On 20/08/13 17:06, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> wrote:
"And it's only the beginning. I agree with Groklaw's owner. The Internet
is over."
Thoughts?
Darknets. What we cypherpunks have been saying last two decades.
I have two main thoughts around this.
1. Sousveillance [1] is one of the best hopes of not falling into
dystopia. Big Brother is scary only until the point that everyone starts
looking back.
Sousveillance interests me, too. For a start, it offers some obvious
defences against abuse of power against you; but it has secondary
effects, too - the presence of widespread sousveillance reduces the
argument for needing centralised surveillance. "What good are all these
surveillance systems in preventing crime, when the victims of crime will
have their own sousveillance?".
2. A brilliant quote from silklister Heather Madrone captures my
thoughts. From memory, "Save your dial-up modems. We can restart the
internet right under their feet."
I think that darknets and the like will solve parts of the problem, but
the biggest part by far is this trend to centralise around big services.
There's an entrepreneurial mindset around creating new Internet services
by hiring a bunch of servers and a bunch of developers and getting them
to write code that runs on your servers, and funding it via advertising
or premium services. However, this creates a wonderful central point for
monitoring and surveillance.
Back in the Day, new Internet services were created by writing
open-source software for a daemon that people could run on their big
shared Unix boxes or, later, that your ISP would run for you as part of
a suite of "expected services", and those daemons would collaborate in a
peer-to-peer fashion to create the service. IRC, Usenet, email, finger,
etc. Of course, things like IRC and Usenet, being broadcast media, are
still prone to snooping; but people can also create private IRC/Usenet
networks if they want a bit more privacy. Email lingers on due to
ubiquity, and is rather snoopable partly due to centralisation at places
like gmail, and partly just due to not having had privacy as a priority
when the protocol was designed, but it needn't be so.
The thing is, the Centralised Service Model drives progress because
investors will pour money into it. Can the federated model pick up due
to sufficient interested volunteers, or can it be monetized somehow?
Diaspora and Status.net aren't exactly taking the world by storm. What
can we do to fix this?
Decentralised encrypt-everything-by-default Internet services could go a
long way to putting the brakes on the ubiquitous surveillance state (as
well as many other benefits).
ABS
--
Alaric Snell-Pym
http://www.snell-pym.org.uk/alaric/
