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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @07:19AM
I've done a lot of research in this topic, and if anyone is actually serious about what the underpinnings would have to look like, let me know in a message,
Right away, oh Anonymous Coward, who has left no way to message you. I am not the same AC, but you can message me back the same way. Nice to know that someone has been working on this, whatever it is, for so long with no results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @05:32AM
Sure. At least someone's showing an interest.
What the hell, let's start.
The first thing you need is a robust numbering system so that you can connect arbitrary networks of devices with reasonable confidence in avoiding numbering collisions. This is actually an old problem, with many approaches. This does not resolve maliciously created collisions, but there are other solutions for that. An approach I favour is 64 bit timestamp + independently salted random bits, totalling, oh, let's say 256 bits of number. Since it's not intended to be human-convenient, the fact that it's 64 hex digits is no big deal. Since with modern computing equipment it's trivial to create those ad lib, there'll be no shortage of numbers for the foreseeable future (64 bit timestamp) and it's a big boost to multiple identities.
To be clear, my problem hasn't been solving problems on the technical end (although that is an occasional challenge) but getting people to care. Most people just stare at me and loudly wonder why bother. I think Snowden answered that question pretty comprehensively.
Anyway, if at any point you decide I'm not entirely replete with the crazy, and you want to hear more, you may feel free to say so. And send me a burner email address or something.