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You Won't Recognize the Internet in 2020
alphadogg writes "As they imagine the Internet of 2020, computer scientists across the country are starting from scratch and re-thinking everything: from IP addresses to DNS to routing tables to Internet security in general. They're envisioning how the Internet might work without some of the most fundamental features of today's ISP and enterprise networks. Their goal is audacious: To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management. Researchers are trying to build an Internet that's more reliable, higher performing and better able to manage exabytes of content. And they're hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets. This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as the US federal government ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the United States is building the world's largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage thousands – perhaps millions – of end users in its experiments."
As I came to the end of the article, I saw... "You are not logged in. ... or post as Anonymous Coward."
I wonder, with all these fancy features and identity management, will the veil of anonymity on the internet be removed?
Internet censorship has always been limited because the internet as we know it makes it hard with its anonymity and proxies, etc.
The question is will a government-funded internet make big-brother-ing easier?
If every computer was linked to every other in its vicinity, rather than directly to a limited number of ISPs, I wonder everything would be faster and more robust overall; a self healing network rather than one vunerable to a few cables snapping. The watchers won't be happy losing control but might it be a better net, if not everything had to go through the narrow part of the funnel?
Can this already be done with wireless bridging?.. is it possible to fragment DNS lookup so the ISP becomes redundant?
Personal identification is bad for porn.
Finding a new source of money of such dimensions will be challenging.
It's one thing to not talk openly about it, it's another to forget it.
"Free speech without the need for anonymity is way better" agreed, if only it were the case. Sometimes you need to openly discuss something while retaining privacy, putting your name on questions about disease or sexuality could cost you your insurance, job, social status, family and even your life even in "the free west".
If you have something sufficiently important to say, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you either need anonymity or the willingness to be sued, imprisoned or killed for what you say. "Deep Throat" used anonymity, Martin Luther King Jr. didn't.
There is still no way for me to buy something with cash on the internet. Cash is cash. It's money, in and of itself, divorced from my identity. No identity is necessary. I can buy something at the corner store, or the liquor store, or the gas station with cash; the cashier doesn't need to verify my identity to see if my money is "good". It doesn't matter; my cash spends the same as anyone else's. When I meet someone to buy something off craigslist, I don't NEED to check anyone's identity; only to see that they are holding a wad of cash. The cash will spend regardless of who they are. There is nothing like this on the internet. I have to pay via credit card, paypal, or something else. How about getting around to inventing digital cash?
And since cash is "just money", and the property of whoever is holding it at a particular time, why not invent identities which are themselves "just identities" in the same way? In one of the Terry Pratchett books, there were ID cards that were, inherently, identities of themselves. Nobody had to prove you were the "owner" of the identity. It didn't matter; it was a non-issue, just like nobody has to verify if you are the owner of a wad of cash. The card WAS the identity.
I still long for a True Names anonymous internet of pseudoannonymity, multiple online identities, digital cash and annonymising remailers.
Unless it adds value to end users it will not be adopted. Works faster? Great. The US/Iranian/Russian government is now reading my emails in addition to google? Not so great.
What would be incredible, is if the US government could implement OpenID on all of their websites. Taxes are rolling around, couldn't they make a site that lets me file directly with them? Or one that lets me see every outstanding ticket i have in my fair city? These systems don't have to be the same to be integrated.
Hmmm... let me check. How many academic, apolitical non-commercial internet sites do I visit a day ....
....
/. displays ads. So without corporate/commercial interests getting involved, it will be missing features they need, and those entities will find dozens of work-arounds that won't work the same in every browser and cause it to need to be done it all over again in another couple of decades or so.
Going through all my bookmarks
Zero
None
Nada
Even
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
The same people who watched Star Wars and wanted to build the Death Star are now working on turning The Matrix into reality.
This has been in the works for a while, driven by a collusion between security agencies and high tech industry. This is what they meant when they were "caught off guard" by 9/11, and decided to "wage war on the internet" as a response to dissent during Operation Iraqi Liberation. When the entire plot of America's next blatant power grab becomes common knowledge within a matter of weeks thanks to a free global individual communications medium, FBI agents with 486's could no longer successfully pull off the kind of false flag operations they could when television was dominant. They had to pick their donut-stuffed asses out of their plastic chairs and resort to the good old fashioned foot-work of personal attacks, disappearances and discrediting anyone who questions the official line to keep the blood money flowing.
Profit is of course the motive, but not profit for society at large, profit at your expense. The initial purpose is to enable more reliable monitoring of communications by making identification more reliable. Stick your smart-card enabled driver's-license-slash-food-stamp-card into a reader in order to access the internet. Copy a song or movie, or pose a sufficient threat to society, and your access can be revoked. Government are the only ones who might be motivated to pay for such a scheme, with no clear benefit to anyone but the types of delusional control freaks government attracts.
The next step will be to take everything you say or communicate electronically, and to use it against you. This is where the profit comes in. Your ideas are copied, stolen, and then black-holed. Your views are distorted. Everyone from your employer to your landlord to concerned parents would pay for information on you. Those who control it's collection will control it's perception and use, and profit from it. Your health insurance may be cancelled. Your boss may not recommend you for a raise. Your parents may decide to cut you out of their will. Your bank may reduce your credit limit. They will have no qualms about doing so. You will never see it coming. The information they base their decisions on comes from the government, and government is trusted. The information is thus trusted as well, thanks to step one above.
The final step is segmentation. The internet is no longer global. You get your own personal copy. Every search result you get and every website you go to is filtered and personalized. The internet is no longer your link to a larger world, but a fictional creation used to manipulate and control you. Freedom of speech is no longer liberating, but a jail for your mind. This will take a while. But it is coming. It's just targeted advertising for now, but wait ten years and see what it becomes with the Federal government picking up the tab.
Consider this: There is a $200 trillion financial derivatives market in the United States. At 3% growth, this represents $70,000/yr for each and every US household, nearly every dollar earned by working Americans. And it's already accounted for. They know you will spend it. They know to 99% certainty how you will spend it. And if they happen to be wrong, they will get bailed out. There is no room for error. There is no tolerance of paradigm-changing technologically innovative ideas. Every economic transaction is now backed by the force of government. And they have every incentive to increase their intrusion into and control over your everyday life.
My response is to be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it is better not to know whether the cat is dead or not.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
The problem is the difference between "provably secure" in theory and practice. From recent news Schneier's blog reports on a quantum encryption system that was provably secure that has been broken.
What they are proposing sounds an awful lot like freenet, in practice.