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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @04:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 02 2015, @04:59PM (#257587)

    For somebody who claims to have researched the problem, you do not mention the best solution I am aware of:
    Cjdns [wikipedia.org].

    You also claim that a no central naming system is possible. However namecoin exists. It is essentially a centralized database stored in a decentralized manner using mutally-distrusting nodes. The biggest problems with name coin are that it can not scale, and that there is no remedy against cyber-squatting.

    I think the biggest problem is that most new computers have been compromised since about 2006 (in the name of the "protected Media Path"). Windows (still the most popular OS) now explicitly spies on you and pushes opaque updates that do not say what they do. There is an uneasy feeling that systemd may be a systematic compromise of Gnu/Linux systems, but I am not aware of anybody who has been able to conclusively prove that yet.

    On a whole, you post reads almost like a shill post. "Encryption (and authentication) is hard! don't even try!"
    Psuedo-edit: hmmm, so does mine (but for a different reason).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @05:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 03 2015, @05:20AM (#257824)

    You're kind of missing the point.

    CJDNS: great, it solves one problem. (Kinda.) What about the others? Given the very nature of IPvX, you'll need (at least) to update CJDNS to make it compatible with something which could even theoretically work.

    The good news is that yes, these things are feasible. That's not something I dispute.

    The problem with a centralised naming system is that it affords authorities of various stripes a place to strike - a place to send writs and warrants and thugs. It's a single point of failure. If is decentralised, then ... it's not centralised. So, yeah. Pick one.

    I'm actually saying: it is hard, sure, but it is possible to describe the terrain in a way which is useful, and can lead to an effective protocol design. I have no idea where you got this "don't even try!" stuff from.