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Pirate Bay Founder: We've Lost the Internet, It's All About Damage Control Now (thenextweb.com)
Mar Masson Maack reports via The Next Web: At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we've continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can't fix it -- we can only make it slightly less awful. That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay's co-founder, Peter Sunde's talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest. TNW sat down with the pessimistic activist and controversial figure to discuss how screwed we actually are when it comes to decentralizing the internet.
In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
In Sunde's opinion, people focus too much on what might happen, instead of what is happening. He often gets questions about how a digitally bleak future could look like, but the truth is that we're living it: "Everything has gone wrong. That's the thing, it's not about what will happen in the future it's about what's going on right now. We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg, who's basically the biggest dictator in the world as he wasn't elected by anyone. Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and I don't think there's a way for us to stop it." One of the most important things to realize is that the problem isn't a technological one. "The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
Whenever something goes main stream, its only a matter of time until its cheap and ruined.
to roost in the ARPANET founder nation.
Make a parallel open internet using the open backbone with end to end encryption. Done. Internet. Good idea stolen by NSA and recovered by open systems as UCLA envisioned.
Listen.
Seriously, I've distrusted Facebook from the very start, and never will trust it. Given that Zuckerberg is on record as saying that anyone who trusts him is a fool, I'm going to work accordingly. I've got better things to do with my life then spend it tethered to bullshit.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
What nonsense. Until people turn away he has full consent.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I don't FB, lost my unused pswd 5-6 yrs ago so I Email my friends. Often its "I spend most of my time on FB and don't remember to check - why aren't you on line"? Ughhhh. It *IS* a problem
Look, I've taken a fair amount of copyrighted content down the TPB myself.
There's no way in hell I'd have paid for most of it, so for the producers to cry that it's "lost revenue" is bullshit - if I'd even decided it was worth the trouble I'd have waited for Netflix or Hulu or Netflix DVD and watched it.
Further, I think the draconian copyright laws, and copyright ad eternium is ridiculous and frankly unconstitutional.
But for TPB to cry "we've lost the internet" is very much like Blackbeard crying "I've lost my freedom of the seas!" - true as far as it goes, but let's understand that your PRIME activity was copying crap that was for sale and essentially giving it away for free without authorization. You're not the "good guys" here.
-Styopa
You don't have to use Facebook for them to have your data. Oh and just because a web page isn't indexed by Google doesn't mean they can't see what you do.
"Trump is basically in control over this data that Zuckerberg has, so I think we're already there." is this guy serious.. does anyone remember what FB did during the election? They banned so many right leaning political people and they skewed the feed results so you couldn't see real news. Facebook is horrific and everyone should quit them.. but.. come on man put the crack pipe down.. no social media company is working with trump in any way..
I think you mean greatest dick.
My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and nowhere else.
Bullshit. Unless you count "your data" as pictures of your cat, which nobody cares about. But data about your activities is tracked and traded. Have you ever bought something online? Have a Paypal account? Sent email to a company with email hosted by gmail (even if their domain was not gmail.com)? Ever visited a site with javascript enabled? Owned a smartphone? A thousand other things like those?
Then your data is harvested and traded as a commodity. It is not made obvious to you, but it happens.
But hey, out of sight, out of mind.
Facebook already has a shadow account for you. Other people you know signed up and gave them your contact info.
The proper thing to do is get an account and just never use it.
People elect to use Facebook, not once every 4 years, but 14 times per day. No one is forced.
You think too small. Fuck em' they control the internet, well, we'll fuckin' control them and then take that fuckin' control away. Look at the chaos we have already wrought with the powers that be nuthin' and we have only just started. The control is an illusion dependent upon us, our control will be fuckin' real. Democracy, the majority must rule, the workers are the majority, the workers must rule. Don't like what they are doing, not a problem, replace them and do it again and again and again and keep doing it, keep the good, toss the bad. Don't like a corporation ostracise it, wreck it's marketing and public relations, bankrupt the fucker by all 'bendy' means possible, I promise it's fun ;D.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Anyone who says : "We've centralized all of our data to a guy called Mark Zuckerberg," is a clueless fool.
And another thing a clueless fool might say is,
"At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place."
You could sort of say it was kind of like that during a brief period in the mid 90's when the general public first started getting on it. But before that there was nothing "equal" about it.
My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and nowhere else.
This statement is a contradiction. If all your data is in one place then it's centralized, be it facebook or your own computer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It is not like it is mandatory, and I don't see it going that way either. I know a lot of people who use Facebook all the time, who are glued to it. I know a lot of people who use it occasionally but don't give much of a fuck. I know a lot of people that don't use it at all (I'm one of those). This spans all ages too. There is this false idea that every single younger person is glued to Facebook so in the future it'll be the only way to communicate. Nope. Plenty of our students don't give a fuck about FB, whereas others love it. Same shit with older people.
So far I've seen no indication that not using Facebook makes you an outcast, unable to get jobs, unable to travel, or anything like that. As such if you don't trust it, don't feel what you give up is worth it, or just plain don't care, then don't use it.
FTFY
That does not make a difference. Think again.
I tend to agree but it’s not easy to change. Technically, the internet (as I understand it) is just a bunch of interconnected networks, all sending and receiving data. By that standard, we should all be running our own little networks, complete with all the services that we need: DNS, AAA, mail, VoIP, VPN, web, etc., and also the applications that we want: media serving, short message (Tweet-style) publishing, etc. At that point, sites like YouTube or Twitter would only be used either as aggregators (specialised search engines and directories, finding stuff on our servers and linking to it) and as CDNs (for increased performance, if desired by us). The problem (as I see it) is that, instead, the internet has really become more like a giant local network: a bunch of pure clients (consumers) connected to servers (a.k.a. the cloud), with the peculiarity that those servers on the network are run by administrators that are unrelated to each other and to the clients, and who only have their own interest at heart.
To regain some freedom, people would need to be able to serve data freely and effectively. And, right now, most of them cannot, for various reasons:
I don’t see this changing anytime soon, for several reasons:
"The internet was made to be decentralized," says Sunde, "but we keep centralizing everything on top of the internet."
It's an inevitable consequence of asymmetrical Internet connections. The vast majority of Internet connections currently in use today have microscopic upstream bandwidth compared to downstream. The Internet would be a great deal more democratic if hosting a server at home didn't mean that your sister would be too impatient to wait for the family photos to load.
If high speed Internet provided by cable companies didn't have its origins in one giant kludge, things might have been different. Unfortunately they were in a far better position to take advantage of packet switched networking. The phone companies were stuck with a circuit switching legacy that really crippled their ability to deploy decent Internet. And here we are. The companies that viewed their customers as silent consumers own the majority of the Internet, and to this day they really hate that their customers are allowed to upload anything at all. The companies that viewed their customers as equal parts producers and consumers lost the market.
Fiber to the home, deployed by someone who isn't the incumbents, would solve the problem. And... yeah, that's over. Everywhere. So he's right, we've lost the Internet. Get ready to pay $65/month for your Basic Internet Bundle of Five Websites! For only $30/month extra, you can add ten more! All of them are owned by one of the existing media conglomerates! You will take this deal and you will like it! You have no choice!
At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place.
Pfft! Hardly.
Ever the contrarian, I have to opine here that this is simply false. There is NOTHING stopping anyone with knowledge of how the interweb works from simply starting a new internet. It would be simplicity itself to start such a thing, if one already runs a website or a hub. Just write a new protocol or use encryption, make it invitation only, perhaps via a VPN, and make it a rule that things have to operate in a certain specific way, and let that way be how it used to be back in the good ol' days.
If the issue is with ISPs acting as gate keepers, then the solution may be to start a coop internet service provider, to compete with the vampires, and make part of the bylaws of the coop that it can never be sold to anyone, and must make public the compensation for all employees, and costs of the operation to all users, broken down item by item, and require a minimum income in the form of member fees or monthly service charges, to be either returned proportionally or reinvested, etc.
Also, the worse the ISPs behave, the easier it should be to persuade people to join the New Internet. Oh, and while we're at it, let's outlaw SPAM on the new internet. :)
A ban on links. Any link to any site or domain is as much of an issue as the content. That will stop all deep links in comments or blogs.
No comments about communists parties or their past leaders.
Blasphemy laws and no cartoons or animations about a faith.
No crypto or teaching crypto.
Search results will depend on a political parties connection to a search engines upper management.
Other political parties will find their content or news gets moved back in any results. A new memory hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
SWJ to clean the internet of politics, authors, content, history they don't like or are paid to remove.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The internet was built by DARPA and universities, and the web by large research labs - paragons of decentralization? I think not. This fantasy of decentralization got added on later by college kids listening to Napster and thinking it would all turn into some golden, trans-national mass of utopian rainbows. I was one of those college kids in the 90s, and gave that kind of thinking a funny look even back then. Much like nuclear power and Tang, the internet is just a weapon of war that we have somewhat re-purposed into cat videos and porn (both of which are better than Tang).
There was never a "we" that "had" the internet (unless one believes in said utopian rainbows), so "we" cannot "lose" it. it's just a medium for ideas, like books or democracy, although a darned good one, and frankly one that has caused more democratization of more ideas than anything since the printing press. Just because some power-hungry curmudgeons have figured out how to fat-finger their way into a few tweets that help win political office, it doesn't mean the internet wasn't a step forward for ideas overall. It's working, it's healthy, so forget this drama-dude.
The Internet was founded by DARPA. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The internet was a military project!
It was not built to foster good things.
It actually started in Hawaii. Making a military radio network between the islands. Look up aloha protocol if you don't believe me.
It has lots of flaws.
Take off your rose colored glasses and smell the fertilizer
Decentralized solutions are difficult when the majority of participants cannot easily be hosts. The asymmetric download/upload rates seen in many popular Internet deployments has meant serving content is often not effective. Additionally, every ISP I have had has forbid running servers on home plans.
The above has really makes it so there is no real market for decentralized solutions. Even as someone who wouldn't need a turnkey solution, I find the unfortunate reality is that it is the more centralized solution of renting capacity in some data center wins out over needing a business plan for the home.
The moment that China was allowed to have its so-called "Great Firewall" the Internet was irreparably broken in two. The moment it was revealed that all internet traffic routed through the United States became captured and analyzed by the NSA, the Internet lost its basic foundation of trust-in-transit. The moment people worldwide figured out they could throw out some bogus BGP updates, the backbone of the Internet lost its equivalent version of trust-between-peers. Speaking of peers, the moment Cogent unplugged half the United States from the world over a business argument, corporations lost the confidence of users in competently running the Internet.
Ever since its inception the fabric of the Internet has run in an uneasy truce between network infrastructure operators, network infrastructure owners, and national governments -- and it's coming apart at the seams.
My data is not centralized, it is on my computer and nowhere else.
Then it *is* centralized. On your computer.
Ok, Karl, enough with the rhetoric.
Fortunately its not the hardware that creates the value... its the minds behind the IP. The wallets. :)
[($)]
I have gone without internet for nearly two years and I will do it permanently if the internet becomes a pointless waste of money for the same reasons I have permanently given up TV.
They may take the internet, but if it gains them nothing because all government services requiring internet are done at libraries or work, they'll find they've bought a lot of thin holes in the ground.
That's not 'insightful', that's autistic. The word "centralized" implies a single location for the data of all people, under the control of a single,powerful entity. His own data, on his own computer, is separate from the data of all the other people, and is therefore not centralized.
Anyway, what did mr. Sunde do himself to keep the internet decentralized? Did he, perhaps, build a protocol to have decentralized distribution of .torrent files (which would have been easy enough)? Nope, he set up a single, centralized webserver where he could gain ad revenue. From stealing other people's work, no less.
I don't FB, lost my unused pswd 5-6 yrs ago so I Email my friends. Often its "I spend most of my time on FB and don't remember to check - why aren't you on line"? Ughhhh. It *IS* a problem
This. The only reason I joined FB was because I started missing out on the parties and meets ups. Why didn't anyone call or e-mail me? Oh, there was a Facebook event. WTF is a Facebook event? I left a couple of years later when I gladly traded less party invites for more sanity and privacy.
Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to have websites. Now they have Facebook pages. If they still have websites, it's a single page with a logo, address, and a link to their Facebook page. If my girlfriend didn't have Facebook, I would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend, since all information is on Facebook.
I absolutely *HATE* the way the internet has gone backwards. Sometimes I feel we've essentially abandoned the Web. The Web is supposed to be this open thing where everyone has an address and it points to your website that anyone with an internet connection can easily reach. Yet we've closed it all off into walled gardens. First it was the social media platforms, and then mobile made things worse with the invention of apps. Social media on a PC is still accessed via the browser, so it leaves the Web open to you...on a phone, you rarely have the need to open the browser. Paradoxically, it feels a little bit like the pre-internet days when using these services. Facebook and Twitter are the modern AOL and CompuServe.
I am confident that the police state is here already.
Btw, so there was a national holiday with the yearly parade recently, and the days after you could read in the newspaper about how police snipers supposedly had been on top of the roofs. Yet, nothing happened that day. Talk about being pro active.
With mass surveillance (NSA et al), there being this lack of privacy rights to secure 'privacy needs', and perhaps the most damning, when nobody seem to care about security on the internet and with computer software/hardware, I can't help but think that the world is just a big mess, because the powers that be wants it that way. Not exactly a world of order.
I vaguely recall having about some ancient Chinese proverb (by some bureaucat or state leader?) or something, something about there being chaos under the sun, and that is good. But this sentiment sucks.
These days it seems to me that technologists suck (heh, admittedly, I don't know about that many), because it doesn't seem to me that they understand what 'privacy needs' are.
...MUCH! This guy needs to get a grip and delete his Facebook account
Time for bed, said Zebedee - boing
Peter, the Internet is just a transport. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it. If you don't like anything in the US, don't use anything in the US. (Of course, in that case, why do you use Twitter and why did you help redistribute so many films created in the US and promoting US culture and ideas?)
If you want to isolate yourself completely from icky people like me, you can even run a mesh overlay network on top of the Internet. Neither Trump, nor Facebook, nor people like me can then communicate with you or get at your data. Come to think of it, I strongly encourage you to do that.
Humans are all too easily addicted to the Shiny Thing, all too easily placated, and all too easily rendered docile, like a chickens neck is stroked before being broken. Humans are too content to be made cattle, and look where allowing themselves to be cattle farmed led Cowkind. #Moo
John_Chalisque
Right. We are just seeing the inevitable consequence of the Eternal September.
but now 90% of the most accessed content is centralized in a handful of places.
Rewind to 2002 and people sounded like this:
The time of popular open standards was short. ~2002-2006 RIP.
Before that, not everyone was online. After that, Facebook swallowed them.
There is a big difference: Choice.
Free email service were provided by many companies, and ISPs also often had email service as part of the subscription. On top of that you could create your own or buy access to an email service if you wanted. And best of all? Everything worked together, because the communication protocols were public and free.
Facebook is one company. You have to use Facebook to interface with all the goings on, because almost everyone else is using their closed (but free) platform.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Creating social networks requires joining data. Distributed storage sounds great. Solve the distributed join problem and it might work.
As long as we stay independent there is a chance.
1) Keep out of the walled gardens.
2) Run your own servers, adhere to GNU free.
3) Teach someone else 1+ 2.
It is a moral obligation.
My point is that it was very short time when open standards were popular.
I'm horrified at what people accept as "normal" now. I recently tried to have a club use a mailing list. I told them Google Groups would mean that having a Google account would be a requirement to join the group... "so?, they're free!"
They looked at me like I didn't understand what Google groups was.
It seems we're going back to a time when only geeks are on the Internet. Everyone else is in various marketing silos.
You think it's bad here (in "the west")...in China (not just PRC), it is really scary how much dominance WeChat enjoys. It is used for almost everything there.
Max.
Like most software, feature bloat and mercenary design choices ruined Facebook's initial design. I dumped it several years ago and don't miss it.
Let not being on Facebook be a sceener: if your "friends" don't think of inviting you just because you're not on Facebook, they're not friends. Also, help friends deactivate and delete their Facebook accounts. Let them know you don't like FB for x,y and z and thst for free you'll help them leave FB. In 2017 so far, I helped 4 people leave. Also help friends of friends. It's a community service. Have delete FB parties. "Friends" who leave you out cuz you're not on FB weren't real friends in the first place.
Let's make the third Tuesday of every month, Leave Facebook Day.
LFD
has "all our data", even allegedly, you *know* something has gone wrong. Remember this is the guy who calls his users "dumb fucks". http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5
On a side note, the we're in the same boat if someone called Leonnard Poettering controls the majority of the major linux distributions. Outch.
"Also, consider bars and clubs. They used to have websites. Now they have Facebook pages. If they still have websites, it's a single page with a logo, address, and a link to their Facebook page. If my girlfriend didn't have Facebook, I would be at a loss as to where to go out on the weekend, since all information is on Facebook."
i just wanted to address this. soon you will figure out that these bars and clubs aren't worth the money that you spend at them and that there are much better things to do in other places. the real secret to enjoying a social event is the people there not the location. to come full circle to facebook, I deleted my account last year for good after not using it for a couple years and since i stopped using facebook i have figured out a few truths about life.
Real friendships require effort, those "friends" on facebook are really only voyeurs who want to distract them selves from their lives by watching other people. in essence, facebook is reality tv.You will find out really quickly who your real friends are, they are the ones willing to put in the effort to be a part of your life.
by deleting facebook i have been saving money by not going to these events, clubs, bars or places. When i do end up going out, it is with a friend who already knows about the place and event and there is more of a sense of adventure and overall the evening becomes more enjoyable.
You will also end up finding out more places that dont have an on-line presence, be it out in nature or a small exclusive place that doesn't get any hype through the curating algorithms.
basically what im tryng to say is that you will be happier when you leave facebook, it just takes time to get over the dependence on it and become self reliant.
I am actively looking for material like this report. Many thanks for linking to it. Very high quality with public, verifiable sources.
It's all true. I wish some of you that were younger had gotten the chance to see the early pre-Facebook, pre-streaming cable web, to fully grasp just how amazing it was. I also wish that these issues were more important to you than your Netflix speeds. This isn't just sad, it's tragic. To long for an ideal is one thing, to have actually lived it is quite another.
Fuck you, and your google mandated account. What is the deal with people such as yourself. You're on slashdot. You have a user ID that suggests you have been around a long time. You're in your 40s, at least. You can't come up with a solution that is not tied to Google? What have you been learning the last couple decades?
Reading comprehension is not your forte
Cool - glad ot help. It's verbose, but high quality info.
You don't need to use Facebook to arrange meetings. Now there is meetups dor com. It took me some time to get used to how it worked. How I thought it would work is that someone announces a meeting at a particular place, date and time and that's it carved in stone. Then I'd go there and no-one was around. Then I realized you had to subscribe to the discussion of the event, and find that there was a whole load of haggling over the time, date and venue. So what was a meal at a Tex-Mex at 6pm on Friday, suddenly became an Italian meal at at Bistro on Saturday at 2pm.
That's where we are at: best communication tools ever, worst communication. :-P
What? First time I've heard that.
The internets design is HEAVILY centralized.
I think you mean ARPANET, which has zero relation with the internet besides the basic concept of packet switching. (and I mean very basic, the whole system is different these days)
Even ARPANET wasn't feasible as a design idea, which is why it went nowhere.
Mesh networking has pretty high overhead and nobody has of this day made a good, scalable system that works reliably. (sadly)
I'd be surprised if it happens any time soon. We simply lack the useful bandwidth and have high expectations of speed. (even in a choppy 3-4g mobile-heavy world)
So the problem is that lots of people use a service that you don't use? That sounds like that's YOUR problem. Not theirs.
So the problem is that your friends are using a system that you don't like? YOU should be the dictator of the Internet, telling people what they can and can't use?
Fiber to the home, deployed by someone who isn't the incumbents, would solve the problem. And... yeah, that's over. Everywhere.
Well, just 3 days ago, the local electrical contractors advised the building that they're installing FTTH this week, and hope to minimise disruption.
This afternoon, it looks like they've already finished. We didn't even ask for it.
All the ISPs, there's 6 that I can recall off-hand, are all having their customers automatically re-routed through the fiber.
Must suck to live in your country...
so easy to use, no wonder why it's #1. That's what Facebook is. AOL 18.0
That site, thenextweb.com evidently requires a facebook login in order to comment.
See that thing up there, going over your head? I wonder what it could be?
Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) wrote:
No, the seller might be losing something, but maybe they aren't really: it's not that easy to say. E.g. I've bought DVDs to give as gifts because I saw the material for free first. (For that matter, I buy disks sometimes to support the businesses selling them, or just because I like having disks kicking around, but skip all that for now.)
Book publishers don't go around complaining about how those damn public libraries are putting them out of business, and cassette taping was not really the death of the music industry, and if sales are down for music it might be because Internet, or it might be because people don't give a shit about music right now (a theory that would explain a lot about the music out there).
By the way, sales of vinyl LPs and books-on-paper are evidently doing pretty well just now. The world sure is complicated.
There's nothing actually keeping FB from becoming that 'platform no one else uses,' because everybody else has moved on, leaving FB a mass of abandoned accounts. It wouldn't even be the first social media platform to die that way.
Facebook is one company. You have to use Facebook to interface with all the goings on, because almost everyone else is using their closed (but free) platform.
I deleted my FB account a few years ago and haven't missed it. My teenage kids don't use it either, it's all Snapchat these days. So I'm sure there's a large chunk of people that still use it, but like top 40 radio who cares. That audience is completely irrelevant to most people I want to interact with.
I see you like making this same inane post over and over. How much does Suckerberg pay you? Does your mom know what you do for a living?
Actually that would be an improvement. My data is decentralized. Which means everyone and his dog probably has a copy of it. :(
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Correct. The government loves it too - why spend all that money to create a dossier on everyone when they'll just create it themselves for free ?
Don't use Facebook