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Rushkoff Proposes We Fork the Internet
Shareable writes "Douglas Rushkoff: 'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change. The mere fact that lawmakers and lobbyists now control the future of the net should be enough to turn us elsewhere.' And he goes on to suggest citizens fork the Internet & makes a call for ideas how to do that."
I think all you need is one of those cable splitter things.
DON'T.
Both the physical infrastructure and the logical underpinnings need to be forked. The current Internet is both insecure and not private enough. The physical infrastructure is easily controlled by a few central entities. It's all broken.
We should be building our own physical infrastructure and put fences in contracts that keep any entity from ever owning a significant part of that infrastructure. We should be adopting protocols that are secure, always encrypted and make it easy to be largely anonymous.
When its built, businesses will come, because that's where we are. But they will never, ever build it themselves. At least not big ones.
It took about 15 years to find some fairly effective control handles. This time, lets make sure it's at least 30 or 40 years before it can be figured out.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
This might (slim chance, mind you) approach the realm of sane if we assumed that people actually wanted to learn how to do something, instead of the popular approach of "I just want it to work." There appears to be no concept of costs, the eventual degrade of such a system due to human nature, etc. No matter how you start a system like this, you're going to end up with a governing body at some point. People want order, they want to be told what to do, and there's always people that are willing... and on rare occasion capable of doing such.
Macs, Linux, Windows... who cares, they all suck at something.
I agree with the idea, in theory, but it's not like we can just up and start a "new internet" from scratch easily. The infrastructure would be a massive undertaking... decisions about whether to reuse old protocols or create new ones would have to be decided... hardware support would need to be dealt with... And at some point, because it's bound to happen, some government(s) are going to want to step in and ruin the work all over again. I'm hopeful about the future of net neutrality by a simple line from Serenity: "You can't stop the signal, Mal."
It's not that difficult.
Just have NGOs run IPv6 stack Net2 servers that blacklist any upregulated commercial traffic and run them worldwide.
But you don't have the guts to do that.
All talk, no action.
In my day, ARPA*NET was clean and free of spam.
And then you sold us out for cash.
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I've been telling people to fork off the internet for years
Let's have the internet operated by people working in autonomous groups of varying sizes, working to build group-to-group connections that work independently, and are controlled by terms totally independent of administrative and policymaker regulation.
Oh wait...
Newsflash: The Internet is a series of (mostly) privately-owned and privately-operated tubes. Keep your regulations off my tubes. If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
You don't believe how much porn I've been downloading lately.
Forking would only empower the mega-corps to invest in the locked down interwebs, while letting the free internet rot away into nothingness.
The effect would be the same, the locked down internet will be given priority while the free internet will be given "best effort" status.
oh bull. we ran ARPA*NET on telephone wires and 110 baud modems with RAM and disk that make your iPods look HUGE.
What infrastructure do you mean?
The average household in America or the EU has more computing power than all the servers and workstations and mainframes we had when HTTP first became important.
You're just lazy.
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I hate to say it but I found the linked article to be mostly just a "sensationalist" report with no real backing. Sure the internet as we know it is very much regulated today, and disorganized: hell the thing is equivalent to a tree fort constructed with toothpicks and duct-tape...but unless this author had something new to present, some original idea, this article is just the author complaining. (I am sure he is not the first individual to consider the implications of Fidonet...) Honestly I will maintain my voice for net neutrality and not fear Mr. Big Mean Corporations all the time.
Let's just hope Apache Subversion isn't used.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Ad hominem ignored, when I said infrastructure I meant everything. Pipes, computers, nodes, the whole thing. ARPA didn't have to deal with millions and millions of devices. It had hundreds, if even that. Technology was a lot less refined then. We learned great lessons from it and a lot of what created it was put directly into what the internet is today.
You're comparing a bag of rocks to the Burj Dubai.
That is the proposal I have. Have a line for those who love security, and an opening for those that could care less. Of course, secure control of the plane in both cases. But, let the passengers who don't care about security avoid long lines and groping by government perverts. Perhaps 20% of flights can be scheduled as "Speedy Flights".
I know in some other countries "local/communal" networks are still doing quite well, and usually instead of everyone buying an internet access individually, whole building (condo/apartments/whatever) has a network that is plugged into an ISP via somewhat thicker and more economical connection.
Given that some networks grow to a large size, you get multiple buildings connected together, up to several city blocks. And then you get peering between communal networks, local gaming servers etc.
Biggest issue is, of course, that users still need to connect to "real" internet, so full fork is not possible. The second biggest issue, is that you need a substantial degree of participation. If out of whole subdivision only three/four houses want to fork, while everyone else is happy enough with their current connection, there's no chance of making a dent in ISP's policies or creating an alternative to "normal" connection.
There's no content beyond what's provided via proxy. And I doubt that Blizzard would allow local network to run local servers without paying a large amount of money (which also kills the whole idea -- if you have lots of money, you're okay with non-neutral Internet, cause you can afford it). So, other than local file sharing, which in most cases would be just a pile of pirated stuff, there's nothing to attract regular users.
Maybe Google will actually decide to provide an alternative to telcos, but given their recent alliance with Verizon and overall "don't poke the hornet's nest" attitude (gigabit project is still up in the air, phone services from Gizmo are non-existent, Google Voice doesn't do SMS etc) I kinda doubt it.
So, start connecting to your nerdy neighbors, but forget about becoming an Internet Alternative for a looooong time.
Hyperom.com
You don't have to run it on the primary ports, you can use the backup port assignments. You can specifically disallow commercial devices (like all those toasters and fridges and cars wasting IP resources) on Net2.
Load balancing is nice - but actually putting up the Name servers and running them worldwide on the backup ports is the first step.
Then lease some sat space and some trunk line space.
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Time to bring back the BBSs!
> it is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them
So why not fork the policy makers? In the end, it serves a much higher purpose.
Forget the computers for a second. That's not a problem. Remove your television cables, satellite dishes, phone lines, wireless devices, cellphones from your house. Now ask everyone to do the same to build another internet.
Not so simple anymore.
His solution is to bring back FidoNet (popular on the Amiga!) and other BBS solutions (I just KNEW UUCP wasn't dead!) or overlap WiMax or some part of the spectrum and put something akin to IPv4 or 6 on top of it.
Good fucking luck with that.
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
What we are doing now is tunneling INSIDE the corporate controlled networks to evade detection. Tor, old IPSEC tricks, encrypted BT - all these are methods of moving data around while avoiding the perception to the sniffing devices that data is being moved around, or at least what the data is. The idea that somehow there will be again some network of the people by the people is just a little too HAM radio modemish for me, despite the fact it can work technically.
I get the distinct impression that when Rushkoff said "fork the internet" he really meant the entire thing, including backbone and infrastructure. I'm not saying you're wrong - you're completely right in what you're saying technologically. I'm just saying that if we're going to take Rushkoff literally, we'd have to start from scratch.
I'd also say it's worth taking note that if we want to ensure that the internet doesn't become the mobile phone provider that it so wants to be (in relation to the business models of Comcast/Verizon/Cox/et al) that perhaps starting fresh with new backbone hardware and protocols - that try to prevent what is threatening net neutrality - would be a boon for making things better in the future.
As soon as someone connects our fork to the existing fork of the internet, we'll be reduced to a connected network and not a true fork. You could decide that anyone who connects to the old internet will be blacklisted, but then we'll be reduced to controllers in the same form as those we currently deride. It's a beautiful irony built in to the design of the internet in the first place.
This seems like an issue for which representative democracy was created. We get the laws we ask for, and the reason we're having a debate is because the telecom companies are currently much louder than we are. It's because your average person doesn't give two shits about net neutrality right now, they just want a broadband connection good enough to do what they're used to doing. But, anyone I sit down for 30 minutes and to whom I explain what the underlying debate is out always comes out pissed we haven't forced net neutrality down the throats of all involved already.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
they can easily control the physical cable networks, but, if people start setting up wireless networks with powerful in-home devices, then it would become a real network that could live dynamically. add on top of that concepts like freenet, dns-p2p and so on, then you have a really free internet which has its own life.
Read radical news here
Wasn't that what some of the Republicans were saying? Government control of the internet won't necessarily protect the internet, it might ruin it.
And shouldn't the existing common carrier laws that were designed for phone companies come into play?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
To run a twin clean Net - build the backbone.
That's all we had originally.
We added all that other stuff later.
Let people who care about those other things add those things later - just bind the contracts to make it clean - that will keep out most of the cruft right there.
I remember CERN beamtime being a big thing, and that damned coke machine and coffee pot. People ADDED those. People ADDED webcams.
Don't let the Perfect get in the way of the Future. You just need a backbone architecture that's clean and grow it from there.
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Gopher!
My two cents would be a re-implementation of Freenet.
People who want to use it set up an access point that patches into a wireless p2p network, and lets the machines interconnect, strictly via the freenet protocol, which is sandboxed in the client-server (to keep unwanted attacks out). For longer distance connection, at the expense of speed, a regular phone line could be used, with modems at both ends.
The server runs a directory of logically (therefore geographically) neighboring nodes, and replicates a global directory, showing which site is available on which nodes, as well as replicating part of the content to ensure redundancy.
The client looks up the nodes serving the requested content from the directory, and pulls in the content from as many nodes as possible (to avoid overloading any given link in the network).
This should form a fully connected graph, which also makes it highly redundant, as a downed access point can be simply routed around as long as there's another one in range, and the content is distributed in the entire cloud along with routing information, making it as decentralized as possible, ensuring that no single entity can control the network.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a network engineer, but I take full responsibility for any errors/flaws/fallacies in the description given above. Tear it apart, Slashdot!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Nobody asked you to remove anything.
We just need to get a clean Net2 running on IPv6 and then slowly add back all those things.
Have you never wired your own place?
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'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost. For once the fate of a network — its fairness, its rule set, its capacity for social or economic reformation — is in the hands of policymakers and the corporations funding them — that network loses its power to effect change.
The fate of the Internet was in the government's hands the whole time it was ARPAnet, and it went directly from their into the hands of the corporations who, in Rushkoff's view, fund policymakers. All of this was well before the "net neutrality" debate began, and much of it was before the term "the Internet" for the particular batch of systems was even coined.
If we were to accept Rushkoff's premise, then, the Internet was doomed before it even existed and we should have all just ignored it and made our own, with neither corporate nor government involvement, using neither public nor corporate infrastructure (I'm not sure if Rushkoff's idea of "corporations" includes for-profit businesses operated under forms other than the corporate form -- e.g., sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, etc.; if it doesn't, its not clear what the meaningful distinction of the corporate form is, if it does, I'm not sure how you avoid "corporations" having disproportionate influence over it even if you do keep government out of it, since the people with the most incentive to put money into the infrastructure will be those who have a profit-earning business that uses the network in one way or another, and the owners of the infrastructure or going to have absolute control if the government is kept completely out.)
Really, Rushkoff's analysis seems to be entirely disconnected from the history (and technical architecture in his suggestion that FidoNet is somehow decentralized in a way that the internet is not) of the Internet in assessing the problem, and as a result his solution is "let's just surrender the existing Internet to corporate control with no governance, and build a new one just like it, with no governance plan, and hope that magic fairies keep it free."
It its unregulated and commercially useful, corporate control will follow.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
If this guy is right, then net neutrality is only a small part of a bigger problem that deserves more attention from everyone (money has far too much influence on politicians). Fix that and the benefits will be far more extensive than "only" the Internet.
Yes they are made in a cage by hamsters in my apt with Platinum plated connectors. U can't get better than this And no outsourcing or child hamster labor is used.
You are wrong on most of your arguments. Take the xray scanners at the airports. They "randomly" send people to get xrayed, doing them no good, yet, 95%+ just go along with it. They don't care how they work. They don't care how much damage those devices are causing or could be causing. They don't care that their risk of dying from the scanner is higher than from a terrorist blowing up the plane (based on government's own numbers!). They don't care....
So I say, do not overestimate people.
You've just described walling ourselves off into a tiny techie ghetto. Who do you suppose will use your Net2, as you describe it? How will your proposal actually help anything?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
There are other internets out there such as community wireless networks. Ones that are popular and cover a whole city are quite resourceful. Direct peer to peer networking is free and more like a hobby.
Other than that its all older tech like dialup/BBS, or amateur/CB radio where you have the power to communicate how you want to where you want without the commercial/government middle man.
US Begins Sophisticated Wireless Jamming Project:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/04/1641244/US-Begins-Sophisticated-Wireless-Jamming-Project
Soooo, yeah, Freenet. And funnily enough, both Rushkoff and Freenet completely ignore the PHYSICAL TRANSPORTATION MEDIUM.
Freenet assumes you have an Internet connection. It runs on the Internet. Rushkoff, on the other hand, provided an "super simple" example where he relied entirely on phone lines. Like that's somehow better.
Now... he DOES offer some alternatives, like HAM radio, Wi-max, that jazz. And an ad-hoc mesh network of everyone's wireless router WOULD be super neat. But such a thing can't compete with physical lines going across the continent and across the ocean. And that's really expensive.
No my friend, we will not bulldoze the city so we can build a utopia on an open field. And this is one of the biggest reasons that I really don't want the Internet to be fucked up; it's going to exist that way for a very long time.
I don't think that "forking the internet" is all that bad of an idea if we want to keep it "open".
The way to fork the internet, while maintaining accessibility is through tunnels.
Basically a specific open-source secure tunnel bridge application should be created which can connect to various different portals into the "new internet", and the list of "tunnel portals" should be maintained via some peer-to-peer/signed method much like BGP but with an authoritative signature.
This way servers and websites can join the "new network" exclusively, and have a web plugin which would be able to know how to use this "new internet" and connect to sites through these portals until they're able to join this network by choice through their provider.
I would think it would help create something from the ground up on IPV6, and at the same time I would implement a new form of "sendmail protocol" which leverages encryption and a public / private key system to not allow people to send you spam unless you've added their public key to your email program. People can put their public keys on websites so if you want to send them an email you can grab their key, but unless they've added your public key to their local settings they can't get email to you.
Sure, lots of people want to be able to receive email from ANY source, to attract new business or whatever, but that's where form mail on websites is handy and also having a phone handy. You can call someone and say, "i met you at CES and want to send you an email, can you add my key?" And if they want to talk to you, they can enter your email address and grab your public key from your website. If you dont want to ever talk to anyone or have them talk to you to get emails, use a form email system on your website.
How many stories do I have to find where municipalities decided they had waited long enough and started to roll out their own fiber-to-the-home networks, only to be hit by a lawsuit from one of the Big Companies citing unfair competition? You have to be a Business (written with a capital) in order to do anything that a Business Might Ever Do or else it's unfair competition.
I would like to add that GlobalJak is in holding pattern. So for now, iis.se, nominet.org.uk, and switch.ch are sacrosanct (until the extradition becomes active, then GlobalJak is underway).
to register sex.fork and (just for the typo's I promise) sex.pork
It's pretty hard to create an alternative physical network. I suggest we just rebrand the web (e.g. OpenWeb), enforce encryption everywhere, utilise existing networks and decentralise the root DNS servers.
. . . who, exactly?
Newsflash: The Internet is a series of (mostly) privately-owned and privately-operated tubes.
...that run over public land. Sounds like a utility to me. They better get use to some regulations and rules governing how they operate if they want to run their damn cables all over our commons.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Put a couple gateways to the old nasty internet so you still have legacy download access and bada-boom. Anyone wanna go ad-hoc with me in San Diego?
No, I said most machines can host 2 net cards or 2 ports - run the clean version on the unused IPv6 stack that is in most OS and use it before they pollute it with commercial upregulation to higher priority for "valued customers".
All your old stuff will keep working until you switch it over.
How is that not technically feasible?
Do you think they'll GIVE you a nice clean twin Internet? Of course they won't. You have to build it and run clean on it.
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Like using smartphones for a mesh/P2P network without involving the carriers at all. It would be a very spotty and dynamic "Internet" with totally different contraints, but it would be unregulated and totally grassroots. Physical distance would be expensive for data to travel (at least for large bandwidth), but this would make any centrally controlled resources very hard to implement, which would be good.
Of course you don't have enough control over the radios in smartphones to do that. Or do you?
You can't stop the signal? Did we see the same cut of "Serenity?" They stopped it for years. It took a multimillion-dollar geek outpost, a Reaver invasion, a dead pilot, a moved nerve cluster and a minor superhero to get the signal out.
BTW, the signal has already been stopped. Have you tried to run a mail server or a web server from your home lately?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
this is like saying the universe is broken, lets fork it.
Isn't that what IPv6 is for?
Let the politics have IPv4. By the time they notice the other tubes, it will be about time for IPv7+ or IPIP (inter-planetary IP)
You can, right now, today. How much would it cost you to string up a cable to your neighbor's house or set up a wireless link? How much would it cost them to do the same? Once you have a few hundred houses, you'll need someone to spend some time configuring it all.
I'm imagining that latency would be pretty bad for anything outside of your ZIP code on a 1-house = 1-hop network topology, not to mention that if you want a global network, someone's going to have to pay for the house-to-house connection from a house on one side of the (Atlantic, Pacific, etc.) to a house on the other, which is going to be a pretty big cost.
Natural Monopolies of network service providers.
Network communication is a vast and popular societal service, almost everyone uses it, and yet it is dominated on the consumer-end by Natural Monopolies. Coming-up with an idea that can not only compete with net discrimination, but also the natural monopolies created by physical lines, would be quite a feat. For the same reasons roads aren't owned by companies, network lines shouldn't either.
Major network mediums should be owned and controlled by the state/federal governments in the same way roads typically are, then service providers would sell their services over that medium like cab drivers, to extend the road analogy. If the comcasts of the world didn't own the lines, there would be some tough questions that would need answers, but open-market competition would be a viable and most likely excellent solution to the problem. Net Neutrality would become a selling-point of providers, and if it truley was superior to Net Discrimination, then it would thrive in a fair market.
As a knowledgeable community of technical experts (slash-dotters), it is in-fact our responsibility to push forward these ideas. If technically inclined and concerned members of our society like us don't take action to correct this chronic and looming problem, who will... I believe the real solution to this problem is for us to get proactive about "socializing" communication lines. I understand "socializing" has a negative connotation for most, due to it's implied link to socialism. Yet, if you evaluate my argument, you will notice it is actually an argument FOR capitalism. The problem is a break-down of capitalism in disguise. Capitalism can solve this problem if governments did their jobs properly and broke-up monopolistic tendencies by ensuring fair markets of exchange. To do that, governments need to erect and own the physical medium, just as they do with roads. WE, as concerned and knowledgeable member of society need to influence our governmental bodies to do so. THAT, is the solution.
A solid and simple start would be for people to write their local representatives regarding this issue.
You ran all those phone lines yourselves?
Because that is what we would need to do, if they own the pipe they can stop any chatter you want to make across it.
Okay, so what will this brand new shiny Internet actually DO for you? Who will use it? What content will it host? Why would anyone host content on it, when no one is using it? Why would anyone use it, when no one is hosting content on it?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Making a DIY Internet isn't going to happen, and nothing that has been said in this thread is likely to convince me otherwise.
You want to defend the current Internet? You only need to do two things.
1. Make sure the government enforces a strict net neutrality law
2. Make sure the government doesn't abuse their enforcement
If either of these sounds unlikely, they're still orders of magnitude easier than trying to convince hundreds of thousands of people to participate in building another 'net.
See, that's what we did with the original Internet.
We hung stuff on it.
Like HTTP and FTP and so on.
That's the beauty - it's whatever you WANT.
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IPV6 means we have plenty of addresses, so no worries about running out of those. The real thing to replace will be all the phone lines and routing equipment.
Again, my point is, if you're running encrypted, nobody really knows what is in those pipes.
Other than the NSA and MilInt, which is why they run it thru their devices.
Leasing satellite space isn't hard, nor is leasing cable fractions. There's a lot of unused cable trunk lines out there and companies willing to sell it to you, or lease it out.
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people use the internet for the same reason they use the phone network, because it connects them to those they wish to talk with. The problem with forking the net is that you lose all of that connectedness. As for control, someone has to pay the bills to keep the net up. Either it's government or it's business. We need to ensure it stays in the hands of government, because we (in theory) control that. We have -no- direct control of business. If you don't like the direction that government is going then fix it, don't walk away and hope for something better. Better things only happen for those who work for them.
Most of you don't know the history, and are therefor doomed to repeat it.
For much of my life I have spent fighting the Ma Bell / AT&T monopoly. From the monopolistic control over Unix to all long distance services, to hicap pipes.
It wasn't until there breakup in the 80's that direct physical connection of modems was even allowed on to the phone networks.
Well we are down to the last few companies controlling the last mile, and many of the backbones. Legislation will just further this till we are all locked down to a few Internet services and the rest will be squeezed out or severely hampered.
IP TV and Cable TV over IP will be the largest changes coming. And companies like Cox and AT&T find themselves in a conflict of Interest.
Providing last mile Internet while at the same time watching it eat away at their cash cow, cable TV.
I think we can provide a VPN like tunneling service across the public Internet over to a private network. Most corporations already do this for their employees.
Getting that last mile has always been the hard part.
We could then make this private network host content only available on that network, but would anyone want too?
I mean if you are going to invest in a web server you'd want it to be accessible to as many users as possible.
Still I have some ideas I may be willing to discuss with an NDA.
For an interesting read checkout my ecip.com
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
It's a bird, NO! a plane?
NO!
It's FIDONet!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If you truly want to build a second internet, including all of the physical communications infrastructure, you'd have to ban large binaries otherwise it will just become a big music and movie sharing network.
But if you ban large binaries, then you're already violating the net neutrality you were running away from.
And of course a simple binary ban wouldn't be sufficient - there are a multitude of ASCII-only encodings available. And I'm sure someone has already come up with a text based steganography method that lets you hide any data in an arbitrarily large body of text.
So then, you'll have to have per-user bandwidth constraints.
Perhaps within a city you can get by with relatively short-haul Wifi hops to give decent bandwidth throughout the city, but it's the long-haul hops that are going to be expensive - who's going to have the money to pay $8000/month for a 20 mile point-to-point T3 to bridge the gap to the nearest town?
Who the fuck is this jackass and why should I listen to him? His wikipedia page is unimpressive.
Replace the physical infrastructure first. Launch a communications satellite with private donations, those that donate get a set number of connections as per the amount of money donated. Make it invitation only. use high altitude balloons with a wimax type wireless system with no encumbering patents. Mimic a secure social structure in the process, cell based, etc.
What is needed is a protocol which is topology-independent, self-discovering, self-managing, self-healing to damage.
It's a mathematically tractable problem.
To get privacy, add inherent encryption of all traffic, and forwardable packets to mask sources/destinations (built-in proxying).
Add a naming scheme which is similarly flexible for human interaction.
It's not all that hard. If there's a programmer who really, really wants to do this, and not waste my time, respond here. I have the outline of such a proposal in hand. I did the maths years ago, but it's as valid as ever.
You use phone lines?
I don't even have one in my house.
I have cable service that my phone uses.
My neighbor next door doesn't have phone lines.
She has Satellite service for her TV that her phone uses.
And there's lots of cell phone towers.
You speak of phone lines - but modern Internet does NOT use them.
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While it sounds great to talk about such things as what he proposes, he unfortunately lacks even a rudimentary understanding of what's required to create an "Internet". The fact is that we have only had "free" internet in the past because of the companies that own it being generous. It takes millions of dollars and an enormous amount of work to even link up two cities. It takes guys digging trenches and/or running wires and putting up poles or putting a satellite in orbit, and that's hard, dirty, and expensive work.
It's exactly like the numerous claims that you hear about returning to a Gold Standard for our currency. It sounds great and makes good press and all, but when you ask them how to actually do it, they fall silent. Like the Internet, we've gotten ourselves in too deep now to really change or go back to the way it was, short of inventing an entirely new system that hasn't existed before. But that also doesn't magically come out of thin air.
He wants ideas? Well, sorry to say, none that exist are free, and as long as it costs someone money to make it happen in this world, they will pass on the cost and control it because they own it.
You accept these forces ruling your life but not your internet... Pathetic
This sounds like a great idea! A couple years ago I tried to get some people interested in building a community network based on some of the concepts from the Wellington Internet eXchange. Nobody wanted to touch it.
As soon as the people try to flex their muscle, they are immediately shouted down by the corporations. The laws in the USA have become structured such that corporations have all the power and the people have none. Just ask the citizens of Philadelphia, PA or Wilson, NC.
Both of these cities, acting as agents of their citizens, were attacked by the corporations. In the case of Philly, they got squashed. Wilson's system is still alive, but not for the lack of effort on Time Warner's part. At one point TW had someone answering the phone for one of the congressmen the night before a vote. It was only thanks to the dedication of a small group of citizens, many of whom had to take off work to attend the oddly scheduled committee meetings, that the system is still online. We know that at any point TW will try again to scuttle it.
And there wasn't 'an internet' already out there, easy to use, read set up, that everyone in the world (give or take) can access. Never underestimate laziness.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Forking the internet won't work.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why don't we just fork the government? It'd be just as easy
Have you never wired your own place?
I've wired my own house and a bunch of reasonably large networks. That's hardly an issue. The problem is hooking up to the outside. I'm damn sure not wiring the whole town, nor am I going to drop that submarine cable to the mainland. You can go radio - and everybody needs to realize that Amateur radio already has a low speed, low bandwidth, low infrastructure cost system already in place - that basically does email and simple video. Given frequency and power constraints (controlled by the Government) it will never be the high speed, high bandwidth arrangement that the Internet currently is.
Light (terrahertz radiation) suffers from the same issues as radio with even more problems with range.
So I don't see how you're going to wire the big thing together.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
> See, that's what we did with the original Internet.
That's a VERY different value of "we". That "we" was technically literate. The current "we" isn't.
We're already wired.
Internet is literally running over the following:
a. Wireless
b. Satellite
c. Cable
d. Microwave
e. Power lines.
Your problem is you're stuck on an AOL vision of today when that day has already come and gone.
Most people around the world use Internet cafes that get their signal from satellite.
Stop thinking old school and get with the fact that it's already 2011 and the future is already here.
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What infrastructure do you mean?
Satellites, intercontinental underwater fiber cables, hubs with huge traffic capacity (dozens or hundreds of Gbps), etc. Computing power is almost completely irrelevant for this.
ARPANET was dependent on the telephone companies, the same which are now the ISPs that are trying to fuck net neutrality. If you rely on their backbone they are still in control.
You're just delusional if you think all this is a matter of installing a $50 mesh router on your home.
Dilbert RSS feed
Why we don't just lobby the policymaker to make policies in favor of the citizens? We still live in a democracy and the politicians are paid by us and they should be working for us. Of course it would make some of us go up from their chairs, write letters and actual vote. It's sure harder then just write a blog and whine how corrupt and broken everything is.
If we give up on the way democracy is suppose to work then we have way bigger problems then the internet. Join the EFF, vote the pirate party, join the OSF, write to your politicians.
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
When hearing how government/military networks had been compromised, my first thought was that; with their resources, why not develop a proprietary network protocol? I mean, yeah, all routers, switches, cards, possibly cables would be needed...but the US military budget is way out of whack with everything else...they have the resources. I also entertained this notion on a private level. I think it's fundamentally sound but untenable...maybe if we started now though, in 5-10 years the idea (by virtue of a slew of other good idea) could be implemented. It's much easier to dismiss the idea than to give it serious consideration. Fear of failure is a self fulfilling prophesy. Can't never could and so forth...
It's only a matter of time before the law requires that any encrypted communication involve a license for one end. Banks, etc, witll be licensed https servers, the rest will be outlawed.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Most people don't use their backbone.
In most big cities the backbone is already running over non-telephone circuits.
The question is, if you want to offer a non-tiered alternative, what preconditions you need.
You need an encrypted method of transmission - ok, IPv6 with encryption will work fine.
You need some method that connects to the major usage - power lines, cable, satellite, telephone, whatever.
And you need to be able to deliver it.
My neighbor runs a Wireless-N encrypted router next door, using her satellite provider. The problem arises when the provider tiers service.
Somehow you have to bulk buy non-tiered access on some major trunks - what they are isn't that important.
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Pitchfork some of them, say I.
Do you hand-encode your cellphone?
Doubt it.
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It's only a matter of time before the law requires that any encrypted communication involve a license for one end. Banks, etc, witll be licensed https servers, the rest will be outlawed.
You mean like in Saudi Arabia?
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The fact is that we have only had "free" internet in the past because of the companies that own it being generous.
That's not true - no one is being generous, all of the telecom providers are compensated for the use of their infrastructure. Unless, of course, when you said "in the past", you meant back in the pre-AOL internet when only universities, some government agencies, and a few research oriented companies were online and most people that were online at the time *were* online due to the generosity of their university or employer.
It is true that such infrastructure is hugely expensive to build so requires many millions of users to pay for it (or fewer rich users, as in the Internet2, but even then they are buying facilities from the Telco's so don't have freedom from government interference).
If you want to create something revolutionary, create a store and forward message system that can run on mobile devices and can transfer messages via bluetooth. It's akin to carrier pigeon, but it might actually work.
Usenet is a store and forward message system that used to run on UUCP and dial-up connections. Bluetooth has the RFCOMM protocol. I think it would work.
Use low speed, low bandwidth Amateur radio for the long distances. You've heard of bootleg stations? Make nodes directional and aim them. I'd be willing to use frequencies I'm not allowed to legally use if I'm using a directional transmitter.
They don't have to know what you're transmitting. All they have to know is that they *don't* know what you're transmitting, and that you're transmitting a lot of this "unknown" stuff. Then they throttle you down to 5kbps.
Have you seen what happens on facebook, twitter, (insert any of a massive number of "me too, must make noise or believe life is not worth living" websites)?
The Internet has been royally forked for many years now.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
"The moment an activist's debate began was the moment the activist's debate was lost."
If paradigm applies, insert foot into mouth.
1) The "Internet" does not exist. It is an idea. Like heaven.
2) Networks belong to the people who own them, generally corporate shareholders. Not to you.
3) Historically, it has worked out that paying customers want to purchase access to networks that exchange traffic with other networks using internetworking protocols. There have been plenty of bumps along the road (The CIX, peering disputes, DDOS, etc.) but it has generally worked out, because providing "Internet access" is what consumers want.
4) #3 only happened because of a continual fight to avoid Federal regulation of the Internet during the 1990s. We had a ton of threats (like the Communication Decency Act).
5) Localities typically grant monopoly franchises to copper pair, coax, and fiber last-mile providers. If you don't like your last-mile access, please go to your local franchise board rather than providing the Federal government with legislative weaponry they will no doubt use to tear up the Internet in the name of "net neutrality".
6) "Net neutrality", like porn, is in the eye of the beholder. Did I mention how much we fought against the Communications Decency Act? It was because porn is in the eye of the beholder.
Who is this jerkoff guy and why do we care about what hes got to say?
Create a self-forming mesh network device (preferably solar powered). It can use a wifi-like technology. This is important for true democratic freedoms. Its power is not controlled by a central service. There is no central router to control access. All it requires is a little bit of spectrum. This is where all the tv spectrum should have gone in the US, to the people, not the corporations. I've been too lazy to do this myself, but have been thinking about it for a while. A few inconveniences in rural areas, but all can be over come. Our government paid ridiculous sums of money so that people could manage the digitial television switch just so that media wouldn't loose customers. Such a device would not cost much more and would be a statement for freedom and democracy because it would not be controllable.
"He who writes the code, chooses the license" Oh wait, wrong monopoly.
The Internet was created by policymakers and corporations, and spent its first 15-25 years (depending on when you start counting it the "Internet") in the hands of no one else. When the Federal government divested the Merit Corporation that was the government vehicle for managing the Internet, it became even more in the hands of corporations rather than even policymakers.
Moreover, the only power that can stop corporations from doing whatever they want ("profit and power to perpetuate it") with the Internet is policymakers. Treating them as the enemy is giving up any claim on power over them.
Rushkoff's treatment of Internet governance is so naive as to seem downright autistic.
--
make install -not war
How do you think out of band management works?
I think you know nothing about modern or otherwise internet.
Wireless.
Paranoid Linux.
Little Brother.
Cory Doctorow.
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
And how are you going to prevent the trunk providers from doing what they want? Effectively you'd be on the same internet we're on now, just with a different ISP.
Let it go, man. You're not going to get a forked internet, completely independent of the current internet, if you rely on parts of the current internet.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
f. RONJA
Not governed by radio spectrum authorities, but still cable free.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Imagine local users polling their 5kbpts for long range connections. There are interesting advantages to decentralization.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Large amounts of cans, rope, microphones and speakers an a dailup modem. On each point a can, with builtin speaker and microphone and that connected to an old 56K8 dailupmodem. Cross talk might be an issue, but that will probably very easy to fix ;)
'The moment the "net neutrality" debate began was the moment the net neutrality debate was lost.
Once Congress and the commercial interests that fund Congress get involved (e.g., U.S. Chamber of Commerce), any hope of any manner of neutrality is lost to the money of lobbyists and special interests.
With the corporate takeover of the US Government how can anyone expect for net neutrality to survive once the lobbyists get involved?
It is no longer Republicans and Democrats, it is now individual citizens vs. corporate interests. And it looks like corporate interests have won. We no longer have a Republic. We no longer have a Democracy. We now have a kakistocracy run by corporate interests.
No matter the form of the internet, as long as it is possible for me to send a bit of data to you across it, then it is theoretically possible for me to privately communicate with you using it.
The speed and convenience with which I can do so depends on the form of the internet and the quality of the system that we use to disguise our communication.
A two step plan for creating a totally separate Internet just for "cool" people:
1. Get an IPv6 allocation from your RIR.
2. Find an ISP to throw you a BGP session and some bandwidth.
Once again ye shall find yerself participating in a network amoung peers of clueful operators and enthusiasts totally isolated from todays hoarde of botnet zombie infested clueless lusers who foolishly choose not not to spend every waking hour on slashdot. At least for the next 2-3 years :-)
Enter the Monkeysphere, a project that leverages the GPG web of trust to build trust paths for secure browsing (among other uses). From the site:
Don't worry. It's Joss writing. I'm sure Wash is only Buffy-dead.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I'd say either the net is already forked, or we are...
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
i could do it with two empty cans and used shoelace.
it's all about recycling these days;)
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
I have been thinking "Credit Union" for air travel but TFA inspired me to go further.
The idea is to establish a "Network Union" or "Net Union" entirely serving its own members.
This NetUnion could then afford its own micro-sattllite.
Every member gets as many GUIDs as needed
Every member will have to have a "satellite modem" or have an arrangement with a member who has a satellite modem within his/her WiFi range, to carry her/his traffic
All data is encrypted: System A encrypts outbound traffic to B using B's public key and vice-versa
The satellite does the broadcasting and receiving
The satellite could route traffic to other NetUnions
The satellite stores nothing except for forwarding
Other can add other ideas to improve it.
"Co-operatives" existed long time ago and still do. The big corporations took a large bite out them over the years and may be its time to do things more "Co-operatively" and "Credit Union" way.
BTW, Credit Union of air travel would be an air liner and air ports wholly owned by members. I know this will be obvious but ...
How Ironic that we the people being the members of the Union/Republic have to consider being members of specialized smaller Unions to when the big Union is supposed to be looking after its members!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
Looks like it is already built.
The reason we subjugate ourselves to law is to better procure justice. If law does not accomplish this purpose then it m
This guy had a much more likely proposal for the future of the free Internet: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/900yq/using_gps_to_mesh_route_the_planet/
Everyone will be carrying smart phones with Wi-Fi in a couple years. If we got off IP addresses and started using GPS addresses, that's a *lot* of democratic wireless routers.
As soon as transfer of information via QT becomes possible, peer-2-peer networking will become a serious competitor to the internet. Right now, everything is on the internet - freenet, i2p, etc.. Governments and corporates own the pipes and therefore have great control over what goes through those pipes.
Let me show you my thing; it's the most advanced on the planet.
I was referring to the original Internet, because in the vast majority of cases like this, the person who is writing the article is nostalgic for the old days before commercialism took over. But to make anything that functions like that requires an immense gift by the company/ies doing it or a similar gift by someone with a silly amount of money to waste.
http://www.xkcd.com/841/
(esp. the alt text.)
i had an idea to create a second unregulated network independent of the internet that was linked through wifi, some kind of bridging point to point using a beam antenna. anyone could join, any content, could be used as a backup to the internet, and may be usable in a major disaster, if the diy instructions, included battery backups for some components. starting out with hobbyiests. not sure if wifi could handle the bandwidth. if you could get such a network established, in major disasters it could be used to distribute information, via websites, video, audio, text, maybe even a voip telephone system. no censorship, no govt or corporate control. someone could probably even create some kind of out of the box product to connect the masses to it. increasing the size of the network, in much the way that participation in file sharing networks work, hmm. probably requires a lot more thought. and not likely to find more that a few interested users, but maybe. could be an underground network.
I'll tentatively agree with Rushkoff by asserting the internet has already been forked thanks to geography.
You see, we've luckily never created one world government. Indeed, the internet has helped prevent that by revealing the mind boggling & fundamentally alien stupidity of our fellow humans. It then follows the internet can stagnate in one country while flourishing elsewhere. You should therefore give donations to organizations that'll fight for net neutrality in Europe and Asia.
There are big advantages to starting companies inside the U.S. instead of Europe, well mostly access to capital. Yet, there are enormously successful European tech companies, like Skype. If Europe has net neutrality but the U.S. does not, well that'll create more such companies.
Otoh, mobile phone operators are completely out of control in Europe. Pay-as-you-go in France is over 50 cents per min, for example. Soo who knows how it'll turn out, but we know the next battle ground.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet open, free and neutral. built through peer to peer agreements where everyone can join the network by providing their own connection, thus extending the network and gaining connectivity to all members. 11.554 active members in Spain and counting...
It will be interesting to see how far Google goes with their fiber-to-the-home initiative.
They are one of the few companies with the money to compete with the ingrained telcos and cable companies.
If they can get good penetration in a few major cities and purchase enough rights of ways (from power companies?) between them to run fiber, they can be a serious competitor.
And then, it will be curious to see how far their "do no evil" motto goes when it comes to giving equal access to competitors traffic.
Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow wrote _Unwirer_ back in 2003 or so.
It posits a (then) future where the corporates had such a lock on the US Internet that concerned citizens need to take some techo-guerilla action.
Worth reading for inspiration.
To fork "the internet" and create a so-called "citizen's internet" is one of the most cretin idea ever brainfarted. The fact it got so much public support on left-dominated forums such as Slashdot is just further proof of that :-)
As usual, nothing bigger than a local network for an apartment complex or a few houses can really be done by *citizens* themselves. They will need an agent - which can only be either a municipality or a corporation.
If it's a corporation we're back to square one.
If it's a municipality we're talking about using public funds to compete on what's supposed to be free market (regulated, but still free). I know many lefties are actually pushing for that, but the question is where exactly will such enterprise lead? To me the answer is clear.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
One question which is very important; will the lack of net neutrality affect latency or bandwidth?
Bandwidth will always tend to grow, and it's less of a concern to me about that. But latency tends to fixed, and I'd fight any bias towards the dichotomy in that case.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Already got an infrastructure in place. Latency isn't that great for online gaming but it's open, unfiltered and uncensored: I'm posting a 120GB Hard Drive full of stuff to a friend this afternoon. Assuming it gets there 16 hours later that's 960Gb / 57600s = 17Mb/s . Not too shabby
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Have you tried to run a mail server or a web server from your home lately?
I'm doing that, fwiw.
I work at an ISP. I do all the core and edge stuff you would need to "fork the Internet" as part of my normal routine.
Wireless is not an option as it's overloaded and heavily regulated.
Wired is not an option as laying fiber is _expensive_. And even if you manage to cable your neighborhood, then what? And even if you get connected to another city, then what? Repeat until you need undersea cables.
Sure, you could just rent dark fibers or active wavelengths. Or you could have everyone chip in with a bit of money to try and fund it. But then you are back where you started. _Someone_ has to make the decisions. And if a law is passed to regulate your forked Internet, then what? If you refuse, they will simply drive over and switch stuff off.
tl;dr:
a) The Internet has always been regulated by people; both via technical and policy means
b) There is a reason why no one is forking roads and bridges when a toll-booth is set up: That shit is expensive
law, as a concept, is morally neutral
I disagree. There are two classes of law concerning human social interaction: natural law (laws derived from human nature), and artificial law (laws derived from political power). Natural law concerns the rules of life which human beings understand by instinct, i.e. all normal human beings understand that it's wrong to lie, steal, cheat, and initiate physical force against others -- even the ones who succumb to temptation. Even a toddler understands that it's wrong to hit others or steal their toys, even though some let temptation get the best of them -- and they know this because they understand what it means to be a victim (out of simple human nature). The tiny minority of human beings who honestly don't understand natural law are considered mentally ill.
Artificial law concerns the rules of the elite who control government, and can be summed up as anything which goes beyond natural law, i.e. no human being knows by instinct that it's "wrong" to (let's pick an obvious example) smoke pot. That is something that must be learned from others, or rather, imposed by others -- via threat and group-think.
The key difference between natural and artifical law is that natural law employs and permits coercion (physical force) ONLY in self-defense, while artifical law employs coercion in offense (and in fact requires it).
A subset of the laws government enforces concern natural law, and indeed, it is natural law which provides the initial justification for every government. But clearly, natural law represents only a tiny subset of what government does, and counts for only a shrivel of government's enormous budget.
Understanding the difference between natural and artifical law, we can conclude that no law is truly "morally neutral", because any given law serves the purpose of either initiating coercion (morally wrong), or defending against it (morally right). Although you may debate the merits and drawbacks of artifical law, I don't believe you can argue that it is "morally neutral". It is a compromise, and that compromise is morality, because of the simple fact that artifical law requires an initiation of force (morally wrong). Morality and the law are two completely unrelated concepts, despite what the elite who control government would like you to believe.
I hate to start a new thread when there are so many already, but this idea doesn't seem to have been suggested yet. What about rethinking this under the conditions of latency not being an issue? I'm thinking of distribution of large, never-updated files. Games, movie downloads (Both legal and otherwise), linux distros, images, etc. Just about anything over a few meg or so. It's not a replacement for the internet, but it would take a lot of the strain off it. Here's me idea:
1. Anyone who wants to join needs a computer with a wireless interface, some software, and a really big hard drive. A terabyte, more if possible. Storage is really cheap these days. Two terabytes is easily affordable.
2. Content is identified by a hash, or a hash of hashes for a large file. Think of the old ed2k hashes, though updated to use something more secure than md4. Same princible.
3. You tell your node you want file 0x1234....cdef (Actual hash 128 bits). You can get this hash off of a conventional internet site, via IM, email, etc. It's only 128 bits, it doesn't matter how much your connection is throttled.
4. Your node broadcasts out a message: 'Anyone got file 0x1234...cdef?' Nearby nodes (This would use plain old 802.11g, though probably not TCP/IP on top of it) check their database on their big drives. If they have the file (or file part), they offer to send it. If not, they wait a second or so, listening for any other node that has it. If none replies, they rebroadcast with a decrimented hop count. If they file has to go through them to get to the original requester, they can store a cache of it too.
5. Requester hopefully gets the file part. And caches it should anyone else in the vicinity want it.
Nodes may also connect via conventional internet to improve long-range transmission. I'd suggest making it function as an extension to bittorrent, at least at first. A mobile client would also be desireable.
It strikes me as the IPV6 cluster-f^&K unfolding would be a great opportunity to fork the Internet, and perhaps fix some other short sighted issues with the old internet.
How about decentralized Internet infrastructure that does not depend on the ISP system for such things as dynamic IP address or DNS servers and registration? A free secure cloud, if you will, that will be hard for any one party to mess with.
The difference is in how you organize the corporate structure. For example, the Green Bay Packers are a corporation, but it's structured in a non-profit way that haven't left Green Bay for "greener" pastures.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The Orwellian-named "net neutrality" government power-grab needs to be resisted, the ideal being fallback connectivity infrastructure that is 100% privately owned (and that obviously excludes reliance on any commie phone or cable monopolies that in reality are just branches of the state). Solar panels and a wireless mesh router on every roof, a cache proxy server in every basement, and a gun in every home is the prerequisite for any hope of human freedom.
(Signed: Alex Libman's sockpuppet.)
This point cannot be made too often. Most supposed democracies are oligarchies ruled by a power elite who use elections as a PR tactic.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I had this idea for building a system which allows for the sharing of hierarchies of things across systems. It was in response to the possible demise of Flickr. I called it InterTubes.
The idea is that you create a container (a tube) which holds stuff... photos, blog posts, etc. The "tube" is really just a text file with agreed upon syntax describing the files and their attributes. You trade access to your tubes with friends via ANY communications channel you can find (including the Internet).
The real magic (and hand waving because I don't have ANY code to show for this) is that the final system would synchronize changes to the files (and metadata) whenever you told it to (or via schedule)... You could also build adapters to fit to the tubes, an example would be an adapter that creates thumbnails, or smaller sized images instead of the full size originals held in a tube... this would make sharing LARGE numbers of photos with friends and family easier and quicker in terms of transfer time and size.
Supporting the syncing of metadata would mean that a family member or friend could note on their copy of the tube that they like a certain photo, or who is in it, etc.... and that info could be synced back to the original source.
IR lasers are better.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
It's worth repeating here.
I think the first steps should be pretty clear:
(1) New internet over old internet. Like IPv4 over IPv4, we should be able to connect to the new network over the infrastructure of the old. That doesn't mean that we have to use the old infrastructure, but that we can if we have the capability and inclination. This is necessary for mitigation and/or migration.
(2) Tor-ified e-mail. It should be a simple matter to set up a mail client that works over Tor and that incorporates full public key encryption. It might take some jiggering, but you should at the very least be able to set up a makeshift listserv that has RSS feeds that update with the latest messages. Publish it on your computer in an RSS feed the listserv is set up to check, cryptographically sign it and encrypt it with their public key, and the listserv decrypts it, reencrypts it with each recipient's public key, and the recipients retrieve it via RSS password protected by HTTP basic access authorization. You now have a message that you can be sure came from the sender and has not been tampered with--so if it's spam, you know who the spammer is, and you do not know who is sending messages unless you're the recipient. You would probably also want a list of message-IDs for the messages downloaded to be kept on each recipient computer, so that the messages can be removed from the queue once the other computer receives them. I'm sure this could be streamlined, but this method works now.
(Please do not construe this opinion as representing that of my employers)
The only idea that I have heard of that has any sort of merit is to create a sub-net of BBS type sites like in the days before you had a commercial Internet. This would require leased lines from the phone company to do correctly(or maybe Google or whomever will still give you a bare link in 5-10 years). But I suspect most people will want speed over any and all other concerns about privacy and free access.
Would you go back to a 56K modem? I sure wouldn't.
I have a solution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(file_sharing)
Why would you lease lines from the telco rather than running encrypted links over the existing internet? If the idea is to be free of government interference, then leased lines won't accomplish that.
Yup. So do you.
Oh, no POTS infrastructure? Must be newly built. Most houses have lots.
We call those phone lines. They connect phones, in lines, using cables. Phone lines. And, you know, your calls go from the cable service to other people using... phone lines. They connect the cable providers to everyone else.
Are you sure? Most houses have at least one the builders installed.
No, the satellite service is downlink only, it requires a phone line. Unless she has some completely new sort of service that isn't available elsewhere, or she owns a communications service company with an uplink facility.
Connected by... phone lines.
We must not have any of that modern Internet here on planet Earth.
Around here, the long-haul Internet is composed primarily of cables owned by telephone companies... those links are commonly called phone lines. Because they are, you know, linear. And owned by telephone companies.
Nope, no phone lines. I'm literally wired into a cable router, comrade.
See, in America, we have this thing called Choice.
Look into it.
Many cell towers are connected by various other devices - like the ones you find on top of mountain peaks - those use microwaves, satellites, etc.
Choice. It's what's for supper.
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Hahahaha, you have made a very good point. The GOP and their libertarian lapdogs advocate the free market without knowing what the term even means. These people never think on their own and prefer to repeat others. Over at the pence-item it is a common practice for free market advocates to simply copy and paste articles. Their education is limited to the lkes of Beck, Limbaugh, Fox News, and outdated trade schools. The outdated trade schools they prefer to call them "Community Colleges" and the biggest one is Indiana Vocational Technical College.
Progressive,on the other hand, knows the proper role of government is to provide clean water, health care, and education; protection against violent offeders, drug users, drug dealers, smokers, drunk drivers, inbred racists; and to regulate the market. Is it any wonder the free market advocates are all crackers?
BTW, head on over to the Pence-Item(www.pal-item.com) and register. You could be useful in forcing those free-maret advocates into personal attacks so they will be eliminated through the TOS.
And exactly how long will providers put up with large amounts of encrypted traffic? Not very long, I'd wager.
All this reminds me of the building of the interstate
highway system.
Many many town centers were bypassed and
then withered and died. Towns not bypassed
prospered.
Oh and BTW unlike trains the interstate highway
does not pay real estate taxes on the right-away
and stations (buildings). It also bypassed all
the main street real estate value robbing individuals
and families of their legacy... but estate taxes
would have flushed that.....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.