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To me, code is much more of a long term threat to the power structure than intellectual property theft is. I'm wondering how long before we have government-san

To me, code is much more of a long term threat to the power structure than intellectual property theft is. I'm wondering how long before we have government-sanctioned libraries, languages, and chipsets that we may develop for. I see this TPP as power consolidating ahead of any looming citizen revolt in order to chop it off at the knees. It's very weird and awesome to watch. I do chuckle about all this though because these moves are so clumsy and obvious. And recently the spokesmouths of the powerful have been SO ineffective. The Jade Helm scare-o-tron rollout was completely botched and scrapped as far as I can tell. Selling a war with Syria was also completely botched. Kerry has been a fool as sec. of state and never met a war he didn't like, talks about going to war all the time to the press with no context. CIA and arms deals in Benghazi and the sloppy coverup around that, we FUBAR'ed Libya for no good reason. Obama openly threatening whistleblowers like a douche. Republican establishment is losing its grip on the reins and losing containment of the growing number of dissenting voices. If I were the archons in power behind the scenes, I'd be concerned. As a developer, if I wanted to - REALLY wanted to - I feel like I could upend all of their power and diminish their relevance. I wouldn't do it with anarchy or hacktivism or whatnot because that destruction is desperate and ultimately self-defeating. Instead, I'd take the constructive route and build an alternate system to the internet that resists regulation and rewards the decentralization of server computing power and storage. I have a day job that pays just fine and I live a peaceful life with my family where I get to enjoy a lot of personal freedom. I don't take a lot of action today other than to avoid the social networks like the plague. I think the trigger for me to act will be when my ox gets gored somehow by these new regulations. Or, perhaps if we go to war with some rogue state who dares violate the intellectual property rights of Disney, etc.

api 11y ago
I see the TPP as part of the obsolescence of the nation state in favor of global corporate governance. The incompetence you mention fits in with this-- those boobs are just leftovers from the old system. The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead. Not saying this is a good thing. Read any 80s cyberpunk novel to see what's coming. William Gibson was a prophet.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead. It doesn't tell me that at all.
  - insanity55 11y ago
    go on...
    - striking 11y ago
      It means people are so tired of listening to self-interested politicians toe the party line that they're willing to elect a candidate solely based on how crazy his ideas are and how much he won't backpedal on them, even in the face of adversity. In terms of fearless leaders, he definitely is one. Of course, I also think his ideas are mostly inane and that within fifteen minutes of his inauguration he would have already started World War III. But I can understand why people want to elect him.
      - laichzeit0 11y ago
        Excuse my ignorance as I'm not American and perhaps miss all the nuances. - Wants to stop illegal immigration. Not immigration. Only illegal. i.e. people not paying taxes but living there undocumented - Non-citizens giving birth in USA and then automatically the baby is USA's problem until it dies - Tax reform that wants to stop corporate inversion and bring money back to USA (Google, Apple, etc.) - Wants a more competitive health care system than Obamacare - Wants USA to make better trade deals because there are crazy trade deficits. Why are any of these ideas seen as being crazy by Americans?
        Natanael_L 11y ago
        Because of the how and why
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
jacobolus 11y ago
> The Jade Helm scare-o-tron rollout was completely botched and scrapped as far as I can tell. Can you explain what you mean? As far as I can tell Jade Helm was a fairly routine military training exercise, which was latched onto by a group of conspiracy nuts. What’s a “scare-o-tron rollout”?
- EdSharkey 11y ago
  I personally draw a distinction between the gigantic-sized stuff the US federal government does (military and wars, fiscal and monetary policy, taxes, transfer payment programs) and the medium-sized stuff (HUD, EPA, FCC, etc.) The medium sized stuff can be steered by the adminstration in power. The people you elect can exert influence in those areas, I mean. But the huge stuff is out of their control. The military especially is very interesting to me because no war just happens spontaneously. It's all got to be planned years in advance. In that context, where does a Jade Helm fit in? Anyhow, regardless of what you think of the loudmouths regarding Jade Helm, that campaign was certainly odd in its conception both in terms of size and setting. What possible valid reason would the US military have for doing large scale trainings in US urban settings? I don't mean that question in a conspiracy sense. I mean, logically speaking, why? The military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat. Just training for training's sake? That's nonsense. I'll leave the speculation as to the "real" motives for Jade Helm to the more frothy-mouthed. What I know after-the-fact was there was an odd/confusing move by the military, followed by a terrible sales job by the stuffed shirts in power that led inevitably to a failed/cancelled campaign. It reinforces my point that the power structure seems to be creaking here.
  - dtroja 11y ago
    With respect, I understand many people viewed that one training event with skepticism. I'm not going to try and change your mind. I would, however, like to address the idea that "training for training's sake" has no value. Tough, frequent, realistic training is exactly what is required to keep certain parts of the military prepared. I'm not talking about logisticians or acquisitions types. Personnel turnover is a problem. People must learn how to work together. For people like you and I, we have the opportunity to learn to work with our coworkers... every day! In the military, a service member only really learns how to work with their coworkers during these kinds of exercises. When it's cold. When it's dark. When everyone is tired and hungry. You've also suggested that "the military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat" ... and you're absolutely correct. Senior personnel have lessons learned. Those lessons are captured in various documents. However, much like a start-up, execution is everything. The execution comes from personnel who typically have just a few years experience. There is an enormous amount of knowledge which must be transferred in a short period of time. These training events are how the lessons and doctrine are shared with those junior leaders. Classroom instruction is not sufficient. Finally, I will disagree that the training event was "odd in it's conception." Certain parts of the military perform these kinds of exercises regularly. The only part of this exercise which was odd was the amount of attention it garnered.
ddingus 11y ago
>>>I'm wondering how long before we have government-sanctioned libraries, languages, and chipsets that we may develop for. "You there! STOP!" "Huh?" "We've got you on record for bootstrapping, machine code, and compiler writing!" "so?" "That's a threat, and you are going to have to come with us and register." "Register for what?" "As a weapon. We need to know where you are and who you associate with..."
- dghughes 11y ago
  Your hands are deadly weapons.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    As is the brain. Just talking to someone, in what we consider an ordinary way today, could be trouble.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I doubt it will go that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if the end result of the War on General Purpose Computing will be laws limiting access to turing-complete machines to licensed software engineers. For everyone else, playing with a compiler will be illegal.
  - EdSharkey 11y ago
    Your vision of the future sounds like hell to me! It's sortof like gun control ... only the bad guys will have access to development rigs.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Yes. It terrifies me. But that's exactly what we'll have if we actually get "programmer professionalization". This is a part of the War on General Purpose Computing; on one hand, as software runs more and more life-critical systems like cars or energy infrastructure, you see a push from both security professionals and big companies towards turning programming into real engineering discipline; on the other hand, you have media companies fighting to limit public's access to turing-complete computation. Unfortunately in this context, while everyone hates the big media shops, infosec has a lot of good karma currently, and they're also against us in this war.
vacri 11y ago
"I could create the replacement to the internet and destroy the current corporate powers in doing so. And despite this replacement's power, it'd be designed in a way that governments could never infringe on it. I just don't because I have a comfy job"? Oh, please.
- jqm 11y ago
  What wires/wavelengths is this free internet going to run on?
- EdSharkey 11y ago
  You lack imagination! There are so many ways to deliver what the internet delivers today that you have not considered. I wouldn't even have to foresake our current software ecosystem built up around tcp and http. Keep your YouTube and Twitter for as long as you'd like.
  - Retra 11y ago
    The only thing worse that not knowing how to fix something is to know how to do it and be unwilling.
- SturgeonsLaw 11y ago
  What if you substituted "I" with "we" in that sentence?
mirimir 11y ago
Time's a wastin' ;) I think that we need something like IPFS, which connects via covert channels, and is fully deniable. With ubiquitous HD video, download bandwidth would be trivial, even with ~1% signal/carrier. Upload bandwidth would be harder to hide.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  We need fully open high bandwidth radio protocols for creating useful mesh networks (MU-MIMO tech in hardware you don't need licensing for), using protocols like CJDNS, anonymization like I2P, Tahoe-LAFS and IPFS for distribution and management of data, etc... And we really need better crypto key management. Keybase.io, Namecoin, OpenKeychain, Yubikey NEO, etc, they all contribute to part of the solution, but we need something more comprehensive.
Natanael_L 11y ago
I mostly agree, in the long term. There's no point in fighting if you'll need to replace what you're fighting with something more resilient, as merely building it and showing it is better can be a far more effective way of winning, by deprecating the entire system. That's the approach taken by Bitcoin - why attack the banks when we can circumvent them? We can build what we need and ignore the old system. No need to get down to the level of kindergarten kids throwing mud. Do better instead.
- EdSharkey 11y ago
  Exactly! We can do better, or at least different, instead. Bitcoin has good incentives built into the system that improve its trustworthiness. And, it doesn't need to ever completely replace other currencies to be disruptive and useful. I think the same kind of design principles could be applied to the general problem of communications. We CAN build what we need, in fact most of what we need exists in software bits and bobs already. Connectivity to this alternative network I envision would be free, but users would need to pay local trusted individuals/businesses to aggregate and cache subscriptions to wider-area feeds for them. Consider that these feeds would necessarily constitute large amounts of data since you'd need to bring huge swaths of data you're interested in close to your locality. The volume and freshness of the data users would subscribe to would be proportionate to how much they'd collectively be willing to pay to fetch and store on an ongoing basis (sortof like how we have tiers for internet connection speeds today.) The software for the network would build on existing tools and libraries on the client with proper sandboxing of sessions. The storage, cache, feed management, payments, chargebacks, and crypto are all solved problems for the most part. Yes, this would be a huge effort and would probably work best if some new consumer hardware were developed and that would require investment. But, I don't think anything I have in mind is technically infeasible. I'd like to have some reasonable systems and protocols in place that prevent users being identified and tracked on the network for most classes of communications.
throwupaway1138 11y ago
"avoid the social networks like the plague" he said and posted his opinion publicly to HN

api 11y ago

I see the TPP as part of the obsolescence of the nation state in favor of global corporate governance. The incompetence you mention fits in with this-- those boobs are just leftovers from the old system. The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead. Not saying this is a good thing. Read any 80s cyberpunk novel to see what's coming. William Gibson was a prophet.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
The fact that Donald Trump is being seriously considered for president should tell you that the nation state is dead. It doesn't tell me that at all.
- insanity55 11y ago
  go on...
  - striking 11y ago
    It means people are so tired of listening to self-interested politicians toe the party line that they're willing to elect a candidate solely based on how crazy his ideas are and how much he won't backpedal on them, even in the face of adversity. In terms of fearless leaders, he definitely is one. Of course, I also think his ideas are mostly inane and that within fifteen minutes of his inauguration he would have already started World War III. But I can understand why people want to elect him.
    - laichzeit0 11y ago
      Excuse my ignorance as I'm not American and perhaps miss all the nuances. - Wants to stop illegal immigration. Not immigration. Only illegal. i.e. people not paying taxes but living there undocumented - Non-citizens giving birth in USA and then automatically the baby is USA's problem until it dies - Tax reform that wants to stop corporate inversion and bring money back to USA (Google, Apple, etc.) - Wants a more competitive health care system than Obamacare - Wants USA to make better trade deals because there are crazy trade deficits. Why are any of these ideas seen as being crazy by Americans?
      - Natanael_L 11y ago
        Because of the how and why
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago

jacobolus 11y ago

> The Jade Helm scare-o-tron rollout was completely botched and scrapped as far as I can tell. Can you explain what you mean? As far as I can tell Jade Helm was a fairly routine military training exercise, which was latched onto by a group of conspiracy nuts. What’s a “scare-o-tron rollout”?

EdSharkey 11y ago
I personally draw a distinction between the gigantic-sized stuff the US federal government does (military and wars, fiscal and monetary policy, taxes, transfer payment programs) and the medium-sized stuff (HUD, EPA, FCC, etc.) The medium sized stuff can be steered by the adminstration in power. The people you elect can exert influence in those areas, I mean. But the huge stuff is out of their control. The military especially is very interesting to me because no war just happens spontaneously. It's all got to be planned years in advance. In that context, where does a Jade Helm fit in? Anyhow, regardless of what you think of the loudmouths regarding Jade Helm, that campaign was certainly odd in its conception both in terms of size and setting. What possible valid reason would the US military have for doing large scale trainings in US urban settings? I don't mean that question in a conspiracy sense. I mean, logically speaking, why? The military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat. Just training for training's sake? That's nonsense. I'll leave the speculation as to the "real" motives for Jade Helm to the more frothy-mouthed. What I know after-the-fact was there was an odd/confusing move by the military, followed by a terrible sales job by the stuffed shirts in power that led inevitably to a failed/cancelled campaign. It reinforces my point that the power structure seems to be creaking here.
- dtroja 11y ago
  With respect, I understand many people viewed that one training event with skepticism. I'm not going to try and change your mind. I would, however, like to address the idea that "training for training's sake" has no value. Tough, frequent, realistic training is exactly what is required to keep certain parts of the military prepared. I'm not talking about logisticians or acquisitions types. Personnel turnover is a problem. People must learn how to work together. For people like you and I, we have the opportunity to learn to work with our coworkers... every day! In the military, a service member only really learns how to work with their coworkers during these kinds of exercises. When it's cold. When it's dark. When everyone is tired and hungry. You've also suggested that "the military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat" ... and you're absolutely correct. Senior personnel have lessons learned. Those lessons are captured in various documents. However, much like a start-up, execution is everything. The execution comes from personnel who typically have just a few years experience. There is an enormous amount of knowledge which must be transferred in a short period of time. These training events are how the lessons and doctrine are shared with those junior leaders. Classroom instruction is not sufficient. Finally, I will disagree that the training event was "odd in it's conception." Certain parts of the military perform these kinds of exercises regularly. The only part of this exercise which was odd was the amount of attention it garnered.

ddingus 11y ago

>>>I'm wondering how long before we have government-sanctioned libraries, languages, and chipsets that we may develop for. "You there! STOP!" "Huh?" "We've got you on record for bootstrapping, machine code, and compiler writing!" "so?" "That's a threat, and you are going to have to come with us and register." "Register for what?" "As a weapon. We need to know where you are and who you associate with..."

dghughes 11y ago
Your hands are deadly weapons.
- ddingus 11y ago
  As is the brain. Just talking to someone, in what we consider an ordinary way today, could be trouble.
TeMPOraL 11y ago
I doubt it will go that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if the end result of the War on General Purpose Computing will be laws limiting access to turing-complete machines to licensed software engineers. For everyone else, playing with a compiler will be illegal.
- EdSharkey 11y ago
  Your vision of the future sounds like hell to me! It's sortof like gun control ... only the bad guys will have access to development rigs.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Yes. It terrifies me. But that's exactly what we'll have if we actually get "programmer professionalization". This is a part of the War on General Purpose Computing; on one hand, as software runs more and more life-critical systems like cars or energy infrastructure, you see a push from both security professionals and big companies towards turning programming into real engineering discipline; on the other hand, you have media companies fighting to limit public's access to turing-complete computation. Unfortunately in this context, while everyone hates the big media shops, infosec has a lot of good karma currently, and they're also against us in this war.

vacri 11y ago

"I could create the replacement to the internet and destroy the current corporate powers in doing so. And despite this replacement's power, it'd be designed in a way that governments could never infringe on it. I just don't because I have a comfy job"? Oh, please.

jqm 11y ago
What wires/wavelengths is this free internet going to run on?
EdSharkey 11y ago
You lack imagination! There are so many ways to deliver what the internet delivers today that you have not considered. I wouldn't even have to foresake our current software ecosystem built up around tcp and http. Keep your YouTube and Twitter for as long as you'd like.
- Retra 11y ago
  The only thing worse that not knowing how to fix something is to know how to do it and be unwilling.
SturgeonsLaw 11y ago
What if you substituted "I" with "we" in that sentence?

mirimir 11y ago

Time's a wastin' ;) I think that we need something like IPFS, which connects via covert channels, and is fully deniable. With ubiquitous HD video, download bandwidth would be trivial, even with ~1% signal/carrier. Upload bandwidth would be harder to hide.

Natanael_L 11y ago
We need fully open high bandwidth radio protocols for creating useful mesh networks (MU-MIMO tech in hardware you don't need licensing for), using protocols like CJDNS, anonymization like I2P, Tahoe-LAFS and IPFS for distribution and management of data, etc... And we really need better crypto key management. Keybase.io, Namecoin, OpenKeychain, Yubikey NEO, etc, they all contribute to part of the solution, but we need something more comprehensive.

Natanael_L 11y ago

I mostly agree, in the long term. There's no point in fighting if you'll need to replace what you're fighting with something more resilient, as merely building it and showing it is better can be a far more effective way of winning, by deprecating the entire system. That's the approach taken by Bitcoin - why attack the banks when we can circumvent them? We can build what we need and ignore the old system. No need to get down to the level of kindergarten kids throwing mud. Do better instead.

EdSharkey 11y ago
Exactly! We can do better, or at least different, instead. Bitcoin has good incentives built into the system that improve its trustworthiness. And, it doesn't need to ever completely replace other currencies to be disruptive and useful. I think the same kind of design principles could be applied to the general problem of communications. We CAN build what we need, in fact most of what we need exists in software bits and bobs already. Connectivity to this alternative network I envision would be free, but users would need to pay local trusted individuals/businesses to aggregate and cache subscriptions to wider-area feeds for them. Consider that these feeds would necessarily constitute large amounts of data since you'd need to bring huge swaths of data you're interested in close to your locality. The volume and freshness of the data users would subscribe to would be proportionate to how much they'd collectively be willing to pay to fetch and store on an ongoing basis (sortof like how we have tiers for internet connection speeds today.) The software for the network would build on existing tools and libraries on the client with proper sandboxing of sessions. The storage, cache, feed management, payments, chargebacks, and crypto are all solved problems for the most part. Yes, this would be a huge effort and would probably work best if some new consumer hardware were developed and that would require investment. But, I don't think anything I have in mind is technically infeasible. I'd like to have some reasonable systems and protocols in place that prevent users being identified and tracked on the network for most classes of communications.

throwupaway1138 11y ago

"avoid the social networks like the plague" he said and posted his opinion publicly to HN