backdoors in the cryptosystem
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The states right now would not cooperate with a federal key. A "national ID card" has been resisted for decades in lawsuits and court decisions across the USA.
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So let the states generate the keys at the same time they generate the IDs, and hand them out at the same time.
If they were competent they could even put the key on a smartcard chip on the ID, and then you could slot your ID into a smart card reader on your laptop, assuming it has one — they are cheap and take up little space, and they would be ubiquitous within little time if they were needed by many people. USB smart card readers are cheap enough that Target gave them out to a bunch of people for a
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Unfortunately for the mandatory national electronic ID policy, the centralized database and tracking could, and would, be abused. It would _immediately_ be used to override the "right to anonymity", a right the Supreme Court in the USA has upheld as a vital aspect of the First Amendment protections for free speech. The EFF may have a bias in interpreting these, but this article from Yale seems both detailed and un-biased.
https://digitalcommons.law.yal... [yale.edu]
The debate is hundreds of years old, and dates back to
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They have these - they are called "corporate LANs" or I guess the current term is "Enterprise Networks". Machine and browser certificates, a O365 auth token tied to login, etc.
For home users you can kinda fake it by using Chrome (or I guess Firefox now), signing in, and having it save and synch your passwords and cookies etc. Or everywhere possible authenticate your account with Google, Fb, etc. Of course the issue with this is "who do you trust with the keys to your kingdom?"
But much like real life, I p
HTML (Score:2)
Do people realize that HTML was never intended to do what it currently does with often crappy and sometimes disastrous results?
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HTML 5 resolves most of the weirdness, bringing HTML from it's broken SGML to a well defined syntax. And hopefully putting an end to the abomination that was XHTML. Of course, if you start reaching for use cases outside of the original goals of HTML you run into problems. HTML is not good for publishing physical media, and probably will never be.
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HTML 5 resolves most of the weirdness
... and WebAssembly resovles most of what is left.
With WebAssembly, you can develop websites in C++ or Rust.
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I'm not thrilled with the web as an application platform, I think that aspect of it is a mistake that we'll be forced to correct several years from now.
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It's not ideal, but it certainly has advantages. It works across operating systems and devices (mostly), it comes with sandboxing so you don't have to vet every web-app you use.
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... and WebAssembly resovles most of what is left.
With WebAssembly, you can develop websites in C++ or Rust.
...as soon as it gets usable DOM access, as it should have from the day one. which is.. in three years from now?
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And let's not forget the nightmare that is CSS.
What were they expecting? (Score:2)
Either you pay a subscription or you're the product. I swear, it's like some of these people binge watch old Star Trek and forget it wasn't a documentary. We don't live in a post-scarcity society and the economy still needs human participants to function.
Unless you come up with a way so folks can afford whatever they want without having to exploit their fellow man to make it possible, we're going to have an internet which also reflects our capitalistic nature. And maybe, just maybe, there isn't actually
Re: What were they expecting? (Score:1)
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the fact that they have mining colonies and credits should tell you otherwise.
The raw materials in a $1000 iPhone cost $1.
Even today, little value comes from mining and extraction.
In the 24th century, it will be even less.
Re: What were they expecting? (Score:1)
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The asteroid mines will be operated by robots.
There may be a few humans around to do repairs or for operational management, but they won't be doing "shitty dangerous" jobs.
In space, the cost of a human worker is a hundred times that of a robot.
Re: What were they expecting? (Score:1)
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The first ones might be. If we do ever manage to get to asteroid mining, then that supervisor is going to be stuck in a tiny little ship for months on end, with a crew who spend most of their working day maintaining the delicate machines that keep them all alive, one mechanical disaster away from death. No more shitty than certain jobs in very remote locations today, like long-deployment submarines or polar research bases. But still pretty shitty.
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The relative cost of a robot worker _that is as flexible as a competent human_ is infinite for the foreseeable future: they don't currently exist. There are many tasks robots do better, but the robot is normally designed exclusively for that specific task.
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Star Trek was a socialist paradise, which is why it's so weird that the right-wing incel crowd loves it so much.
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Star Trek was a socialist paradise, which is why it's so weird that the right-wing incel crowd loves it so much.
Later additions to the canon showed its dark underbelly. That's probably what they adore about it. They see themselves as the last bastion of reason, saving people from themselves.
Re: What were they expecting? (Score:1)
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There is zero filenaming conventions.
All the file downloads and email attachments and stuff never seem to have reasonable and complete and dated and topic included in the filename. And if it is a directory, it is even worse!
Why date in the filename? Because many times when moving or copying a file, the date of the file becomes the copy/move date so sorting by file date becomes useless and really confusing.
I've lost count of the directories that have a more recent date that the files inside. Yes, there ar
This is going to sound weir but... (Score:3)
And while, in these cases, the mentality came back to bite them, it doesn't always. A lot of times, it suits the large companies just fine to push the responsibility to the end users. A video game bought too much microtransaction stuff and emptied their parent's account? That's the parent's fault for not teaching the kids. You don't know which button takes a screen shot on a mac? You should look that up. Like, I know people yell that that's what companies are suppose to do, CAPITALISM. But capitalism or not, this is eventually going to not only make things unsustainable for the company themselves, but also leave a barren, broken irradiated wasteland that use to be know as the internet behind them. And, without a doubt, they'll move on to the next thing to suck dry while shouting "CAPITALISM!".
Someone once told me "technology is a tool". Meaning, it's not a hammer or a screwdriver that's interesting, but what you build with it. With that said, its not technology that's bad, is the people's approach to it. I think the place to start is to change the way we all think and approach technology.
Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty sure they did. The early internet was a military project, which then expanded out to universities. Naturally they all use policies governing usage of their computers, including not using the big line printers to make ASCII porn.
There is this idea that the early internet was a free speech paradise free from censorship, but it was the opposite. Hosting websites was expensive. Usenet services were run by the university or your ISP and they only carried groups they thought were acceptable. Those things r
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It wasn't until later when free web services started to appear that more people gained a voice and there were sites to cater to fringe views and content.
Did you ... read Usenet?
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It wasn't until later when free web services started to appear that more people gained a voice and there were sites to cater to fringe views and content.
Did you ... read Usenet?
Yeah, that's very much what I was going to say. I was using the Internet back when it was pretty much all unis and USENET was totally the wild west, and most schools carried either only a handful of groups, or a FULL FEED. alt.sex, alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk... You name it, they carried it.
And that was before the web even existed.
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I did read Usenet, because my university didn't carry the alt.binaries.* groups.
As I recall they dropped the Neighbours soap opera group after it turned into 90% erotic fan-fic too.
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Pretty sure the dreams of the early creators didn't include all this censorship.
Do you think they included the Nutsies? or the president twitting like a child? or massive propaganda (from both left and right and crazies) via fake news?
Unexpected problems require unexpected solutions.
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Pretty sure the dreams of the early creators didn't include all this censorship.
Do you think they included the Nutsies? or the president twitting like a child? or massive propaganda (from both left and right and crazies) via fake news?
Unexpected problems require unexpected solutions.
Um, they included all kinds of nuts. Read some early Usenet archives.
Tunnel vision. (Score:4, Interesting)
Internet is not going to be fixed... (Score:5, Interesting)
... because the public has no idea how technology works and most people are politically uninformed and ideologically blindered because corproate america has totally taken over the US government and the electorate are idiots.
Everyone on slashdot in the 90's was worried about software and hardware drm, well the game industry didn't even have a war, the public willingly committed suicide with Ultima online, Everquest, Guild wars 1, Dark age of camelot and world of warcraft. So the entire public took up "Drm" natively by companies rebranding their stolen RPG's as "MMO's" to steal PC games from a gullible illiterate and irrational public, this turned the entire silicon valley tech community on its heels as everyone knew the public was dumb as fuck and the tiny minority of us had to watch in horror as idiot teens, 20 somethings and stupid adults literally handed over ownership of our PC games to the corporate world on a platter.
If you buy any client-server PC game/app/os, you're literally having your game stolen and paying to get robbed, don't think so generation mmo? I can feel the downvotes and nerd rage, but you enabled the shit internet by not having a clue.
John carmack -- "Effectively no limit on the # of players",
https://youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc?t... [youtu.be]
In a game like Quake 2 which had networking and dedicated server hosting code embedded inside the exe, they took that out of games when they realized the public was stupid with Ultima online, where the kids/nerds who paid for UO, everquest, wow and guild wars taught the game industry you were all retarded regarding computers.
Any two or more computers in a network joined together behaves as and becomes a single machine, so that means whoever controls the network and programs the network (aka the world sized personal computer) owns it, that means every single app can be split into two executables and run over the network, and you are literally being defrauded of a complete local application, aka they are selling you half-a piece of software. Imagine you bought a PC in the 90's from staples and there was a guy in the back claiming windows 95 needed "an internet connection" in order for it to function, well if you believed that shit, you just bought hardware dongle enabled software by way of network connection. Here's how it works kids -- I steal some files and code and trap it on the other side of the network on my PC, then I LIE THROUGH MY TEETH, and invent new words like "cloud, mmo, f2p, always online,etc" to get you to belive my bullshit because you are irraitonal...
And if you buy my bullshit you get to pay more money for a piece of software that has a time limit and can be disabled remotely because it wasn't sold to you as a complete applicaiton to begin with (aka fraud), this is what mmo's were in the mid 90's and early 2000's which gave valve the idea for steam, and Ubisoft the idea for uplay, the entire industry was watching the dumb half of the moutbreathing nerd/mud generation commit PC ownership suicide. They (the game industry) couldn't belive they had given us things like gtkradiant and things like Descnet 2 mission builder, free maps, mods and skins,etc. When the dumb masses would willingly buy this shit at inflated prices, like in Destiny 2 (look at the mtx)
https://store.steampowered.com... [steampowered.com]
So all those cool things we got with PC games briefly from 1992 to 2004 roughly went away when the entire industry did a U-turn when Ultima online was released, and the entire silicon valley tech community was jealous of what Richard garriot and Electronic arts got away with, so everyone started rebranding their PC RPG's in development "MMO's" to sell a gullible public on non ownership, drm, and monthly fee's, and everyone lapped it up!
https://icculus.org/gtkradiant... [icculus.org]
So after 15 years of game theft from roughly 1995 to 2010, the final w