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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.
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!”
I was going to say. Punk's solution to what they saw as a corrupt society was to spit at it, swear a lot and hole up in squats. I hope these tech revolutionaries can bring something more to the game than a series of affected snarls.
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.
If they do succeed it just means they'll live long enough to become the bad guys themselves. Remember back when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple and acted much the same idealistic way or Google's early mantra of "don't be evil". Not every company or its founders start out as a complete dick bags, but most of those who become wildly successful turn into them.
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"
They will bring exactly the same thing to the game as the current tech giants did, when the replaced the previous tech giants, as in the future when the new tech giants who replaced the current tech giants are replaced by future tech giants. Tech giants has much more to do with marketing and public relations than it has to do with reality. They way they crap on about corporations of what ever ilk, is just ludicrous. The only reason it is so loud, is because their customer service is so bad. Seriously I wonder if one day they will wake up an realise that good customer service is cheaper than advertising and far more profitable. I know that wont show up in some psychopath douche bags spreadsheet, as they try to pump up the bonus by saving money cutting service and support but it's a lie and advertising to hide shite service and support is far more expensive than providing service and support, which in reality provides free sales staff for life.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
While reading the headline, my first thought was that this was about Yemeni hipsters making budget medium range ballistic missiles from scraps.
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.
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.
[repost, sry was not logged in last time] A few differences tho, (disclaimer I am in the article), MaidSafe have taken no VC funding and worked very hard (possibly harder than the tech at time, certainly took more time) to maintain that stance. VC funding seems incompatible from doing good as a VC will often seek quick profit and mostly in traditional ways (from customers). So the maidsafe design is such that it cannot know its customers. The problems to solve, I feel, become simpler when you do not have a profit seeking motive, but instead set a mechanism where income will be generated from doing a good job and cease when you don't. So for instance to achieve the goal we would fund competitors (the crowd sale was supposed to be 30% to competitors). That is also an anathema to some traditional VCs. Being free of those chains sounds just perfect, but it is extremely hard, the company majority was given away in the early days, 50% to a foundation for education and innovation and 30% to the staff, the remaining 20% to small investors (yes some bug us for quick returns, but most are fine as they see progress). There are other issues when you have less cash but the highest staff costs you can with the budget you have (so speed). It is a different structure to fix the problems of centralisation, privacy erosion and lack of security for people that leads to loss of freedom, so we had to do it differently. So the setup is maidsafe can be replaced/enhanced easily by other entities who wish to take the GPL's software and complete or further upgrade it. It is a new way really, between VC funded fast profit seeking and open source spare time projects. We try to fit the middle, funded full time staff to create marketing, graphic design, UI's etc. all with back end Engineering and research. If it works then great, it is so far, its slower but hopefully fairer to the rest of the people who will benefit.
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.
What a totally epic failure of understanding. Punk rock's message was very simple. Be yourself, make it yourself, be self reliant and find your own way. DIY and self determination. All the hair styles, posturing, regulation safety pins, bondage pants etc. was crap tagged on by the establishment media who did their best to dilute and suppress the message.
Punk is not a dress code. It's not a set list of music to like and it's not a set of rules.
Be yourself. Do it yourself. Think for youself. ake it yourself. Be free.
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."