How healthy is the internet?
internethealthreport.org
internethealthreport.org
- Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.
- How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack.
- Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.
- Who can succeed? Getting online isn’t enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world.
- Who controls it? A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.
Also whenever there's any positive news about the browser people always like to bring up pocket, that ARG misstep or how their CEO is a victim (Use brave!!!)
Technically, most of the online applications we use today don't have to be centralised. Email, social networks, blogs, even videos, could all be hosted on "grandma ready" peer to peer systems. Why they aren't has more to do with how we shaped the market forces. (Market forces didn't come out of thin air. A big centraliser was the political decision to let our bandwidth be asymmetric.)
For example:
>The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us.
I disagree entirely. Not with the the ideal of course - it's about as positive sounding as possible - but with the word "could." We don't even have this offline, it requires a level of cultural conformity that doesn't exist outside a cult's commune. It's not going to be any easier on the internet, which nullifies the distance between mutually-incompatable cultures.
At this part in the line of thinking, someone tells me to stop being unreasonable, that they represent all the reasonable people's interpretation of "loving and communicating freely," and I'm being too strict in my definition, and I should really scale it back a click. It doesn't mean a cult, it just means a large social group that gets along really well. OK been there, done that. In different groups I've been both an insider, a fringe member, and an outsider. I don't think "live, love, learn and communicating freely" describes a single one of them. It might be easier to get along than randos, but you're either at the core steering the group to keep everything from falling apart with lots of bite marks in your tongue, riding the wave by keeping up with the broadly-acceptable norms you don't mind adopting in the context, or rolling your eyes at how "welcoming" the culture is while obviously incompatible with your own personality.
Then at this next point in the line of thinking, people usually just imply I'm socially defective and incompatible with all the good shit that's going on. But all I see is a bunch of fretting over the good shit not happening correctly.
If the system protects you then you can't be yourself, because invariably these systems that protect people also censor people. Nowadays we hear about it quite often how the people that advocated for hate speech rules online are getting screwed by those same rules.
>The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate.
Except those we (you) disagree with.
>Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us.
If you find that it's not welcome, then why not add a place that is welcome for people like yourself?
The most amazing and important thing and the internet is that it lets regular people share things with the world with little interference. Their opinions, thoughts, experiences etc.
Who is welcome? Anybody with a computer and an ISP. Note that everybody from white supremacists to the most Left of Left-leaning SJW have a voice.
I could not grok the web version. I got headers and those took me to tiles and those took me to blog posts? I was lost. In the end, I downloaded the PDF to read this.
And that's a lie. To start with I had to tell NoScript to allow their third party domain scripts because the content did not work without javascript.
They make some interesting points, but the standard scientific paper format vastly outperforms Web 4.0 routers and widgets for conveying it.
https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/
And OMFG the 2018 report. Ow my balls!
https://internethealthreport.org/2018/
2017 is the best of the bunch: https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/
Something as simple as https://status.dropbox.com/, but for all of the Internet.
We could make the same useless "clock" for the internet, advancing it every time a website is blocked or a new backdoor is discovered. Making sure new threat categories are added when things get better. "Oh, it looks like https is becoming the norm, that's good, make sure to add fake news in the mix to make it look like things are getting worse..."
By comparison, the Dropbox status page provides useful technical information.
A similar page for all of the internet would include things like the states of root DNS servers, tier 1 networks, etc... That could be useful.
You mention a couple
- Status of root DNSServers
But we could come up with more (I suspect around 50 metrics would be comprehensive)
- Ratio of servers reachable by http vs https - Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work) - Ratio of devices able to reach "representative servers" (ie can your device in beijing reach bbc news and WeChat and Russian newspaper)
- Ratio of devices in areas with "24 hour" electricity supply
- ratio of servers that do not have basic security holes plugged
- ratio of devices that have uptodate security patches
- current volume of DDOS attacks
- Number of successful ransomware attacks per day
- number of networks only reachable through N pipes (ie resilience to network failure)
I would be interested in any thoughts / extras / improvements
The US, UK, Russia, 5 Eyes countries, China, the EU; everyone has a stance on whether they're safe or not.
I think it better to just measure "location diversity", and give a heatmap of server locations (indicating replication and mirrors) so the user can decide for themselves.
It might just be me, but I think it's reasonably clear that some of these places have mature legal frameworks where the rule of law exists (US, UK, EU) and some generally do not (Russia, China, Venezuela). But perhaps I'm mistaken and simply do not understand what a mature legal system is.
whaaaaaa
How is 'recording everything, decrypting everything, targeting persons of interest without warrant or record, extensive networks of informants and agents in all branches of politics, art, and business while bombing people based on their cell phone ping location globally without oversight or any attempt at legal justification'
The United States is 0 privacy, 0 honesty about the actual laws in place, 'fusion centers' completely removing any sane separation of national and regional power or separation of police from military, and 50 TLA's arguing over how best to harass political activists or run criminal gangs themselves. And an entire other spy agency of a different country on the other side of the world allowed to do basically whatever they want in our borders and harvest every ounce of the data of our lives.
That's not a 'mature framework', that is reverting 'civilization' to before the magna carta, much less the geneva conventions.
And since in no case where it was revealed how the government is breaking its own laws and using technology to make an illegal monstrosity out of the internet has the government ever meaningfully been held to account of actually changed, behold what rules you.
Stop pretending something is worth your trust just because there are flags and rotundas and people in suits on the news 24 hours a day and a cultish military junta hasn't completely taken completely over yet, visibly. edit: ...in the united states.
It's also, for the moment and strictly for the purposes of this particular conversation at hand, irrelevant.
Though I understand if some might choose to believe otherwise for political reasons. The discussion at hand is about overarching legal systems, their general reliability, and how much bearing laws have on what actually happens.
Similarly, one could probably point at some by-the-book handling of a parking ticket in China as proof that it is a nation with rule of law. It would be similarly possessed of opportunity to come into greater alignment with relevance.
If human rights are not relevant to the article and thread, then the article and thread are for robots and someone should clearly post that.
If the article does not discuss rights, which to me appear to have completely disappeared and any semblence of them we only have is due to a lot of this generation of TLA officeres not being total monsters
Now we just have to hope Kushner doesn't use his global admin rights to do anything mean. /s
That is the state of the internet, this silent well-born manchild who has chummed with madmen since he was a child has clearance and hooks into everything the nsa scoops up, which is nearly the entire internet, and the entire pollyanna internet.
Is that in TFA?
Then why are they writing about 1995?
The USA and Russia have been closer to a shooting war in the past five years, then they have in the last decade of the Cold War.
And there are many ways for shooting wars to escalate to nuclear wars.
And how much "free" is it, still?
DRM isn't a problem as long as non-DRM isn't forcefully eliminated by it.
DRM is a problem for free speech.
The existence of DRM does not limit your speech. It does limit what speech you can consume but the author (presumably) wants to be limited in their speech.
> OONI Explorer serves as a resource for researchers, journalists, lawyers, activists, advocates and anyone interested in exploring network anomalies, such as censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation, and how the internet works in general.
The portals worked for a while, then came google and Facebook, and now we have nothing. I mean, if HN stopped how would you find anything interesting on the internet?
Imagine a 'newsworthy' story about a budgerigar that can dance to jazz music. The source could be on a website that has all kinds of fascinating stuff about budgerigars. But this you would never know, perhaps you might get a link to the original tweet but that would be it, no link to the website that gave rise to the one thing that went 'viral'.
I've sugested to Mozilla that unclear labels, vague stock photos, and acres of whitespace are a poor choice of media for conveying a complex, and yes, truly important, story.
But at least it's not animated floating balls.
The page wants more clear relevant text.
The first iteration remains the best to date:
If over 60 percent and increasing that’s very detrimental to the Internet as we know it today.
Problems only arise when professional activists try to change existing communities. E.g. the new linux kernel code of conduct and it's, let's say "questionable", author.
We don't discriminate against you, but you have to hide every aspect of who you are otherwise we're going to threaten to rape you to death.
Edit: The point being that the mailman is a red herring. If the internet is really an extension of public space as (presumably) claimed, let's treat it like one.
In my country, I can open a police report for online harassment.
We are now in an endless debate. Internet isn't the problem. Bad behaviours, uneducation, missinformation, fake news, etc are the problem. Blaming internet won't solve those. And they will be ready for the next tool.
So think carefully when you ask for this kind of environment. I think what some people are actually asking for when they say "non-discriminatory" is an environment where people who do not accept minority members or opinions are not welcomed.
These are not the same thing.
What about convictions that compel action (Jihadis, Jehovas, militant atheists, Nazis) it might serve to eject people of those convictions because it should be expected they take those actions.
It is like asking for bullets which only hurt guilty people whom it would be necessary to shoot.
Death and rape threads on the intertubes is just people being mean.
Deal with it, there will always be somebody who hates you. Life's tough.
It doesn't have to be.
I suspect this is a big part of the divide between the old guard "nobody knows you're a dog" and the new "broadcast your identity". I turn to the Internet to not be participating in the monkeysphere. Any trace I leave behind is due to laziness rather than intent.
I do have to wonder how much this is just inevitable "normie" human behavior, and how much it has been stoked by companies pushing realname policies and profile selfies.
Would you please stop upping the inflammation like this in HN comments? You've been doing it a lot, and we've been cutting you a lot of slack because you've been a good contributor over the years, but this is not cool, and I can feel my roll of slack running out. If your taste for ideological warfare is growing, please gratify it elsewhere, not here.
This comment violates numerous site guidelines, including:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait."
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
There are a bunch of women who don't post to HN at all.
I'll dial it back a bit, but you need to regain control from the misogynists who are making this place hostile to others. Parent post is literally telling women not to identify as women, yet you didn't say anything to them. Respectfully, you need better aim.
It's subjective in some ways which makes the discussion complicated.
I can think of four removeyish things that happen to comments and threads: (1) downweighting of rank; (2) collapsing by default; (3) killing (marking [dead]); (4) deleting altogether. Moderators and software do the first three. We never do #4, except when the author asks us to, or—exceedingly rarely—when our attorneys tell us we have to (less than half a dozen times in ten years, and we push to avoid it, except one time when an HN user was exposed).
In cases 1, 2, and 3, nothing is deleted. Anybody can still read everything if they want to. They can read #1 by scrolling; #2 by expanding a subthread; #3 by setting "showdead" to "yes" in their profile.
Are those removal? censorship? Sure, if you like—people use those words to express a feeling. But deletion, in the sense of "you used to be able to read something but now you can't", is a question not of feeling but of fact, and the fact is we don't do that.
I don't think these are narrow distinctions. To see why, try this simple thought experiment: imagine what would happen if we removed the "showdead" option and simply made all dead comments permanently unreadable. There would be a huge uproar in the community—a scandal to end all scandals.
It's "heavy-handed" when there's too much and "cesspool" when there's not enough. There are as many definitions of enough as HN readers.
> arbitrary
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> unaccountable
You must not know what it's like to get flamed by this community if you think that!
edit: self censoring myself even I'm afraid to say that here
someone is trying to erase the entire history of the events of Tianmnen Square involving Tank Man.
The United States, defending freedom and multicultuarlism supposedly, is recording basically all internet traffic and sharing it with the most racist country in the world while they create hordes of refugees due to their never-allowed-to-be-spoken plans for aggressive expansion in violation of the very United Nations that created them.
Processors will be made in this country and shipped all over the world. Routers, microwaves, all phones, plagued with endemic backdoors. Auditing capacity is overwhelmed and results seldom in any changes, see iratemonk seagate events.
Social media has basically given TPTB the easy capability to harass and interfere with all of the next generation of anything, while placing their agents in 'key positions' all over the place.
It's a bad situation, the real internet is not the public one anymore. Power exists, and the physical structure of power is, as always, hard at work trying to regulate the ideological structures.
Make us forget Tiananmen, and who knows what else we'll forget.
Wasn't there something that happened in Las Vegas a few monthyears ago? hmmmmmmmmm
The internet is being used, successfully, to attack the human mind on a global scale and the people with the most money are doing it while a bunch of really bright people think they are just solving math problems and making good money.
The situation is bad, I don't need algorighms and network maps to tell me that. The internet has lost China and Russia, and is running away from The United States of America.
It's no wonder that Brendan Eich's new browser is Chromium based. ;- )