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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.
Or the fascist idea of taking money from the people and giving it to corporations to protect them from their own incompetence or prop up their profits, or the taking of someone's land for the benefit of a corporation or two sets of rules: one for the plebes and one for the corporations.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
It's more subtle than that - it's about who did what to generate profits, and who gets what in return. Suppose I upload some pictures / video / interesting reading material to say, FB. And that helps to attract other users, and 'eyeballs' for advertising / marketing purposes, and that -in turn- generates profit.
Then effectively my effort translates into FB's profits. I would have 0 say in how it's all done, and see 0 of those profits.
I think mr. Zboralski is arguing that isn't fair. Or at least that the effort vs. rewards equation is tilted too much towards the corps that run the show. And indeed... I think he's got a point there.