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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.
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?
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!
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
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.
While reading the headline, my first thought was that this was about Yemeni hipsters making budget medium range ballistic missiles from scraps.
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.
DuckDuckGo is an obvious honeypot.
The courts are fond of discovering new and innovative rights. Perhaps they could discover a constitutional right to run one's own home server.
I mean, if a bunch of unelected dunderheads in robes are going to be the ultimate legislative authority in the land, it would be pretty awesome if they at least invented *good* laws.
Ebba GrÃn. 800 grader.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Slightly worse. It's self-selection. By doing a search on DuckDuckGo you have flagged your search activity as "interesting". Perhaps you'll get a little more compute resources devoted to analyzing your activity. A shorter escalation path to attention from a human analyst.
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.
You could say they took the SAFE Shilling ;)
FFS, could this be more transparently Yet Another Coin Scam (tm)?
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...
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 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).
There is a constitutional right to run ones own server. I'll give you a hint. But *first* you need to read *one* of the amendments.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
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.