Slashdot Mirror
Internet Is Easy Prey For Governments
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN that the revolution in Egypt starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away. 'Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points,' says Rushkoff adding that when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the US the very same government authority was used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding. Rushkoff suggests that we use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider. 'Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.'"
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Shortwave radio is unstoppable.
And since we can do IP over shortwave, the internet is unstoppable. Well, provided you aren't trying to download something like the bloated abortion that is Slashdot 3.0.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
As much as people complain about some government/company having the ability to do 'something', completely decentralized systems are also subject to wide spread abuse that is nearly impossible to stop. Think about the proposed "mesh" networking - you traffic goes through who knows whom's device, your IP address comes from where? Your DNS queries come from who knows where? If I can feed you your IP address and DNS results and your data passes through my network - then I own you. Witness what has happened with even fairly simply systems such as SMTP. The world is inundated with SPAM because the system in inherently decentralized and it is impossible to verify where email is coming from. Put all your network traffic through a decentralized system and no one is going to be happy with the results. You think SPAM is bad? You've not seen anything compared to what would happen if you could not say where your IP/DNS/Traffic is from.
The Internet was actually designed to be distributed ... true story.
It only happens to have a few large choke points because its economically effective to do so.
Believe it or not it is entirely possible for the Internet to be used over terrestrial radio ... in fact ... it can be done by 'amateurs'! In fact ... it already is!
Right now the Internet has these choke points because theres no reason other than FUD not to have it that way. Should the actual need for a more diverse infrastructure arise due to the government going psycho than we'll shift gears and make it go that direction. Yes, it'll suck for a period of time to start with until new links are added, and we'll probably have to lose things that consume massive bandwidth for pleasure like youtube ... but rest assured, porn will make sure we recover promptly.
Its just silly to spend a bunch of money for a bunch of links that aren't needed and all the installation costs that go with it.
The Internet works pretty much exactly like fido net when you use UUCP. The difference is simply how you dial the phone line ... the data is actually STILL traveling over the same fiber and copper as it did when you sent your fidonet mail up to your mail hub and distributed back to other nodes.
As for seeing Facebook and Twitter as a path for 'freedom of the people' ... well that just makes you sound like a freaking idiot. Neither of these sites provide anything that wasn't already done before them on the Internet as well in more traditional methods. Old idea, new theme, new fad ... not a world changer. The only difference is now we're paying attention to someone hundreds of miles away from us that has no bearing on our lives what so ever, instead of the people in our own neighborhoods. Its just a different popularity contest.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The problem is that even the 'basic' information dissemination sites these days are bandwidth-intensive. Facebook / Twitter - They're unusable on a low-bandwidth connection what with all their imbedded features. Heck, even the 'new' Slashdot is barely usable on my older system.
...so not only do you need new networks, you need 'light' interfaces to those networks, a la Lynx or the WAP browsers we were using on our phones a decade ago.
Really? If they got Comcast and Sprint/AT&T to shut down service, that would pretty much cut off the entire state that I'm in. Are you up for traveling hundreds of miles to get to that "competing" service provider during some sort of a major national event?
You could use a distributed caching system, like freenet. But that seems to have worked out to be very clunky.
Emotions! In your brain!
I've thought of this a bit from time to time, but there are two issues with wireless mesh networking (on a large scale) that I think will cause problems.
First: routing will be a pain. On a small network, you can have a routing table in each host, which over time learns the shortest rout to a particular destination, but routing tables for a large network would be a pain. How do you know who to send a packet to next?
Second: Even if you solve the routing problem, at some point there are going to be huge bottlenecks. For example, the wireless routers located next to Google's headquarters are going to be vastly overloaded. And before you talk about some kind of caching mechanism, realize that Google likely has multiple OC256 lines, each of which has enough bandwidth to saturate a hundred 802.11n devices (numbers from here, sometimes my math is bad, but the point is, even if you manage to cache 95% of the stuff across the internet, it's still not enough).
I'd like to see mesh network working at a large scale, but these are some real problems that need to be dealt with.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Controlling mass media.
Seize and hold the newspapers, the radio stations and TV stations. That has been the highest priority for every faction coup, revolution or uprising, pro or contra, for the last century. The Internet is just a newer medium but the same principle applies. Today you don't just occupy newsrooms, printshops, broadcast towers and satelite uplinks but NOCs or DSL concentrators too, that's all.
And as for the much talked about "Internet kill switch", that is a red herring which is so dead, it smells rather awful by now. "Physical access trumps everything" and whoever has the power has this access. Network admins are not known for owning, and using, weapons om an effective way.
Nothing to see here, move along citizen.
...our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people...
Ha ha, he made a funny.
In the words of Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver, "That's not funny. That's just sad."
Just because the writer can't imagine a time before tweeting doesn't mean it's Twitter that provides the right. That is a natural right, and in the US it's protected from government interference by the Constitution. That's not to be confused with use of a network of computer networks being a "right," or using a private company's microblogging service to set up a flash mob with the right to assemble. People managed to speak and assemble long before companies, schools, and government agencies started peering their networks.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This problem really comes down to economics and convenience, rather than any fundamental technological limitation.
All sorts of ways of going around The Man and Big Telco exist(802.11i and pre-standard variants, AX.25 links, RONJA setups, more or less jury-rigged fiber runs between buildings, 802.11A/B/G/N directional antenna links, etc.) Trouble is, without some critical mass of users, you either have nobody to talk to and/or make yourself fairly visible to the hypothetical repressive authorities.
As with internet anonymity schemes like Tor and Freenet, so long as just using the comcast line is cheaper and easier, getting Joe User onboard is going to be a challenge. Should the situation change suddenly(as in Egypt) Joe will have a hard time getting onboard at the last moment. Most of the 'internet-alternative' stuff is much easier to buy and set up when you have internet access...
Perhaps a more serious problem, longer term, is that shutting down the internet is a very crude solution, one that smart authoritarians are going to want to avoid: Why cut off a major business tool and supply of soothing porn and entertainment? Why push activists off a medium that feels anonymous(but is comparatively easy to tap and monitor programmatically) and onto a wide variety of ad-hoc solutions, many of which will have to be chased down by your street-level jackboots and creepy HUMINT types one by one? The capabilities of malicious actors to keep the internet functioning almost perfectly, while compromising or blocking undesired material are only going to increase as time goes on.
I believe that in this context the group of people who are advocating for things like civilian run mesh networks are not advocating that we *replace* the Internet as we know it today with these networks as so man Slashdotters seem to be assuming. They are not talking about having these systems in place for watching movies on Netflix, or for telling all your friends on facebook that you just farted.
Rather, the point is so that in a state of emergency (i.e., the government has completely lost it's marbles and decided to declare martial law and thereby shutdown all civilian communications) these networks can be used to continue to take advantage of the kind of instant mass communications our society has come to rely on. The point is so that you can still contact your family back on the other coast, or tell your friends you're hosting a meeting to talk about how to handle the national guard unit stationed around your neighborhood for your own "safety", ...etc.
I think really, they just want to be able to send e-mail, and post in online forums.
Personally, I think it's too late. If, for example, the US federal government decides to "go Egypt on our asses", they're going to do it in the next few years, well before we have time to setup any sophisticated civilian run mesh networking. Our only hope is to make sure that such a thing never happens by pressuring our politicians hard, and getting our friends to do the same...
Or just bulk-write MicroSD cards and leave them in various places around the town. They're incredibly tiny, and can easily fit in a breath mint tin or other piece of identifiable (yet generally ignorable) piece of trash. Or just trade wristwatches - I carry 8GB on my wristwatch (thank you ThinkGeek :-)
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's jammable, and has the bandwidth of a capillary. My friends who live on an oceangoing sailboat get their email over HF and data rates are so skimpy that they have to ask their friends not to quote them on replies.
Could do a lot worse than cutting Internet access. But if they are just after your mesh network, they could just jam it our cut out electrical power until laptop batteries drain. You can not solve a human problem using only technological measures. Any government powers sufficient to catch and prosecute crooks is also sufficient to abuse ordinary citizens. The only answer is democratic oversight and population educated enough to use it effectively.
Netnews, or USENET, has that property. Netnews really does interpret censorship as failure and routes around it.
That remark was originally made about USENET, during an episode in the 1980s when Stanford's IT department tried to censor "rec.humor.funny". Whenever two USENET peers connect, each gets any messages the other doesn't already have. Any messages that are censored across some links will be efficiently restored if there's any uncensored link. Even a low-bandwidth uncensored link is sufficient if the number of censored messages is small.
In the Stanford case, while the main USENET feed was censored, a few departments had machines with dial-up USENET connections. That was enough to automatically circumvent the censorship.
Something length-limited, like SMS messages, over a USENET infrastructure could be useful to have around.
HF is a very narrow, crappy channel for digital transmission. With a lot of error correction, and long blocks, and ARQ, you can get data through. But is it slow. Years ago, I used to run radio-teletype on HF. We generally held things down to 60 Baud or so because shorter symbols got smeared. And even with freqency shift keying of 170 Hz, you would still sometimes get "single tone fades" -- that is the Mark tone or the Space tone would be great, but 170 Hz away the other one would fade.
HF *can* move data -- if you use good, modern codes. But it can't move a lot of it very fast. The correct RF approach would be to go to a mesh network at UHF frequencies, like some re-farmed analog TV channels.
Strange as it may seem, the parent is right - a lot of modern ad-hoc routing algorithms don't automatically keep their routing tables up-to-date -- instead, they flood the nework with a "where is so-and-so" message when they need to send a message to a certain host they don't already know about. As the reply is flooded back from the destination node, every other node learns how to reach it, and the path is built up by the forwarding nodes in the reply, so that when it finally gets back to the initiator, it knows the full path to get to the destination. Data packets are not flooded, only route requests and replies. This is how DSR works. AODV works a little differently but I don't remember the details. By contrast, OLSR is a link-state protocol rather than a distance-vector protocol -- every node tries to keep a current map of the whole network. This is expensive for large networks, but it's reasonably efficient for small ones, like you might see popping up in a disaster area in order to re-establish local communication. The nice thing about OLSR is it runs at the IP layer, so it doesn't have any kind of weird hardware dependency -- it's easy to set up on all kinds of computers (Linux, Windows, WRT54Gs...), or at least that was the state of things a couple years ago when I was using it.
I have used OLSR in small networks of wireless routers (running OpenWRT) and laptops, and it seems to work well. I haven't done any large-scale testing, but some people have.
Amateur Packet Radio was a big disappointment. Everybody got up and running at 1200 Baud and went: "Whoo Hoo! Problem solved!" and moved on. *sheesh*. No experimentation with higher speed RF modems to speak of.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that moder RF chips are so excruciatingly hard to use that nobody every gets very far with them. Some of the moder cell phone chips and WiFi chips could be used for other data networks, but dealing with tiny BGA packages and ticklish PCB layout problems is something only the pros have the funding to pursue.
Ultimately, though, the answer to decentralization is going to have to be some kind of RF mesh network with reasonable bandwidth -- so up at VHF or higher frequencies. But who is going to build all of that when most of the time DSL is way cheaper and 'fast enough'? You can't wait until you need it to start building something like that.
it never died, its still in use today
I can't stand it... I'm going to help plant the seed since its taking too long and I'm busy (and can't see profit which I need more of today than goodwill.)
Facebook is a walled garden. Unlike some other closed companies they will try to interconnect to survive as well as create as much lock in as possible but these APIs and contracts are purely business related and therefore are limited in their scope and adaptability (obviously the choke point is an issue.)
This isn't microsoft, its merely a contact system with idiot proofed 'home pages' and addictive web games. Twitter is in a much better position; but it too is at risk for open or distributed alternatives (think if your email all had to go through hotmail.com how long that would have lasted... but today we are just fine with this??)
An open set of protocols and secure IDs would provide a flexible completely open alternative to the centralized proprietary network. We could develop an application layer social internet to mirror how the internet killed off the private networks and their networking stacks. Facebook might live as a search engine / directory for these IDs like how google helps you find URLs - but it won't be the only place like it is now.
I see something akin to openID but with PGP, GPG keys as well as contact and identification data available; each bit of data being encrypted with different keys. Your ID could float around openly and freely without the associated data and you could search for it among many catalogs and interlinking services -- plus private facebook like services - but you've be able to migrate or incorporate other services without deals between facebook and others. My email can be made public and people can find me but naturally it has spam issues - but I'm not talking about having open contact data with the IDs-- a high school can list student IDs without other data and your app can discover the connections.
Sure there are privacy issues; not much worse than already being dealt with behind closed doors - security by obscurity (that is, obscure because you can't see inside facebook like you can an open system.) Governments likely are building/have social connection linking systems in addition to easy access to cutting edge corporate systems.
The problem with email was spam; its a messaging system not a "permanent" reference like many people's cell phone number has become. This is where I'm not so keen on OpenID either... There are multiple issues each needing some serious thinking and design work-- unique IDs separate from your verified identity - search engines could find the ID over the web and you can find the ones who are the person-- they accept you and you've got a private social network which can securely be formed within that group to share data. I guess I'm for long numeric IDs like phone numbers; we can remember those.... besides you have directories to help find the numbers and if you place that number around with your name enough the connection will be made outside a formal 'networking' system. At least then I can see this John Doe is not that John Doe because their IDs differ (or he changed IDs losing all the benefits.) This lets you stamp things with your ID-- sure it can be faked-- let it! Authentication issues would be separated and optional.
lots of options... john.doe.3546871 for example (ignoring changing names) but not to tie your ID to a 3rd party name like facebook.com, country, etc. duplicates are possible; can't avoid that-- its distributed and open- but since authentication is a side issue it doesn't matter. Your legal full name hasn't been good enough for generations already. Perhaps a simple string format... with recommendations on picking a more unique name (yet another service somebody could provide.)
Multiple RFCs needed. Many creative uses are possible with multiple loosely coupled aspects of such a system. email integration means no facebook email; IM too; games too; authentication systems integration; certificate and domains; dating services; address/ema
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
http://www.kingsbridgelink.co.uk/
http://www.open-mesh.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_community_network
http://freenetproject.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeshBox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking
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