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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.
-Can't do it, it's too late
-Need more money
-Brendan Eich! ahahgfhahadgdaha!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
got to get there to get off the grid. and in some cases, commercial air travel is necessary.
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)
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.
use packet over shortwave, sure its only like 9600bps but it will go for (lots and lots and lots of) miles
It will be filed with nothing but porn and racist sites.
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.
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.
...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.
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."
" "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/...
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.
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
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.
I'm not sure how to do it, but I know it'll involve middle-out compression.
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
I propose a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside. Now give me my $2M !
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.
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!
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.
And slow it to a standstill while wasting MW of electricity and processing power..
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
http://librarybox.us/
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"
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?
YouTube Ex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbMUGQQ2Pn4
D-STAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-STAR
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
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.
Sorry, but shortwave isn't going to get you 9600bps. Shortwave gets you 1200.
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.
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.
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Now it's not just from Nigeria. They want it so it could be from anywhere on the globe.
Witness BitZtream getting pwned!
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.