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Paraphrasing an article by Time Magazine's Joel Stein:
The Internet's personality has changed -- once it was like a geek with lofty ideals about the free flow of information. Now the web is a sociopath with Asperger's. [ Submitter's note: the "Sociopath with Asperger's" comment is not my addition, but a verbatim phrase in the source article ]
The people who relish their online freedom to act under influence of the online disinhibition effect are called "trolls." Trolling is, overtly, a political fight; but it has become the main tool of the alt-right, an Internet-grown reactionary movement that works for men's rights and against immigration. They derisively call their adversaries "social justice warriors" and believe that liberal interest groups purposely exploit their weaknesses to gain pity, which allows them to control the leverage of political power.
When sites are overrun by trolls, they drown out the voices of women, ethic and religious minorities, gays -- anyone who might feel vulnerable. The alt-right argues that if you can't handle opprobrium, you should just turn off your computer. But that's arguing against self-expression, something antithetical to the original values of the Internet.
The article closes with a description of an exchange between Stein and a detractor. In meeting the detractor in real-life, he was surprised by her lack of bravado, to which she responds, "The Internet is the realm of the coward. These are people who are all sound and no fury."
Stein ruminates in response, "Maybe. But maybe, in the information age, sound is as destructive as fury."
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 20 2016, @05:40AM
It's easier with HOAs (uggh), but if you can get an entire neighborhood together it's possible to completely obfuscate your location with wireless meshing & obfuscation with onion routing protocols like TOR. Bitblinder was an interesting project attempting to do this at a very local level. As with everything of course, it require participation.
Imagine 3 small utility sheds maintained by the community that have commercial fiber. From there it's wireless communications layered on top of an onion routing protocol, for everything. Your IP address is actually in that utility shed, with you tunneling all traffic to that router over obfuscated wireless where those networks could even change on a regular basis, across IPv6, which is 128bit.....
Your IP address would be localized to a point that could easily be 10-15 miles away from, and not in a straight line of sight, much less in the direction of the initial onion node. Higher population density is even better, and with fiber connects inbetween utility sheds in multiple communities you could expand that further.
It wouldn't be fool proof of course, but I think it would be possible to require interception of a large amount of wireless traffic across an entire city protected in such a way in order to eliminate anonymity. It does gain us something, because then even Google and others can only isolate us to the utility sheds at best, and we may have obsfuscated thousands at once. We're not attempting to remain completely anonymous, because we do actually register our real names in the collective, to help maintain ownership over property and to get it paid for. Your actually paying a group of locals in Smith Town USA to help distribute your own ISP service across hopefully a large number of nodes.
We can dream though right?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.