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While the Net has certainly scored a point or two against the State, the State has scored a lot more points against the Net. If the State wants your domain name, it takes it. If that's independence, what does utter defeat and submission look like?
Worse: whatever state tyranny exists, it's obviously dwarfed by the private, free-market, corporate tyrannosaurs that stalk the cloud today. We can see this clearly by imagining all these thunder-lizards were actually part of the government. "Private" and "public" are just labels, after all.
Imagine a world in which LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and the NSA were all in one big org chart. Is there anyone, of any political stripe, who doesn't find this outcome creepy? It's probably going to happen, in fact if not in form. While formal nationalization is out of fashion, regulation easily achieves the same result, while keeping the sacred words "private enterprise."
How do today's technologists win freedom from State control?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday November 01 2015, @06:41PM
Tor is a beginning, that satisfies part of those requirements.
I2P is a better beginning, which satisfies more of those requirements.
Both are subject to MIM attacks, but less so than any of the current common protocols.
The people at I2P are pretty serious about development. The one major fault that I find with them, is that Java is the underlying technology on which everything works. I really don't like Java, and I suspect that some exploit based on Java will ultimately be their downfall.
If there is anything that even approaches the anonymity of Tor and I2P, I'm not aware of it. Other tools like VPN are somewhat helpful, but most of them can be defeated almost trivially. Pretty much everything in use today operates under some scheme of trust.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday November 03 2015, @07:02PM
Are you unaware of Freenet, or are you aware of some flaw in it? Unlike I2P and Tor, it's an entirely contained network and doesn't try to proxy stuff from the normal web, so that may help resist some different classes of attacks. Of course, I haven't paid much attention since the 0.5/0.7 network split a few years back. At the time there was some serious suspicion of the main dev's motives, so it could be totally compromised by now...but there was also a lot of movement towards web of trust and other such ideas that I still haven't seen in any other network.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:28AM
You point out one fault yourself, that being trust. Relying on a web of trust means that you cannot meet the parameters of GP's post. In a world where paranoia is appropriate, you must trust no one.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:22PM
Depends on what you're trusting that person to do. In the Freenet discussions, it was mostly just about trusting someone to not flood the message boards with spam.