Jailbreaking the Internet For Freedom's Sake

snydeq writes "With so many threats to a free and open Internet, sooner or later, people will need to arm themselves for the fight, writes Deep End's Paul Venezia. 'If the baboons succeed in constraining speech and information flow on the broader Internet, the new Internet will emerge quickly. For an analogy, consider the iPhone and the efforts of a few smart hackers who have allowed anyone to jailbreak an iPhone with only a small downloaded app and a few minutes,' Venezia writes. 'All that scenario would require would be a way to wrap up existing technologies into a nice, easily-installed package available through any number of methods. Picture the harrowing future of rampant Internet take-downs and censorship, and then picture a single installer that runs under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux that installs tor, tools to leverage alternative DNS servers, anonymizing proxies, and even private VPN services. A few clicks of the mouse, and suddenly that machine would be able to access sites "banned" through general means.'"

Comments

Achilles Heel

[wanzeo]

Any alternative internet technology relies on encryption, and as long as courts have to ability to require you to decrypt data upon request, any discussion of workarounds is pointless.

To really address the real problem, the laws themselves must be the focus.

Re:Achilles Heel

[Lundse]

Nonsense.

"Upon request", as you say. "Courts". Ie. within a legal framework, subject to rights, seizure and eventually your own compliance.

The danger we are trying to avert, is the disappearance of the need for those things. Of course the evildoers can always get a death squad or a court order - but they cannot automatically spy on everyone and aggregate the results, nor keep us from doing and saying what we want.

That, not immunity from due process, is what we are looking for.

Re:Achilles Heel

[SuricouRaven]

I don't trust private owners, and I don't trust the government. I'm undecided which one I trust least. Cooperatives don't really scale well. The best option I see is to make it technologically difficult for whoever controls the tubes to abuse their power: If all the data is encrypted, and they can't decrypt it, what can they do? Worst they might achieve would be blocking by address, but that's a modest level of evil compared to what they could do if the data were not encrypted.

Re:Achilles Heel

[jd2112]

When marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws.

Re:Achilles Heel

[AngryDeuce]

I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.

The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.

As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.

Hell, Steve King (R-Iowa) was sitting in a SOPA hearing and tweets "We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet." What did he find boring? From her remarks:

But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"

Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.

The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.

All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.

it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibil

[mapkinase]

it's not about connectivity, it's about accessibility: presence in the search results, being properly indexed.

There could be million free pages under any super-free Internet. What's the point of it if nothing could be found?

Main battle is going to be around google search results and there have been several front pages on that: content providers are already fighting with google.

If a movie is getting NC-17 rating, forget about profit (in this case most rightfully so, that's Islam speaking).

If a website is accessible only via Tor, forget about business.

Imagine isntead of banning megaupload website were still accessible through Tor or some other kind of superfreeandsecretnet. Do you really think Dotcom would be leaving in 22M mansion?

desired outcome

[prgrmr]

I would go further and suggest that this is a desired outcome by both governments and content holders: to drive the subversives, the perceived anarchists, and in short, all of the non-mainstream consumer users of the Internet off of it into their own "underground". This keeps the nominal Internet "market" sanitized from both subversive content and disruptive behavior, as well as segregates the undesirables into their own sandbox where keeping an eye on them may not be easier, but lowers the degree of urgency for doing so.

Re:it's not about connectivity, it's about accessi

[DocBoss]

People go where the content is. If The Pirate Bay were only accessible over the Tor network there would be tons more traffic there, thus more information on how to access it. If enough content were only accessible over Tor soon there would be extensions for web browsers that would make it as easy to get there as any other site.

Re:Why cross-platform?

[CanHasDIY]

Are people so dumb now they can't pick from three or four installers the one appropriate to their system?!

No; it's just that you've made the same ignorant mistake that many folks here on /. seem to: assuming that the majority of internet users are technically educated.

FYI, it's not 1993 anymore; thanks to commercialization and social networking, everyone from your mailman to your granny are accessing the internet these days. Many internet users are specialized in non technical fields, such as nursing or architecture. Your statement is akin to a doctor saying, "If you're too dumb to perform gastrointestinal surgery on yourself, why should I bother doing it for you?"

Yes, there are many, many people online these days who have little to no idea how the internet works, outside the knowledge that typing "www.google.com" will take them to Google's search page. Maybe if you tried educating the noobs, instead of responding to their ignorance with your own, you wouldn't find them so loathsome.

Just my 2 pennies.

Re:it's not about connectivity, it's about accessi

[GameboyRMH]

As a darknet I2P is clearly superior to Tor, both in speed and security - Tor still relies on trusted directory servers while I2P is fully distributed and requires no trusted servers of any kind. Tor is better as an anonymizing proxy.

Re:YES!

[Microlith]

In a free society, piracy can happen.

In a society where no piracy can happen, it cannot possibly be free.

I leave it up to you to figure out how to reconcile a free society with one where piracy cannot happen.

Re:Freedom's Sake?

[JohnFen]

I don't think the argument that corporations threaten free speech holds water.

We disagree. I think that corporations present a greater threat than the government. With the government, we at least have the constitution and some sort of influence over how it behaves. Not enough, but some. With corporations we have none. And nearly everything we do is in a corporation's control at some point or another.

I have an iPhone. It comes with a user agreement that specifics how I can use the phone. If I don't like it, I can get another phone and/or another provider.

I don't have to have an iPhone. I don't have to use AT&T.

In the US, your choices of providers is extremely limited -- is it three nowadays? The smaller ones simply resell the service of the larger ones so they don't count. You can get another phone, sure, but when they are all behaving in the same fashion -- as they do -- then this choice is illusory.

And you do have to use AT&T. If you use the internet or telephone service of any sort, the odds are overwhelming that AT&T is handling your communication as some point in its travels, even if you aren't their direct customer.

Using tools to get around restrictions set up by the government (as in China, etc) is NOT the same thing as getting around restrictions placed on a device by the manufacture.

I think they're exactly the same thing.

I think I see where we differ. You see a difference between corporations and government. I think that they have effectively merged and there is little functional difference, except that corporations operate with far fewer safeguards. Corporations do the things that are illegal for the government, and vice versa, but they work hand in hand. The end result is the loss of liberty overall.