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Taming the Web
Thomas writes: "A story on Technology Review outlines the closer-to-reality-than-you-think fact that Internet regulations are right around the corner. It points out three false hopes held by web 'libertarians.' 1. the web is too international to control. 2. the net is too interconnected to fence in. 3. the net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This is a good read." Bingo.
OK, read the article. Yes, it's true, but it's also false.
First, my creds are longer than I care to think about, back in the dawn of time. And, no, I don't hack any longer, but all I'll say is, if I had, the statute of limitations is up.
Myth #1 The Net is too International to be Controlled
The Net, the totality of the Internet, is. The Web, the channel that our browsers serve up http and https and suchlike, is affected by our ISPs. We can still use TCP/IP and backchannel, go thru various ports - this part is still wild and wooly. Or we can stay safe inside AOL and MSN and their versions and it's controlled. It's like the Wild West - when you come into Dodge, they take your guns at the city limits. If you stick to the patrolled routes, it's fairly safe; if you wander off into the badlands, it's not.
Myth #2 The Net is to Interconnected to Control
See above. While you can route around censorship and damage, this requires active or passive participation by someone. So long as bastions of freedom exist, so long as encyrpted channels go through, this will continue to exist. But the rest can be partially controlled.
Myth #3 The Net is Too Filled with Hackers to Control
So long as we reward hackers with publicity and teens have very little to lose and don't care about it, this will always be true. If they suddenly fear being caught, it will increase some people's activity and scare off others. So, this is mostly true.
But, in sum, it all comes down to this:
The Net is the Perception, Not the Reality.
So long as people believe in the above tenets, it will self-perpetuate. If they lose faith, it will change. Just as the founders of America believed in press freedom but favored other restrictions - remember the 50s, that teen gang era, eventually followed by the 80s.
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The American people are as bought and paid for as the government, so to say that the government somehow doesn't represent the people is a convenient excuse to dismiss your civil responsibility. Believe me, when there's a large public outcry, the government will listen.
Corporate control of the Internet may very well happen, but don't let your experience of corporate control over your lifetime lead you into false assumptions. The greater a controlling power becomes, the more unstable it becomes until it topples. That is the really real truism of history.
Fallacious agrument #1: "Swaptor Isn't Too International to Be Controlled" == "The Internet Isn't Too International to Be Controlled". Following this kind of argument, 4 is not even because 3 is not even and they're both numbers. As a side note, am I the only one that hasn't heard of Swaptor?
Fallacious agrument #2: "Gnutella uses a bandwidth-inefficient protocol" == "The Internet isn't very interconnected". There's nothing impossible about efficient true P2P. If Gnutella isn't it, that's Gnutella's problem. This is actually the same fallacy type as #1.
Fallacious agrument #3: "Software hackers can't do hardware" == "Nobody can hack hardware". A topical counter example: it's not very hard to buy a DVD player modified to be region-free.
Honestly, do journalists not have to take a critical thinking course at some point? For that matter, do editors no longer edit? While the main focus of the article (the Internet ain't as free as some people assert) is probably true, the lack of a single cogent argument in a three "page" article is horrifying
As long as you don't own the pipes, you can't rely on being able to pump anything you want through them. The bad news is that with many smaller ISPs having been failed, abandoned, and made obsolete by the bigger/higher bandwidth players, many of us don't even have the ability to vote with dollars, except to forego Internet connection entirely. As if.
So it's not as easy as switching providers. And unless you live in a cell block or a row house, connecting your system via your own pipes isn't much of an option. Okay, not even in the cell block. Maybe wireless technologies will help ameliorate this, but at the moment, I wouldn't want to transmit anything to my buddies using the high-speed wireless data transmission technologies readily available to me.
But I disagree that geeks should stop fighting "rules" and restrictive legislation out of fear of causing a clamp-down effect. Those who are skilled and interested should work toward sensible legislation (if such a thing exists). The demise of technocrat.net is one indication to me that such skills are rare in the geek community. The average R&D meeting is another such indication.
I have more hope that as geeks continue to occupy influential positions in Corporate America and other industrialized nations, that the geek ethic will get a voice that matters to someone besides geeks. With due respect to Richard Stallman, the CTO at any company I've worked for has far more influence on the corporate direction - and the limits of corporate expectations - than any outside voice.
But hey, I could be wrong, and I'm sure I'll find doubleplusgood travel arrangements on WorldOnline2010 (a wholly-owned subsidiary of AOL/Time-Warner/Daimler-Chrysler/Philip Morris/Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati).
Your probably just trolling, but here goes anyway:
The internet has been around for more than two decades...
It's been around for 2 decades, but has only recently been recognized as something more than the worlds largest geek toy, largely ignored by the rest of the world. Big business on the Internet is still in its infancy, but you'd better believe that if it continues to grow like it has, laws and regulations will follow.
The internet stretches across national boundaries
Read the article, they actually address this argument. It doesn't matter if I setup a Napster server in Timbuktu if the RIAA can cut off my one-and-only access point to the outside world.
Now that we have web servers in space
Show me a timeframe for getting a robust, stable, viable Net Sanctuary Space Station, and I'll show you an Internet that has long since been beaten down by Evil Big Business (tm).
As long as I can connect two computers together, the internet will exist...
For me, it started with a null modem serial cable strung between two TRS-80 Color Computers, so that I could "share" the single floppy drive I had.
I quickly moved to a 300 baud modem - and I suddenly had a whole new world at my fingertips.
Later came a 2400 baud modem, a 14.4, a 28.8. BBS's all over town - the city - Fidonet - across America, and in some cases, around the world.
I messed around with connections over telephone wire, building funky parallel port bit-bangers, to create a po-man's networking system.
Now I have a personal network inside my house - cobbled together from parts and pieces the corps didn't want - picked off the scrap pile of electronic hubris...
I hear talk of 802.11 - lasercomm - radiocomm - it is in the air. Hackers will do it. Fidonet will be recreated.
What are they to do? Regulate radio - oops, they already do! Regulate 2.4GHz - yep, that will come. Regulate sell of lasers? That could happen, too. Regulate light making devices? Perhaps.
Maybe I will then hack together a system that only transmits/recieves during the daytime, using mirrors to reflect the sun over long distances, to be received and converted using homemade selenium photocells (and yes - I know how to make them). Regulate mirrors?
Then I will stand on the roof of my house - and shout to the heavens, and my friend beyond, who will relay my message. It may be slow - but to shut me up, you will have to kill me.
KILL ME, DAMMIT! DO YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND, YOU GODDAMN FUCKING CORPORATE GOVERNMENT MACHINE?!
/end...fucking...rant>
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Even if you believed that Freenet has *no* userbase, and that it is still so incomplete that nobody can use it, the simple fact that it exists and he doesn't (can't?) present a way to shut it down, refutes his argument. As has been pointed out elsewhere, even if ISPs placed restrictions on usable ports, Freenet can easily be persuaded to tunnel over other ports.
Of course, you should never let the facts get in the way of a good story...
Our html coders know how to make a series of links between a sequence webpages.
He comments that hackers won't be able to come and sodder a hardware workaround... Well he is absolutely and blatantly wrong. for $6 I can have the kid next door modchip my PS1. most of that money pays him for the sodder.
For the PS2 I can go to my local game store, and for $30 (most for the warranty on the chip) they will do it. THAT is convenience.
Hackers will break through any hardware lock as easily as software locks. Why? Because unlimited free time will always beat limited paid time.
skye
The result, in Ballon's view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios and labels and publishers will send over lists of things to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella. Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're drastically shrinking the pool of available users."
:)
While people will put up with crappy service and high bills, if you take away their MP3s and porn, they will take their business elsewhere. If AOL and MSN started blocking MP3 trading, and Earthlink ran another round of "We don't spy on you or control you" commercials, they'd grab huge chunks of their competitors' former customers.
Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.
That's because it's harder to leave your country than it is to switch ISPs. Well, maybe only slightly harder.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Hey, you think your house is cool?
Sure... most of us would raise hell. But if they withstood? Then we're the ones who get screwed.
Think about it.
Jason
He's totally creeping out the Great One, eh...
I think this kind of thing would be pretty hard to police.
"Someone who does this is obviously interested in illegal activities. So we have to make it illegal to build networks that are not under the supervision of a trusted provider."
Claus
The international nature of the Internet is really just a red herring. The real important point is the 'net is too hetrogenous to control. Too many different protocols, laws and locations are involved. The proof of this is that even though nearly all countries with significan Internet connections consider kiddie-pr0n to be highly illegal, it continues to thrive. If being illegal were enough of a reason for something to disappear wouldn't that be gone by now?
Napster, Gnutella and BearShare all have their flaws. This shows that regulators/authorities will always find a way to shut down any new innovation. Whether this is true or not is unimportant. The only thing that could make the interconnected nature of the Internet meaningless is if somehow it were possible to stop the next version of the program to avoid blocking. Freenet may well have many flaws and may be blocked completely some day, but how long do you think it would be till Freenet2?
The only argument the article addresses that's at all meaningful (hidden away in that secret 3rd page) is that the 'net is full of hackers that are impossible to control. This really ends up being the same argument as the other ones. The only way these hackers are not an issue is if the thing they're attacking is attackproof. The only way to make something inaccessible to hackers is to make it inaccessible to everybody. The best that someone protecting something is that they make it so hard it's not worth the while to try. This is possible, but very unlikely.
Back to the subject line. This whole article is about preventing one or more people from getting something they want. One obvious example of this is video games. EA has been publishing computer games for about 20 years now, and in that time I've played cracked EA games on just about every platform, from the C64 to the PS2. Throughout that whole time EA has fought against "pirates", but they just can't stop them.
Right now getting an MP3 of RIAA music is about as easy as using a few POKE and PEEK commands on a C64 to bypass the copy protection of MULE or the Pinball Construction Set. In the future it may well be as hard as getting past the copy protection in Madden 2002 on a Nintendo cartridge. If it's worth it to them, people will do it.
The fact nobody has yet broken into Fort Knox doesn't mean that Fort Knox can't be broken into. It especially doesn't mean the issue of "keeping gold safe" has been solved. It's always just a matter of time.
My 'false hopes' revolve around the fact that I can connect one computer to another, somehow, without what I do being filtered, no matter what. So can anyone else, and so we eventually get the internet.
Pundits can argue all they want that it won't stay that way.. but it will.
Articles like this help to emphisize the points made in the story/article. Interestingly, the slashdot article meantions hardware changes as a way to protect copyrighted materials without the possibility of copying. I should mention that this overlooks a major point-- hardware has to give the majority of choice up to the software, and anything that completely prevents digital copying of works must by necessity interfere with many innocuous activities without offering complete security (suppose I rip music from an encripted CD, decrypt it, pass it to another process through a named pipe, encode it in another format, and write it to disk. Is the hardware going to measure everything that the kernel does?)
THe only way around this is, IMO, to outlaw open source kernels (a possibility mentioned in The Right to Read). I don't think that this is a current possibility. The other possibility is to prevent CDROM drives from reading audio CDs. That is not going to happen soon either.
The slashdotted article states:"I can write a program that lets you break the copy protection on a music file," says Dan Farmer, an independent computer security consultant in San Francisco. "But I can't write a program that solders new connections onto a chip for you."
This statement is somewhat naive... One can always write a program to emulate any piece of hardware, and there will always be ways of breaking them.
Stallman seems to indicate that the DMCA poses a significant threat to free debuggers (which could be used to circumvent copy protections) and free kernels, which could also be used to circumvent protections.
We need to stand together supporting the right to read.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That's an unsupportable generalization. Plenty of individuals and groups have seen their online activities regulated - Napster, Yahoo! France, and any site ever kicked off an ISP due to outside legal pressure.
The internet stretches across national boundaries. For regulation to be successfully carried out, an international body would need to be involved.
Ever hear of the Hague Convention? It was in the article. International agreements on intellectual property, copyright, etc. are growing day by day, as the economy is globalized and more information moves around the world.
Now that we have web servers in space, even international bodies will be powerless to censor the internet.
The US is embarking on wholesale weaponization of space. I disagree with it, but satellite-killing satellites - built by the US or someone else - will become a reality sooner or later.
The skills of hackers and crackers will summarily overcome any attempts by government to lock-down the internet. If hackers can infiltrate the most secure military computers of the greatest nation on earth, how will the US, but more especially, the rest of the world, ever regulate the internet?
This is about the only variable that I don't think can be controlled. Human ingenuity is pretty amazing. But the hurdles to an open Internet are going to get higher and higher (you didn't mention hardware-based content management, featured prominently in the article), and only an elite few may end up being able to circumvent them.
Internet service providers can always pull the plug?treating Freenet, in essence, as an unsupported feature, in the way that many providers today do not support telnet, Usenet and other less popular services.
...at which point Freenet will start tunneling through http, pop3, ftp, ssh, and any other common protocol. If ISPs start peeking at specific packets, Freenet will start using SSL.
And like i mentioned in an earlier comment, why would ISPs do this? MP3s and porn are far and away the most popular uses for the Internet today, according to a study i just made up. It would be like making cars that don't go over 55 or "tobacco water pipes" that only work with tobacco.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Corporate control of the net will happen, because that's the only thing that can happen in today's world. Sure, it would be nice if netizens got some of those silly myths the author talks about out of their heads and adopted a more realistic attitude, but it's not like that would do anything to prevent corporate control from setting in any way. You can't prevent it -- that's the real truism of the net.
Free Hans!
While we've been focusing on rights language, and discussions of what should be, WIPO, with the support of many old-economy publishers have begun to implement the legal constructs which will allow prosecution for net based offenses, related to intellectual property. The first evidence of this in the US was the DMCA, but for the rest of the story, read the WIPO whitepaper "Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law, and Commercial Licenses" (available in M$ word format and PDF format). It's a vary interesting read.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
This article holds no water if any of the three myths are actually true - and surprise, there are problems with all 3 myths, particularly numbers 2 and 3.
The assumption that you need central servers, or identifiable traffic in order to run an efficient decentralized file sharing network is just plain wrong. The fact that something hasn't been done yet does not mean it can't be accomplished, you know. FreeNet itself is proof of concept that you can have a completely distributed network where no one node knows the whole story. As a programmer I see no reason why you couldn't design a system with traffic indistinguishable from SSH or a VPN, with adequate performance, that was completely decentralized.
I'm surprised at how well written this article is. There are bound to be opposing views on any subject, and I guess it's a good thing that this isn't filled with more FUD or pro-media propaganda. But as it goes, the arguments in this article just don't work. If you had a file-sharing network where you could publish anything, available to anyone at a high speed, how could you justify to the courts that you wanted it shut down? Does the availability of copyrighted material outweigh the overall benefit of the system? Of course not! As the article even says, in order to shut that kind of network down, you'd have to turn off the Internet.
Well one could hack one's TCP stack so an initial SYN-ACK with certain fields set a certain way is treated as a normal SYN packet. That blasts a hole in the not allowing incoming packets filter. Of course, they can filter out that hack, etc. As was said in another post, they have to REACT, and would be one step (or more) behind.
What they could do, is change the rules. Right now things are permitted unless prohibited. If the laws were changed so that things were by default prohibited, instead of permitted, and made it illegal (preferrable as a felony - heck, then they could eventually take away the right of a felon to be on the net too), and made it illegal for hardware or software to exist that doesn't enofrce that, they they could win.
THey could require you pay the gov't a $10M license to provide content, and revoke licenses from any "troublesome" sites (so rich "eccentrics" would not be a threat).
Put enough people in jail for YEARS of their life, take every thing they own and sell it, and make them felons without the right of self-defense or even to vote (so the politicians can IGNORE them - and their fellow "citizens" will think of them as EVIL UNTRUSTWORTHY CRIMINALS), and people will be scared off and/or neutralized as a threat to the New World Order.
WE NEED TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS POLITICALLY, NOT JUST TECHNICALLY. IF YOU GET SENTENCED TO 20 YEARS IN PRISON FOR USING FREENET, NO TECHNOLOGY WILL HELP YOU (except a shovel to try to "tunnel" your way out of prison).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Here's a brain teaser. Bobby wants to give Sally the DeCSS source code. Jimmy has absolute control over both of their computers, telephones, and the intervening network. Can Jimmy stop Bobby while permitting them to talk about nice safe legal things?
Answer: No.
Here's why: The only way to stop the transferral of "bad" information is to stop all information. Let's see how it would work in real life.
I think you see where this is going. Bobby will always be able to pass DeCSS off as "safe" traffic. No matter what Jimmy does, Sally will be cracking DVDs in short order. The article brings up some good points, but I think that there's no way to stop the informational tidal wave. Information may not "want to be free", but people do. There will always be a way.
This
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens' What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- fair use excerpt from "Atlas Shrugged".
You don't have to buy into the rest of her philosophy to see that she hit the nail on the head here.
connected to a shinyhappy ad-laden corporate network through ATM-like dumb terminals.
/. now?
Larry Ellison? You're posting to
Seriously though, I thought we had pretty much squashed the idea of network computers circa. 1998.
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
Looks like it's police state time for Amerika.
Big Brotherism starts the moment that individuals are forced to have ID numbers like a bunch of slaves. It's been around for a long time. It's just getting more efficient with computers. In fact, the more a trojan horses and viruses are unleashed on the net, the more secure and efficient it becomes. IP laws are just the tip of the fascist iceberg.
On a side note, there is a story in the old testament where King David gave the order to take a count of the people. God got so pissed off at that flagrant violation of liberty that he sent a nasty plague on them. Just a thought.
If you don't have income property, you're a slave. You can either live with it or fight it. But watch out if you decide to fight. The state is rather powerful. It is armed to the teeth and will not give up its power easily. They'll hurt you real bad if they have to. But first they will disarm you as they have pretty much done already. So you're all shit out of luck.