‘Cybersovereignty’ Splits the Once World Wide Web | Hacker News Reader

‘Cybersovereignty’ Splits the Once World Wide Web

bloomberg.com

99 pointspseudolus38 comments

There's allegedly been a thriving industry of in-person data transfers in Cuba, where people get their portable media loaded up every week with the latest pirated/banned media [1]. I wonder if more isolationist or censorship-oriented embodiments of this sort of policy could lead to that model (and loosely similar ideas like USB/Wi-Fi dead drops [2]) becoming more widespread.

[1] https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article2...

[2] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2597815/dead-drops-off...

The part where the disks contain ads from local businesses reminds me of diskmags: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_magazine

As for the second link, wow, we were that naive about plugging in unknown USB devices only six years ago?

Maybe Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” was somewhat more prescient than it seemed...

I have thought about this; it would be good to have a common "protocol" established for searching, requesting, and (eventually) retrieving documents over sneakernet. Perhaps some sort of updateable index passed along with the documents, and an anonymous register of what files are being requested. I envision sort of a physical version of Tor, where nobody knows who has what files or who is requesting what files; the only thing you know is who you just exchanged info with, but you don't know if the new requests/files came from them or from the next hop on the network. This could serve as a backup if the network becomes unavalable in the long term (due to a war, for instance) or if severe repression is put in place, restricting access to information.

Recoll works great to maintain a local searchable database of text documents. If you create a text record for each media item it could work.

We’re doing it all the time already https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Soon, we’ll have a new crime called “bit smuggling” and it will involve buying a light switch fixture from the hardware store, and flipping it to the wrong on/off position, and then putting it in your pocket, and trying to cross an international border with it in that position.

I love that you made that account just for that post.

I want to have that account name now :-)

We'll get those bits there, somehow!

I'll claim something seemingly controversial now:

No noteworthy 'Internet' currently exists, and what this article talks about comes about as a consequence of exactly that.

Don't believe me?

Try these slides:

http://rina.tssg.org/docs/DublinLostLayer140109.pdf

Or, if you prefer more academic detail:

http://rina.tssg.org/docs/How_in_the_Heck_do_you_lose_a_laye...

(Citations here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1615656212926930603...)

I really wish the RINA and GNUnet projects would start working together instead of just... Each doing their own thing entirely, and not even acknowledging each other. Otherwise, we'll just face the very same "two separate working groups leading to a total clusterfuck which most people don't even notice as existing" problem outlined above by John Day.

Relevant recent discussion about potential extensive internet regulation in Austria:

"Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19698003

And these policies are only being egged on by people in the West who favor censoring hate speech, ostensibly to protect or defend minorities, instead of confronting dangerous ideologies head-on. It's a sad thing to happen to the Internet for sure.

As the other people stated, these things don’t work. More information doesn’t mean it beats bad information.

Instead, some content is virally structured content and others are not. Emotional content is, and well crafted propaganda definitely is.

These policies are inevitable. Because at a fundamental information level we are discussing two different worlds, and one of them requires a tolerance of illegal and hateful behavior that society behavior will not countenance.

> Because at a fundamental information level we are discussing two different worlds, and one of them requires a tolerance of illegal and hateful behavior that society behavior will not countenance.

Except this tolerance has already been accepted by Western societies in the form of freedom of religion. You can't have your cake and eat it to: if you're going to censor 'hate speech', then you're going to have to start censoring religious speech.

The resources do not exist to confront these ideologies. It's not practical.

This is going to be the big story of the next decade and it's being largely ignored right now because it's mainly happening around the margins in some developing countries right now.

China and the US are presenting two very different visions of the web and I don't think it's as simple as presenting a narrative of West right, East wrong. For non-aligned countries, I think there are compelling arguments on both sides in ways that simply aren't relevant for the US.

It's interesting to contrast this with the immigration control/border security debate where the US has placed itself very far onto the side of "sovereignty" (that is, the state should have significant and overriding power over practical, implementational elements of who & what crosses US borders). It's hard then, for any country not steeped in an existing Western liberal tradition, to look at the West's hardline stance on border sovereignty and not see how the equivalent cannot be prioritized for cyber sovereignty should the state so choose.

Look at Sri Lanka for example, after the bombings, the Sri Lankan government had a single, binary choice: Shut down all social media or don't shut down any social media. This is the equivalent of the government only being able to choose a normally functioning border or a total and complete shut down of the border because border control facilities are operated by foreign, uncontactable private entities. Governments are increasingly seeing how this is an untenable state of affairs and how much of their public policy is now being outsourced to American, private companies outside of their control.

Outside of China, nobody else really has the clout or scale to build a somewhat hermetically sealed internet but this is what gives China now the avenue to export their technologies and present a new vision of how governments can use cyberspace to achieve policy aims. I believe companies like WeChat are working on a suite of tools where they will be able to go to Governments and say "look, we can provide you an install where any message going between two of your citizens will be stored exclusively inside of your country in a place Tencent does not have access to and we will provide you with the entire suite of Government management tools that we currently provide the Chinese Government on any message that crosses your border." After something like the Sri Lankan bombing, Sri Lankan censors, hired by the Sri Lankan government could use Chinese made tools to provide a much more surgical shaping of the conversation.

This is the strategy credit China is willing to wield (Chinese companies have much more experience building Government management tools) and it's up to Western companies to decide whether they want to stick to their principles or be forced down the same path (any guesses which they will pick?).

For example, there are four key sectors I believe are obviously going to fall under strong government purview in the coming decade: Messaging, Publishing, E-Commerce & Transportation.

Imagine if a government told Uber that they have to start recording the real IDs of every rider and report trip request info in real time to a Government API where the Govt can veto the ride (so as to detect when protests/riots are about to start and choke off transportation to the site). If the condition is, Uber not complying means the Govt means the country kicks Uber out and replaces it with Didi, is Uber really not going to cave? Even if Uber does comply, maybe they still give the contract to Didi because Didi has a larger pool of data in their system and can provide better ML tools to the government on when public disturbances are going to happen.

This is not to say that all governments will take all the steps, but that it's going to be increasingly important that any government can take any of the steps and we're going to increasingly move into a world where tech companies in key sectors will have to devote as much effort into building Government Management tools as they will, Community Management tools.

This is what the Cyber Sovereignty movement is all about.

Not just Sri Lanka - India does it, and there’s regular shut downs of the internet in sensitive areas.

The China model has won, people on HN just don’t know it yet.

Remember that just a few short weeks ago, Facebook proposed an internet based regulator for hate speech and other difficult subjective judgements that have to be made every day.

These are related - this is fundamentally a question of how communities, cultures and society’s survive on the web. And the short of it is that we can’t.

The only way society survives the attackers environment of the internet, is by creating the Chinese fire wall. And narion states are no longer the lumbering elephants of the 90s and before.

Now patriotic coders are more than happy to help their governments and they march to a different tune than the peace inspired founders and inventors of the net.

It will be interesting to see what happens after Starlink and competitors make radio internet ubiquitous. What are they going to do, shoot down satellites?

I am Russian who knows some Soviet history. Here’s what they are going to do:

1) ban all satellite-connecting equipment, unless you have government-issued license for that;

2) if it fails, they will jam satellite links, at least in large cities;

3) if _that_ fails (and also some show trials of people caught with satellite modems, to send the message to the others), yes, they will shoot down satellites.

A country shouldn’t be able to profit from the web while blocking other countries from exchanging ideas and wealth with its citizens. We should disconnect China.

This is hypocrisy and a dangerous mindset. "A few misguided people do things we don't like? Throw the entire country under the bus!". How can one hope for an open web and advocate this kind of mass censorship at the same time?

>...while blocking other countries from exchanging ideas and wealth with its citizens. We should disconnect China.

Have you never heard of the Wassenaar Agreement[0,1]?

[0] - https://www.wassenaar.org/about-us/

[1] - https://www.wassenaar.org/app/uploads/2018/12/WA-DOC-18-PUB-...

China is not profiting much from the world wide web like Google or Facebook. It mainly profits from its domestic intranet.

Your suggestion is also ironic; how could further disconnecting China help to prevent China from blocking other countries?

The people building that intranet are making heavy use of resources that aren't hosted within the country, some of which require circumventing the Great Firewall (e.g. tensorflow.org is hosted on Google infrastructure and therefore blocked). Some companies even use Google Docs in their hiring process to filter out candidates who can't evade government censorship.

Completely cutting China off from the rest of the internet would certainly lead to infrastructure outages and put all development on hold until mirrors for the necessary services are set up.

And that's just the tech industry. If a gadget manufacturer in China can't be reached to order gadgets, they might just as well not exist. Without communication, international trade breaks down as well. The outcome would be equivalent to sanctions on all Chinese-made products, which no country is willing to try due to how much it would hurt themselves.

The same point could be made about the US for the very same reason. After all, the US has an history of extraterritorial judicial overreach and embargos.

Their government will be thankful for the help.

The splinterweb is real, and growing.

Yup. And EU is also working on its own splinter web courtesy of GDPR and Article 13

Several EU countries have been blocking/DNS-blackholing certain websites for decades. Ostensibly in the name of "protecting children" or "copyright protection", but AFAIK there is no real oversight or democratic process involved.

All webs are splinter webs of the EU, since the web was invented here.

Nit: "Web" and "Net", or more specifcally, "Internet", are problematic terms. They're used poorly in TFA's title.

The Web -- WWW -- invented by TBL at Cern, is a set of data representation and request protocols, but doesn't address underlying royting and peering, the domain of the Internet itself, and BGP specifically. The WWW could splinter, but it would do (and may be doing) so along protocol lines, not underlying connection levels.

App-level proxies and DNS further complicate the discussion, an legal and regulatory matters operate at yet another level. Largely these too were not invented in the EU.

The Bloomberg article is clearly referencing the Internet as a whole, title ambiguity notwithstanding, and that was created in the United States, not the EU. As AnonymousPlanet notes, CH is not an EU member state.

So your statement is false.

Sorry, I forgot about the mentality here for a second. I will spell out the point I was trying to make through provocation. It destroys the fun/joke, but whatever...

The Web was invented a few meters away from the EU, in a lab that literally sits in the border between the EU and a non-EU country that is mostly aligned with the EU, by a EU citizen, funded mostly by EU money, is the only reason why anyone cares about the rest of the technology stack and infrastructure that we call "Internet". It was a dream of creating an interconnected system of knowledge and communication, that transcended borders and would move humanity to a higher stage of civilization.

The Web matters because of what it allows one to do, the implementation details are only relevant in a narrow technical sense.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for many American achievements, and I grew up thinking that the USA and Europe were close friends and allies, fundamentally sharing the same values. NASA and its many achievements inspired my lifelong interest in Science.

I am not nationalistic, and I don't care how invented what. What I am fed up with, is this USA-centric view of the world, as if freedom emanates from the USA, without whom we would be condemned to vile authoritarianism. I am also fed up with the idea that invention comes from VC money, which is largely untrue. Even the Internet as you describe it was invented using government money.

Nationalism really has nothing to do with my response. A fully-admitted-in-advance pedantic sense of accuracy does.

The Web is significant. I'm well aware of its history, and the (yes, publicly-funded) Arpanet and Internet. But the WWW not the whole 'Net, and other than some path-dependent accidents of history (see Meredith L. Patterson's "On Port 80" https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a) would probably be subsiding now largely due to mobile tech. Designed in Cupertino, built in China. (And likely designed in China before much longer).

The point remains that TFA talks of partitioning the Internet, not merely the Web, via mostly Internet-specific, not Web-specific, mechanisms.

Cheers.

I actually intended to type “splinternet” but I think due to years of dadjoke “interweb” muscle memory typed something else.

Splintertubes!

Since we are nitpicking: Switzerland is not part of the EU.

No mention whatsoever of the Snowden revelations? Non-US nations have a good reason to want cyber sovereignty. The US is spying on them and their people.

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