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How DIY Rebels Are Working To Replace Tech Giants (theguardian.com)
mspohr shares an excerpt from an "interesting article about groups working to make a safer internet": Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied. What they are doing could be seen as the online world's equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant -- as well as governments whose surveillance programs have fueled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralized internet. Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as "Free is a Lie" and "Avoiding Digital Feudalism."
[David Irvine, computer engineer and founder of MaidSafe, has devised an alternative to the "modern internet" he calls the Safe network]: the acronym stands for "Safe Access for Everyone." In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people's data -- files, documents, social-media interactions -- will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people's computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user's encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords. No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people's (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
[David Irvine, computer engineer and founder of MaidSafe, has devised an alternative to the "modern internet" he calls the Safe network]: the acronym stands for "Safe Access for Everyone." In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people's data -- files, documents, social-media interactions -- will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people's computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user's encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords. No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people's (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
I hope they fare better, but don't expect it.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Let's see what their ISPs have to say about this.
Another question is how well it blends in with regular traffic, so that some of those ISP issues and restrictions can be mitigated or circumvented entirely.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Isn't the whole file splitting and storing idea a lot like btfs?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
yay another buttcoin copy pump and dump
I thought they'd say 'freenet'
they didn't say it
not once at all...
Elrich!!
This sounds a lot like Freenet except they've made cryptocurrency a part of it. Freenet is incredibly slow because hunting down less used resources can take forever or be nigh impossible. They might be able to interest a few people because "CRYPTO!" but once Bitcoin crashes back to reasonable values, most of these digital tokens will shrivel up and leave a lot of these companies struggling. A lot of these tokens are simply ideas tacked onto a coin instead of coins tacked onto an idea; in other words, if the coin dies, the idea dies because the idea was never the real foundation.
the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied
Completely ignores who developed the Internet, and for what purpose...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
>> hacking and data theft will become impossible
muahahahahahahahahhahahhaha.
That right there is Nevada beachfront property. An app is going to consume that data. To consume it requires access to it. If the hacker steals the keys used by the app to get the data then they can steal the data. To think less of it is naive.
Nowadays, itâ(TM)s like Facebook
I'm going to call it a "wheel"
In other news, someone has re-invented distributed file storage. aka BitTorrent Sync
Wasn't this how the net worked in Neal's Stephenson or William Gibson's novels?
rather than being stored on distant servers
people's data [...] will be scattered around other people's computers
Which is obviously unlike, say, storing data on distant servers
But I'd be willing to give the idea another shot if there were no dependency on a particular programming language and the protocol could at least be sufficiently nailed down for backward compatibility.
(This was years ago. If things had improved, I presume everyone would be talking about it.)
Fetching some stuff takes forever, but I'm not always in a hurry. There's always the regular Web, or maybe Tor.
hacking and data theft will become impossible.
No, they won't... You will just need to hack a different device in order to steal the data. Hacking an end user's system will typically be much easier than a large provider, but you'll only get one user's data each time and have to hack many devices.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Not another internet. Another bitcoin... Yawn.
Billy Idol.Net ?
Be interesting to see which came first, "SAFE" or Season 3 (I believe) of "Silicon Valley" where Richard Hendricks gets the idea for the distributed interwebs?
If it was Silicon Valley, can they sue? I imagine they would want to, just to get publicity about what's being described in the show.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
called 'The Clash'
The brands that helped the clandestine services with PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The brands that could not get crypto to work and allowed plain text data to exist on networks that could be seen from the internet?
The brands that hire SJW to remove links, derank news? Remove accounts and ban movie reviews?
The brands that demand users allow malware on computers as "ads"?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Today's rebels are tomorrow's tech giants.
n/t
I recently switched to DuckDuckGo. I don't use Google any more except for Google scholar and maps. It works pretty well and I've never wanted for Google for basic search.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
While reading the headline, my first thought was that this was about Yemeni hipsters making budget medium range ballistic missiles from scraps.
EFF seems to get that there is an issue with home servers, but they seem to have a soft stance on net neutrality, either generally, or specifically here. The status quo of intimidating the home server market financially benefits the establishment centralized services profiteers. Before GMail existed, there was SquirrelMail. SM has been relatively unimpressive since then, but I don't believe that our home served webmail interfaces would have remained uncompetitive if the server persecution strategy had not been in play. And despite what many with a counter narrative will try to claim, this kind of type-of-software gatekeeping from ISPs is precisely what net neutrality is, was, and should be about.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
There's something quite beautiful about this solution... let's call it Punk-Chain...
I think the idea is to set up a system where no one is in complete control. In this way, even if the founders change their minds, it doesn't matter because the system is de-centralized. Whether or not such a system is feasible, or popular, remains to be seen.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
They are no more "working to replace tech giants" than Radio amateurs are "working to replace broadcasting giants". They are doing a lot of interesting stuff, some of which will be adopted by tech giants and some of which will remain niche.
Didn't you watch Star Wars Episodes VII and VIII you clod!
You could say they took the SAFE Shilling ;)
FFS, could this be more transparently Yet Another Coin Scam (tm)?
would seem to be ahead of the game.. Tho it needs 3rd party downloader/content manager so nothing can be blocked.
I'm weary of all this blockchain stuff tho.. I mean, it appears hashgraph is clearly far superior, so what's involved in getting over it's patents and developing that tech.
If they ever become a threat to the established corps and the interests of big government which collude with big industry, they will get legislated/sued out of existence. There will never be any challenge to the Powers That Be. Ever. Get over it.
We're working on decentralizing the internet too. We're a startup that was founded in Norway who have gotten an international team of highly experienced Tech personalities who also agree that this is the future. This is also partly what's behind the Blockchain movement. We've made an open source operating system that we're inserting into the internet. Autonomous infrastructure that allows for building desktop and mobile apps on decentralized technology. Check out the Friend Unifying Platform. https://friendup.cloud/ - https://github.com/FriendUPClo...
Would you say that Wikipedia just did something that was adopted by Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta, or did it practically replace them?
The trend since the early 2000s has been client server because VC backed companies couldn't monetize email. So instead of having an open protocol blogging system (RSS), or open protocol instant messenger (XMPP), we get Facebook and Twitter owning 90+% of the market.
Just promote protocols instead of websites and this will sort itself out.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
This was already done in 2000, it's called Freenet.
That is a reason that was retroactively applied, and in now way represents the purpose of the nascent Internet, which was simply to link up university computer systems for the purpose of sharing research.
I was intrigued until I read 'cryptocurrency'. Rather than being a solution, this is just more millennial nonsense that fails to even understand the issues, and it still smacks of usuriousness. Cash or cryptocurrency - the intent is the same. The millennial mind's inability to parse logic and think critically is *breath taking*. Nothing to see, it's a non-starter, yet again, with all the depth of a petri dish.
they are just trying to replace the tech giants with themselves. Why else would they create a service that is intrinsically linked to a form of payment that they have also created and control.
the ONLY way that they can refute that is if they open source everything, make the controlling corporations non profits from the start, and fix the glaring hole in their implementation:
"Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user's encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords."
so how does it work if i want to see someone else's social media page? if it is distributed and encrypted how are they going to handle access rights?
In the age of hype and walled gardens this sounds like a bit of both. The whole backing it off of a crypto coin is incredibly suspicious as well, because inevitably they will rely on one of the tech giants to handle their payment processing....
looking at their website i found a few gems:
"Lowest possible price through a perfect market. No humans setting prices for network services, the network continually adjusts and sets prices at the lowest possible costs based on available resources and user demand"
Human beings are really good at gaming systems like this, if algorithms are in control then human beings will find a way to game said algorithms unless there are humans at the steering wheel.
"The ultimate smart contract. SAFE stores and protects all data within a network that has been designed for this specific task, and Farmers are paid for their excess resource that comprise the network. The network calculates the costs of services (such as storage, communications and in time computation) providing it to the user at the lowest possible cost. You should think of this as the ultimate smart contract."
how does this Ultimate Smart contract then deal with data duplication? or do they just assume that the people storing the data will have 100% up time.
In the end, there are alot of big promises but until they prove that they are not in it for the profit they are no different than any of the other tech giants they claim to want to get rid of.
This really looks like the Holo project. Holo proposes a more human, agent centric internet — where you control your personal data and chose how the applications work. With Holo you share your computer's spare capacity running peer-to-peer apps. When people use the apps you host you get rewarded in cryptocurrency by the apps's creator. Holo is based on a technology called Holochain, a next generation platform for decentralized apps that is more scalable, exponentially faster and far more energy efficient and 10000x cheaper than Blockchain, not using global consensus and not based on tokens, rather on a mutual currency. You can join the crowdfunding campaign (already more than 200% funded by now) by purchasing a Holo port, a preconfigured silent linux box that sits on your desk and earns you criptocurrency (the open source software will also runs on any machine).
These kinds of people... I think they are perpetually stuck in a quest for an idealized society. Sure, bottom-up, freedom-seeking, semi-anarchistic society sounds good. So why doesn't that society emerge?
- nearly all human societies become hierarchical;
- nearly all human commerce organizes into recognizably pyramidal corporations;
- nearly all human religions have a command structure, and typically one recognized 'prophet';
- nearly all human non-profit groups establish a leader and organize around them.
It's because this is a more efficient structure, better at fulfilling an articulable mandate.
Loose coalitions have a hard time establishing and achieving a mission. There are more problems with internal communications. It's commonplace to find subgroups in coalitions with different priorities, goals, and deal-breaker issues. As a result coalitions are prone to breaking up, often with little warning.
And those passionate advocates? They are frequently placed in the role of Leader-In-Waiting, even if their ideology explicitly rejects the idea of a leader.
people's data -- files, documents, social-media interactions -- will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people's computers
Hey, this is almost Tahoe LAFS.
...same as the old boss.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
"Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion" How odd that someone named Balkan would form part of a fragmented solution.