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HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Joins The Push For A Decentralized Web (ieee.org)
Tekla Perry writes:
HBO's fictional Silicon Valley character Richard Hendricks sets out to reinvent the Internet into something decentralized. ["What if we used all those phones to build a massive network...we could build a completely decentralized version of our current Internet with no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."] That sound a lot like what Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and Vint Cerf have been calling the decentralized web. Kahle tells IEEE Spectrum about how closely HBO's vision matches his own, and why he's happy to have this light shined on the movement.
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
In 2015 Kahle pointed out the current web isn't private. "People, corporations, countries can spy on what you are reading. And they do." But in a decentralized web, "the bits will be distributed -- across the net -- so no one can track the readers of a site from a single point or connection."
He tells IEEE Spectrum that though the idea is hard to execute, a lot of people are already working on it. "I recently talked to a couple of engineers working for Mozilla, and brought up the idea of decentralizing the web. They said, 'Oh, we have a group working on that, are you thinking about that as well?'"
...and ended up where we are here.
You, the person reading this right now, is on Slashdot. According to Alexa, it's one of the top 5,500 most visited websites on the internet, so even despite its downturn of late, there's still millions of people who visit this website every month.
Why are you all not on Usenet? You're all technical enough to download and configure Pan or Agent, and if your ISP doesn't provide Usenet access, a 5GB block on Blocknews costs $2.75 and will provide years of text-based discussion. There are plenty of technical categories, and plenty of them have actual users on them.
But you're on Slashdot.
You are here because millions of other people are here, and because not every NNTP server replicates every message, everywhere, ever. You are here because the value of information is determined by the person posting that information, and for some people, posting "you are all cows", "only luddites use nntp without apps", or "Fr33 V1@gra" is deemed valuable, while the vast majority of readers disagree. Spam filtering can only happen with someone deciding 'this is spam' and 'this is not spam', and boom, there is the beginning centralization.
Why are you not on Retroshare?
It has forum-like functions, email-like functions, IRC-like functions, and even Limewire-like functions and is 100% decentralized and relies on PGP keys for connectivity, so everything is encrypted.
You're not on it because getting messages to proliferate is a problem, especially if you only have a few friends who aren't themselves connected. You're not on it because firewall configuration is a pain, even if you know how to port forward. You're not on it because 2/3 of the discussion is key exchanges, and the way many people get started is in the new users room which is, essentially, centralized. Or, maybe you are there...and hopefully you're not one of the people who post things in the forums which are actually-racist or providing bomb-making tutorials or degradingly sexually explicit.
Even at that, what's to stop a TLA agency or RIAA lawyer from just being another user who's a part of the system? Decentralization combined with equal access invalidates the viability of the goal to minimize access by undesirable parties, as it's only a matter of time before "Joe Blough the dude who likes to discuss fishing and parasailing...who also happens to be in MI6" joins. Blocking government issues IP addresses is easy enough, but you're back to needing a central authority to provide that.
Without the commons, a project never gets any traction. With the commons, we end up with Facebook, but without the filtering tools that keep it generally free of dick pics (or a means to at least hide them).
No matter how you slice it, the network effect is inherently necessary to make an internet service work, and attaining critical mass of a decentralized (and presumably free/Free) communications platform is something that has yet to be done successfully. After all, you're not on Usenet or Retroshare. You're still on Slashdot.
"someone has to enforce those rules against the small percentage of people who are psychopaths - otherwise the psychopaths will literally murder millions of people."
In a centralized system, the psychopaths end up in charge. Where they do murder millions and millions and millions of people.
Decentralization is the future, because it's impossible to keep pyschopaths out of power in a centralized system.
Some parts of the Internets infrastructure are decentralized, the network on the whole however heavily depends on central authorities. If you want an IP address, you have to ask a central authority. You want a DNS name, ask a central authority. Even when you want to connect your laptop to your phone you may need to ask your phone company for permission.
With the Web it gets even worse, since almost everything people do on there is hosted on some big Google or Facebook server farm. In theory everybody could run their own Web and mail servers, but in reality everybody depends on centralized providers. Another problem with the Web is that all the addressing is location based, not content based. So you can't refer to a specific document, you can only refer to a storage location and whatever is stored there can change.
There are attempts to build a decentralized content addressable network on top of the Internet, like Freenet, Maidsafe or IPFS, but so far none of them has reached critical mass. On the raw network side mesh networks are slowly gaining some traction and they might help with the whole need for an ISP, you just connect to the nearest phone or computer and hop on from there.
I'm not a religious person, but the point of the story is to illustrate a point about human nature: Most people want a hierarchical, centralized structure, for good or for ill. It, apparently, is just how we're wired. If you create something that's free-form, decentralized, some people will call that 'anarchistic', and some other people will insist that 'order' be imposed upon it, and they will take steps to make it centralized, over the objections of everyone else. We've seen this happen with the Internet, and with Bitcoin, as a couple examples.
Furthermore: criminals are just as likely to want to impose some sort of 'order' on something that can benefit them as governments or any other group might. Stet?
Here's what I believe would happen with a 'Free and open Internet 2p0', made up of a mesh volunteer networked nodes:
"no way to ensure your machine won't have parts of something disgusting and vile."
This is intentional. Plausible denyability. Even if something is found your node, it's impossible to prove you had any knowledge of it.
That won't stop you being arrested, your computers and devices seized forever and your reputation dragged through the mud. Your life will be made a living hell, your family will have to distance from your in order to have at least a faint hope at carrying on with their lives, and even if you're acquitted you will never, ever recover. Once a suspect pedo, always a pedo.
Triple if RMS is mentioned.
And empty the liquor cabinet if APK posts in the comments, though that's not so much a game as a coping mechanism.
Blank until
What's being developed in this show is being built and they are rather far along. Go to www.maidsafe.net to check the companies website and head over to the forum to ask any questions you have safenetforum.org.
In any system at all, "the psychopaths" tend to end up in charge. That is the default state of affairs: assholes take all the power and shit sucks for everyone else. It is possible for the rest of the people to fight back against that tendency though, and all the "systems" are just different approaches to doing that. They may have different strengths and weaknesses but they all depend ultimately on people actually using them. "Decentralization" (liberty and equality for all, instead of a few assholes holding all the power, "centrally") is the end-goal of all such systems, it is not a system unto itself. Be careful not to confuse the goal for the means by which you seek to achieve it, otherwise you may thing the best means is just to do nothing, to have "no system", which means you end up with the assholes seizing all of the power and ruining everything, just the opposite of what you wanted.
To translate all of this back into conventional political philosophy terms: assholes holding all the power for themselves is a state. Systems to keep (other) assholes from seizing power over others are forms of governance. Having no state, no assholes holding all the power over everyone, is anarchy. And the only way to maintain it is through some form of governance. Stateless governance. But that's the hard problem: how do you govern without setting yourself up as a state, or else letting someone else get away with doing so? Better forms of governance, that ensure more liberty and more equality, diminish their own statehood more and more, without thereby allowing other states to spring up (in fact if not in name; immensely powerful "private" parties become effective states if they get insufficiently governed). But we haven't figured out how to get all the way there yet: how to do away with the state entirely and still somehow continue governance sufficient to prevent new ones from spontaneously popping out of the vacuum. That's the hard problem.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
The way Freenet supposedly works is that no one can really prove what's on a given node, or decrypt it "locally". How true that is is a matter for the security researchers, but it's not a foolish approach as you imply. It's just chunks of encrypted distributed data with the keys elsewhere.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm not sure you understand the design of Freenet. If I upload a 2-minute video of hot Putin on Trump monkey love, that video won't be stored as a whole on anyone's machine (unless they've actually downloaded it as a client of the network). It will be broken into chucks, encrypted, and the chunks distributed across the network identified by their hashes. The keys are off in some metadata chunk somewhere else on the network. A Freenet node stores a bunch of fragments of encrypted files without the keys to any of them.
An attacker with the resources of a government could certainly figure out that some server had one of these chucks right now (they gradually move around, or just get deleted), but there's no legal precedent that that means anything. No one has ever been arrested just for running a Freenet node (unlike TOR exit nodes - more like normal TOR nodes). If the network were only used for illegal activity, there might be a legal angle there, but if we're talking about a replacement for the internet or the web as a whole, that doesn't work.
OTOH, someone downloading the Putin/Trump manlove video could be tracked given enough resources, and obviously the video would exist as a complete entity on the downloader's machine. That's very clear legal ground, easy to understand and prosecute.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.