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Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could acces

Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others).

sgt101 10y ago
Ok, given the election I have to ask.... Who's knowledge will we democratize?
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  Duh whatever Google and Facebook deem to be real news of course. The Ministry of Truth will root out all these evil white supremacist sites like Breitbart and Fox News. I long for the day when only Salon and Slate are considered sources of truth.
  - andrepd 10y ago
    Risible tirades like these is why people don't take you seriously.
  - nindalf 10y ago
    I've heard of Breitbart. Isn't that the site that encouraged people to "hoist the Confederate flag high and proud" because the Confederacy was a "patriotic and idealistic cause"? Same one right?
    - sergiotapia 10y ago
      That's the one! Breitbart is all about killing foreigners and hating non-white people, right?
      - mark_edward 10y ago
        Well that's what the Confederacy was about.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- vedranm 10y ago
  That's a very good point. I love seeing how many people on HN assume that, if everyone had access to the knowledge they have, everyone would vote D. Which isn't true and which is precisely the reason why R won. Furthermore, Pew Research has shown a lead of 9 points for D in college-educated population, which isn't very impressive given the dominance of liberalism at colleges. Overall, it's a hard problem. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...
revelation 10y ago
This still requires ground stations. Though I guess you could pay for "censor resistant" traffic where your data is bounced among the satellites until someone has a US ground station in sight...
- krastanov 10y ago
  I agree that the US is above average in terms of protection against censorship, but I imagine that if it is an option a lot of people would specifically avoid US ground stations (US is above average in tracking online activity as well).
  - ohyes 10y ago
    To some extent we just need something better than https and the various email protocols that we have for securely transmitting data, with built in blinding for sender and reciever. (Only the receiver knows it is a message for them). Stuff should never be in the clear on an intermediary server, and it should be at least resistant to MITM (everything should be signed). It isn't an easy problem. But you can't snoop on and censor what you can't decipher.
    - tscs37 10y ago
      The problem is that blinding for sender and receiver is hard to achieve on a route-based mesh. On the internet you need to know the receiver and sender of a message, otherwise you have no idea where it's going and the best method to from there is to use very inefficient methods. HTTPS and IMAP over TLS already achieve MITM-resistance, as long as you verify the certificate. With TLS (and SSL to some extend) you can't snoop on and censor data, not without compromising the sender (assuming you trust their certificate explicitly).
- kuschku 10y ago
  That still wouldn’t give you access to piracy sites, for which the FBI has required US ISPs to censor them from their DNS servers. I’ve had this occur quite a few times now that 8.8.8.8 (yes, verified with DNSSEC to be the real one) and DNS servers of US ISPs returned different IPs than the authoritative nameservers, and the returned IPs always showing a neat "The FBI has seized this property due to piracy" link.
digler999 10y ago
you could totally do this, almost free. I think the entire (pictureless) wikipedia is ~8gb ? maybe more ? That file could be broadcast over multicast off these things on their unused frames. For instance, the bird knows that when it flies over some impoverished region, there's maybe 0-3 paying customers probably not maxing out the capacity at any given time. They could freely broadcast wikipedia or other educational books on a multicast basis. It would just require word of mouth and equipment to tell them what to tune into. After, say, 5 days, you eventually get all 8gb and can unzip it.
- callesgg 10y ago
  "Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this is probably what you want, and is approximately 12 GB compressed (expands to over 49 GB when uncompressed)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...
- tlrobinson 10y ago
  Some Iranians are already doing basically this with satellite TV equipment: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-satellite-tv-beam-banned-data/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-s... Definitely an interesting idea. Since SpaceX will control the pipe and terminal they could use some of the bandwidth to prime a cache in the terminal with content they know will be commonly accessed. HTTPS makes doing this transparently difficult, though.
tdkl 10y ago
Free, global internet access is the next step toward more ads.
SubiculumCode 10y ago
Free global wireless internet lets every device in your home spy without an easy way to firewall it off.
- SubiculumCode 10y ago
  And why was that down-vote worthy? Globally available FREE internet means that devices in our homes could bipass our routers to signal home with little ability to oversee and limit that signaling save throwing the device away and a faraday cage. Today the same is also possible with 3/4/5G antennas, true, but the cost of sending data over cellular networks on billable data accounts is probably just too cost prohibitive for IoT device manufacturers to do, so they just do it through your wifi.
  - eloff 10y ago
    An IoT device is not going to have a satellite hookup. The things are about the size of a pizza.
- pmontra 10y ago
  They'll have local connectivity to the satellite antenna > Home Internet customers would receive a "low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs." You can place your firewall between your LAN and the antenna. However there could be devices with their own antenna, much like iridium phones. I googled for them and they are not cheap. Mass production could shave off a zero and bring them under $50. Maybe.
viraptor 10y ago
You may be interested in the Filecast https://outernet.is/filecast https://outernet.is/filecast project in that case
manachar 10y ago
Spreading true (well, at least less wrong) information is a noble goal. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet. Instead, the internet seems to be helping people create cocoons of ignorance and "evidence" to support even the most specious claims - such as the world being flat. Knowledge does not seem to be enough. Wisdom and the ability to sift through knowledge with some degree of appropriate skepticism need to spread at least as fast as the knowledge if we are to get a smarter planet.
- profalseidol 10y ago
  Do you think that having workers/employees overwork, sometimes mindlessly; worrying about their jobs or otherwise go hungry - is a factor in the problem you described?
  - rubberstamp 10y ago
    It definitely is. Plenty of evidence all around.
- geuis 10y ago
  I suspect this is just a phase. I don't have any hard stats at the moment to back it up, so it's just a feeling. Internet culture is still very young. At least in the US based on the election last week, the majority of people 18-25 voted progressive in most states. These are people who have never known the world without internet access. I guess that the people who voted the other way are folks who have transitioned into internet-required lifestyles later in life and had their young adult lifestyles set in the 80's and early 90s and earlier. This makes them less digital natives and more like immigrants (ironically). Again, none of these are universally true of course and this is all just personal opinion. I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering out bullshit because they've had access to much more information than older folks did growing up. I was born in 1980 and while I'm technically outside the millennial cutoff, I still identify with that group more than any other. While we didn't have a computer in the house until the early 90's, I was always exposed to computers and the internet from a super early age. Most of my viewing habits are gaming and making on YouTube, some streaming, etc. Still haven't really gotten the value from Snapchat personally, but I think that's more of a function of not having much need to use it. Overall I am hopeful things are getting better as boomers age out and die off and the younger folks are coming into their own.
profalseidol 10y ago
I agree with democratizing knowledge very important. The means to access it is also important to democratize. If you live in my country, you'd care about speed: https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pldt_deliberately_keeps_local_internet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pld...
wott 10y ago
> Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others). Come on... It was very fine to say this 15 to 20 years ago, but now we have had the ability to see what Internet evolved into during the last 5 or 10 years, and it has definitely not gone towards the achievement of this dream, but in a completely different direction.
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago
  http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Great_On-Line_Eq.html http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The... >The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It has everything in it except homeless people and that's only because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge. The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone equal. All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are now in your face. You can feel their hot breath on the Internet. >It's called "humanity." --- Maybe you feel like comments have gotten too stupid or that too many people have backwards beliefs. Maybe you feel like that goes against the notion of a "progressive planet". But the way I see it you're absolutely wrong.
  - placebo 10y ago
    I think the quote contradicts itself: I find that "The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large" and "it TRULY makes everyone equal" are not compatible. I think the internet has gradually become a good reflection of the world at large, with plenty of its beauty and plenty of its ugliness and the person you responded to was just expressing sadness that we couldn't filter out the ugly. Also, the word "equal" deserves some attention. There's "equally powerful" and "equally wise". The two are not necessarily related and today's internet does not guarantee either. While the internet levelled the playing field for a while (at least for those who had access to the field), things are getting back to their "natural" state of "whoever has the gold (or power) makes the rules". Venting one's beliefs on the internet (whether wise or moronic) is possible for everyone but the amount of impact it will make will usually depend on the amount of resources one has.
segmondy 10y ago
Can we get free clean drinking water first? That is more of a problem than free internet.
- h1d 10y ago
  He doesn't have to build business in parallel with the world's priority. Why not ask Apple to make schools instead?
- beilabs 10y ago
  I live in a developing country. Much of the problem in the communities I've seen is a lack of knowledge. I'd much prefer if local people become the experts through knowledge sharing / gathering than bringing in expensive consultants to train them and tell them how to do it. The most vulnerable places often slip through the cracks. Smart phones are dominating these communities, not the latest and greatest but they are definitely starting to come online. By the way, there are plenty of videos to understand the different solutions on offer for clean drinking water. Email and VOIP allows community leaders get expert advice without leaving their shelters. By empowering the community to chose and implement a solution most appropriate for them they will be able to achieve much more in the future. Teach a man or woman to fish and all that jazz...
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  That is a much, much, much harder problem to solve. You essentially have to fix politics before you can fix water. Information access gives people the ability to fix their politics. Then they can fix their water themselves.
JKCalhoun 10y ago
Who said anything about it being free? And, increasingly, I'm not so sure the internet has been a good thing all told.
mycall 10y ago
As China proved, it is easy to blow up satellites. I don't know how reliable this will be under global pressure.
- pmontra 10y ago
  It's thousands of satellites. You're going to create a debris cloud so big to shutdown satellite access for everybody. Much better to go to the headquarter and tell them to shut down operation, or ban its usage in your country. I bet transmitting antennas can be detected even if hidden from sight.
puranjay 10y ago
We didn't have internet when I was in high school If I had Wikipedia and Khan Academy back then, it would have been life changing. I would have probably made very different decisions than I made
babyrainbow 10y ago
Sadly, this is a naive view, and perpetuated by people who wants to push more ad channels in the name of "empowering" communities... Access to information does not mean consumption. If you give access to internet to 100 people, 99 of them will use it for Facebook or Porn. 1. If you have enough motivation, learning about anything was already possible even before Internet (local libraries and resources) 2. If you don't have enough motivation, then providing access to Internet, is not going to make a difference. So the key to a smarter planet does not lie in providing internet. But in installing enough motivation, imagination and a quest for knowledge and free thought in younger generations. But sadly, the Internet of today seem to work against this by providing perpetual distraction and addictive/useless chitchat across the world......
- macns 10y ago
  Sadly, this is a naive view, Views like this created the internet and wikipedia and we need more of them. Wikipedia is still going strong thanks to them: [1] Assuming good faith (AGF) is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors' edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were untrue, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning. As an example, the story with the teens from FYROM creating false news sites for the americans[2] could be avoided with better education from both sides, not by "stopping the internet" or putting them to prison. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith 2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.smdk8AX7nj#.yfJDzm1GJ5 https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
- irrational 10y ago
  >99 of them will use it for Facebook or Porn You misspelled 100.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- placebo 10y ago
  Totally agree. I think the disappointment is that in its earlier days there was hope that the internet would end up changing the world for the better but it ended up just magnifying whatever good and bad already existed in world before it came to the scene. Still, I wouldn't want to go back to pre-internet era. With all the crap, it seems the bottom line is still a gain to humanity and hopefully that gain will increase with time.
m1sta_ 10y ago
What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.
- espadrine 10y ago
  I doubt it would have caused as much of a fuss. The problem was that they picked popular low-bandwidth public-good informational websites (like Wikipedia, mostly text), and Facebook which isn't either. All US websites. The website selection was almost comical. No Google Translate, but ESPN, which is only relevant culturally in America... And there's also a problem related to having large companies harm local ISP markets, which only providing just the non-profit Wikipedia would have mostly avoided.
m1sta_ 10y ago
What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.
m1sta_ 10y ago
What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.
akamaozu 10y ago
When one doesn't know what they don't know, where do they intuitively begin learning when given the firehose of data that is the internet?
schiffern 10y ago
>Free, Not free according to Musk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=12m37s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=12m37s >Well it can't be free. Because then we'll, like, we'll go out of business. [laugh] >No, no, it can't be free to the user. I don't think so. >This would be... this would cost a lot to build. Ultimately over time to build the full version of the system, we're talking about something that would be 10 or 15 billion dollars to create. Maybe more. And the user terminals would be at least 100, to maybe 300 dollars, depending on which type of terminal. >And this is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. So looking into the long term, and saying, "what's needed to create a city on Mars?" Well one thing's for sure... a lot of money. [laugh] So we need things that will generate a lot of money.
- fmueller 10y ago
  Nothing a company builds is free. And I think it's better to pay with money than with data. Not saying you're not paying with both here.
  - FilterSweep 10y ago
    > Not saying you're not paying with both here. If Facebook's "Open Internet" (Read: "Walled Garden") denied by India is any indication, you're unfortunately paying more for the service with your personal data than you are with any money.
  - bigboris 10y ago
    Absolutely. Money is once...you pay it to someone, they pay it to someone else, they no longer have it. When you pay someone with your data, they have that forever and can monetize it hundreds of different ways over and over long after you've moved on or stopped using whatever you got from them.
    - thasaleni 10y ago
      One question we fail to ask, when we compare money to personal data, is how much is that data worth to you, when it's not being monetized by some company x?
ratchet123 10y ago
Please, no. Keep your political views to yourself. Respect the others. We don't need more "democratized" countries like Lybia or Siria.
akerro 10y ago
Where does it say it will be free?
brainwashedla 10y ago
The whole idea of "progressive" humanity is bizarre and absurd. Look at the world. I mean, what do you see? The world is a polluted, concreted over mess. Suicide rates are sky high and people work in shitty meaningless jobs they hate. We are all being stacked on top of each other in apartments. Where exactly do "progressives" think we are progressing? Why don't other animals need to progress? What is having access to wikipedia even going to do? "Education" is basically just another term for brainwashing and the internet is largely about administering that brainwashing. Silicon Valley has literally no idea what it is doing. The leaders don't realise they are not as smart as they think they are and are not actually right in the direction they are attempting to steer the world. If I look at all of the areas where the internet has improved my knowledge and helped me in some way, it has only been to solve problems caused by "progress" in the first place. For example, sitting down all day as part of my job led to a terrible posture. I used the internet to figure out how the muscles work and what needed to be changed to fix the problem.
- lerpa 10y ago
  > Where exactly do "progressives" think we are progressing? Originally, the answer to that would be Communism. It was looming, remember? Just a matter of time and it could be accelerated through different kind of policies... Except it never happened. But these days that's a bad word and some of them abandoned it, and others just don't say it anymore.
  - FilterSweep 10y ago
    > But these days that's a bad word and some of them abandoned it, and others just don't say it anymore. I don't think its seen as bad of a word amongst young progressives, however, those same progressives who are students of history know that some individuals in a Communist society are "more equal" than others. If you're not catching my drift, Communism, historically, has been rife with hypocrisy WRT the "ruling classes" who instill it on the proletariat.
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  Digital imperialism. Zuckerberg and Musk are competing who will control the means of communication and information. Zuckerberg tactic seems to be collecting data as much as possible with his drones and then sell it to the highest bidder in exchange for a free walled garden, while Musk has a more old school approach with his lobbying for privatization of public services.
waynenilsen 10y ago
There is no such thing as free. Perhaps you mean included in developed country taxes and/or deficits?
bluthru 10y ago
I used to think that until smartphones became inexpensive ~3 years ago. Now twitter and facebook have stupidity poured into them rather than the people learning from it.
silverdrake11 10y ago
There's Wikipedia Zero. The goal is to provide free access to Wikipedia through mobile carriers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero

sgt101 10y ago

Ok, given the election I have to ask.... Who's knowledge will we democratize?

sergiotapia 10y ago
Duh whatever Google and Facebook deem to be real news of course. The Ministry of Truth will root out all these evil white supremacist sites like Breitbart and Fox News. I long for the day when only Salon and Slate are considered sources of truth.
- andrepd 10y ago
  Risible tirades like these is why people don't take you seriously.
- nindalf 10y ago
  I've heard of Breitbart. Isn't that the site that encouraged people to "hoist the Confederate flag high and proud" because the Confederacy was a "patriotic and idealistic cause"? Same one right?
  - sergiotapia 10y ago
    That's the one! Breitbart is all about killing foreigners and hating non-white people, right?
    - mark_edward 10y ago
      Well that's what the Confederacy was about.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vedranm 10y ago
That's a very good point. I love seeing how many people on HN assume that, if everyone had access to the knowledge they have, everyone would vote D. Which isn't true and which is precisely the reason why R won. Furthermore, Pew Research has shown a lead of 9 points for D in college-educated population, which isn't very impressive given the dominance of liberalism at colleges. Overall, it's a hard problem. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trump...

revelation 10y ago

This still requires ground stations. Though I guess you could pay for "censor resistant" traffic where your data is bounced among the satellites until someone has a US ground station in sight...

krastanov 10y ago
I agree that the US is above average in terms of protection against censorship, but I imagine that if it is an option a lot of people would specifically avoid US ground stations (US is above average in tracking online activity as well).
- ohyes 10y ago
  To some extent we just need something better than https and the various email protocols that we have for securely transmitting data, with built in blinding for sender and reciever. (Only the receiver knows it is a message for them). Stuff should never be in the clear on an intermediary server, and it should be at least resistant to MITM (everything should be signed). It isn't an easy problem. But you can't snoop on and censor what you can't decipher.
  - tscs37 10y ago
    The problem is that blinding for sender and receiver is hard to achieve on a route-based mesh. On the internet you need to know the receiver and sender of a message, otherwise you have no idea where it's going and the best method to from there is to use very inefficient methods. HTTPS and IMAP over TLS already achieve MITM-resistance, as long as you verify the certificate. With TLS (and SSL to some extend) you can't snoop on and censor data, not without compromising the sender (assuming you trust their certificate explicitly).
kuschku 10y ago
That still wouldn’t give you access to piracy sites, for which the FBI has required US ISPs to censor them from their DNS servers. I’ve had this occur quite a few times now that 8.8.8.8 (yes, verified with DNSSEC to be the real one) and DNS servers of US ISPs returned different IPs than the authoritative nameservers, and the returned IPs always showing a neat "The FBI has seized this property due to piracy" link.

digler999 10y ago

you could totally do this, almost free. I think the entire (pictureless) wikipedia is ~8gb ? maybe more ? That file could be broadcast over multicast off these things on their unused frames. For instance, the bird knows that when it flies over some impoverished region, there's maybe 0-3 paying customers probably not maxing out the capacity at any given time. They could freely broadcast wikipedia or other educational books on a multicast basis. It would just require word of mouth and equipment to tell them what to tune into. After, say, 5 days, you eventually get all 8gb and can unzip it.

callesgg 10y ago
"Current revisions only, no talk or user pages; this is probably what you want, and is approximately 12 GB compressed (expands to over 49 GB when uncompressed)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#English-language_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#En...
tlrobinson 10y ago
Some Iranians are already doing basically this with satellite TV equipment: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-satellite-tv-beam-banned-data/ https://www.wired.com/2016/04/ingenious-way-iranians-using-s... Definitely an interesting idea. Since SpaceX will control the pipe and terminal they could use some of the bandwidth to prime a cache in the terminal with content they know will be commonly accessed. HTTPS makes doing this transparently difficult, though.

tdkl 10y ago

Free, global internet access is the next step toward more ads.

SubiculumCode 10y ago

Free global wireless internet lets every device in your home spy without an easy way to firewall it off.

SubiculumCode 10y ago
And why was that down-vote worthy? Globally available FREE internet means that devices in our homes could bipass our routers to signal home with little ability to oversee and limit that signaling save throwing the device away and a faraday cage. Today the same is also possible with 3/4/5G antennas, true, but the cost of sending data over cellular networks on billable data accounts is probably just too cost prohibitive for IoT device manufacturers to do, so they just do it through your wifi.
- eloff 10y ago
  An IoT device is not going to have a satellite hookup. The things are about the size of a pizza.
pmontra 10y ago
They'll have local connectivity to the satellite antenna > Home Internet customers would receive a "low-profile user terminal that is easy to mount and operate on walls or roofs." You can place your firewall between your LAN and the antenna. However there could be devices with their own antenna, much like iridium phones. I googled for them and they are not cheap. Mass production could shave off a zero and bring them under $50. Maybe.

viraptor 10y ago

You may be interested in the Filecast https://outernet.is/filecast https://outernet.is/filecast project in that case

manachar 10y ago

Spreading true (well, at least less wrong) information is a noble goal. Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're not seeing such information availability providing avenues towards a smarter, more progressive planet. Instead, the internet seems to be helping people create cocoons of ignorance and "evidence" to support even the most specious claims - such as the world being flat. Knowledge does not seem to be enough. Wisdom and the ability to sift through knowledge with some degree of appropriate skepticism need to spread at least as fast as the knowledge if we are to get a smarter planet.

profalseidol 10y ago
Do you think that having workers/employees overwork, sometimes mindlessly; worrying about their jobs or otherwise go hungry - is a factor in the problem you described?
- rubberstamp 10y ago
  It definitely is. Plenty of evidence all around.
geuis 10y ago
I suspect this is just a phase. I don't have any hard stats at the moment to back it up, so it's just a feeling. Internet culture is still very young. At least in the US based on the election last week, the majority of people 18-25 voted progressive in most states. These are people who have never known the world without internet access. I guess that the people who voted the other way are folks who have transitioned into internet-required lifestyles later in life and had their young adult lifestyles set in the 80's and early 90s and earlier. This makes them less digital natives and more like immigrants (ironically). Again, none of these are universally true of course and this is all just personal opinion. I believe that in general, younger people have become better at filtering out bullshit because they've had access to much more information than older folks did growing up. I was born in 1980 and while I'm technically outside the millennial cutoff, I still identify with that group more than any other. While we didn't have a computer in the house until the early 90's, I was always exposed to computers and the internet from a super early age. Most of my viewing habits are gaming and making on YouTube, some streaming, etc. Still haven't really gotten the value from Snapchat personally, but I think that's more of a function of not having much need to use it. Overall I am hopeful things are getting better as boomers age out and die off and the younger folks are coming into their own.

profalseidol 10y ago

I agree with democratizing knowledge very important. The means to access it is also important to democratize. If you live in my country, you'd care about speed: https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pldt_deliberately_keeps_local_internet/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Philippines/comments/2aurzq/how_pld...

wott 10y ago

> Free, global internet access is the next step toward a smarter, more progressive planet. I don't even care about the speed - if the only thing users could access was wikipedia, I'd still personally donate to the project. I cannot emphasize how important democratizing knowledge is to me (and many others). Come on... It was very fine to say this 15 to 20 years ago, but now we have had the ability to see what Internet evolved into during the last 5 or 10 years, and it has definitely not gone towards the achievement of this dream, but in a completely different direction.

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Great_On-Line_Eq.html http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The... >The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large. It has everything in it except homeless people and that's only because they can't afford the monthly hookup charge. The Internet is scary to people because it TRULY makes everyone equal. All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are now in your face. You can feel their hot breath on the Internet. >It's called "humanity." --- Maybe you feel like comments have gotten too stupid or that too many people have backwards beliefs. Maybe you feel like that goes against the notion of a "progressive planet". But the way I see it you're absolutely wrong.
- placebo 10y ago
  I think the quote contradicts itself: I find that "The Internet is a perfect reflection of the world at large" and "it TRULY makes everyone equal" are not compatible. I think the internet has gradually become a good reflection of the world at large, with plenty of its beauty and plenty of its ugliness and the person you responded to was just expressing sadness that we couldn't filter out the ugly. Also, the word "equal" deserves some attention. There's "equally powerful" and "equally wise". The two are not necessarily related and today's internet does not guarantee either. While the internet levelled the playing field for a while (at least for those who had access to the field), things are getting back to their "natural" state of "whoever has the gold (or power) makes the rules". Venting one's beliefs on the internet (whether wise or moronic) is possible for everyone but the amount of impact it will make will usually depend on the amount of resources one has.

segmondy 10y ago

Can we get free clean drinking water first? That is more of a problem than free internet.

h1d 10y ago
He doesn't have to build business in parallel with the world's priority. Why not ask Apple to make schools instead?
beilabs 10y ago
I live in a developing country. Much of the problem in the communities I've seen is a lack of knowledge. I'd much prefer if local people become the experts through knowledge sharing / gathering than bringing in expensive consultants to train them and tell them how to do it. The most vulnerable places often slip through the cracks. Smart phones are dominating these communities, not the latest and greatest but they are definitely starting to come online. By the way, there are plenty of videos to understand the different solutions on offer for clean drinking water. Email and VOIP allows community leaders get expert advice without leaving their shelters. By empowering the community to chose and implement a solution most appropriate for them they will be able to achieve much more in the future. Teach a man or woman to fish and all that jazz...
vinceguidry 10y ago
That is a much, much, much harder problem to solve. You essentially have to fix politics before you can fix water. Information access gives people the ability to fix their politics. Then they can fix their water themselves.

JKCalhoun 10y ago

Who said anything about it being free? And, increasingly, I'm not so sure the internet has been a good thing all told.

mycall 10y ago

As China proved, it is easy to blow up satellites. I don't know how reliable this will be under global pressure.

pmontra 10y ago
It's thousands of satellites. You're going to create a debris cloud so big to shutdown satellite access for everybody. Much better to go to the headquarter and tell them to shut down operation, or ban its usage in your country. I bet transmitting antennas can be detected even if hidden from sight.

puranjay 10y ago

We didn't have internet when I was in high school If I had Wikipedia and Khan Academy back then, it would have been life changing. I would have probably made very different decisions than I made

babyrainbow 10y ago

Sadly, this is a naive view, and perpetuated by people who wants to push more ad channels in the name of "empowering" communities... Access to information does not mean consumption. If you give access to internet to 100 people, 99 of them will use it for Facebook or Porn. 1. If you have enough motivation, learning about anything was already possible even before Internet (local libraries and resources) 2. If you don't have enough motivation, then providing access to Internet, is not going to make a difference. So the key to a smarter planet does not lie in providing internet. But in installing enough motivation, imagination and a quest for knowledge and free thought in younger generations. But sadly, the Internet of today seem to work against this by providing perpetual distraction and addictive/useless chitchat across the world......

macns 10y ago
Sadly, this is a naive view, Views like this created the internet and wikipedia and we need more of them. Wikipedia is still going strong thanks to them: [1] Assuming good faith (AGF) is a fundamental principle on Wikipedia. It is the assumption that editors' edits and comments are made in good faith. Most people try to help the project, not hurt it. If this were untrue, a project like Wikipedia would be doomed from the beginning. As an example, the story with the teens from FYROM creating false news sites for the americans[2] could be avoided with better education from both sides, not by "stopping the internet" or putting them to prison. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith 2. https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo?utm_term=.smdk8AX7nj#.yfJDzm1GJ5 https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...
irrational 10y ago
>99 of them will use it for Facebook or Porn You misspelled 100.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
placebo 10y ago
Totally agree. I think the disappointment is that in its earlier days there was hope that the internet would end up changing the world for the better but it ended up just magnifying whatever good and bad already existed in world before it came to the scene. Still, I wouldn't want to go back to pre-internet era. With all the crap, it seems the bottom line is still a gain to humanity and hopefully that gain will increase with time.

m1sta_ 10y ago

What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.

espadrine 10y ago
I doubt it would have caused as much of a fuss. The problem was that they picked popular low-bandwidth public-good informational websites (like Wikipedia, mostly text), and Facebook which isn't either. All US websites. The website selection was almost comical. No Google Translate, but ESPN, which is only relevant culturally in America... And there's also a problem related to having large companies harm local ISP markets, which only providing just the non-profit Wikipedia would have mostly avoided.

m1sta_ 10y ago

What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.

m1sta_ 10y ago

What if it was only Wikipedia but it was funded by facebook? I mean, hypothetically.

akamaozu 10y ago

When one doesn't know what they don't know, where do they intuitively begin learning when given the firehose of data that is the internet?

schiffern 10y ago

>Free, Not free according to Musk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=12m37s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHeZHyOnsm4&t=12m37s >Well it can't be free. Because then we'll, like, we'll go out of business. [laugh] >No, no, it can't be free to the user. I don't think so. >This would be... this would cost a lot to build. Ultimately over time to build the full version of the system, we're talking about something that would be 10 or 15 billion dollars to create. Maybe more. And the user terminals would be at least 100, to maybe 300 dollars, depending on which type of terminal. >And this is intended to generate a significant amount of revenue, and help fund a city on Mars. So looking into the long term, and saying, "what's needed to create a city on Mars?" Well one thing's for sure... a lot of money. [laugh] So we need things that will generate a lot of money.

fmueller 10y ago
Nothing a company builds is free. And I think it's better to pay with money than with data. Not saying you're not paying with both here.
- FilterSweep 10y ago
  > Not saying you're not paying with both here. If Facebook's "Open Internet" (Read: "Walled Garden") denied by India is any indication, you're unfortunately paying more for the service with your personal data than you are with any money.
- bigboris 10y ago
  Absolutely. Money is once...you pay it to someone, they pay it to someone else, they no longer have it. When you pay someone with your data, they have that forever and can monetize it hundreds of different ways over and over long after you've moved on or stopped using whatever you got from them.
  - thasaleni 10y ago
    One question we fail to ask, when we compare money to personal data, is how much is that data worth to you, when it's not being monetized by some company x?

ratchet123 10y ago

Please, no. Keep your political views to yourself. Respect the others. We don't need more "democratized" countries like Lybia or Siria.

akerro 10y ago

Where does it say it will be free?

brainwashedla 10y ago

The whole idea of "progressive" humanity is bizarre and absurd. Look at the world. I mean, what do you see? The world is a polluted, concreted over mess. Suicide rates are sky high and people work in shitty meaningless jobs they hate. We are all being stacked on top of each other in apartments. Where exactly do "progressives" think we are progressing? Why don't other animals need to progress? What is having access to wikipedia even going to do? "Education" is basically just another term for brainwashing and the internet is largely about administering that brainwashing. Silicon Valley has literally no idea what it is doing. The leaders don't realise they are not as smart as they think they are and are not actually right in the direction they are attempting to steer the world. If I look at all of the areas where the internet has improved my knowledge and helped me in some way, it has only been to solve problems caused by "progress" in the first place. For example, sitting down all day as part of my job led to a terrible posture. I used the internet to figure out how the muscles work and what needed to be changed to fix the problem.

lerpa 10y ago
> Where exactly do "progressives" think we are progressing? Originally, the answer to that would be Communism. It was looming, remember? Just a matter of time and it could be accelerated through different kind of policies... Except it never happened. But these days that's a bad word and some of them abandoned it, and others just don't say it anymore.
- FilterSweep 10y ago
  > But these days that's a bad word and some of them abandoned it, and others just don't say it anymore. I don't think its seen as bad of a word amongst young progressives, however, those same progressives who are students of history know that some individuals in a Communist society are "more equal" than others. If you're not catching my drift, Communism, historically, has been rife with hypocrisy WRT the "ruling classes" who instill it on the proletariat.
clydethefrog 10y ago
Digital imperialism. Zuckerberg and Musk are competing who will control the means of communication and information. Zuckerberg tactic seems to be collecting data as much as possible with his drones and then sell it to the highest bidder in exchange for a free walled garden, while Musk has a more old school approach with his lobbying for privatization of public services.

waynenilsen 10y ago

There is no such thing as free. Perhaps you mean included in developed country taxes and/or deficits?

bluthru 10y ago

I used to think that until smartphones became inexpensive ~3 years ago. Now twitter and facebook have stupidity poured into them rather than the people learning from it.

silverdrake11 10y ago

There's Wikipedia Zero. The goal is to provide free access to Wikipedia through mobile carriers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero