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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, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday November 01 2015, @06:56PM
Fairly good summary AC, something that annoys me about the linked article kind of in parallel with what you're saying is the threat analysis seems to carefully implement NIH and top down ivory tower... so all the work done on freenet, i2p, tor, just pretend nothing ever happened and its blank slate time, I donno about that. It would seem there is a lot of useful development stories, bugs, implementation issues, all buried in those older projects.
Urbit is also annoying in having to give cutesy new names to all the old concepts. Renaming punctuation marks, ugh. So something like 6 >= 4 is both true and read aloud as "six gap tis four is a true expression" or some BS like that. Still its fun to lurk their mailing list and kinda follow along at a distance. The explanation of how ducts interface with the underlying unix makes me want to start drinking and just replace the whole thing with about 5 lines of perl and also displays the general characteristic of urbit where we'll start with like 500 bytes of functional assembly language that are almost too obvious to pay attention to and the next step is suddenly hyper complicated and make my brain very sore. The learning curve is best expressed as fathoms of flat ocean bottom and suddenly you impact a rendering of sleeping Cthulhu at mach three and barely have enough time to say "whoops" before your head pounds on the desk like a bug hitting a windshield. But other than that, not too bad.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:13PM
TL;DR: If your foundations are cracked, building on them is worse than pouring a fresh foundation.
Fairly good summary AC, something that annoys me about the linked article kind of in parallel with what you're saying is the threat analysis seems to carefully implement NIH and top down ivory tower... so all the work done on freenet, i2p, tor, just pretend nothing ever happened and its blank slate time, I donno about that. It would seem there is a lot of useful development stories, bugs, implementation issues, all buried in those older projects.
Thanks. I'm neutral as to how we get where we need to - however, I'm pretty adamant that the threat analysis is pretty darned important, because otherwise you end up with half-solutions, which in the world of security aren't solutions.
Yes, there are lots of useful stories, lessons learned, and we should absolutely capture those as best we can. Experience is valuable, but trying to salvage systems which are broken by design is (as experience teaches us) a fool's errand.
As for the urbit idea, I'm familiar with it, but I have major reservations with respect to the urbit architecture. For example, you don't necessarily want a persistent anything, and you don't want to be the host for anyone else's persistencies - because you can flood your system with iteratively created persistent data. But that's just one example, and this is not a good venue for diving down that rabbit hole.