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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.'"
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?
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.
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.
Amusing story coming right above one lauding the benefits of U.S. government regulation over the internet.
I assume you're talking about an article on net neutrality. I think most supporters of net neutrality in the US also oppose the US President having an "Internet kill switch," and these two positions are consistent.
There's a principle, in classic liberalism, of dividing up authority so that every authority is limited -- most famously, there are the "checks and balances" of the three branches of the US government, but I believe the principle goes well beyond that. The democratic principle is that the ultimate authority is the citizenry, and that is limited by the principle of civil rights, in which there are individual rights that are not to be taken away. The thing to be guarded against is unchecked power, in any hands.
The point of the FCC regulating ISPs to enforce a policy of "net neutrality" is a check on corporate power, but it isn't a grant of unlimited authority over the Internet to the FCC. An Internet kill switch does sound like unlimited authority over the Internet.
It's a question of checks and balances on powers. Like any social structure, the government can be a powerful force of good so long as there is a way to watch the watchers. However, the more central oversite you have, the more fragile the entire network becomes. What is clear from this incident is that old proverb that "the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it" is dead wrong - as a communication medium, the Internet can be functionally crippled within a region by poking just a few corporations.
What this has me thinking about is what equipment should I add to my disaster kit to enable me to participate in assembling an ad-hoc community network in the event that the Internet is not available due to natural disaster or deliberate disruption.
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.
What worries me most is that political discourse in the US is diluted down to a series of maxims, which are largely not only incorrect, but actively damaging to the nation. Cutting taxes is not always good, nor is regulation always bad. It's time people should think about the issues in a more nuanced manner and start to appreciate (and understand) the amount of complexity and difficulty in these issues.
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The other article is about government regulation to reduce restrictions on internet access, not to impose them.
And if you are fool enough to believe with the mechanism in place it will not be used for other things... well then I have a whole shelf of history books to sell you that might make you think twice about power granted never being used or expanded upon.
Doubly so with the very same government snuffing out domain names, the next step of course would be to mandate ISP's not allow routing to those addresses either...
Is that so impossible to see coming down the very path you are helping lay the flagstones for?
The funny thing that I am complaining about a hypothetical yet realistic threat; while Net Neutrality seeks to impose regulation to solve a problem we not only have not had but have no signs of having soon.
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