Rushkoff proposes we abandon the Internet, and create something better | Hacker News Reader

Rushkoff proposes we abandon the Internet, and create something better

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67 pointsngorenflo39 comments

I blogged about a proposal like this some while ago: http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/07/07/using-computers-to...

In the long term I'd like to see that every computer sold in the western world came configured as standard as freedom-enabled: this would mean mesh networking, encryption, a steganographic filing system, etc, out of the box.

This would have two advantages. One is that western governments would find it difficult to take freedom away from the internet.

The other is that authoritarian governments would either have to abandon the free internet and implement their own locked-down and incompatible one, or they would have to accept that they can't control their people's communications. The advantage this would give the west in any future cold war against China is, I hope, obvious.

I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm elected I'll try to get something like this implemented.

"I'm standing for election to the Scottish parliament later this year. If I'm elected I'll try to get something like this implemented."

I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the options? Do they care? Do they care once <something> is explained? That sort of thing.

There are a number of comments posted on HN to the effect that "mere" users don't care, don't understand, can't be bothered, etc. That they only care that Stuff Works, for some limited definition of "works". I'd like to think that's not true, but my sample set of non-geeks is probably too small to make broad statements about the general population.

> I'd really like to hear how the voters are responding to such an issue. Do people understand, more or less, the technology, the ramifications, the options?

The vast majority don't (yet). That's one reason why the Pirate Party is going to have other policies as well!

The author doesn't quite get it. Nonwithstanding the fact that physical infrastructure is never free (his fido example is a case in point: phone lines), once something turns big corporations will enter the game, and then even freifunk-like architecture would suddenly be corporate-owned, as their nodes outnumber private ones.

Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.

> Also, what non-free internet? Pirate bay is still up (despite many attempts), wikileaks is still up (!), etc. Wikileaks isn't even blocked by the search engines.

This is a good point. But I don't think we should be complacent: if the USA and EU got serious about blocking these, they would be able to shut down both, with the current network infrastructure.

While it's true that physical infrastructure is never free, there is communications infrastructure available that is truly independent and distributed. For example, Ham Radio has the ability to send digital signals around the world. Equipment is required, of course, and our overlords have ruled that encryption on these bands is illegal, and that it cannot be used for business purposes, and so on.

In fact the rules and restrictions governing Ham transmissions are very interesting in light of the evil government/corporate overlord tone of the article.

The book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow proposed a free distributed network formed by peer-to-peer links on hacked game consoles with wifi. Certainly something like that could be done with various technologies we have today including hacked wireless routers.

However untenable the situation, we're (surely? hopefully?) in a better position to do it with today's technology than we were a few decades ago.

One can't escape the corporations or governments' influence. They are already in every aspect of one's life. Rather than trying to build a super secret treehouse away from their gaze it's more productive to find a way to protect people's freedoms within the current system. To make it so senators do not have the power to meddle with the network arbitrarily.

Why not work on both political and technological solutions to the problem? The more ways the problem is attacked, the more likely one attack will succeed.

Of course. I thought that was implicit, sorry. What I don't agree with is the article's proposal to start over.

You might like the book "A Lodging of Wayfaring Men."

will check it out, thanks

or tunnel through existing infrastructure, which you would be anyway with the other options. I actually like that the internet is a library, a shopping mall and any number of other things all at the same time and am not too fearful that yanking DNS entries would be such a terrible thing. I never used fidonet but I did have a uucp email address and set up dialers to get email working between unix systems back in the 80's. I feel like we are always tunelling over something existing, so why not use the most convenient. Wouldn't a VPN over the public internet give you the same result? Of course, your provider could pull the plug on you, but you switch to another, just like if someone else started transmitting on your frequency if you're using ham radio. the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption (which they are also unable to define, or rather differentiate between providing confidentiality vs message ciphers for obscurity) so you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary traffic.

There's nothing forcing any of us to use ATT or comcast or whomever, its just a more fun place on a network where there are more people. If you grew up with uucp as your mail carrier and progressed to ccMail and finally a netcom shell account you'll remember how boring it was reading physics papers on gopher servers and looking at fluid dynamics latex documents. There was a time though between gopher and veronica and today's 500 million people wasting 2 hours every day checking out each other's cat washing stories and playing at being farmers. Maybe I'm just remembering it all wrong, but I kind of like the current internet.

> or tunnel through existing infrastructure

This would certainly be how any new network started. If/when it got bigger, it could outgrow the existing infrastructure.

> the FCC tends to take a dim view of encryption

Are they not aware that it is routinely used on the net, then?

> you would have to embed your subversive internet within benign ordinary traffic

Datastreams with lots of bits are best for hiding things. So I'd expect steganography over video VoIP to be one mthod used.

Typical worthless purist drivel.

Sure, let's throw away 25 years worth of infrastructure and progress and go back to a system where people have to dial in to a centrally controlled system via ham radios or the (corporate-owned) telephone system! We can even use our old 56k modems! Or pigeons! And let's make sure not to use any money to support it, since money is corporate owned as well!

It may yet be possible to create a sort of 'commons' by opening up large portions of the radio spectrum for free data interchange.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

Personally, I think the solution that could get some kind of market traction would be to sell WiFi routers that can organize themselves into Metropolitan Area Networks. A certain portion of the units is instructed to become 'long-distance' nodes, connecting to other nodes a mile or two away, and shifting large amounts of data between them. Another portion of the units is instructed to become 'medium-distance' nodes, distributing the traffic from the long-distance nodes to devices within a few thousand foot radius, and all devices are simultaneously capable of being 'short-distance' nodes, connecting directly to end-user devices. Since it takes more resources and a better antenna to run a long-distance node, routers capable of acting as long-distance could possibly be distinct from medium-distance-capable ones, and sold at a premium, with an assurance that local devices connecting to it will get better network performance. Apart from that, devices become either long, medium or short-range nodes depending on network and geographical needs.

The market for these devices will of course get its start with piracy and porn, just like any good burgeoning internet protocol, but you can bet local TV stations, radio stations and advertisers would be all over them to get their content out without having to pay the traditional network gatekeepers. Content producers would get free access to the network if they just run a node or two.

Eventually, as the metropolitan area networks become dense enough and spread out widely enough, it will be possible to link the different cities to each-other and start to create another wide-scale network. Until that happens, though, there's enough going on in most metropolitan areas to give more than enough value to a decentralized network such as this.

I assume you haven't spent much time using mesh radio solutions - they have their uses for sure but their performance and reliability are very poor compared to traditional solutions. And even then most of them rely on backending on wired plant for longhaul.

I have not, though I am aware of it. Perhaps the planned white-space open licensing would give us the bandwidth to address this problem, and the performance of such decentralized systems could be improved. If such an improvement is possible, then something like mesh would have a good shot at market success.

In a given channel, 802.11 mesh networking provides roughly 1/7th the performance of non-mesh (and an ideal protocol only achieves 1/3) [1]; using more spectrum increases throughput but the waste is still there. Many people (especially telco lobbyists) would argue that spectrum shouldn't be wasted on such inefficient protocols.

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/grid:mobicom01/

OK, plan B. First, we quantum-entangle a few million pairs of particles...

I support this project. I was hoping stuff like Meraki.net would be a good tool for this, but it doesn't seem to have taken off.

"Back in 1984, long before the Internet even existed..."

I believe he meant the Web or perhaps the other applications that run on top of the Internet. Email, ftp, and the Usenet were on the "Internet" in 1984.

The one fatal flaw is that the author assumes disparate hoards of people can come together to create a new network to replace the existing one, which is a difficult task (dare I say extremely difficult). Just look at how an organized, business & government sponsored approach to creating a new network has already failed to take much traction (re: ipv6). Hardly disparate, yet a decade of efforts and still not truly active.

I wouldn't say ipv6 has failed, merely that it isn't being adopted fast enough. It'll get there. Sooner or later, reality will force ipv6 adoption.

Yes, failed is a bit harsh, but see how difficult adoption has been? A near apocalypse of ipv4 is required before the leap occurs. My point, though, was simply to illustrate how insane it sounds for a bunch of random people to do what an organized and financially backed group even struggles with.

GNU/Linux? Firefox also turned out quite a bit better than IE. I'm aware that money and organization are involved in both of those endeavours, but the amount of each is miniscule by comparison.

I'm trying to figure out what the net neutrality reference was for, besides an attention-getting throwaway line.

In some hypothetical future inter-net that is truly decentralized and magically not subject to "lawmakers and lobbyists", there could be no neutrality, since the system would be (somehow) free from any authorities who could impose neutrality.

Perhaps he imagines neutrality to be the default state of a lawless Internet, not something imposed from outside.

That's definitely imaginative.

as long as the mesh is wide enough, then if someone tries to block a port or protocol, presumably the network would route around it. unless everyone hates it...

This assumes that the cost of doing so is zero. In the real world, it isn't.

Holy crap, these are good comments. I agree that it's impractical to build a new net from scratch, but there's some really good work arounds here from cabalamat, wiseweasel, sfphotoarts, and others.

What other ways can we increase Internet freedoms working with existing infrastructure? What other legal and technical work arounds are there?

This definitely is related:

http://wiki.freifunk.net/Kategorie:English

They're around for quite a while now and with some success not only in urban areas. (I don't know anything about them meshing together local networks, what I suspect to still require the ISP internets at the moment.)

Maybe this would be an opportunity to start with a content-centric protocol:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8

It would probably be heavily based around RSA encryption.

While it is true that encryption will be involved, it is not the hard problem, I think that's a bit like saying nails will be used to construct a building. The hard problems are how to get a packet of data from here to there without a central mediator (solvable with current tech but can have performance issues), and how to create a human-usable naming service of some kind that doesn't have a central mediator and doesn't inevitably degenerate back into having a central mediator by its very nature. Technically DNS is decentralized but the way it works causes it to centralize naturally. I'm not sure if this is avoidable.

Strictly speaking there's no need for a DNS-like system to use domain _names_ - you could use domain keys instead (locating the authoritative servers could then be done with a DHT of some sort). The problem then is that it becomes hard to type them in manually, but people could exchange such things with QR codes, or abbreviated hashes of the keys. You do lose usability, but it's a compromise that wouldn't be entirely unusable.

And you'd have to solve the issues of deliberately corrupting DHT nodes, deliberately constructed collisions, and forged copies of the whatever-human-key ends up being used, since it is pretty much out of the question that we will all type in 128-bit numbers for website access.

Note I do not mean this as criticism of your comment, because you can't possibly solve these issues in an HN comment. Just pointing it out. Designing a decentralized network that works at all is a big enough challenge, designing a fully decentralized network that stands up to hostile attacks by intelligent adversaries is even harder.

how to get a packet of data from here to there without a central mediator

One interesting idea in this space is the Hardy/Tribble 'Digital Silk Road' concept:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Bionomics/Extropians/HardyT...

Alas, such discriminatory routing by per-packet payments and reputation is probably illegal under the FCC's recently asserted 'neutrality' regulations.

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