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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: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 01 2015, @06:54PM
What you're looking for, technologically speaking, is a new protocol and environment which supports the interoperation of an indefinite number of mutually untrusting nodes. If you're sitting in your basement/livingroom/pornpalace/library, you have to start with the assumption that every single line is tapped, every single router is owned, and every single infrastructural service or component is suborned. Unfortunately, if you assume the same about your home device, then you're screwed at the basic level because the Big Evils already know it all, so we have to separately find some way of, at minimum, creating a temporary communications interface which retains no information after use. A bootable CD may be one way - but that's beyond the apparent scope of the original story, so I'll pass on to the requirements of such a network system.
An interesting point, AC. I'll get to that in a moment.
I found TFA to be poorly written and, given the source, quite self-serving. Now I can't get that time back. :(
At the same time, if you ignore the self-serving, pseudo-political bullshit, the ideals of decentralization and strong structural incentives for fair play and mutual trust are quite appealing.
The question which came to mind while reading TFA was "Who is this person, and why are they writing this?"
The answer came by looking further at the site [urbit.org] hosting it. From the main page of the site:
Back to your point, AC. Apparently, the author(s) of this piece are involved in the creation of an open, decentralized (if you can have such a thing in a virtualized environment) PAAS [wikipedia.org] environment which purports to address "identity and security problems which the Internet can't easily address."
A more interesting (at least to me) treatise [urbit.org] hits upon your point:
Given that this project is licensed under the MIT License [wikipedia.org], should it flourish, it could create a very interesting ecosystem. Then again, I thought that could be the case with Diaspora [diasporafoundation.org] as well.
Both projects attempt to move important network concepts (social networking in the case of Diaspora, and virtualized computing and data sharing in the case of Urbit) out of corporate hands and create open, decentralized platforms for them.
While the goals are quite laudable, and the mechanisms novel and, in some cases, quite elegant, gaining widespread acceptance is unlikely. Which is quite sad, IMHO.
The biggest problem is that change is painful. And for most folks, projects like urbit and Diaspora, the pain to make such a change is much greater than the pain involved in doing what they're already doing.
As such, it seems unlikely that this project, aside from a few niche players, will be able to survive and thrive. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think so.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:09PM
I've been following urbit for awhile, a better comparison than urbit and diaspora would be diaspora tried to use ruby on rails for an underlying language and in theory urbit would make a better underlying system to write diaspora 2.0 upon. At least as I understand it.
Another problem is urbit as a new idea is a radically functional OS/language/bytecode all the way from UI to bare metal (well, maybe bare metal in the future) is proposed to solve a lot of "enterprise size" problems, so its entirely possible that "urbit as the new diaspora" bombs however as a technology maybe facebook in 2020 is just talking to a giant urbit based cluster at facebook inc doing all the usual corruption in an exciting manner. Much as you can try to make a 80s/90s AOL-like walled garden experience that happens to run over the TCPIP internet, or a TV-like experience over the internet, you could make a NSA/FB-like experience that uses urbit on its backend on a private cloud.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:30PM
I've been following urbit for awhile, a better comparison than urbit and diaspora would be diaspora tried to use ruby on rails for an underlying language and in theory urbit would make a better underlying system to write diaspora 2.0 upon. At least as I understand it.
An excellent point. I'd clarify that my comparison had less to do with the technical platform and more to do with the political idea of decentralization and breaking away from the strongly centralized corporate environments like Facebook, the (pretty much) dead Google+ and the "someone else's servers" providers like AWS and Azure.
Another problem is urbit as a new idea is a radically functional OS/language/bytecode all the way from UI to bare metal (well, maybe bare metal in the future) is proposed to solve a lot of "enterprise size" problems, so its entirely possible that "urbit as the new diaspora" bombs however as a technology maybe facebook in 2020 is just talking to a giant urbit based cluster at facebook inc doing all the usual corruption in an exciting manner. Much as you can try to make a 80s/90s AOL-like walled garden experience that happens to run over the TCPIP internet, or a TV-like experience over the internet, you could make a NSA/FB-like experience that uses urbit on its backend on a private cloud.
I alluded to that when referencing the MIT license. Yes, I suppose it could be (especially if you can eventually implement Urbit on bare metal) quite useful for both public and private virtualization environments, both commercial and non-commercial. However, I think the transformative potential in a platform such as Urbit is in creating truly decentralized interactions that support strong encryption and don't require a middleman such as Facebook for such interactions.
As I pointed out in another post (I neglected to include it in my original one), the potential for creating a truly decentralized Internet will be largely dependent upon truly high-speed symmetrical ISP/last-mile connections. When I can securely serve up my creative/personal content to those I choose, without bottlenecks or the support of centralized information/money grubbers, our networked world will be a much richer and more egalitarian one, IMHO.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr