On 07/04/2013 10:04 PM, hellekin wrote:
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I want to thank Christian Grothoff and his team(s) for the exceptional
work they're doing on GNUnet. Christian gave an awesome presentation
at the Free University of Amsterdam a couple of days ago, and the
slides are available as a PDF file. [1]
PRISM and an Agenda for European Network
Security Research
Another Turn of the Wheel: Mainframe, Desktop, Cloud, Peer
introduces the European situation in the light of the PRISM
surveillance program of the NSA, with good insight on its dimensions,
and goes on to describe how the GNUnet framework is offering a viable
solution to the decentralization problem.
Highlights (with personal comments):
* Current practice of encryption on the Internet: send everything to
the USA in plaintext
* NSA's upcoming Bluffdale datacenter is estimated to suck 65 MW power
consumption. Compare with the new super-computer of the Leibniz
Supercomputing Centre, SuperMuc: < 3 MW, 155,656 cores, ≈ 3 Peta FLOPS
* US companies trade unpatched software vulnerabilities in exchange
for access to intelligence gathered from the NSA: i.e., there's a
vicious circle where NSA acquires more intelligence capability with
the help of businesses. Does that sound like fair trade, free
competition, ethical practice? Or collusion between big business and
government?
* US controls Internet infrastructure: IANA, DNS roots, DNSSec root
certificate, x509 Certificate authorities, i.e. it's compromised!
* Decentralize data and trust: end-to-end encryption, decentralized
PKI, decentralized data storage, no servers, no authorities
* current decentralized solutions are slower, more complex to use and
develop, do not benefit from economies of scale, and are harder to
secure and evolve
* in comparison, centralized solutions are... COMPROMISED!
* GNUnet seeks to make decentralized systems: faster, more scalable;
easier to develop, deploy, and use;
What exactly is GNUnet?
To put it in gaming parlance (useful because games-- or at
least the gaming community-- take UX seriously), is it
currently the equivalent of a prototype for a
gaming engine that has a GUI for the sake of convenience
and development?
Or is it a prototype for a system that includes
a GUI that an end-user would eventually use?
(I.e., the "game" itself.)
Or something else?
You write that it aims to make decentralized system easier
to use, but where does the user actually fit in to the picture?
I sometimes feel like GNU forgets that "freedom to run the
program for any purpose" is moot if merely running the
program requires skills that 99% of the population doesn't have.
-Jonathan
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