A Frightening Week | Hacker News Reader

A Frightening Week

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86 pointscwan22 comments

The Internet was designed to be immune to such things.

It wasn't. That's a common misconception. The Internet Protocol was designed to be a simple, easy to route protocol that would push computational load towards the edge of the network and away from its center. Resistance to damage wasn't a design consideration.

Hmm interesting got any references?

"It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability, including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the underlying networks"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET#Misconceptions_of_desig...

Very enlightening thanks.

"My business interests are based on the availability of the wired and wireless Internet to everyone all over the world. Our firm has been active in working with the US government to make sure that continues to be the case in our country. We support net neutrality rules and oppose legislation such as COICA and the Internet Kill Switch."

Well said. Now would be a good time for Hacker News to re-examine its bias against discussion of civil liberties.

EDIT: downvoted! Are you (a) saying the Fred Wilson quote isn't useful or (b) saying civil liberties are such a poisonous topic that we can't even propose talking about them?

I wasn't among those who downvoted you, but here's my two cents:

1) I don't think the quote added anything new to the discussion. Nor was it a good summary of the article.

2) You asked a loaded question that implied a bias on the part of your listeners. You are deliberately creating a situation where discussion is impossible, since only one answer is "right". Why, then, would anyone want to engage with you?

Thanks for the feedback. On point #1, I wasn't trying to summarize, but thought it was pretty relevant that a superstar VC like Fred Wilson sees these civil liberties issues as affecting the companies he invests in. Entrepreneurs should be paying attention to stuff like this, and nobody else had mentioned it.

On #2, I'm not the one who created the situation. RiderOfGiraffes announced that he'd be downvoting anything TSA related and encouraged others too. 'tptacek (who's got the highest karma on HN) weighed in that the posts were "manifestly off topic". Paul changed the ranking algorithm to penalize TSA posts and commented that they were a "danger" because "if there's a road from hacking to politics, it's probably civil liberties." When I replied to his post, he didn't respond.

It seems to me like I want to engage in dialog and others don't. How does it look to you?

> only one answer is "right"

If you care about civil liberties, then I would love to hear why you see "we won't talk about civil liberties and will downvote anybody who does" as a good answer.

While I care a great deal about civil liberties, HN has a topic bias. The TSA situation, while touching on tech via backscatter x-ray, is really a purely political situation: there is opposition grounded either in medicine or general civil rights, but it does not specifically or unduly impact tech entrepreneurs. Shutting down all internet access is far more directly relevant to the web-centric startup world.

It was you who chose to lump in the anti-TSA moderation with this article and launch this thread into that debate based on that relationship - none of the 'site authorities' you mention have commented on this piece, and there has been substantial discussion of the situation in Egypt on HN in the past week. It seems to be fairly accepted that Internet censorship affects us all.

And as for your last point, again, HN has a stated topic bias. You might as well bring up the death penalty or gun control - of course they both affect everyone, and of course most people will have (likely very strong) opinions. That does not necessarily make HN a good place for the discussion.

To close with a question of my own: why are you so set on making this the place for all civil liberty discussions? Given the sizeable overlap of this community with Reddit these days and the clearly stated opposition to holding the debates here, why persist rather than just go there?

Agreed that HN has a stated topic bias. I'm suggesting changing it.

The TSA stuff very definitely affects tech entrepeneurs who have to travel as part of their business. So yes, especially given Paul's quote about the dangers of discussing civil liberties, I do see them as related.

> why are you so set on making this the place for all civil liberty discussions?

We'll only start to recover civil liberties in the US when enough people start doing something about it, so I discuss the topic wherever I hang out. Just as Slashdot used to be, HN's a great opportunity to reach a lot of people who believe in civil liberties but aren't currently engaged in the battle.

When I saw the title of this post, I thought it might be about Yuri Milner and SV Angel's new Start Up Fund!

that gave me a chuckle

however, i'm not frightened by anything that helps entrepreneurs

I thought this was about a possible bubble in the VC and Angel market. On a different note, a lot has to be done to ensure fast, no/high cap wired/wireless broadband to the world. All our dreams are based on a platform which operators are making weak every day.

I believe that technological solution is better than the political solution, primary because we don't have to get everyone interested in anti-censorship tech.

So if we can invent a censorship mesh network(pardon my ignorance), two geeks can set it up and connect to each other. Then, another geek come along, and connect his node to their. Next week, doubled the geeks come. Next week, double the geeks come, but also documentation on how to build such a wireless mesh node. Well, you get the idea.

Once a lot of people is interested, geeks that manufactured anti-censorship kit can achieve an economy of scale.

Empower one individual; empower an entire crowd.

Land based wireless communications are trivial to track and authoritarian governments already do so. A better solution could be satellite based communications. Or directional microwave/laser.

It's a very hard problem.

But satellites would also likely be controlled by entities subject to government pressure. (Perhaps a different government than the one in control of the local territory, but whichever, it won't always be in sympathy with the people on the ground.)

Tight-beam directional laser is an interesting idea, but does require a fair amount of advanced setup and calibration. And the base stations would still be vulnerable to detection if they're transmitting to something else that isn't tight-beam, like mobile handsets.

Perhaps balloon-based relay stations in the stratosphere, or solar-powered drones, which could be deployed without the expense of a satellite launch?

It is indeed a very hard problem.

EDIT: Further discussion, both on base stations and alternatives (packet radio, and the severe limitations thereof) here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158111

If only it was that simple.

Another thread on this subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158111

This is why the "Internet Kill Switch" is a bad idea. Also, ISPs need to say no to the government more often.

An ISP's default answer to government should be "No".

It should have been 'no' too when the government wanted unlimited tapping abilities of internet traffic, instead the answer was 'how much?'.

Maybe ISP's in Egypt did, but they probably didn't have a choice in the matter! It's hard to argue with an armed police or a soldier or a regime who'll do anything to stay in power.

Also, when the government has a free hand to create legislation that allows them to do such a thing, it's hard not to comply without loosing one's business or life. Vodafone's been quoted as saying something to that affect:

"Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it ... "

From: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/08dbe398-2abb-11e0-a2f3-00144feab4...

Governments will always have the power over the physical infrastructure that the internet lives on top of. The only way to protect our access is via education, people need to see the internet as owned by the people, not the government (backdoors, unlimited taps) or corporations (net neutrality, anti-competitive caps). It needs to be seen as a new basic human right in the 21st century.

http://i.imgur.com/YU3Ww.jpg

Summary: the author, who is apparently not familiar with the terms "buggery act", "13th amendment" and "people's republic", realises that freedom ain't free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com