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If You Can Decentralize the Internet, Mozilla Has $2 Million For You (cnet.com)

Mozilla and the National Science Foundation want a new internet. And they want it to be free and accessible for everybody. From a report: They'll pay $2 million for it. On Wednesday, the two organizations issued a call to action for "big ideas that decentralize the web" as part of the "Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society" challenges. The challenges include getting the internet to communities off the grid, with proposals like a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside.

127 comments

  1. In this thread: by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 4, Funny

    -Can't do it, it's too late
    -Need more money
    -Brendan Eich! ahahgfhahadgdaha!

    --
    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    1. Re:In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How about: You can easily block packets, but try blocking spammed packets from the air? Denial of service will take on a whole new meaning. You'd have to contact the FCC to prevent someone from actively jamming you.

    2. Re:In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Back in the day we used to have a saying (back in about 1990) "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of floppy disks" Now that is decentralized. Please send me my $2 Mil.

      (I think back then I had a 14400 modem on an Atari ST with 1Meg of ram and a 3.5 inch floppy drive. The disk capacity was 720k or 1.44MB - depending on something that I forgot)

    3. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's already BEEN done. DARPA is infecting my brain with skepticism using 8.3khz frequency. They are spreading ideas using tree pollen and genetics!!!

    4. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ha I remember that saying. I think the floppy size depended on how you formatted it. I could be wrong. Someone chime in please. Thanks.

    5. Re:In this thread: by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      It will destroy us all. With the IoT, and a wifi server plugged into every street-lamp, malware will make its own decentralized internet. But at least we'll have a decentralized internet.

      Interesting thing is that malware can do a decentralized internet because its usage patterns are different. Malware spreads out traffic (more or less) randomly, whereas normal human traffic tends to go to the same few places, thus creating huge bottlenecks.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    6. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wow 2 whole million dollars?
      That's a MUCH better deal than the trillions you'd get otherwise...

    7. Re:In this thread: by Captain+Splendid · · Score: 1

      Huh, I hadn't thought about it that way. I could also see the IoT adding so many nodes, it makes trying to control the internet too expensive to do properly, and that's even before we get to the more interesting stuff you brought up. Thanks!

      --
      Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
    8. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Single or double sided.

    9. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There was single(SD), double(DD) and high density(HD) disks. Higher density disks could be used as lower but obviously not the other way around. They could actually handle 500kb, 1 MB and 2 MB but formated the could handle 360, 720 and 1440 know on the PC but more on other systems. There was utilities that could format them with higher capacity on PCs using less metadata. Great for disks only containing a few zip files.

    10. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So where would I get trillions in funding to implement a decentralized internet.

    11. Re: In this thread: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I didn't hear that till the 90s and it was a plane full of cds

  2. what airline would allow that? by turkeydance · · Score: 1

    got to get there to get off the grid. and in some cases, commercial air travel is necessary.

    1. Re:what airline would allow that? by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      how so? isn't most of the Earth still accessible by foot, boat or pack mule? Unless you have some particular limitation on travel time, it seems that commercial airlines are not necessary. And if you have the budget, flying as a private pilot will get you lots of places if you don't mind multiple stops for refuel and pilot breaks.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    2. Re: what airline would allow that? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Switch to version 9. Allows for arbitrary ping times. Yah the node at mars cratered last I heard. I suspect ICANN

  3. Internet of the grid by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's kind of an oxymoron.

    However backpack with WiFi is fucking retarded. How far off the grid are the places 500 ft? At that point run some fiber. Geostationary says will work nearly everywhere and iridium will work everywhere it's stupid expensive but since that's already been solved can I have the 2M for pointing it out. As for the decentralizing the Internet isn't that kind of the general idea anyway of the whole project.

    1. Re:Internet of the grid by war4peace · · Score: 1

      Implement standalone Access Points to each smartphone, they should be enabled by default and become active either on request or when no other type of Internet Access is available.

      I only accept payments in Ethereum.

      --
      ...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
    2. Re:Internet of the grid by Osgeld · · Score: 1

      use packet over shortwave, sure its only like 9600bps but it will go for (lots and lots and lots of) miles

    3. Re:Internet of the grid by OrangeTide · · Score: 1

      You'll want an 20-80 meter antenna if you are transmitting on shortwave to get good coupling to the air. If you try to use a cheap little antenna that works for receiving SW then you'll end up burning up your transmit stage uselessly trying to heat the air instead of making effective radio waves.

      --
      “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
    4. Re:Internet of the grid by Tailhook · · Score: 1

      you'll end up burning up your transmit stage

      You can use any conductor as an antenna without burning up your transmitter... just have to impedance match it. Damp trees have been resonated. Now, whether anyone will hear you is another question: your crap antenna is likely to be down a few db.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    5. Re:Internet of the grid by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      Sorry, but shortwave isn't going to get you 9600bps. Shortwave gets you 1200.

  4. Freent by Powys · · Score: 4, Interesting

    https://freenetproject.org/ Those guys are already trying to do it. It is fully decentralized and private. It is very slow, and consumes huge bandwidth, but it works. The real concern here is the lack of choice when it comes to ISPs. They control the last mile, which almost everyone MUST lean on if they want to be on the internet. Break up the monopolies/duopolies and most the problems Mozilla wants to solve evaporates.

    1. Re:Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm all for Freenet, or similar. It solves the problems of censorship and surveillance. However, it comes with its own problems, mainly in very undesirable content. If somebody could clean it up, so it's at least off the "front page", I think it would appeal to more people.

    2. Re:Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuck Freenet. They expect you to give up your bandwidth and a chunk of your storage space for other people's content with no guarantee that your own content will stay available (only the most popular stuff gets to stay on Freenet). I'd rather just run my own servers so that my bandwidth and storage space is being used for my own content that I get to control access to.

    3. Re:Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It "works" but if it worked faster more people would use it.

    4. Re:Freent by allo · · Score: 2

      Content undesired by some is the reason for decentral and censorship resistant networks.
      You may object some content and find it reasonable. Other people restrict content, you want to have. Legal rights, morale and related things are relative.
      Freedom of speech is allowing people to say (or in case of digital media distribute content) you DO NOT agree with. Freedom of speech is a right you grant to others. And you can only have total freedom for everything or for nothing.
      But don't worry too much. Digital content does not kill anyone. Never. You may think about sites, where somebody hires killers. Yep, that's a problem.
      But the problem is not the digital data, but the killer. And a killer kills you in real life. Where real life police protects you. The content itself will never kill you.
      AND when you have a uncensored network with an open site for hireing killers, you have a starting point for investigations, which you do not have when there are only secret markets.

    5. Re:Freent by allo · · Score: 1

      That's the way block storage networks work. The only way you can guarantee to host something, which isn't dependend on services you provide or you pay to stay available.

    6. Re: Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes undesirable content like the us Constitution, the UN declaration of human rights etc has to be removed like on the regular internet where we do that. And with "we" I mean all that's capable of setting up a firewall and remove any content they please.

      The problem of course is that when we can censor undesirable content it's mostly going to be used for EVIL purposes.

      This is just en excuse to do EVIL. The same organization that started pushing censoring the content you are referring to also wanted to protect children by removing content related to homosexuality, extramarital sex, blasphemy and a lot of other things. So know what you are supporting. Nema.

    7. Re: Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well the problem with your solution is that it's not distributed and among other things are vulnerable to DODOS attacks. But yes Freenet is something I call Failnet because literally nothing I tried accessing was reachable. There are newer initiatives such as IPFS but unfortunately there aren't yet any really good solution.

    8. Re:Freent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What?

      The only way you can guarantee to host something

      Freenet doesn't guarantee anything. That was stated in the post you responded to.

      which isn't dependend on services you provide or you pay to stay available.

      Except it IS dependent upon services I provide and costs me money (computer resources and internet connection). I'd rather just run my own server, which would cost me the same except my content will be available for as long as I want it to be, not when Freenet decides to drop it.

    9. Re:Freent by allo · · Score: 1

      Freenet is a distributed block storage. Your content stays in there as long as it's wanted or as long as you reinsert it. Its a bit like torrents with DHT, but you're guaranteeds some distribution, even when nobody downloaded from you, yet. Still it dies, when you stop seeding and everyone else stops seeding/loading.

      > I'd rather just run my own server, which would cost me the same except my content will be available for as long as I want it to be, not when Freenet decides to drop it.
      On the other hand, it is instantly dead if your server hoster pulls the plug. On freenet the content may stay forever. Or at least long enough, you can download it again to start creating your site again.

      In the end it is always +/- 0. But The +/- 0 is more failsafe, because there is some redundancy in there and the content isn't associated with the creator and his servers anymore.

  5. Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It will be filed with nothing but porn and racist sites.

    1. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Powys · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem with this mentality is it defeats the entire purpose of decentralization and non-censorship. If you want a fully free and uncensored internet, you will always have to put up with sites/opinions/ideas you don't like. That is part of FULLY free speech. The left and the right both cry foul about censorship when their ideas are being squashed, but are very will to squash others ideas they don't agree with. If you want an open internet, you get 4chan (and worse) in the mix.

    2. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Fortunately, anyone who doesn't want to look at 4chan (or whatever else), doesn't have to.

    3. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's what we need!

      I HATE non-pornographic and non-racist sites. As a matter of fact, why should sites be racist OR pornographic?

      All sites should be racist pornography sites.

    4. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Vlijmen+Fileer · · Score: 1

      And government approved "news".

    5. Re: Yea.... Nope. by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Add warez and what else would be needed?
      The porn are boring though.

    6. Re: Yea.... Nope. by aliquis · · Score: 1

      We indeed need much more Nazi / fasc porn.

    7. Re: Yea.... Nope. by aliquis · · Score: 2

      Now it's all black cock for white girl and no baby-making since its all in the ass anyway.

    8. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What happens when someone's free speech is: "I want to take up all the bandwidth with trash, literal trash"? (Just to fill up the space and make it impossible for anyone else to communicate.)

    9. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's decentralized aimed at remove locations, so it WON'T be in the U.S...

    10. Re:Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

      That is already a thing, Look at the(mostly liberal) media.

    11. Re:Yea.... Nope. by allo · · Score: 1

      Then the answer is: nobody listens.
      A decentral network must be resistant to attacks like this one.

    12. Re: Yea.... Nope. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      There are no really good source of porn anymore. There used to be a lot on Kazaa, aMule and simular. These days not event the darknet hava any good stuff.

  6. THIS IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED! by FrankHaynes · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Internet was designed to be distributed so that it had no central point of attack/vulnerability. Was NOBODY paying attention for the last 20 years while money-grubbing businesses jockeyed for control, thus creating the very problem that it was designed to circumvent??!!

    HOW FUCKING STUPID DO YOU HAVE TO BE??!!

    --
    slashdot: A failed experiment.
    1. Re:THIS IS THE WAY THE INTERNET WAS DESIGNED! by SuricouRaven · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Different operators, different requirements. For the military, decentralisation and redundancy was a core goal - they needed a network that would continue to function even if large parts of it were being bombed. But a commercial operator just doesn't have that requirement, and is more concerned about cost.

  7. Its the DNS system and the SSL racket by sg_oneill · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they want to decentralize the web, DNS and the SSL racket has to change. Domains have been completely compromised by both business interests, particularly the .com domains which have been squatted to hell and back, and government interests that can take away those names just because your politically inconvenient (See: Torrent sites).. And the SSL racket has to go, why the hell should we have to pay huge sums of cash to companys that *clearly* can not guarantee the integrity of the trust chain for certificates and have let us down again and again.

    To my thinking, whatever must come next must be decentralized and let *US* choose who we trust and who we don't, both for domains, and for encryption.

    --
    Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    1. Re:Its the DNS system and the SSL racket by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      News flash: SSL is now completely free via let's encrypt.
      Not sure what you are talking about with regards to DNS. Domains are cheap. Free ones are available. You might not be able to get "facebook.com", but that is not an infringement on your civil liberties. Use a tor domain if you want to be private.

    2. Re:Its the DNS system and the SSL racket by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every browser allows self-signed certificates. What's the problem?

    3. Re:Its the DNS system and the SSL racket by tepples · · Score: 1

      Every browser allows self-signed certificates.

      I was under the impression that the developer of an application for Android 7 had to explicitly opt in to trusting user-installed root certificates. Does Chrome for Android 7 opt in?

      What's the problem?

      Even apart from the Chrome for Android 7 issue, it might not be so trivial to install your home NAS's private root certificate on laptops, tablets, and smartphones carried by friends and family visiting your LAN.

    4. Re:Its the DNS system and the SSL racket by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      DNS is centralized and not encrypted, so all requests can be logged.

  8. Too late by QuietLagoon · · Score: 1

    ...And they want it to be free and accessible for everybody. ...

    The mega-corporations already control all the on ramps. Of course, if Mozilla intends to rewire every household in the United States, then they might have a chance of hitting their goal.

  9. RTFA: the title is misleading by nctritech · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.

    NEITHER OF THOSE IS "DECENTRALIZATION."

    1. Re:RTFA: the title is misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A real decentralised network would be something like Scuttlebutt,

      So far, the network has received a dedicated social network desktop app, a Soundcloud alternative, a Viewer webapp, and a git layer (putting “distributed” back into “distributed version control”). The platform is being improved constantly, in areas such as: mobile support, an NPM alternative, WebRTC support for browser peers, and even legal transactions in New Zealand

    2. Re:RTFA: the title is misleading by Kjella · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.

      I never understood these types of projects that are trying to create a super-low cost alternative in an established market they have no clue about and have no intention of becoming a commercial player in. Whether it's to build a $100 laptop (hello OLPC), $10 tablet (hello Aakash), $3 smartphone (hello Freedom 251), deliver Internet with donkeys or some other flop/scam. Usually they start with some hilariously optimistic plan that a billion people need their product, do cost estimates based on the sum of the BoM and burn ridiculous amounts of investor/charity/government money re-discovering that industrial design, mass production, QA, distribution and support is not free. Meanwhile the traditional players operate on fairly razor-thin margins knowing that if you get them hooked on your brand there's a good chance you'll buy another, more profitable model if you get more money so if the project was feasible they steal your market and if it wasn't you're never able to deliver.

      My guess is that whoever wins this will create a boondoggle of a solution for a thousand people that in a few years will be replaced by another 100 million people getting electricity, cellphones and mobile internet. Or at the very least a satellite uplink for the village/island driven by generator/battery. Maybe Mozilla should get back to producing some software people want to use, once they get online? Just saying that despite the goals seeming noble, this is pretty much pissing away money in the wind.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:RTFA: the title is misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's bitztream, the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating and Qualcomm-hating Slashdot troll!

    4. Re:RTFA: the title is misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's wrong with OLPC?

    5. Re:RTFA: the title is misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Mozilla isn't trying to decentralize the internet. The challenge with the money involved is either to deploy access to places that have none OR deploy BETTER access to places that have lousy access.

      I never understood these types of projects that are trying to create a super-low cost alternative in an established market they have no clue about and have no intention of becoming a commercial player in.

      Cassandra and all the rest scale data horizontally, so that problem is more or less tackled. A lot of websites are db centric. Can we somehow have the database auto spawn using compatible resources at ISPs? (Yes I'm ignoring a ton of security issues for the purposes of this argument.)

      At any rate if you had a web protocol that would automatically allocate resources locally upon demand and then replicate what is required there, it might work. There are a lots of details to work out and maintain, but you could certainly reduce the long haul link bandwidth required. They key is to automate it all (and secure it). To some extent don't cloud resources already do this though?

      Either way, the basic idea needs solved, since we will hopefully live as a species long enough to populate other planets, the moon, etc, etc and we aren't going to want to wait on the speed of light to interact with a web page. Of course, I'd hate to see what Amazon Prime shipping would cost if from New York to the moon became an option ;)

      I tend to think the solution is something closer to a windows/other container that serves resources rather than a virtual machine. The idea is similar either way, you just want to minimize the VM overhead. Basically you can get the security you need by fully controlling the entire VM/container/whatever, assuming you trust the host OS that is...

      Once upon a time caching proxy servers actually did something useful, but these days it is pretty limited. Either way, finding someway to intelligently cache what can be cached is the key to reducing long haul link overhead.

    6. Re: RTFA: the title is misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You'll eat your words in a few years when Servo is ready. Mozilla have the best renderer in the world by miles but it's still beta

  10. So a price is set for Mark Zuckerberg's head... by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

    " "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." https://politics.slashdot.org/...

    1. Re:So a price is set for Mark Zuckerberg's head... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Zuck doesn't have MY data and never will. If you don't want Zuck to have your data, and I highly recommend that because he literally calls his users "dumb fucks!", well just simply get off FB like *right now*. Right now.

      Still here? Get off FB fcol!

  11. Corporations, governments don't want this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The corporate world and governments don't want a 'decentralized' internet, because that would make it much more difficult to collect data on people, spy on people, surveil people, and exercise censorship. If Mozilla wants a 'decentralized' internet, they'd be better off spending that $2,000,000 on WMDs to wipe companies like Comcast/Xfinity off the map and assassins to kill government officials who advocate for destroying peoples' privacy rights all in the name of corporate profits. For the most part the Horse Has Already Left The Barn, and the only way you'd get real Net Neutrality and true Decentralization would be to hit the 'Hardest Refresh' button.

  12. Simply you cannot by aglider · · Score: 1

    Not the internet, which is strongly polarized towards the connectivity providers. The "inter" part of internet mostly pertains the ISPs and the carriers. A decentralized solution would require the total kill of the concept of ISP. It would take seconds or even minutes to reach a site (or whatever you call it).

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    1. Re:Simply you cannot by wolfheart111 · · Score: 1

      Ahhh you just want the loot for yourself dont you. :)

      --
      [($)]
    2. Re:Simply you cannot by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      It would take seconds or even minutes to reach a site (or whatever you call it).

      I call it the electromechanical superhighway (or, colloquially, the Interstate).

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  13. new internet? by unixisc · · Score: 2

    Incidentally, whatever happened to Internet2? The very high speed internet that colleges & such institutions were working on?

    Anyway, my suggestion: for such a thing, deprecate IPv4 and use only IPv6, and that too, using a 96:32 split instead of 64:64. And make this hierarchichal, so that the uppermost blocks drill down from IANA -> RIR -> Nation -> Organizations. And instead of having provider independent IP addresses, which tends to break that, encourage them to use multicast addresses to group the IP addresses that they have in different domains, be it nations or complete regions.

    1. Re:new internet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No because you're mapping numerical nations and regions which in a way is centralising it. IP's need to be completely random and given out within numbered ranges that apply to everyone. Class the ranges from Residential to Commercial and Govt and that's it. Choose which "net" of the Commercial and Residential nets gets centralised. Leave the Residential net to the people completely unabated.

      Which is the answer to Moziilla's $2mil question. And because of this reason, you CANT decentralise the web. Now were's my cash beatches!

    2. Re:new internet? by bn-7bc · · Score: 1

      Oh lovrly so organisations with significsnt infra structure needs to renumber everythong when they change isps, or even hevs 2 or more ips for dverything if they hsve multiple isps (bcp and all that) , what a good idea, intead of just advertising the same condistsnt prefix to a frw upstreams, I know tcam isn't cheap but I think all in all it will turn out cheaper, and sith ipv6 ypu arblightly tonsee only one prefix/sight snyway due to generous allocation from rirs

    3. Re: new internet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I already use TOR and I2P for isp neutral addressing for addressing. We don't need any new system, we only need to improve upon these two. Preferably with the capability to route outside of Internet. Routing between LANs that's only bridged by I2P or TOR should be possible.

    4. Re: new internet? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      So in other words, get rid of national TLDs, and have only addresses based on .com, .org, .net & .gov? Could be a solution, except that multiple English speaking countries could have a 'National Bank', in which case, which one gets the nationalbank.com domain name?

      Random IPs are not the solution, particularly if they are static. If they were dynamic, your idea would make sense. But organizations need static IPs as well, and as IoT grows, even people will need it. Maybe 1 solution to your issue could be to not have RIR -> nation, but rather, RIR to everybody in it, which would be a big headache for RIPE and a big potential headache for APNIC (w/ 3 billion people b/w China & India alone).

    5. Re: new internet? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      No, that's what my multicast (or even anycast) suggestion was about: when you add a new ISP, just add that ISP's allocated addresses to the multicast address mapping, and you're good to go. So that an organization just needs to add that, and then all the sites serviced by the new ISP get the same content as before w/o having to update things on all the nodes

  14. Start the Pied Piper jokes in 3...2...1... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm not sure how to do it, but I know it'll involve middle-out compression.

    1. Re:Start the Pied Piper jokes in 3...2...1... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm surprised. I expected more Pied Piper comments. So far this is the only one.

  15. Re:I have in 1 respect (China agrees w/ it) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    more fucking gibberish from you.

    Your hosts file does not eliminate the need for centralized DNS.

  16. How about Mozilla fixes the memory leaks instead?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As I write this, the firefox.exe process on my computer has ballooned to 2.8 GB of memory usage.

    (which is impressive for a 32-bit windows process)

    Focus on the core mission of building a quality web browser, and stop trying to futz up the user interface. The UI was fine 10 versions ago. Or 20 versions ago.

  17. Freifunk by xororand · · Score: 2

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Freifunk (German for: "free radio") is a non-commercial open grassroots initiative to support free computer networks in the German region. The main goals of Freifunk are to build a large scale free wireless Wi-Fi network that is decentralized, owned by those who run it and to support local communication.

    The initiative counts about 400 local communities with over 41,000 access points. Freifunk uses mesh technology to bring up ad hoc networks by interconnecting multiple Wireless LANs

    1. Re:Freifunk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      wireless Wi-Fi

      Whatever will they think of next.

  18. easy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Blockchain-based DNS, then kill the root servers. Beyond that, it's already decentralized as much as it'll ever be.

  19. modular setup for anyone by budsetr · · Score: 0

    How about a set of standards that set X amount of bandwidth and Y amount of data use with (this_set_of_security_protocols) and three protocol update sites that you can set any connected device to? A peer-to-peer opt-in on a massive scale.

  20. RFC 1149, 2549, 6214 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You could do it by post if you needed to. Oh you mean't delivering advertisements and streaming media not just information. Sorry not going to help with that.

  21. Just needs the right team by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    you people are all very narrow minded...
    ipfs and blockchain could decentralize the internet with the right team...

    1. Re:Just needs the right team by Highdude702 · · Score: 1

      And slow it to a standstill while wasting MW of electricity and processing power..

  22. Decentralized by design? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If I'm not mistaken, ARPA originally designed to internet to be decentralized by its nature, allowing for continued C&C in the event that a nuclear war took out our major telephone exchange nodes. Big ISP's then pretty much trashed that idea, and we're now in the same boat again, but with less urgency.

    1. Re:Decentralized by design? by Trax3001BBS · · Score: 1

      If I'm not mistaken, ARPA originally designed to internet to be decentralized by its nature, allowing for continued C&C in the event that a nuclear war took out our major telephone exchange nodes. Big ISP's then pretty much trashed that idea, and we're now in the same boat again, but with less urgency.

      I beleive decentralized at the time meant many routes to the same address.

    2. Re:Decentralized by design? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ah, but what if the content was decentralized so that shutting down one particular server would not kill it? And you had many on-ramps? There are many ways to decentralize things. Just having packet rerouting isn't decentralization more than it is robust.

  23. Proposal by fennec · · Score: 1

    I propose a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside. Now give me my $2M !

  24. Already done, but we walked away from it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    USENET

  25. Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit by tepples · · Score: 4, Interesting

    SSL is now completely free via let's encrypt.

    Let's Encrypt requires a fully qualified domain name (FQDN) under a well-known top-level domain (TLD), not an IP address in RFC 1918 space or a name under a made-up TLD such as .local or .internal. So do all other CAs whose root certificates are included in Mozilla NSS, as a FQDN is one of the Baseline Requirements adopted by the CA/Browser Forum.

    Domains are cheap.

    Cheap enough for every head of household to buy and to continue to renew in perpetuity? Because buying a domain is the only way to get a certificate for hosts on your LAN that visitors' devices will trust, and a certificate is the only way you're going to satisfy the "Secure Contexts" requirement for recently introduced JavaScript APIs.

    Free ones are available.

    Namely?

    If you're referring to subdomains offered by dynamic DNS providers, these providers have to be on Mozilla's Public Suffix List (PSL). If a domain isn't already on the PSL, and 20 other users of subdomains under the same domain have obtained certificates in the past week, Let's Encrypt will deny you a certificate, citing its rate limit policy. If a domain is on the PSL, each subdomain gets its own separate rate limiting bucket of 20 certificates per subdomain per week. In addition, submissions to the PSL must be made by the dynamic DNS provider as a pull request through GitHub.com, and use of GitHub.com requires running proprietary software written in JavaScript on your computer.

    1. Re:Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The FSF considers the javascript required to access github "non-free" but that is not the same as proprietary I think. It's not closed source, more that they didn't fit the high requirements of the FSF to be considered truly free.

    2. Re:Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit by tepples · · Score: 1

      The FSF considers the javascript required to access github "non-free" but that is not the same as proprietary I think. It's not closed source

      Then where's the source code? The script file that GitHub serves is minified, and minified JavaScript is not "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it", which is how both GPLv2 and GPLv3 define a work's "source code".

      In addition, the requirement to run non-free JavaScript is not the only thing that prevents a manufacturer of networked appliances from just starting its own dynamic DNS service for use by its appliances' firmware. I have read reports that the people who handle PSL pull requests are backlogged, which could delay a product launch by months.

    3. Re:Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Domains are cheap.

      Cheap enough for every head of household to buy and to continue to renew in perpetuity?

      Yes. A cheap domain is less than a dollar a month. There are even TLDs offering free domains if you aren't fussy.

    4. Re:Let's Encrypt FQDN requirement and rate limit by tepples · · Score: 1

      A cheap domain is less than a dollar a month.

      Times hundreds of millions of households. This is a windfall to the registrar industry just to satisfy the mixed content blocking and Secure Contexts spec.

      Free ones are available.

      Namely?

      There are even TLDs offering free domains if you aren't fussy.

      Again, which TLDs are these? And do they bundle DNS service that Let's Encrypt can reach and that an ACME client can programmatically configure? If not, then the user will have to run a DNS server on his home computer or server appliance and forward port 53 inbound to that device. This not only requires technical expertise to configure the gateway device responsible for port forwarding but also fails completely on ISPs that put customers behind carrier-grade NAT.

  26. Use a hard drive or SSD. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    am i rich now?

  27. Oh, I misread that bad by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    For some reason I read that as "$2M to deSTABILIZE" the internet.

    I had just about worked through the arrangements to film a video with a Kardassian and about forty cats, good thing I re-read the headline before I signed the contracts!

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  28. Great thanks! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mozilla has just sent you $2 million. Addressed to Anonymous Coward c/o slashdot.

          Yours sincerely Mozilla Foundation.

          p.s. would you like to donate some back to us?

  29. Re: Al Gore here, I invented the Internet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Go fuck a manbearpig, you money-grubbing hypocrite.

  30. Mozilla will not like it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Stop making browsers and embrace ubiquity.

  31. RTFA: the quantums are entangled. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The only real way would be if we could make quantum entanglement work as a communications link. The endpoints are already decentralized to varying degrees. As far as better, or none "white space" may work better in that regard.

  32. already done by smithcl8 · · Score: 2
    1. Re:already done by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

      That looks a lot like a piratebox.

  33. Off the grid? by AHuxley · · Score: 1

    Then just build a series of wireless towers to the site. At some location with good optical and a selection of providers, build a tower.
    Build more towers as needed to get some network to the off grid site.
    Think of security and power needs too.

    "How a group of neighbors created their own Internet service" (11/2/2015,)
    https://arstechnica.com/inform...

    --
    Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
    1. Re:Off the grid? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Join a community wireless group or if there isnt one start your own.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region

      There is some great networks in Australia which are doing well.

  34. look to the US military by rapjr · · Score: 2

    US military has been working on this for a long time and a lot of the research is freely available. For example, multi-hop wireless networking has known scalability limits (you can't connect everybody to everybody because the system slows to a halt, a few hundred nodes is probably the limit) so you need a certain percentage of basestations that are better connected via microwave links or wire lines. Store-and-forward helps with disconnection but is very slow and how do you secure such a persistent connection or decide when it should be dropped? How to only partially trust a newly discovered remote service? (See papers on mobile agents and execution on servers that are assumed to compromised.) . I haven't looked at this area for a while, but I think the state of the art is basically what the US uses in warfare, which is small, local multi-hop networks connected to mobile basestations that connect to satellites with encryption on everything and some jamming resistance. How to distribute encryption keys is always a question; you can cooperatively generate a shared key with a remote connection, but how much do you trust them? How do you trust de-centralized services? Reputation systems can help trust be self-healing. At the least some sandboxing is required at multiple levels of both the networking systems and operating systems, including the ability to reset a system back to a known state (e.g., boot from CD-ROM). There are a lot of difficult questions, and ultimately everything relies on people, so it will never be perfectly secure, but some kind of verifiably-fairly-trustworthy-most-of-the-time system that can self-heal-eventually can probably be cobbled together. Opening up long range radio bands to open-access-networking would be very useful for decentralization. Notice that in the US citizens have little access to open and hackable long-range-wide-area radio links that can carry any kind of content. Cellular and Ham radio is fairly tightly controlled as are high power emissions in any band. Ultra Wide Band might be useful for solving the problem of sharing wide area radio links without bad actors destroying the shared resource. Bouncing signals (laser or radio) off the moon is limited to when the moon is above the horizon (and not obscured by trees or buildings) and is tricky to do. Maybe a grid of big metal reflectors in orbit that everyone could bounce signals off of could work more predictably than bouncing signals off the ionosphere?

  35. I have in 1 respect (China agrees w/ it) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Hardcoded favorite sites in hosts where you spend most time resolve faster locally from RAM increase speed/security vs.remote central DNS' numerous security issues & protect vs. malware etc. too or DNS being down. This also lightens DNS server loads too (bonus).

    * So where's my prize Mozilla? Dns = centralized function of the internet. Use of hosts thus is not.

    (Per my subject - China = imitation = flattery http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/boffins_supercharge_the_hosts_file_to_save_users_plagued_by_dns_outages/ )

    APK

    P.S.=> Via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-7 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ you get all of the above & FAR more for FAR less vs. other "so-called 'solutions'" for security (that slow you down, hosts speed you up)

  36. The ham radio is already there. by Humbubba · · Score: 1
    These geeks are driving around in their cars, surfing the WEB and talking to each other with technology straight off the amateur radio shelf. Relay stations allow for service virtually worldwide. You just need the hardware, the software and the license. D-Star is a digital voice and data protocol specification for amateur radio. There are open source alternatives to D-Star, but I don't know much about them.

    YouTube Ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMUGQQ2Pn4

    D-STAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR

    1. Re:The ham radio is already there. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ham radio is great, here in Australia some of the groups have joined or work with community wireless (WiFi) networks too where they share knowledge and tower space. Having a fault tolerant network that is faster than packet radio can support things such as live remote monitoring of HF at a less noisy area using SDR.

      Join a ham group, even pickup some CB radios which are free to use (class licence depends on country) or even chuck an Ethernet cable over your neighbors fence to connect.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_networks_by_region

  37. Hosts do 94++% of the time via hardcodes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject: Hardcoded hosts favorite sites (where you spend most time) speedup resolution via local system RAM vs. remote DNS.

    Hosts secure vs. DNS tracking, security issues + being down & hosts secure vs. tons more threats too.

    * Hosts do all that for tons less natively in kernelmode speed (+ hosts even lighten DNS server load (bonus)).

    APK

    P.S.=> Truth - there's NOTHING like it like right there above... apk

  38. How's life in the hypocrite lane?

  39. Routing BGP by pcjunky · · Score: 1

    Thanks to it's core protocols it's mostly decentralized now. BGP routing protocol that keeps your IP addresses routable across the global Internet does not have any center. Nor do any of the thousands of routers have any central requirements to operate. Really only DNS requires centralized servers.

    1. Re:Routing BGP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even then DNS can run on multiple servers or can be created on your own.

  40. Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Australia has community wireless networks (not for profit) like this too such as:

    Air-Stream (South Australia): http://air-stream.org/
    Western Australian Community Access Networks (Western Australia): http://www.wacan.asn.au/
    Melbourne Wireless (Victoria): http://melbourne.wireless.org.au/

    Join a club or if there isn't one in your area start your own. Even throwing an Ethernet cable over the fence to your neighbour is a start.

  41. Existing solutions. by SuricouRaven · · Score: 1

    We don't need another piece of technology. There are already several possibilities in play which are in desperate need of resources and support. If Mozilla really wants to decentralise the internet, why don't they start supporting something like IPFS? That project does exactly what they want, but like many others is stuck in the chicken-and-egg stage: No-one will make a website that needs a protocol very few people can access, and no browser or OS vendor will bother to support a protocol that no-one is using.

  42. Let me guess by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe an internet without PC's or forced wifi, how depressing.

    An internet of refrigerators..

  43. Divide and Conquer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    To decentralise the net you just have to establish that tech companies are not allowed to service more than 1 million* users each.
    When they do they have to be divided up into smaller distinct localised companies.**

    Facebook/Apple/Google/Microsoft/Oracle/Comcast/AT&T/Verizon/IBM/Cisco/Samsung/Sony/Adobe/Mozilla/ etc.. Goodbye.

    This is a political fix, just requires lobbying.
    I will take my $2 million now.. thanks Mozilla.

    * An arbitary figure I pulled out of my ass.
    ** This will also help to fix tax evasion of said businesses, because knowing there is a cap on customers you can have a rough expectation of net worth and taxes due.

  44. "Great minds think alike" & I'm there already by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    See subject & https://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10780593&cid=54679243/

    * :)

    APK

    P.S.=> My use of hosts files does what you're asking. So much so, even CHINA agrees & imitated a feature of my program to do so (see link for proof thereof)... apk

  45. Simple idea by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Make every phone and cell tower and wifi device a mesh network device. Somewhere along the way it is provisioned. Hard line for towers and wireless for every phone. Add 5G cell to all routers.

  46. Which One? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Are they talking about decentralizing the Internet or the Web?

  47. my 2cents.. symmetric pipes. net neutrality. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    lisp machines for everyone. eperson status for all avatars. blockchain reputation by dns.
    and keep the millions. make the transport symmetric and trustworthy to profit humanity by [tr|b]illions.
    thanks!

  48. The Freenet Delusion by westlake · · Score: 1

    Freenet has been around for seventeen years.

    It has never been clear how many people actually use the thing, but the numbers are most probably quite small.

    Think closer to ten thousand than ten million.

    The user In 2017 expects agility and speed, all sorts of content accessed adeptly and interactively, not the static web pages of GeoCities and dial-up AOL.

    It also seems fair to suggest that most users are not interested in installing software that links them directly to the dark underside of the net. Freenet is not the kind of program you want resident on your taskbar when clearing your laptop through customs.

    i ,p

    .

    .

    it

  49. Nigerian prince letter by ebvwfbw · · Score: 1

    Now it's not just from Nigeria. They want it so it could be from anywhere on the globe.

  50. Score:-5, Pwned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1
  51. Re:How about Mozilla fixes the memory leaks instea by nctritech · · Score: 1

    The Firefox memory leak problems were fixed a long time ago. Remember that a memory leak is when a program allocates memory but never frees it even when it doesn't use it ever again. Certain add-ons cause excessive memory consumption but Firefox itself doesn't have any significant memory usage problems. I can leave several windows with 10-30 tabs each up for weeks at a time and never hit 2GB of memory usage, and that's with quite a few add-ons and the enlarged pointer/data size of a 64-bit program as well. As for the interface crap, it's shitty but I've adjusted to it so it's not as big of a deal most of the time. The hamburger menu thing is still really stupid and I wish I could print preview the "print selection" option.