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

Posted by msmash on from the call-pied-piper dept.

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.

10 of 127 comments (clear)

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

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

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    Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
  2. 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.

  3. 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??!!

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    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.

  4. 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.

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  5. 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.

  6. 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 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.

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  7. 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.

  8. 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.