Redecentralize: Quietly, some geeks are decentralizing the net again
redecentralize.org
redecentralize.org
My own main motivation wasn't just privacy, but also resilience (against, say, hurricanes) and fun (the web doesn't have the same joy it once did).
So my favourite interview so far is the mobile mesh network one http://redecentralize.org/interviews/2013/08/14/04-paul-serv...
I also think it is important that new algorithms like DHT (Kademlia), BitCoin and GFShare get known and used to their full extent.
Please get in touch if you've a project that would like interviewing!
https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...
And an implementation:
https://github.com/goraft/raft
Decentralised conversations :)
I'm hoping that once the carriers themselves start to push users to use wi-fi for offloading from their network, the more Android and iOS and others will have features to make that easy, and the closer meshnets will be to reality.
This is precisely the reaction that news sites get from me when I click on a link to a story and find video-only content.
Am I the only one, or would it be a really good idea to provide transcripts of the interviews?
No, there are at least a few of us.
- When I speed up the video in VLC the pitch of the sound goes up. This doesn't happen for me in Chrome.
- You don't get the "in-video quizzes" when you download the lectures. Some courses put them up for download separately, for others there is no other way to get to them but through the online player. The quizzes don't typically (never?) count towards your final grade, but they can reinforce concepts and correct mistaken understanding early.
On the other hand,
- I have finer speed control in VLC, and
- The video players on my computer are just "nicer" than the web alternative, maybe better than a web alternative can be.
Videos are a lower-bandwidth medium than text for explaining things. I can read a lot faster than I can listen to a person talk.
Seriously, this website doesn't realize that?
#2. There are a lot of considerations apart from bandwidth when it comes to disseminating information. For eg., having to use speakers or even reach for a set of headphones is reason enough for me to skip to the text.
[1] Sometimes video is more efficient than text. E.g. with respect to video games, gameplay videos can convey a lot of information in a short time. Basically if you want to teach someone about some system that changes over time, showing how it changes in video is often a lot clearer and faster than trying to describe it with words or static diagrams.
But a video that just involves listening to a person talk -- or, worse yet, read slides from a projector -- usually just ends up wasting my time compared to equivalent information presented as text.
[2] It's obvious that video consumes way more bytes-on-the-wire than text.
Video is a good format to get people who do not normally browse source code or read specs interested. I'd rather send my curious-but-not-technologist friends a video link than a protocol design page from a wiki which they'll never read.
And a proper transcription encompasses a fair amount of work. So maybe the authors found that that would outweigh the benefit of pleasing some of us. I'm still happy that someone is creating these videos (and is not putting them on Youtube but is self-hosting them, with WebM HTML5 video).
I'm just saying that I personally prefer text, and explaining why I prefer it.
Have you tried speeding video's up?
A lot of us prefer to read. Most don't however.
If you're trying to engage people who enjoy watching lolcat videos every day, a video is probably the best medium to use.
But I suspect that the majority of the people who are likely to be interested in this topic (programmers, mathematicians, engineers, internet freedom activists) prefer to access the most information possible in the shortest time possible, accompanied by the least possible amount of unnecessary bytes, and in a format that allows quick skimming. Ergo, text.
http://redecentralize.org/about/
What's this all about? Over the last few years, we've noticed quite a few people trying to spread the Internet out again. Back to the edges, like it used to be.
Sometimes they do it for privacy. Sometimes they do it for resilience against disaster. Sometimes they do it just to bring playfulness back to computers and how we use them.
We've a list of the kind of projects we mean (any missing? send a pull request). On this site, we interview one of those projects each month.
If most all internet services can be implemented with open source, and processing and data storage is all virtual, then the logical place we're headed is either 1) big, centralized services that treat the details of our lives as fodder to sell products, or 2) renting cycles and storage out and decentralizing everything.
For anybody concerned with privacy and not looking forward to becoming part of some hivemind, option 2 seems most logical. I don't think cost would be prohibitive, and looks like this site is interviewing guys working in the problem area on new product development, which means that there is a future there. Anybody's bet if it actually happens, though.
We hope to engage digitally literate people and show them that there are concrete existing software and app options they can use now that aren't selling your data, are interesting, easy to use and open.
However, we also need to be pragmatic - aiming to use decentralized open software ourselves when it works for our use case, but not if it stops us doing this quickly.
Please do sign up to the mail list or email us because we have ambitious plans that could use help and would love feedback (esp on stuff like if videos are really much less useful to people etc) :)
Cheers, Ira
Gitlab [2] would is an alternative with similar functionality that's more consistent with the ideology they're trying to promote.
* the issues
* the wiki
* the community because your local repo is fine,
but nobody knows any other remote than github.Issues - I'm sure these can get recreated, even the discussions. In many cases, people will have those threads in their email.
Wiki - In Github's case, this is also a git repo.
Community - GitHub is rarely the only mechanism used to manage a community. There's likely a domain name and mailing list of some form.
Losing all of the above is certainly painful but I'm trying to point out that it's not irrecoverable. A better question might be how painful would it be to lose that (and the likelihood of losing it) as compared to other options.
Larger project have a domain and a mailinglist but github hosts thousands of small projects which do not exist outside of it, and in theory it should be trivial to keep a second remote and put it in the readme or sync it over git in some way.
I don't see how you lose the community more than with any hosting method. If GitHub were nuked off the face of the earth you have all the contributors in your Git history, just send them a mail with the new location of the repo.
Their goal are being achieved: To spread the word about projects that can create a descentralized internet..
So, can we please give them a break, and the credits for their nice work?
Do you know if any of the open Github competitors store the issues in a decentralized way? Similar to Bugs Everywhere?
concretely tho, it generally means hosting stuff on your own machine, on a connection you pay for. That's okay. But it's hard for non-specialists.
I think the way forward is actually to create standardized, easy ways to decentralize. The idea is shared by many and there's several attempts, although none seems to have matured enough yet.
Basically, those boxes and all allow you to store your data on your end. The part that's missing is that you need the devices you use today to be compatible. That means ios, android, etc.. have to be able to sync your pictures, movies, contacts, emails, what not there. That's the hard part.
To this end, I'm optimistic about lightweight containers, especially a la docker.io[1]. Releasing an application as a container can help solve dependency hell. Nesting containers for a complex application (i.e. with multiple disjoint services) looks promising to me, as well.
[1] Not that LXC and/or docker are ready out-of-the-box for non-specialists (yet) - but that seems achievable. A friendly wrapper around vagrant might do the job.
Now something like torrents seems a pretty good attempt at it (as far as I can see, my knowledge on this subject is rather limited). But for the rest (say, your own mail server and dropbox-like solution hosted at your home) this seems simply impossible due to lack of proper, easy to use tools. The masses need a one-click type of solution, not a dozen of cryptic command line instructions for an OS most of them don't even run.
The ones i can think of of the top of my head:
- https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/
- https://www.gnu.org/software/social/
That's not really "the way forward", that's actually quite back to the roots. :)
Also it would be interesting to exchange experiences made with these new apps, so that not every developer has to check every network, what is not possible in one life - the already existing listings of alternatives are of great value, but a more systematic approach in collective knowledge gathering and exchange would be even better.
Hey, that´s what the internet was built for, wasn´t it? Still does no software for this exist? :)
I was hoping for an open, easily available information source that can be followed.
The major problem I see is geeks always think their idea is perfect and have a hard time justifying the technical cost of implementation when it doesn't directly affect them ("You mean I have to make feature x to help my competitor that's actually doing way better than I am at this? Psh!") Openness shouldn't only be about the ability to export and keep that information but to also interop and play nice with others.
I think it sucks that Disapora didn't have the traction it should have and I would hope that a data exchange format among all social networks would be beneficial to all. Unite against the Facebooks of the world. I believe united we can do this much better but its clear we haven't found the perfect disruption yet. I'm glad we haven't stopped trying because it's out there. Somewhere.
So instead of a guaranteed right to access information freely we make every mesh node a potential censor.
I do not want to depend on the likes or dislikes of mesh participants to be able to access or distribute information.
Here seems something fundamentally broken by design. I hope, I am misunderstanding the concept.
[1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929294.500-meshnet-a...
"Oh you're on Diaspora? Too bad, I'm on Kune and they don't talk with each other." You get the idea.
A redecentralizing hub is a great idea, can the list be more cross-referencable like a wiki - allowing project descriptions to be linked to similar projects, with information about what makes the "similar project" different. Appraisals of how projects are going etc.
Judging from the existing list, cross-referencing would have to be introduced by the redecentalize guys before we could start adding the info.
* gnusocial is another project that can be added to the list.
That aside, the site is a good idea and covering projects of this nature is important.
But for some people 'quietly' hints at 'sneaky'.
Incidentally, I'm working on an open-source competitor to btsync called clearskies (https://github.com/jewel/clearskies).
Having a machine on 24/7 is perhaps a bit wasteful, but what is the electrical use of a mostly idling machine? If you really cared, you could perhaps get something with less power, like a raspberry pi.
I thought it was the same folks that wanted us to self-host diaspora (as in OUR home pc/network). If this works, the *aaS market will explode even more.
Disconnected knowledge-islands with people not knowing about already existing solutions to problems they are trying to solve seems to be one downside of scattered communities.
Decentralization is needed for private communication, but there are downsides - creating x parallel nets will not help in finding each others - the knowledge evolution of the internet is driven by the desire of the human brain to connect all available information.
Imagine the NSA decided to create an open and freely available API to the centralized information they have collected - good-minded people certainly will extract useful knowledge from that data, possibly world-changing new ways of thinking about everything could be the results.
The human brain wants this central intelligence (the real one, not the agency) to solve the evolutionary problems we are confronted with today - it must be seen as an ironical evidence of this need that the first biggest data collections that might be useful for all humans on this planet are collected exclusively by paranoid psychopaths to have better tools for control and oppression.
But even if misused, it does happen - the human brain wants to connect. It will not be happy with decentralized knowledge - it is the reason, why the internet exists and it will not want to go back.
This does not mean that decentralized networks are a bad thing in itself (as I said before, needed for private talk urgently!), but it means that we need some information harvesting entity that makes it easy to connect.
It is not only marketing what makes google and facebook so successful - it is the biological meta-programming of our brains that make us want to use these possibilities to connect to the global information pool.
The global brain is the destination - of course it should be untouchable by insane sadist that want to control our life. This evolutionary force will lead to social changes - it does already.
Re-Decentralizing the internet, from this point of view, only postpones the real challenge: build technical and social systems, that can not be misused or at least make it easier to detect and eliminate misuse - we have already concepts for this, we need to apply. Real-life IDS will warn you if you consume fake information or are following the wrong leaders (or if you are following at all). Real-life social SIEM will prevent a group of people misusing the system just for their own profits. Most probably "profit" will be an ancient word that will be remembered only with shame, like being confronted with the primitive life of our ancestors, that were living in caves.
Decentralization will not rescue us from our duty to expand participation.