This article basically describes how the current internet was created.... why would this new internet end up any different?
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?
>why would this new internet end up any different?
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.
I essentially agree with you but there is a missing piece to this.
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.
It doesn't mean anything to "start from scratch" anyway. The Network is a meme, knowing what it is has the effect of creating it.
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.
Well, the novelty of course. Everything has it's way. Radio, TV, telephony, the internet; all have gone through different phases of commercialization and exploitations.
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.
"You can't expect every person to be skilled enough (and witht the time and desire) to be their own network administrator, so someone will have to run the network for those people..."
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.
What I am wondering is why you would question such a (seemingly harmless) call to action. Particulary the last paragraph which simply suggests going forward people might spend less time focusing on learning programming and more time focusing on learning networking. If this "call to action" were to garner any traction, would it impact you personally, or anyone you care about, in a negative way?
No, my point is I think the article is actually arguing for more than just hobbyist networks. I think they ARE trying to reach non-technical users with this plan.
I did not get that impression as the author assumes some readers will be familiar with the "technical" history he describes. Granted, the blog as a whole does not have a necessarily technical focus. Even so, what is the harm if non-technical readers encounter this article.
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.
I don't think this article causes any harm... I am not sure where you are getting that from.
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.
It is the "for the masses" part of your reasoning I do not understand how you read that into the article.
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".
The centralization of core Internet governance functions are a key thing to do better.
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.
Perhaps this is self-serving of me, since I want to build a product like this, but:
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.
If I was going to do this in a weekend, I would avoid the NAS device. "The ecosystem is moving", availability, etc.
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.
I think more and more people are caring if their life story is recorded, but the majority are not there yet. And, for the folks who care, there are no viable places to turn. It is a driving force behind Diode (diode.io) - most of our tech is open source and we are looking for collaborators who want to grow local and connect global.
I mostly like your idea, but filesystems are probably the wrong abstraction for this - concurrency when writes are ongoing is difficult and corruption will likely result. How about something like S3, overlaid with rclone's encryption: https://rclone.org/crypt? The rest of the system could work like you described, exchanging keys via Matrix.
Hey dnautics - we just launched the alpha of dDrive - a consumer level storage system implemented on top of the Diode Network - https://support.diode.io/article/irhluyq82j. No promiscuous replication, all peer-based, so availability is solid. Many similar applications are easily enabled with Diode tech.
One the qualities of what you are describing is that the overlay networks do not have to be large. Almost every "LAN over IP" project you will find on the internet tries to be able to scale to infinity, so most of them are not appropriate for what you describe. However there is at least one I know of that does not try to scale like that and it works well. It is easy to segregate "LANs" (family, friends, colleagues). Each one can have its own TAP interface.
For storage, My Cloud and other centralized systems (e.g. QNAP and Synology offerings) give some usability, but they are limited to storage and still use a central server. We are trying to get Diode tech widely adopted - it is a network that enables N to N private, fully trustless, tunnels. We implemented dDrive (https://support.diode.io/article/irhluyq82j) over it (in Alpha) that can map any storage (laptop, server, NAS, etc...) so that peers can privately access, or so that you can easily share files without having to use centralized storage / email. Telegram group at https://t.me/diode_chain.
Great question - probably three differences:
1) Syncthing is storage only - Diode has dDrive for storage, but also supports N other use cases as a true web3 backbone candidate (e.g. currently deployed: video streaming, VPN, decentralized web hosting, remote SSH, etc...)
2) Syncthing uses community relays/nodes without any incentive structure - it limits the scale of the network. Diode implements a relay incentive in proportion to the traffic handled (which is somewhat predicated on the QoS the relay is able to provide)
3) Syncthing is a closed system (an impact of #1), so it can't do things like link sharing, web viewers, etc... whereas Diode is able to provide all those things fully decentralized
There are certainly also specific UX/functionality differences on how the apps are implemented, but those are probably the macro considerations.
Pogoplug used to be something like a personal cloud, but it looks like it's now an online backup service. There's also OwnCloud. I haven't tried either.
Isn't this built into all modern Wifi routers? Asus has had this for 10 years or so, and they also had their share of security issues that comes with the territory :/
The internet as we know it would be just fine if we de-commercialized it. Most websites as we know it don't need to be riddled with ads, google fonts, social media trackers, analytics.
"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.
1. not a factor for most. they're paying for web hosting already, and that's what is covering the network and computers. I'm talking about content.
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.
I agree - HUGE problem is the monetization - the best models today are ad placement and job postings.
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.
This is pretty awesome. What are the missing pieces to get people using this? Is there a need?
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.
>What are the missing pieces to get people using this?
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.
A firewalled router will not work correctly (it will be slow as hell, basically, and you'll be leeching off the network instead of contributing to it). I appreciate the project as much as anyone interested in it, but let's be real here. On top of that, no router will work efficiently right after installation, firewalled or otherwise. You have to give it time to find other routers and make connections. It's just not suited for the immediateness almost everyone expects from everything nowadays. It needs a major revamp in order to increase its adoption.
This is all true. However if the goal is convenience, speed and adoption, one could decrease the number of hops and it will work much faster.
> 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.
Well I clicked it because I am quite a fan of making internet more open.
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.
> 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.".
When the author says "if you were near it, you could jump it", they meant "near it" == "in academia, defense, or government".
The most difficult part is the backbone, not the software. The internet's power comes from its large scale and resilience, bypassing censorship and copyright is just a side effect. WiFi Dabba's [0] approach is quite interesting but I am not sure whether it will scale well in practice. Optical communications through free space generally requires line of sight and the bandwidth is low due to atmospheric losses. Broadcasting across oceans is another issue, especially when sovereignty is involved.
Discussing torrents:
> people were more easily able to access the things they needed without being forced to ask or pay for permission to have them.
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.
> watching movies and show you didn’t pay for is theft
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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, steal my bikes--which I spent my own money to create--from my store, and and give it away for free, then yes, you are a thief.
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.
You're arguing circularly; it's stealing because it's theft because it's stealing. If I make my own bike store and produce bikes which are identical to yours without taking yours away, then it's not theft.
> If I make my own bike store and produce bikes which are identical to yours without taking yours away, then it's not theft.
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.
Copy or not, you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue. I don't much like how the digital landscape has played out in terms of ownership, but pretending that torrenting a copy of a movie means you didn't steal it ignores the obvious.
> you're willfully depriving the company of their revenue
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.
These arguments you're making are irrelevant. Even you yourself are using the term "pirate", which implies stealing.
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"
I am glad you’ve found a way to make a living while giving away your art. Really. That’s great. (There’s no way for this to not sound sarcastic, but I’m being genuine.)
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?
It's rude and dishonorable to take something someone doesn't want to give you.
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.
> 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.
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.
Music predates currency systems by quite a bit. I'm sure the art would change quite a bit if charging to listen to a song was no longer practical.
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.
> 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.
There's a difference between discussing what the law is and what the law ought to be.
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.
theft
n. the generic term for all crimes in which a person intentionally and fraudulently takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use (including potential sale). In many states, if the value of the property taken is low (for example, less than $500) the crime is "petty theft," but it is "grand theft" for larger amounts, designated misdemeanor, or felony, respectively. Theft is synonymous with "larceny." Although robbery (taking by force), burglary (taken by entering unlawfully), and embezzlement (stealing from an employer) are all commonly thought of as theft, they are distinguished by the means and methods used, and are separately designated as those types of crimes in criminal charges and statutory punishments. (See: larceny, robbery, burglary, embezzlement)
--
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.
I’m not angry. I just disagree. I think what you are doing is morally wrong, but it’s not a big deal. I’m sure you have some rationalization. As long as you can feel proud of what you do, that’s all that matters.
I downloaded guardians of the galaxy recently because someone was praising the cgi and I just wanted a quick look at it, but there is no way I would go to the cinema to watch it and no way I would ever buy it on dvd even if it was being sold really cheap. basically they would not make any money from me either way, so what exactly is being stolen from them?
Copyright is theft of my natural ability to copy things. And now that I have a machine that can do it for me for almost zero marginal cost, I really don't want laws designed for a world of physical publishing to be applied on the digital world.
I think gemini[0] is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible[1].
Thinking of Gemini as an "alternative to" the Internet means you think of the Web as "the Internet" and I thought that we'd be a bit more technically savvy than that here.
Also, there's no real technical reason Gemini-the-protocol can't serve HTML, but that discussion is probably dead, too.
In throwing out the complexity of HTML, Gemini is also disposing of some markup that really helped screenreaders properly handle content. It would be a real shame if this "return to the good internet" left out the visually impaired. I agree with the goals of returning to a more bare-bones, text-heavy internet, but please, include the disabled in your vision from day one!
As a blind person, I dearly miss the textual Internet as it was.
The original Internet -- the textual one -- was perfectly accessible.
The extra markup added to HTML to help screen readers was added because
the web stack had gotten too complex, not because it was too simple.
The lang attribute added to the span tag in HTML really helps with ensuring that a screenreader outputs quoted foreign-language text in that language, instead of just pronouncing gibberish. And this tag and attribute go pretty far back into the 1990s, it is not part of the modern-web-gone-mad. So, similar markup is one of those little things that Gemini should have thought about from the very beginning, and it would not have made their stack appreciably more complex.
Foreign language text could potentially be auto-detected. You could either use some sort of an NN based approach, or use an algorithm like the one that browsers use for detecting the text encoding of a page where that's not given.
I must admit that I don't know anything about screenreading or accessibility in general, but I think you raise a valid concern: Certainly, the "next-generation good internet" should be accessible to all.
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?
I'm currently building a network for a cheesy 80ies-style virtual Lisp machine from a parallel universe with libp2p. It's very cumbersome, the Go libp2p library is pretty arcane and split up across too many packages. But it does work, and when it's ready users of my machine will be able to send each other encrypted messages over a p2p network with NAT traversal.
FidoNet is still living, however it lacks at least strong authentication and data confidentiality (no crypto used at all). But it shows that people could be capable of creating global networks without unwanted third-parties.
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
We techies like to believe that most problems created by technology can be solved by more technology.
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.
Not what the article suggested, but I think there’s actually more potential for local alternatives at the service level, rather than the network level. For example I’ve been considering replacing Gmail with a Helm. (https://www.thehelm.com/).
Anyone have experience with that to share, or know other products that are similar: “easily run your own server for X”?
Shorter: We could and should build local networks, but we can't build inter-networking infrastructure, so we'll just piggyback on the existing longer haul (0) infrastructure but not worry about it because it will be our protocols and data. So we won't actually build our own internet at all.
(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.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Why would anybody sign up for an Internet that doesn't allow them to connect to people all over the country or the world, half the promise of the Internet in the first place? I think this is falling into the classic Linux trap where you assume normal people feel really strongly about your goals and proceed from that false premise.
I've spent a lot of time contemplating these ideas, as I have a personal interest in building my own friends/family intranet. Some challenges:
* 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.
Wouldn't the "building your own" part involve using protocols like 2-5G, WiMax and others in order to have long range connectivity between meshnets?
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?
It's a good article but light on the technical side. I would have liked to know more about alternative networking technologies that what make the vision possible beyond 'running ethernet cables' to different neighbors houses... There is likely to be all kinds of radio tech that could make town-size and then town-to-town links possible. But that's a niche subject
I was trying to make something recently, and I couldn't find the source material any more on the web. Luckily I turned to Pirate Bay and bittorrent and found what I needed. I forget how cool those things are.
There is a widespread perception that the old-style Internet of independent small sites has been subsumed by large social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others. The ease of use, UX and network effect generated by these networks mean that it's a struggle to stay away from them and do your own thing. This is good for the non-technical folk, but leaves technical folk out in the cold because there are no major platforms that serve their needs.
"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.
It means it would have stuff they like but not things they don't like. Also normal people are unwelcome, only technically adept users but only those making things they want.
It's not just that corporations own a lot of the physical infrastructure. Another factor is that humans as a group tend to force other humans to commercialize what they do, even if they expressly don't want to do that and would rather publish it without ads, without paywalls, without subscriptions, etc.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
> People who actually want to make something happen will do the small thing in their power to accomplish today.
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 elephant in the room (or even a mammoth?) is the social status. If it's not at the center of the analysis, the predictions will be flawed and the actions will drive you in circles.
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.
> Another factor is that humans as a group tend to force other humans to commercialize what they do, even if they expressly don't want to do that and would rather publish it without ads, without paywalls, without subscriptions, etc.
I don't think I have. I don't think I have because I was literally homeless for years (and frequently too broke to eat) while trying to figure out how to get money for my writing and being told by people "Writing doesn't pay. Get a real job." while my writing hit the front page of HN sometimes and I was quite open about my medical situation and other factors that prevented me from finding some other way to support myself.
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.
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.
Because Trump hate was literally spoon-fed to you. There's not a single rabid Trump hater who hated him before 2016. Ad spend is a heck of a thing. The simpletons can be made to hate or love anyone. It's just PR, and you fell for it.
I couldn't really care less about Trump before he was elected. And mind you I'm from Europe. That said once he became president it quickly became apparent what a danger he presented not only to the US but also to the rest of the world. I'm seeing political echoes all around Europe. Not looking forward to seeing claims of election fraud here in a year or two... and this is just the most recent outrageous thing he's done.
His whole political career has been full of facepalming moments. He is not fit to be a businessman (he's failed at it miserably) and definitely not to lead a country and I'm shocked to see anyone who doesn't realize that. I don't care if the US is run by a republican or a democrat, just let it not be an illiterate moron.
Probably going to (and should) be downvoted as well, but... while I respect republican/conservative views, how can you not see that this moron is the epitome of a shitty wannabe dictator? He's used all his power to try to falsely prove that the election was a fraud (while building up for it all summer), and failing miserably at it. He would definitely try any other viable means if could.
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.
Because he's the first president since Jimmy Carter not to start a new armed conflict? He negotiated middle east peace agreements between Israel and 4 or 5 other nations. He created Opportunity Zones for tax-incentivized investments in poor (often minority) neighborhoods. He increased funding to historically black colleges. He instituted prison reform to shorten sentences for non-violent offenders. If anything, people have been angry at him for not being enough of a medical dictator with the covid situation, meanwhile a lot of Democrat governors seem to have a predilection for banning churches, arresting small business owners, and instituting lockdowns. Left-wing social media has instituted strict anti-conservative censorship and deplatforming, in an attempt to influence the election. There's been no censorship from Trump. He's a blowhard, and sometimes an asshole, but he doesn't try to silence anyone. He's not locking people up in their houses. He's not un-personing anyone.
I am in favor of net neutrality, but I think it needs to be augmented with more regulation at the application layer. At this moment I'm more worried about the monopolies in social networking, digital content distribution, app stores, and online advertising.
Do you honestly believe he's written a single line of it himself? Those are the policies written by the party. He doesn't really care as long as people love, support and praise him.
You are resorting to cussing, you criticise that Trump is exercising his constitutionally granted right to sue when in his opinion he has been wronged and you openly admit ignorance and unwillingness to educate yourself about issues you pretend to be interested in.
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.
> you criticise that Trump is exercising his constitutionally granted right to sue when in his opinion he has been wronged
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.)
You know this, I'm sure, but you don't even really have that; the Case or Controversy clause says you only get to sue if you can state a harm to yourself that has actually happened and a remedy the court can realistically and legally apply. The rules of standing are what prevents the Supreme Court from being a panel of philosopher-kings.
That's not what downvotes are for (unless you're on Reddit). Downvotes are for wrong or misleading comments. If something is against the rules it can be downvoted and flagged. If you disagree, just move on, ignore the comment. If you support/like a comment, upvote it.
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?