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The Web's Creator Thinks We Need a New One That Governments Can't Control (thenextweb.com)
The web has created millions of jobs, impacted nearly every industry, connected people, and arguably made the world a better place. But the person who started it all isn't exactly pleased with the way things have turned out to be. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, believes that the way it works in the present day "completely undermines the spirit of helping people create." The Next Web reports: "Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network with the web," said Brewster Kahle, who heads up Internet Archive. And he's not wrong: governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think. To that end, Berners-Lee, Kahle and other pioneers of the modern Web are brainstorming ideas for a new kind of information network that can't be controlled by governments or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.The New York Times originally reported on this and has more details. (But it is also paywalled.)
That's hilarious. You go right ahead and then come back and tell us your cool idea about a global infrastructure that can't be controlled by the organizations who build and maintain said infrastructure.
It's that last one, Sir Tim, that matters the most.
Leave it alone. It supports itself and if governments start snooping on the money makers they will put a stop to it.
And I think we need a new web creator.
Build it so that people can't trade kiddie porn, or plan terrorist attacks, or spread ransom-ware to people's computers.
..when it was The Internet v.s. POTS. Will there ever be a truly decentralized global network?
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
We need to remember that governments aren't the only ones who censor others. We see private entities do it all of the time, too. Heck, even Slashdot's moderation system is a great example of this. A small number of people can easily manipulate what content others will see. Remember, censorship doesn't need to involve the complete removal of information. Even just obscuring it, by say downmodding a perfectly fine comment to -1 so it isn't shown to most users by default, is a form of censorship.
If for no other reason than this: We need a physical network of some kind, be it with wires or radio waves. It takes huge amounts of capital to create something that spans a city, much less the world, and that means large corporations or governments. And governments will always, always ensure they have access to the physical portion, or be able to disrupt it in some way.
Say all you want about TOR, for example. It is okay for what it is, but all that data is still going through lines that someone with a lot of money owns.
And hookers?
Regardless of who actually controls a network, any network that reaches within the borders of a country is subject to attempts to regulate said network and the people who use it. Even completely decentralized networks rely on infrastructure and other resources that can and will be regulated. Even something like bitcoin, which uses distributed transaction processing, will be subject to attempts at government regulation. There is no way to avoid this, especially as governments seek to extend the reach of their laws beyond their own borders. And don't pretend that only the United States is guilty of this; China and the EU try the very same tactics. The solution is for governments to resist efforts by other governments to impose foreign laws on them and for citizens to demand their governments behave responsibly. And again, don't point the finger only at the US; China, Australia, Iran, the EU, and so many others are every bit as engaged in mass surveillance and censorship as the US is. This is a global problem that requires citizens in each country and their governments to respond accordingly. Also, regulation by governments is a double edged sword; we love to pretend that it's bad, but things like net neutrality, investigating data breaches, and criminalizing DDoS are essential and very beneficial. Getting rid of all government control will not solve the problems. Be careful what you wish for. This is hopelessly idealistic.
Radio.
...could look at something that was conceived, paid for, and built by the US defense department and sigh "Don't you wish we could have this without all that pesky GOVERNMENT involvement?"
-Styopa
governments across the globe keep an eye on what their citizens are accessing online and some censor content on the Web in an effort to control what they think.
No matter how great your firewall is, I don't see how a country with the Web is more prone to being controlled than a country without it.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
We need to invent a means to communicate via Neutrinos, so no one can intercept the message. Not even the recipient.
Guy should go back to making movies.
The problem is people.
If it's built and operated by human beings, those human beings can be co-opted to turn control over to other human beings in a position of power. Muscle, punitive, fiscal, whatever. Given a large enough operation (and world-wide is pretty large), there is zero chance The Powers That Be will be kept out.
And, if by some fantasy miracle TPTB can be kept out, they can't be prevented from destroying what they can't control.
Poor deluded Berners-Lee, finally giving in to the libertarian pipe-dream of benevolent crypto-anarchy. Kind of sad, really. I mean, it's a nice dream, but like most dreams a complete impossibility to implement. Again, not for technological reasons, but because (quoting DNA) "To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I don't think the word 'control' accurately describes what countries are able to do to the Internet. There is a big difference between using the Internet to do surveillance (legal or not) and actually controlling what information is available. I'm not sure how you build something that anyone and his brother can use, but the governments of the world somehow can't.
Worldwide Raven Information Network. Works in Westeros, doesn't it?
or powered by megacorporations like Amazon and Google.
This.
Because while our governments are slowly turning fascist, corporations are facists. Think about it. Strict top-down control. No democracy or participation at any level (I'm talking about real participation, not token "we listen to your ideas" events). All in the name of superiority and expansionism.
If we want to have a free Internet, corporations are the real enemy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The web has created millions of jobs
Citation? Seems pretty high, considering the brick-and-mortar enterprises either defunct or mortally wounded as a result of it.
Isn't that tor?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
>Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network
I don't think anyone could have predicted that...
Actually, Snowden just gave us proof of what lots of people already suspected.
"Edward Snowden showed we've inadvertently built the world's largest surveillance network..."
Uh, inadvertently...??
Let's pretend the government doesn't exist for a moment. Yes, that's right. No NSA. No FISA courts. No NSLs. No secret data centers. Nothing.
The entities that have robbed us of our privacy and the power they wield today are legally titled under the words I AGREE, and are contained within every EULA that drives every damn app or service that this generation loves to call "free".
Sorry, but I'm not really buying "inadvertently" right now, as if it wasn't obvious enough that our government currently collects or buys most of this data from the very service providers we use every day. Government surveillance today is nothing more than an outsourced arm of corporate data collecting.
And you AGREED to pretty much ALL of it.
Sure they'll pay and regulate it! No hardware needed, it'll run in the cloud.
It's based on the faulty idea that the government must be evil so you can't give them control over it.
The government is made of people - some good and some bad. As such, ALL governments do some good as well as some bad.
There is no way to have an internet with significantly less government control without a shit load more doxing, Blackmail, identity theft, sale of dangerous drugs, pedophilie videos, viruses, hacking and tons of other crimes.
Hell, the government can barely contain the crime on the internet now.
Which means any significantly 'freer' internet would end up being banned.
The BEST they could hope for is to create a specific libertarian UN empowered organization in charge of the free-web, giving it massive enforcement powers but only related to the free-web.
That libertarian organization could possibly maintain enough control over the internet to reign in mankind's darker side, and at the same time preventing regular governments from over-regulating and controlling it.
But make no mistake, it can only be done by ADDING a new layer of government to the internet, not by creating a new internet.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The problem is people .
Samaritan operative located.
thats anti authoritarism - it's just not the amercian way.
The only thing I can think of gets rid of everything since the hosts file, and then builds a mesh system on top of that underlying structure. But I can't think of a way to make that scale.
Clearly the original problem was centralizing control in ICANN, but what alternative can you think of? If you allow different groups to claim the same address you need a decidable way to resolve collisions.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's the biggest "surveillance network" not because of what it is, but because of how it's used. If you only read facebook, and everyone reads facebook, then the facebook node is a great point of surveillance. If you read 100+ resources, and everyone reads a different 100+ resources, then there is no good node for surveillance.
Surveillance was always easy. Your government could always stand at your driveway, or at your grocery store, and watch. But with so many driveways, and so many stores, it wasn't cost-effective.
It's only cost-effective because so many people use the very same resources.
I don't use gmail. I have my own e-mail server. I also don't use acamai. I also don't use google, nor facebook. I don't use a major browser, nor OS. I don't keep all of my stuff on a single service. If someone wanted to watch me, they'd need to spend far more effort than to watch the typical user. Sure they could see my amazon purchases -- so they'd see three purchases per year, because I shop at many places that aren't amazon. Even if they watched me in ten locations, they'd be missing out on half of my data, and since it ain't evenly distributed, they'd have erroneous data, useless and incorrect in every way.
Spread out your activity, and your data will simply be too sparse to collect.
Like always, it's the routine behaviours that allow any bank robber to dodge the security guard who goes for coffee every day at 3:35pm for 12 and a half minutes. It's a sucky movie-plot, every time.
It's tough[er] to track down the last 1%. It's not worth the effort, purely because 99% is enough.
I am the 1%.
Everybody just VPN into Facebook, they have our back!
Problem solved!
Kill me now.
They more or less control it now, but if Internet 2.0 was built completely separate from Internet 1.0, and completely outside of any government control (as unlikely as that would be), then the corporations building it would control it lock stock and barrel. You're all afraid of Internet 1.0 becoming a 'walled garden', courtesy of the ISPs? That's how Internet 2.0 would end up. Instead of World Wide Web, you'd have World Wide AOL.
Even if you managed to build Internet 2.0 without any corporate or government support, governments are too aware of the power of a world-wide data network that anyone can access, and would immediately take steps to exert control over it. In some countries that would go as far as police and/or military action, to secure control of facilities. Even if it was a mesh network of wireless access points, people would have their doors kicked in and arrested; it would essentially be made illegal in some countries, perhaps even regarded as terrorist action.
In my opinion our best bet is to keep fighting to make Internet 1.0 a better place for everyone instead of abandoning it and trying to create Internet 2.0. Besides which, as someone else pointed out, Internet 2.0 can be built on top of Internet 1.0 anyway; the The Onion Routing network is an example of this, as is the so-called 'dark web'.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Wait - snowden did post stuff that nobody wanted him to post. Right? So... victory?
Design a Free Web that can be accessed censorship-free in China, and I'll believe you.
Is it feasible in any way to build any kind of worldwide thing without involving companies or governments? Even if it were possible to get everyone to cooperate (read: pay), some yutz would get in near the top and steal all the money anyway.
Furthermore, if it did exist and were open, there would be no way to keep companies and governments off of it. Right?
If people can participate, and control can be had, bad people will figure out how to put themselves into control. Period. There is no way to enforce fairness.
Sorry, TBL. You're a smart guy, and thanks for the WWW, but I can't see this happening.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
PHAH. The FCC doesn't have jurisdiction at 500 TeraHertz.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Best watch that kind of talk, Mr. Anonymous Coward.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not me. I very clearly state, before clicking the button, that by clicking the "I Agree" or equivalent button I refute any claim of agreeing to EULA terms and that I explicitly disagree with any terms or restrictions the software vendor may be attempting to force upon me. I've never received any dissenting notice or refusal from any vendors, so by the same logic they apply when trying to force their demands on us, the terms of any EULA are void.
(IOW, one-sided "agreements" are a load of bollocks.)
That would be a capitalist's dream, taking the internet back to the walled gardens of AOL and Compuserve. We already know it's precisely what Facebook wants.
Has everyone forgotten the run-in the US DOJ had with Apple Inc. a few months ago? If the government doesn't own the web, they can land on the corporate doorstep, guns drawn, and demand to steal its tools so they can spy on its paying subscribers.
There's a reason most mega-corporations are in the USA. As long as liability laws and taxation laws are designed to favour corporations, the evolutionary result will always be mega-corporations.
you might get some amusement reading my manifesto-
http://cloudsession.com/dawg/downloads/misc/kag-draft-2k121024.pdf
What we need is for more high profile people to admit that ISPs restricting the use of 'servers' by their customers, whether at the router or terms of service level, is tacitly an authoritarian contradiction to what the internet was claimed to be throughout its early history. AFAIU to communicate on the internet, you need a client and a server. If the ISPs/gatekeepers demand that you use their or anyone's server but your own, they are insisting that you use the authoritarian internet, instead of the libertarian internet.
A couple of people, not many, we decided that, well, wouldn't it be really swell if we planted a few gardens. We're gardeners after all. Why not come together and show each other what we know about gardening? We could connect our gardens to each other, have our plants grow together, maybe we'll find some awesome symbiosis happening! And we did. And others came and looked at our garden. It was just a little garden, mind you, there was nobody to hold your hands when you tried to only walk around in them, there were few trails and most of the time you had to carve your own, carrying a machete with you was advisable. Most people turned away when they noticed that it's going to be a bit of work to just look at our flowers. Let alone plant their own garden. Because back then, if you wanted to be part of that gardening experience, you better learned a thing or two about gardening, and fast!
Yes, there was the occasional bully who jumped into our flowerbeds and trampled over them, but we knew how to deal with them. And deal with them we did, swiftly and with lasting effect. We were, after all, gardeners. And we were good at that.
More people came along and we were overjoyed. They're really interested in our stuff! You see, nobody really cared about our plants and everyone we showed any of them called us names because, well, it was not "cool" to plant flowers. But suddenly this was the next big thing, everyone wanted flowers! And we were only too eager to share all the knowledge. Hey, the more the merrier! Knowledge multiplies if you share it!
Well, to be honest... we shared more than just knowledge. There were a few flowerbeds that had those camo nets above them, but hey, ya know, who cares what you do in your spare time, amirite? Just pass it and don't bogard the spliff.
Then people came who said they wanted to build some roads through our gardens so people could walk more easily. We agreed, it was a good idea. After all, most people by now weren't really hard core gardeners anymore. Many just wanted to wander about and smell the flowers. And those that joined were... well, let's say they were happy if we gave them a few saplings because they had no clue at all how to grow plants but wanted some good looking flowerbeds too. We didn't mind. After all, hey, it's not like I don't have that flower anymore just because I give you a sapling of it, right? And we get roads across our garden.
A seed shop opened at the corner. We thought it's cool. Hey, that makes it easier to get seeds initially. Someone's gonna buy, and then we pass 'em around and ... so we thought. But suddenly passing seeds and saplings around wasn't "allowed" anymore. The cornerstone of what we built was considered "bad" now. By whom the fuck and who died and made you king, we asked. We dealt with it the way we knew how to deal with it. The same way we dealt with the bullies, or with others that broke the rules. Only to learn that the rules have changed. We no longer make them.
Long story short, our garden is now walled in. Most of the plots have been sold, or rather, "reappropriated". We're sitting in some corners, tucked away from the busy streets where vendors peddle boring, uninspired hybrid plants (that are of course patented and don't you DARE to as much as SHOW it to anyone, let alone hand him a sapling!) where the masses stumble about, not even knowing what gardening is, for it has been turned into a huge amusement park. Allegedly there is still a tree standing somewhere in what used to be our garden, I haven't seen one in a long time, though.
So we moved on. And we learned.
We built another garden.
And this time, we will not make the mistake to invite the masses in. Leave them their amusement park, and leave them in the blissful ignorance that they don't even know what they're missing.
They most likely even wouldn't want to know.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You have to incorporate the fact that one of the largest collections of deluded sheeplike citizens is also within the USA.
You can't have one for very long unless you have the other.
Otherwise such governments tend to fall. But not here.
The internet does need to be forked! It's become corporatized and monetized. I want to see an internetwork back in the hands of the people, not the government.
Ok all, my DD-WRT'd Linksys router is ready, I have a few Raspberry Pi's ready for the NEW GMO-Free Internet!!!
I'll need to crowd source funding (to pay for the pizza) , and you will need to supply your own patch cable...connect up kiddies.....Woohooo!!!
The modern, corporate web is a bad, bad joke.
From the headline, I thought this was another article about Al Gore, since _he_ created the internet don't you know.
Re-inventing the Web doesn't mean jack & shit unless the Internet is re-invented.
Government isn't the problem - financial interests are. Government is, if anything, the solution: a governance that can make sure the playing field is level, that the rules apply in the same way to everybody etc. Looking back to history, we see that powerful people have always grabbed as much as they can for themselves with little to no regard for the vast majority of the population - this has been the case as far back as we have written records. The laws and regulations that protect ordinary people - the mythical 99% - are there because we have fought hard for them and got the government to change the rules in ouor favour. We have seen this happen over and over, every time some new technology opens up opportunities - in the beginning there are no rules, so those that are strong and ruthless enough move in, take over and push out everybody else; and then we get Government in some form to set the rules more in favour of the rest of us.
The industry - whatever industry - has always felt entitled to use any means at all to maximise their own profits; if not for government regulations, we would not have any kind of food labeling, just as an example. The producers have fought bitterly against having to tell what kind of crap they put in food, cosmetics etc - they still try to hide artificial additives behind meaningless gibberish and deceptive labeling. They hate the fact that they can't put anything they please into any product and lie about it to their customers - we would all be drinking milk "enriched" with melamine, were it not for the government. So why do people still keep talking about government as the only evil thing in the world? Government is, by and large, good for the people - yes, it is annoying that we have to pay tax, but come on. I'm not saying we should just roll over and trust them uncritically, but let us at least be intelligent in our criticism.
So, about the internet: it is again the big players, the Googles, Facebooks, etc, that want to manipulate and spy on what goes on there. Everybody on /. knows this - it is discussed regularly, it is commonly agreed that we don't like it. And then people go back to reviling "The Government" - why? No doubt one element in this is that the big players have an interest in obfuscating the issue, so have ways of ensuring that there are large numbers of anti-government muck-spreaders around, but another essential part is the sheer idiocy of the people who frequent forums on the net and never even stop to ask simple, critical questions.
It was run by citizens and was called "FidoNet". Given, that could use an update, sort of like end-to-end encryption and perhaps some virtual crypto-currency for the Sysops help maintain the bigger network but to me it's a cold hard fact: In terms of quality, independance, hardware requirements and resilience FidoNet and not the Web is the pinnacle of international digital networks IMHO.
Build a mesh-network with the concept of FidoNet in mind using todays technologies and protocols such as abstracted name services (namecoin or something simluar), hard asymetric encryption/signing/enveloping/auth&aut, add in some good mobile node apps and a neat deskop nodeapp + a complete redo of the HTML document ecosystem and Facebook, WhatsCrapp, The Web, E-Mail, Google+ and all the rest could go and f*ck themselves. This all is actually doable, we'd just need to get off our lazy asses and start.
We'd be independant, much cheaper and no once could control the resulting system.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
In the UK in 1835 there was the "Highway Act", it stated rules for various forms of cars (carriages) and their conduct on roads. Then the Motor Car came along... it was still a car and used roads, but was an order of magnitude faster and more powerful than anything else in the 60 years before it, some of them capable of reaching up to 28 mph!! Interestingly these recklessly fast cars which easily broke the highway act speed laws were not instantly deemed illegal, instead new acts were introduced in 1896 and 1903 among other things - substantially increasing the speed limits by popular demand.
The point being that rules follow or change according to technology, invention and society when the utility is too great to ignore... No matter how hard blind pedants argue and try suppress it, people will demand it, and rules will be created or modified to fit.
The RF spectrum is the highway, or more appropriately "airway" of communication, a medium bound by physical laws not human ones... if an efficient flying car is invented, no one will have the power to maintain the old rules.
What the Internet is and how to stop mistaking it for something else: http://www.worldofends.com/
Sure, but the internet uses fire technology, which was originally harnessed by private individuals. Since the technology upon which the internet is based was originally not militarized, that means it and everything downstream will tend towards non-militarization forever.
TCP/IP dates from 1973?
That's it
Remember the good old days when you could drop a bundle of fiberoptic cables into the ocean and assume it was "secure".
The transmission media/devices will always be the weakest link. Physical Plant and user devices are where taps are installed, if you have access to the media anything can be compromised. Even if we had a global wireless mesh the only security could possibly come from a connectionless node that was truly an impenetrable black box. Maybe if we created an AI that would manage the mesh and it's connections, each node would distribute the AI (black box) and manage directory, identity, and location data.
Skynet and me hanging out by the Beach.
Keeping government out is meaningless if you allow corporate advertisers to do the tracking for them
The advertisers only job is to turn people's clicks,eyeballs and links into money
They will sell your entire life for pennies the pound to FBI, NSA,MI-5 and do so gleefully.
We need wireless mesh networks using Wifi. The mesh networks should run TOR too. Messaging apps that run over TOR to anonymize and encrypt communications so no one know who you are talking to and what you are saying. Web sites that use the dark web .onion protocol with https.
maybe backbones would be obsolete, but the routing-tables would be enormous. And who assigns network-addresses?
For a new mesh-network to become something more than a just a tiny area some completely new protocol need to be invented.
Or we do it the other way around... mesh-networks for smaller areas that are then linked together via over the existing internet... DHT network for looking up how to communicate with the target network and route to the remote network. Of Course a new way of addressing hosts would need to be implemented.. .1.2.3.4
Each mesh-network could get a full 4 byte range, and prefix is the hash of the pubkey for the network.
If a node on network DCBA wants to talk to network ABCD the following would happen:
ABCD.1.2.3.4 -> one of the exit-nodes
exit-node -> Look up ABCD on DHT network and create route.
exit-node -> forward package from DCBA.4.3.2.1 to entry-node of ABCD
entry-node of ABCD -> forward package to 1.2.3.4
after route has been set up it all goes much smoother.
Of course ABCD/BCDA are just examples.. it should be a 32 byte hash of the remote networks public key. Entries in the DHT would need to be signed by the public key and there would be a need to be able to lookup the public key for each hash.
Each route over the public internet could be made secure.. standard DH key-exchange during setup and all traffic between two mesh-networks would then be encrypted. Ie make it impossible for current ISP's to see the real source or endpoint in the mesh networks.
Links between networks mesh-networks could also be manually added and be routed via anonymous radio-links or dedicated physical connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio
At least it uses the air, although the FCC would have something to say about it, it can be pirated more easily.
Or go back to the dial-up BBS days or even Gopher. At least a text based Internet is simple and cheap and clean!
You are welcome to use any of this that you think may be helpful:
http://www.ideationizing.com/2...
It is not designed to resist monitoring as much as it is designed to get information in and out of remote areas. Though, it could be modified to fly under the radar, so to speak, pretty well.
Add a rule to the new open web: NO PAYWALLING!!!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Who elects the people who decide what they enforce?
The major news media decide which candidates for public office get name recognition.
I propose a global flock of quantum entangled carrier pidgeons