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posted by janrinok on Sunday November 01 2015, @05:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the dream dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:09PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:09PM (#257219)

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:30PM

    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Sunday November 01 2015, @07:30PM (#257229) Homepage Journal

    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