Slashdot Mirror
Infamous French Hacker Calls Internet a "Digital Shantytown" (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: French hacker and security expert Anthony Zboralski calls social media networks a "digital shantytown" in his most recent blogpost. While fellow members of hacker collective w00w00 have formed successful billion dollar startups, he claims that the rewards for creating content and use are unfair and suggests a better solution would be like the successful creation of land title for slum dwellers — partial ownership for users on social media.
What is the guy arguing for? I'm confused as hell.
What the hell is this submission about?
Phew, at least it's upgraded from Internet = AOL
I think he has a point. Most people (especially non-technical people) primarily only post and interact with others using sites owned by strangers (typically big companies). Just look at the URLs - is the domain is owned by someone other than the poster? If it is, then that other organization decides what you can do or not do. I've long owned my own domain, and I can post what I please on my webiste. If I want to move sites, I can just move hosting organization - the URLs come with me, because I own the domain. I don't think the problem is the existence of big companies at all - the problem is the difficulty of exiting. I don't mind others hosting my material as long as I can leave. If you can't practically leave, then you're no longer in control. Currently it's impractical always own the domain, but even in those cases, it's worth considering the exit cost. For example, git makes it *easier* to move to other hosting organizations (though by no means trivial).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
In Pale Moon, belua.com comes up with a totally blank page for me, even in a clean profile with no extensions active and with a working Flash plugin installed. However, it does load in Vivaldi. That would suggest an incompatibility with at least some versions of Firefox.
Moving towards Internet *ownership* for all citizens, (as opposed to mere *access*), is an intriguing concept to be sure. However, perhaps publicity for the idea ought to have been delayed until the basic infrastructure for promoting it was a little better developed. For the site to fulfill its implied mandate, it needs to be universally accessible.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
This guy is soooo right on!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have now been permanently banned from the following sites for mentioning well-sourced facts (unlike, say, a Noam Chomsky douchetard): rawstory.com --- disinfo.com --- commondreams.org --- boingboing.net --- seatteweekly.com --- thestranger.com --- every Canadian site out there, etc., etc. etc.
Boo hoo.
Whether this guy is a crackpot or not, imagine someone did set up a site like facebook that only took enough to run, allocating healthy fair market salaries to all the staff and instead it allocated all the extra billions to the users. Facebook wouldn't last very long.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The Internet is an amusement park...
At night...
Empty...
Except for you and the carnies.
Why haven't I heard of you?
Well, it is a little, because you can't own IP addresses and domains anymore. But you can get internet access and domains in many ways, and you can own everything else. It's just that people prefer to be on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube over creating and hosting their own web site. It's not even expensive or particularly difficult at all. If your only presence on the internet is on social media sites, you're this decade's equivalent of the people with @aol.com email addresses on their vans in the 1990s. Nobody forced you to live as a digital hobo then, nobody forces you now.
Facebook has about one billion monthly active users, pretty much guaranteeing that your "share" or "stock" in Facebook will be all but meaningless.
Facebook is peripheral to the lives of its users, not central. You will never see the level of involvement that ownership demands. That is where the "shantytown" analogy breaks down completely.
The geek applauds the changes in Slashdot. That doesn't necessarily translate into enough money to keep the site from going on the auction block again. Someone has to pay the light bill --- and that someone, whether subscriber, advertiser, or charitable foundation will have the final say on how the site is managed.
Attention is a currency. Right now Facebook, Google and co are making fortunes by converting our attention to cash through advertising. All we get in exchange is being tolerated on their properties as long as we are willing to be fed crappy adverts. We're not even consumers, we're like serfs of the medieval ages.
As it stands, both merchants (ad-buyers) and peasants (consumers) are being screwed, and the nobility (Google, FB & co) takes it all.
The merchants buy ads with cash hoping it will translate to sales so they get their money back from peasants, but it's a perverse system where the merchant that spends the most in ads gets to push and sell its product - however crappy it is. If you can't pay enough cash to nobility, they make your life as a merchant very difficult. Peasants have it even worse as they end up giving both attention to ads for (mostly crappy) stuff *and* money to the merchants (of which a good chunks end up with the nobility). It's a vicious circle where both merchants and peasants are indentured to the nobility which has no incentive in figuring out a better way for everyone.
But what if we got payed for our attention? What if there was a marketplace where we could signal what we think has value for other people and get payed if we where right? Suddenly we would have a system where true value would be recognized and where people who helped point out that value (by giving it attention first) would be rewarded. This seems like a much better system for both merchants and peasants but, of course, not for the current nobility.
Maybe it's time for the revolt of the serfs...
I'm sure this already exists in some form, though I don't know the name of the projects that might be related.
What if instead of connecting to a service like Facebook, we instead contacted a friend and had them download a piece of software. That piece of software would essentially run a combination webserver and private dyndns. In order to instantiate the connection (which would afterward be maintained by the underlying software), each of the two friends would visit a page that told them their public-facing IP address. They would share their respective public IPs with each other. Then each would enter the other's public-facing IPs into their software.
In order to permanently maintain a connection with each other, you would want to be in a group of users that would be at least 20 or so people. When your public facing IP address changes, the software would know because it would stop getting any auto connection pings from the others in the group. So it would start querying down the list of other users, and after a sufficient number had replied with the same public-facing IP address they were contacted from, this new information would be propagated to everyone else's underlying software list.
As far as the interface, each person would have their own, possibly customized, frontend. It would allow chat, post/blog wall, and viewing everyone else's wall. Because the interface is perfectly customizable, WebGL with 3D would be possible to be shared, etc.
Calls himself a hacker, therefore a criminal, in a digital shantytown, that makes him a digital mobster.
Fascism has a rather muddled definition, but at it's core it is a strong leader ideology with aggressive nationalist overtones, usually associated with hankering back to a stronger purer age and blame shifting to traitorous/poisonous out-groups. This makes it very flexible in what it can offer, but in the end what you get is what the leader dictates, getting in bed with friendly business while attacking the leaders of those who do not suck up is standard.
Because of this flexibility some fascist somewhere saying some solution is good does not mean much, you could oppose almost anything based on this sort of justification. Targeting specific injustices means even less in terms of their validity, after all it is easer to get people angry about real unfairness, after they are angry they are not thinking so clearly so you start to point them at you chosen target.
how about you point out some rational problems with the idea? even working solutions have problems, what makes this bad, other than silly ideological purity arguments?
Yeah, belua.com gives me a totally blank page in Firefox too, not even a background.
I guess he has no idea how to make static text and images appear in HTML without using Javascript. I haven't seen that level of web braindeath since Slashdot stopped linking to Forbes, another perfect example of web developers without a clue.
You need resources, you can get a loan but someone has to pay it back, this sort of thing is what non profits are for. The problem is that to get a loan you have to be able to show how you will beat facebooks network effect, which at this point might require governmental melding. If it was a priority it could be done, ith could even happen in a fashion that did not give extra control to government, but that would take considered planing and effort, for little voter reward, so probably will only happen if facebook acts much more abusive.
The internet has been tamed. The digital frontier is no more. Deal with it, smelly nerds.
"...partial ownership for users on social media."
So let me get this straight. The generation who gave up their privacy in order to demand that every online service be magically free is now somehow deserving of the title of business partner?
You've got to be fucking kidding me. You really can't get any more entitled than that.
Last time I checked, those on YouTube generating millions of hits are not paid in gold stars and emojis. No, those turning six figures making an ass out of themselves online for the sake of calling it entertainment are paid in cold hard cash doing that "job" and even making a career out of it. For a group who essentially invested nothing into starting the service that birthed them a career and demands that service be provided for free, perhaps we can kindly dispense with this bullshit notion of ownership.
Infamous French Hacker Calls Internet a "Digital Shantytown"
French hacker and security expert Anthony Zboralski calls social media networks a "digital shantytown"
These two things are not the same thing.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.