Winning back the Internet by building our own
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You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people... and they will need to be compensated for that work... and some people will be really good at running that network, and will have lots of clients and get very efficient at running networks, so more people will hire them.... and they will get big enough to hire people and pay for laying cables between networks... and suddenly we have the exact same system we have now.
What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?
It takes time for bureaucracy to take over. Think of the natural cycle of a startup becoming an enterprise, a niche shop becoming a large chain.
The last time it could have been possible, with tremendous effort, to divert things such that the Internet didn't become the Network and something else did, would have been around 1990.
That's the point where JIPS happens. Up until then, the US has a lot of IP networking, but some other rich industrialised countries have the ITU's X.25 networking. The ITU in some sense are a logical place to look for the beginning of this Network because they oversaw technological development for its predecessor, the Public Switched Telephone Network.
Anyway in the UK they have some X.25 but people are interested in this American IP stuff, so they agree to offer establishments with X.25 access to IP as well starting January 1991, in a programme called JIPS (the JaNET IP Service). JIPS is an enormous success, everybody loves IP and soon it is apparent that the future is IP not X.25. Game over, the Internet becomes inevitable at that point.
Now, I care also about the last mile, "phase I delivery of the Network" meaning that ordinary citizens in most of the world have access to the Network. No iterations of the Network have been truly universally accessible. Even for the oldest (the global postal network agreed in Bern in 1874) you need at least literacy, a taught skill not truly accessible to every person. But we can get very close, and it took several more years for the Internet to do that.
Why would this new internetwork have to be made available to "those people". This comment seems to reframe the article's implicit "call to action" to a new set of constraints. It presupposes that an internetwork can only be created when it exists for commercial exploitation of its users, despite the author's example of a popular peer-to-peer network that generally has never been used as such, not to mention the "Internet" we are now using was not created for that purpose. (commercial exploitation)
It is curious this fascination with the definition of an internetwork as one that must mirror the present one and include amongst its users unskilled persons with no time or desire to learn how to use it but with money and a willingness (maybe even a forced necessity) to pay others to help them.
I wonder if there has ever existed a internetwork used only by skilled persons with time and desire to learn to use it, and not seeking to be compensated for the time they spent learning and the skills they developed as a result. If not, perhaps there will be.
This article seems to be a call to action, and it doesn't make sense to ask for something if it already exists.
Regarding creation of new networks, it seems your issue with this article applies more to this internet we are using right now. The one that you imply may have non-technical users reading about creating new networks for "technical" ones.
Yes, this article is not addressed to non-technical readers, but my interpretation is that they are wanting technical people to create this "new internet" for the masses.
I think the issue you have is more with the internet ("Internet", capital "I") we are using right now, which is dominated by a www "for the masses" and "content" like this blog. The Internet allows and encourages the type of senseless "content" you are criticising. New networks do not have to be "for the masses", or dominated by a www, their creation and administration does not have to itself be a commercial enterprise, nor do these networks have to be open for commercial use.
IMO, it is the "for the masses" and "open for commercial use" characteristics of this Internet that lead to blog articles like this one. The blog entry is arguably just a means of steering readers to a website, mentioned at the end of the article, that purports to offer training courses to aspiring "revolutionaries".
I think the main advantage we have today is the hindsight of the past 25+ years.
>What would be different this time around if we started from scratch?
I think instead of one big Internet we'd build a bunch of smaller, trusted intranets, and provide controlled access via something like a web-of-trust system.
>You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and with the time and desire) to be their own network administrator
It's up to your tribe/family/community to have its own networking person, and you can compensate any way that's agreeable to you.
Just like it's smart to have your own doctor and mechanic in the family, you should also have your own networking and computers person you can trust.
Many people complain about family coming to them for computer help and suggest that they should go to a "professional". I think this is an insensitve and unempathetic point of view. Where else would they go? Who else can be trusted to help them except you?
No, it's up to us to take care of all whom we care about, because no one else out there will do it for us. And if you shy away from this responsibility, your punishment will be watching family members get taken advantage of.
There are food reasons people get tired of supporting their tribe or family’s IT infrastructure:
1. What we are supporting is often badly designed for individuals and so we’re doing mindless make work to overcome problems cause by corporations. I.e. we are experiencing an externality that a corporation is profiting from.
2. It’s often not reciprocated. Many people have no problem letting someone spend hours fixing a messed up computer, but won’t think to do anything in return. This isn’t universal, I have family members who are very appreciative and will make me dinner, or otherwise value what I’m doing for them, but ‘tribe members’ often just take it for granted that it’s ok for them to just lean on people helplessly for support.
3. Similar to 2. A lot of people keep doing stuff that causes them problems and won’t follow advice that would prevent this. My experience is that it’s the same people who take the help for granted.
I agree that it’s our responsibility to help, but it’s not our responsibility to be enablers.
These are real problems that need to be addressed in order to make tribe technology sustainable.
decentralized PKI, decentralized DNS are part of the ticket.
The other aspect is a monetization scheme at the transport layer to enable ideas like "Web Monetization" https://webmonetization.org/
Diode has implemented both - it has a full deployed decentralized PKI and DNS, has mapped Web2 domains to dDNS (BNS), monetizes infrastructure at the bandwidth level, and is making other strides on the application front.
Check out the Diode dDNS / BNS: https://diode.io/prenet/#/dns
I think honestly the problem is that these systems are not consumer-oriented products. I think there is a real desire by people to not have to live as rentiers in the digital marketplace, but there are not really products that cater to that.
IMO There's a place for something that merges a NAS, with some sort of overlay over current IP that is encrypted and fully peer-to-peer. But NASes are still too hard for many consumers to set up, and most techniques to overlay over IP are likewise too difficult, and basically impossible to correctly multi-tenant (you can't share your network space with your aunt and your coworker without sharing with both). Unlike IPFS, or bittorrent, availability is important, but not critical, and you don't need to promiscuously replicate your information across the entire world, encrypted or otherwise.
I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net". You can sync credentials with a username and a one-time PIN. You should be able to easily set up rules for sharing with friends, with smart defaults.
I think what's interesting from a consumer perspective is that there are things you can do on such a platform that many (not all) people would think twice about letting facebook do, like tag and organize photos of your young kid and share them with relatives/friends who have a PIN.
I also think that the time horizon for this is relatively short (5-years?) soon people will be so desensitized to advertisements/being a digital rentier that the opportunity will have aged out. 20-somethings don't know what a NAS is.
I haven't started on this yet, but if anyone is interested, my info's here.
There are certainly also specific UX/functionality differences on how the apps are implemented, but those are probably the macro considerations.
Build a simple system around "content groups", something that people will put in the same mental category as "group chats". Each "content group" has a LUKS encrypted filesystem somewhere in the cloud. Keys are exchanged using Megolm and Matrix rooms. The filesystems are mounted via sshfs and decrypted locally. The "pin" is replaced by membership in a Matrix room.
The cloud never sees the LUKS key, and the tagging is done locally. The cloud back-end can be changed using the Matrix control channel, so you're not locked in to one vendor.
I really don't think people will buy in though. At this point, no one cares if their whole life story is recorded by FAAMG.
My take on self-hosted services (not infrasructure, though) is layperson-friendlyness. See https://mro.name/ShaarliGo#install--update or the 5min talk I did a while ago: https://txt.mro.name/34c3 (that page isn't layperson-friendly, but you'll make it)
anyone?
I'm also interested, details on my contact page. I have a lab and hardware and a decent internet connection.
"But how do we make money from it?" - if that's the first thought, then maybe it doesn't need to be there. I'd rather have the internet for sharing reliable information, not advertising. It was doing just fine before corporate marketing took it all over.
We can win it back by stripping it down from the bloated mess that it has become.
Please incorporate these aspects:
1. Running a network and computers costs money.
2. Commercial forces seek out channels where attention exists.
3. There is an incentive for content providers to place ads.
4. (add your own factors)
2. don't use them. ads are not a requirement. they really aren't.
3. don't use them either.
People used to make simple web pages because they had information to share. They did it because they enjoyed it. Now everything feels like "how can I monetize this?" We need to change our mindset. Does the internet exist to share information or is it just here now to make money from ads?
I'm quite happy self-hosting. It may cost me $5/mo. I can afford that. I can also use a raspberry pi at home and simply proxy through Cloudflare. There. Not costing me much money at all, and I still don't need advertisements. Point is that we've let marketers take over and then tell us that the internet won't survive without them. It can, and it will. It needs to.
What if we re-used all the other tech (or nearly all) and: a) ensured that infrastructure providers were paid in a market-economy that rewarded quantity of service in proportion to quality of service and b) gave a cut of proceeds to application sponsors?
The Diode Network already implements these things - an answer to the broken systems of today's Internet. We can use the current Web2.0 to drive Web3 forward and allow this sort of "take back the Internet" to work at the local level while connecting globally with new systems that address the underlying problems.
I think it's being able to launch infrastructure like AWS but for consumers. Imagine one click to launch your "virtual home" / bastion. You can mange your virtual home from trusted devices (desktop, mobile, possibly web if you grant keys to 3rd party). In your virtual home you can setup I2P, a personal VPN (e.g. algo by trailofbits), tunnel/forward home server traffic to public internet (e.g. RPi), install torrent client & fire sharing drive for family, etc.
Thoughts?
It's generally slow and it needs port forwarding to work correctly. Its design (whether you look at the java router, I2P, or the C++ one, i2pd) isn't really noob-friendly, either. That's more than enough to deter almost everyone from using it, it seems.
>Is there a need?
I'd say there's an ever-increasing need for anonymous, uncensorable platforms on the Internet. I wager we will progressively notice an urgency to turn to this kind of applications in the coming years. I hope I'm wrong on this one, but I don't think my guess will be too far off.
What are you talking about? You need to put a proxy 127.0.0.1:4444 into your browser setup, but I wouldn't call it "port forwarding". Apart from that, you just install it and go to the eepsites. Upd: Indeed, you will also have to wait until the router finds enough peers.
>What are the missing pieces to get people using this?
I would say, it only needs more people to know about it.
> and you'll be leeching off the network instead of contributing to it
Does not look like a problem in Tor (despite one would expect otherwise, given that by default you do not contribute back unlike in i2p). You just need enough seeders.
From what I've read, it doesn't seem to be comparable to GNUnet in any way, though. As far as I can tell, it is just another p2p network (or, rather, framework) running on top of the existing TCP/IP stack. However, GNUnet aims to replace the internet stack.
How does it compare to Tor?
Unfortunately this article in my opinion is at best just bad and misguided.
New laptops rarely have RJ-45 nowadays, point here is that article is technically misleading and overly simplistic. You are not going to achieve much by just connecting laptops with cable, let alone just switches and then connecting those to more switches, it is far more complicated.
I don't believe in piece below to be true, because one had to be in academia, science facility or government to connect: "For a very long time, no one paid for Internet access because Internet access was not something that was sold. It was like a public beachfront at the ocean. If you were near it, you could jump in, no credit card required.".
In the end "focus on infrastructure, not coding" because "programmers useful only for large companies". Most of that infrastructure needs code that is written by programmers.
When the author says "if you were near it, you could jump it", they meant "near it" == "in academia, defense, or government".
Haha. We’re not talking about folks stealing bread to feed their family. We’re talking about people stealing entertainment.
There’s a lot wrong with big media corporations: DMCA takedown notice misuse, copyright for life of the artist + 75 years, exploitative contracts, and so on. But let’s be honest, watching movies and show you didn’t pay for is theft. Rationalize it however you want, but it still theft.
Even so, it's not the same category of misdeed as stealing bread. If you eat a loaf of bread, someone else cannot. But if you perform or listen to a song, it's still there for others. Sometimes, especially in the case of technically copyrighted but practically abandoned works, sharing the work is actually more likely to keep it available for others to discover or even access at all.
OK, that's good for you and the "others", but what about the person who spent time and energy to write the song and perform? Just because it's "still there for others", it's ok to steal it? You are only thinking from the consumer's point of view and neglecting why people produce things of value in the first place. If they don't get rewarded, they will simply stop producing value.
Not in the case of music. The vast majority is given away for free (some in the hope of future financial success, but plenty just for the hell of it).
If the vast majority were not addicted to popular tracks, the marginal price of music would drop to zero pretty quickly.
Though I'm unconvinced that music would disappear. I can think of many kinds of musicians that do not get compensated per se: small time streamers, buskers, student musicians, garage bands, amateur music clubs, and religious music leaders off the top of my head.
To reiterate, I think it's fair for someone to ask for compensation for providing entertainment. Also I think considerate people will respect the wishes of creators in consuming content.
But bottom line, I don't think people have natural rights to a particular business model or to control the expression of others (which is fundamental to copyright). Creators do have legal rights, but that's a whole other set of issues.
This is the main issue at hand that I've been talking about, while you're treating it as a "whole other set of issues".
When Alice spends her time and energy to produce X AND sell it, and Bob finds a way to get it for free against Alice's will, that is called stealing, no matter how you spin it. This is THE problematic part and what I am talking about. Everything else is a non issue and irrelevant when discussing this issue, like you mentioned.
And if you want to get technical, you're describing copyright infringement, not theft per se.
Anything else I'd probably type in response would mostly be reiterating my earlier points distinguishing between intellectual "property" and physical property, which haven't really been addressed. That is, "stealing" is the wrong word for it and people instinctively know it and make fun of it via "you wouldn't download a car" jokes.
--
Like it or not, no, it is not theft. Yell at the clouds until your throat is sore and you're blue in the face, and it still won't be theft.
watching a movie you did not pay for has never been theft, and never will be. This may anger you to the point of rage, but it's still not going to be theft no matter how much you declare it so.
try harder.
When I have a bike and you steal it from me, you are depriving me of the use of that bicycle. That's what makes it theft.
There is no deprival, therefore no theft in "watching something you didn't pay for".
If you argue "you are depriving the right of the artist to make money" that makes the assumption that the right of an artist to coerce money out of the counterparty existed. And yes, I make art, highly valuable art, with my creative brain, and I give it away without expecting any compensation for it. Yet I still find a way to eat. Huh.
Let me give you back your analogy with a dose of reality: When I make a living by selling bikes, and you steal it from me, you are depriving me of my time and energy and money spent to maintain my business. That's what makes it theft.
So your position is that if a company sells something, anything that deprives them of potential income is theft? If I set up a separate bike store down the street and charge less than you, have I stolen from you? How about if I give them away for free?
If you set up a separate bike store AND make a bike with your own time and energy and money, and give it away for free, good luck on your business.
p.s.
I am a heavy user of Bittorrent myself and appreciate the technology (I'm sure most people on HN have done illegal downloads), but I at least acknowledge what I am doing is technically stealing. The only reason I'm not going to jail is because it's technically and economically not easy to enforce it. Just because I'm not going to jail doesn't mean it's not stealing. Stealing is stealing.
All I'm saying is people who do illegal downloads should at least understand what they are doing is technically a theft and don't feel so entitled for stealing from other people. I sincerely hope there are better ways to incentivize creators who spend their time and energy producing their intellectual property to the world.
That's exactly in line with what I said. It's not theft in that case. You are getting lost in your own analogy.
A bike is valuable because of the time, energy, and money put into producing it. If you set up your own bike store and produce the bike that's identical to my bike, you deserve to make money from it.
But that's not what's happening here. Here's what's happening: Let's say you start making your living by producing and selling bikes at your own bike store. One night I break into your bike store and just take a bike away. I didn't put in any time, energy, and money into producing the bike. You did. You spent your time, energy, and money to build that bike, which you could have spent on other things in life. If I didn't steal it, you could have made money from that bike. I deprived you of an opportunity to make money from your investment.
Let's use a more large scale example to see how this can be a very dangerous line of thought. A guy named anthony levandowski took intellectual property from Google and tried to produce autonomous vehicles which are identical to what Google was trying to build, WITHOUT taking google's technology away. Google can feel free to build their autonomous vehicle, what's the big deal? This is not stealing, right? Well, here's what happened: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21354906/anthony-levandows...
Intellectual property is very real. Just because certain types of intellectual property cannot be protected because of the nature of the digital technology, does NOT mean it is not stealing. Stealing is stealing. Some thefts are considered "ok" because "everyone else is doing it and there's no easy way to enforce it", but it's steal stealing.
POTENTIAL revenue.
You're working from the assumption that all pirates would purchase desired content if it weren't made available for free (illegally).
The alternative you're ignoring is that a pirate can, and often does, choose different content to consume when initially-sought content isn't available to download.
You talk as if "POTENTIAL revenue" is equal to zero, but if you studied economics you would realize that there is such a thing called opportunity cost. It doesn't matter if it's just "potential" revenue, what you are essentially stealing is someone else's opportunity cost.
This is a different story if this person created music and gave it away for free intentionally (because he/she doesn't care, or in an effort to get more audience to monetize in other ways), but if Alice is providing X in exchange for Y, and you take X without giving Alice Y, then it is stealing. Your logic is "I wouldn't have consumed X in the first place if it was not free", and you are right. But at the same time, that does not change the fact that what you did there at the end of the day, no matter how NOT-valuable you see the product, is stealing.
For example, this is like drinking a lemonade from a kid's lemonade stand without paying the $1 price, and saying "You know what, you should be thankful that I even consumed what you created. I would have never drank this worthless beverage for $1, therefore what I just did is not stealing"
What about depriving someone of a paycheck?
But I am not clear what argument you are making? Are you arguing artists should not have the right to charge others for their art? Or can they only charge money if they give up something of value in return?
However, I would think that being much simpler (also, mind you, content-wise) would be a positive thing for gemini, in this context? Would you care to elaborate on what kinds of things are made harder by the choices gemini made? And what do you think could be done to alleviate those problems?
Also, there's no real technical reason Gemini-the-protocol can't serve HTML, but that discussion is probably dead, too.
That part wasn't needed. Please be kind.
http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449
Also hesitating between Java and C for the reference implementation.
Also waiting for better hardware:
LoRa is too closed and Zero uses too much energy!
The radio + screen + controls PCB should be one HAT.
No point in using a IPS screen that small, better would be a persistent state screen like memory LCD or ePaper.
Also looking at using a smaller OS than linux... so don't hold your breath!
The problem specifically is that on some chips you cannot control the frequency hopping manually!
For building store-and-forward networks I created NNCP several years ago and lack of connectivity, censorship (making no connection links) are one of the issues it aims to solve: http://www.nncpgo.org/Use-cases.html
But in fact I think that very few of the problems we're facing with the internet right now are really technical in nature. They are social and political problems that require social and political solutions.
Anyone have experience with that to share, or know other products that are similar: “easily run your own server for X”?
(0) longer haul seems to mean more or less above the maximum length of a segment of CatN cable and/or reach of medium powered wifi transmitter.
An attempt to make all layers of the internet again, on GNU software or something.
And it is a forever vaporware.
* How do you maintain and update software reliably without becoming a part time employee for maintaining your own personal infrastructure?
* How can we handle failure (such as hardware dying of old age) as gracefully as web services do, without the budget and infrastructure of a modern data center?
* If you're interested in detaching from the modern web, you probably care about sophisticated privacy and trust controls. Most easy-to-find open source software is not so sophisticated.
* Plugging into a lot of "modern" systems takes a lot of knowledge, effort, and sometimes money - DNS (dynamic DNS if your ISP won't offer a static IP), TLS, email, text, and push notifications, for example.
* How confident can you ever be about security? Ideally you want access to your service from the internet for trusted persons and devices - but the moment you expose your service outside the LAN, you're up against the world and a single vulnerable service can spell disaster.
* The most straightforward way to detach from the modern web is to yourself become a smaller, centralized service - a private facebook, if you will. But why would anyone want to take the effort of reuploading themselves and their private lives to your personal facebook? You own the data, they don't. If anything, their privacy feels more at risk, because a single person is more likely to fuck up security than the entirety of the facebook organization.
Edit:
Also, I think a large component is that there's "so much internet" in most peoples' lives, that I think many people hardly want more. Who wants another app, another web service, another way of sharing photos or videos or sending text messages?
A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize. There's only so much information that the modern human needs, and I think if you've spent a few years on facebook you probably feel like you need less information, not more.
We need devices that you can plug into the wall and immediately join a local meshnet. If it provided connectivity between remote meshnets with stuff like CJDNS, we'd be making a big step towards owning our infrastructure. But we'd still need the infra setup by our telcos. Is it even possible to get rid of them?
I like the idea really, but this is what this is heading for, right?
curl -s https://roarmag.org/essays/win-back-the-internet/| firefox ./1.htmSee https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
"Winning back the internet" refers to pushing back against the dominance of those large centralized sites and the efforts to build the number of independent sites.
We do a poor job of making it possible for people who create open source and people who create free content to get enough money out of that to give things away freely in service of their ideals. And after a while, people sometimes get fed up with working for free, seeing it benefit other people and not benefit them.
I complain a lot about that wrt to my own writing, but I'm not the only one. I've seen posts recently that complain about big companies using open source and/or open source providers being fed up with working for free.
Just a couple of things that come readily to mind:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25186890
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25032105
I find this maddening, especially when the idea of UBI is so popular. We actively punish people doing good works and tell them "Up yours. If you are an idealist, you can do it for free and find some other way to pay your bills." and then also say "We should just give money away to all the poor people simply for existing" while not actually making that a reality.
Talk of UBI makes me think of people I have known in the past who would make conditional promises, like "If I win the lottery, I will give you half." Somewhere along the way I figured out that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" and to not trust "naked men offering you the shirt off their back."
People who actually want to make something happen will do the small thing in their power to accomplish today. People who make big promises based on long-shot bets (or on the idea that you need to make a big sacrifice before they will consider doing something for you -- and, no, it's not a stated as part of some kind of enforceable contract) are con artists, liars, manipulators and people wanting to be seen as "good guys" based on hot air without having to go through the pain and suffering typically required to do any real good in this world.
If you want a better world, pry open your wallet and give a dollar to Patreon for an independent artist or a $5 PayPal tip or something.
It's sort of a myth that big problems need big solutions. The antidote to a behemoth problem is often not some other equally powerful behemoth. It's often enough "little" solutions to weigh as much, so to speak.
Start investing in the small answers. They are easier to reach and support and more likely to be a real antidote.
This is a well-intentioned but contingent argument. From the point of view of a single organization, raising a small amount of money may not serve as an efficient means to making a better world. Put another way, there is a non-linear relationship between money raised and impact.
When I think about giving money to an organization for a cause, I think about (at least): the efficiency of the organization; the importance of the cause; concentration (versus dilution) of resources; and concentration (versus dilution) of power.
For example, consider the difference between:
A. 1 million people giving $5 to one of 10,000 organizations evenly.
B. 1 million people giving $5 to one of 10 organizations evenly.
I'm not generally saying which allocation is better; I'm simply pointing out how concentration of donations makes a big difference. An organization with $500K can tackle different kinds of problems than one with $500.
You've strained the meaning of the word 'force'.
Can you find another way to say it?
I have a really extreme set of circumstances that have not given me some easy way out of continuing to try to get money for my writing in specific. If I had some easy out, I would have taken it ages ago.
I did apply for a job -- the only one I tripped across that I felt qualified for. I didn't get it. I also do resume work and can't figure out how to get adequate traction with that either. etc etc.
I've tried to find other answers. What little money I make for blogging has proven to be the least worst answer for me so far.
If the entire world literally will let you starve and be homeless rather than give you money for work it values and praises that has no pay wall, I don't think it's straining the meaning of the word 'force' to say that will force some people to give up on their ideals and figure out something that keeps them fed and housed -- if they have any means to do that.
I take your point, but I want to say a little more. You may agree?
To accomplish big things, sometimes you have to change many minds just a little bit. Sometimes you start by asking people to notice something. Then maybe you ask them to wonder if it could be different. Then maybe you convince people that it should be different. Then maybe you convince people that it must be different; that the status quo is not ok. This can be hard work; think about the organizing for civil rights in the US.
This process involves big ideas. Sure, asking people to give $5 for the cause can help, and you also need people willing to do more than give. You need them to agree deeply, because you need their support over time.
The pieces of paper with "five dollars" printed on them, and the ways they travel between wallets (aka "the System"), form a very thin layer over the reality of social status (and other more intricate machinery between our collective pairs of ears). There are not many things that can be corrected inside that thin layer, there is about 5000 years of history of innovation in this field already.
We are the original authors of the post and thought we'd offer some very brief clarifications since there seems to be some good discussion about both the intent of the piece and our approach to the technology. Our hope is to let you know where we wanted to see the conversation go in. Where it actually goes is, of course, something of a collective choice.
We'll keep this short since some people have already provided good responses in some threads that we don't have much to add to.
First, on useful but ultimately tangential technologies:
fsflover writes:
> I2P does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks.
mackrevinack writes:
> the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files
Munksgaard writes:
> I think gemini is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible
Others have suggested similar overlay networks, including GNUnet, Tor, and so on.
As we state in the article, overlay networks are useful, but they are by their very definition reliant upon existing hardware devices to provide the underlying network over which these networks lay. One of the goals of our article is to point out that a hyper-focusing on such overlay networks misses the point of "owning your own infrastructure" at a deeper (hardware) level. What good is an overlay network if your ISP refuses to relay your network frames to the next Layer 2 device?
In other words, LockAndLol said it best in their comment:
> Isn't [Gemini, etc.] just an application layer protocol? How will that create a new hardware network?
It won't, of course. That's not to discount such higher layer protocols. It's just that we're pointing to a side of the mountain that, in our opinion, too few have considered climbing: layer 1, the hardware.
Second, on the path from here to there and self-hosted services as being a better first step for most people than self-hosted infrastructure.
dnautics wrote:
> I think there's a market for something that is like "plug in to your local network, do minimal configuration, you can set up shared folders a la dropbox, and you can access it over the net".
Yes, we agree. In fact, that's how we teach things in our more involved classes and workshops: first, learn to run a service for yourself. Then learn how to build an internetworking connection to someone else, if you're still motivated and find doing this sort of thing fun. (If you don't find it fun, don't keep doing it. Replace "internetworking" with any other vocational trade, like plumbing or residential electrical wiring, or gardening, and the same advice would apply.) For most people, running Ethernet cable from one building to another or creating wireless links from one rooftop to another is a heavier lift than simply running a semi-private service on an RPi or similar with existing network infrastructure. But doing so doesn't resolve the infrastructure ownership problem, of course.
It's important to recognize these two problems as the two related but distinct problems that they are. In our article, we point out also that they are technically orthogonal from one another: one can "own one's own infrastructure" and use it to connect to Facebook, for example, or one can install something like a Mastodon instance on a spare workstation in one's home closet and ask one's "tribe" to use access it over connections originating from the existing (capital-I) Internet infrastructure. From the perspective of an autonomous community, neither of these scenarios is bad per se, they are both simply incomplete.
The point we made in our article is that unlike the situation 20 years ago, installing something like a Mastodon instance (or any of a bazillion other self-hostable services) is far easier and less expensive than it was then, yet most people we encounter (especially politically-inclined but not especially technologically experienced folks) tend to think the opposite is true. The perception that telecoms autonomy is less possible when the capabilities required to achieve such autonomy are actually more accessible is worth countering with more energy than we generally see it countered with. Hence, the article.
Put another way: given that so much more is possible at Layer 1 at far lower price points than has been possible ever before, and also that Layer 7 has seen an arguable overabundance of focus, we feel that hacker mindshare is better spent solving the part of the problem that hasn't received as much attention or honest community investment, which is "who owns the infrastructure," not "what software are you using to share files."
Finally, a few notes on the obvious political implications of this:
* "Who owns the infrastructure" is ultimately a political question, as it is fundamentally a matter of what "ownership" does (or should) mean. There are cynics who seem to think that any prolonged human activity will inevitably result in the same situation as the one we have now. We'll agree to disagree on the grounds that such assertions are at best Stop Energy and leave it at that.
* A number of people identified several sociopolitical forces at play here. For example, helen___keller wrote: "A large part of the complacency of the modern web is that most people (that I can see) are tired of it, whether or not they realize." Again, we agree, which is why our article tried to emphasize the utility and importance of "local services," where "local" means geographically local, not merely located on the same Ethernet broadcast domain or IP subnet as your NIC's current config.
By way of example, most restaurants in the Oklahoma City suburbs do not need a Web site accessible to visitors (or bots) in Tokyo, yet that is effectively what they are paying for when they pay their monthly Squarespace subscription (aka "Web rent"). We're not trying to argue that a global communications network is not useful, because it clearly is. Rather, we're simply pointing out that when a global(ized) infrastructure is the only available option for local coordination, or commerce, it is also clear that there are some obvious misalignments between layperson expectations, economic influences, and governance models that cause conflicts that can be resolved by investing in smaller-scale and geographically-conscious "local" networking solutions. Moreover, these two models (global and geographically local telecoms) do not, technologically speaking, need to be in conflict with one another. They are "not an either-or situation, nor a zero-sum game," as we say in the article.
To borrow a phrase from another recent post of ours ( https://c4ss.org/content/53915 ) that the Trump supporters in this thread are sure to like even less than this one: Reject the idea that successful mobilizations must be large, or that to do anything meaningful you must first do it "at scale." Instead, build coalitions with neighbors and others in your locality by building on relationships already established through earlier work building physical infrastructure together. Coalition means scaling out, not scaling up.
That can begin as simply as simply as sharing your Wi-Fi password with a neighbor in exchange for splitting the monthly Internet bill. This is true physical infrastructure coalition on a tiny, almost imperceptible scale that was damn near impossible just ten years ago. We think that's notable enough to write an article encouraging people to think moderately more ambitiously about what's possible.
That's all.
It's sort of ironic that this article purports to be "anti establishment" and then parrots a the most establishment-friendly talking point imaginable.
This is at least how I see it on HN.
Edit: Downvoted, sigh.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25333255 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
I don't even know what his actual "policies" are (who actually knows, he just leans wherever the wind blows) but I'm hard-pressed to find a more ungenuine person (maybe because the ones beating him are actually not outright idiots).
My view has nothing to do with policy/politics. The guy is just a fucking disaster - whatever text-to-speech puppet making public announcements would sound smarter and more knowledgeable.
It's right there in the open.
Whatever your criticisms of Trump are, this isn’t a distinguishing one.
Why do you believe your thus uttered opinions would change someone's mind (at least in the direction you would agree with), or, at least lead to an interesting discussion? Honest question.
Having actually read some of those suits, I would say you could make a case that Giuliani should be disbarred. These suits are cases where the Trump campaign usually has no standing, the claims are often not even proper allegations, the remedies sought are literally unprecedented, and often even the timing is improper (basically, challenging election procedures after the election can only be done in exceptional circumstances). You may have a right to sue people, but you do not have a right to harass people through lawsuits, and the suits in question are closer to the latter.
(Side note: you don't have a constitutionally-granted right to sue people. You do have one to sue the government, though.)