8 ms·

Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. You might be

Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. You might be able to decentralize the worldwide web of HTML pages and hyperlinks, or invent another protocol that can be encapsulated in TCP/IP packets and ethernet frames, but the internet (the graph of inter-connected networks that speak common protocols) is still a fundamental requirement for your product, and the metadata associated with those stacks is still very real and trackable. To that point as well, the internet already "works how real life works." Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers. It's Conway's Law. We are largely constrained to create systems (including the internet) that mirror the organizational structure we're a part of. Yes, we can evolve and revolutionize occasionally, but it will always mirror "real life" because they will always influence each other.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lappa 9y ago
I don't follow your argument. You are saying that because we have nearly a tree structure within the workplace, the Internet will approximately have nearly tree structure? Seems that it's just a matter if the most efficient structure being this way for both cases rather than us mimicking the workplace in the structuring of the Internet.
owens99 9y ago
> Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers. Hard sell. There's a reason why the government has laws against monopolies. Especially when it comes to the internet, consumers tend to choose the best/fastest product over the most ethical one.
- andrewstuart2 9y ago
  Yeah, that's a good point. The funny part is that it's the very consumer choice we champion that eventually leads to a total lack of consumer choice. We choose the best, they're rewarded, they dominate, choice disappears, they're free to stagnate without repercussion.
  - ReligiousFlames 9y ago
    It's a feedback effect of consumer choice with corporate oligopolization and monocultural cost-optimization. Popular, easy and cheap wins most of the time, even if it hides deferred costs like terrible security and engineering choices.
- apatters 9y ago
  I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonable effort to use ethical software as long as it doesn't make my job too hard, and here are the results: - Ubuntu is my daily driver OS, with Windows getting booted once in a blue moon to play some games - Firefox for 80% of my browsing (the other 20% is Chromium on a Chromebook, which seems to run faster than FF even in an Ubuntu chroot with crouton) - Thunderbird and a plain ol' IMAP mail server for email - Maybe half of my messaging has moved to Signal - Searx.me for web searches, sure I'm using the Google results more often than not, but at least my queries are anonymized, and switching to other providers is easy I started a business on a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack, and I sleep better at night because of that. I gave our latest hire most of the same desktop software I use, and so far no major problems. I'll grant you that the UI of some of this software is a little creaky, but I get by, and overall I'd say most of the nasty bugs we have to deal with in our toolkit are in closed source SaaS stuff. Some notable unethical holdouts include occasional Skype/Hangouts calls, Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Also a bunch of small-time SaaS products. But give me time.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack That's not exactly a unique feature of this stack. Most web stacks are free and open source.
eth0up 9y ago
>Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you.... I do use alternative search engines; however, look at the traffic on just about any website and you'll see Google ip traffic spewing in all directions. I'm quite confident that tracking still occurs, regardless of how I get from one site to the other. This can be locked down a bit, but not 100% and not without effort and maintenance.
- yhu 9y ago
  I use Baidu. Works well enough.
  - guelo 9y ago
    Baidu is good if you like having Beijing filter your results. I just did a baidu search for "tiananmen square" and the top answers all said "Tiananmen massacre a myth".
    - leesalminen 9y ago
      It's all fake news. /s
    - amauta 9y ago
      Lol you think google doesn't do that as well?
- seoseokho 9y ago
  I think your right on about google tracking. you visit a website and they're probably using google analytics or google ads somewhere, or it's a 3rd party feeding data to some form of google ad network.
- ionised 9y ago
  Globally block all the Google scripts that are running
adamsea 9y ago
> To that point as well, the internet already "works how real life works." Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Or did you mean, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time ...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time This saying needs a caveat - sometimes, you can fool all of the people for enough time to complete your evil scheme.
  - nickpsecurity 9y ago
    Goldman Sachs. More times than I can know or count.
  - zaphar 9y ago
    You version also needs a caveat. It's more like: "You can fool enough of the people for enough of the time to complete your evil scheme".
anythingbot 9y ago
This actually isn't true; you can invent organizations of the imagination and mirror those. This "imagination driven programming" is actually quite dangerous and tends to devolve into state secrets and so on since you are solving the problems created by people who "don't exist" but may in fact have lives that are SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR to the lives of people who are doing jobs that are better kept secret. So you can get around the law...but only by risking the integration of something that should be kept secret into the organizational structure...which makes its way into your system. Most people aren't willing to cross that threshold. So Conway's law is true for most people, just not all. If you want to think about it from the adversarial point of view, you can say that all programs are designed to transform or destroy organizations; programs mirror organizational structures because people want to determine the "resonant frequency" of an organization and understand its "social vulnerabilities" in much the same way a physical structure has structural vulnerabilities.
- nilson 9y ago
  One person or AI can do such "imagination driven programming" to mirror any organisation. so i guess organisation of n people can also mirror any organization they want, if that organization is more complex than theirs. Organization can also use some kind of obfuscator to change program structure to not mirror their organization and also mirror less complex organizations. I don't understand how this is dangerous. can you please give an example? I guess if you mimic more complex organization it may be dangerous.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
CodeMage 9y ago
Four years ago, Moxie Marlinspike offered a good explanation of why this "vote with your feet" approach doesn't really work, at DEFCON 18. His talk is called "Changing Threats to Privacy" and I highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM If you're impatient, you can skip the first 10 minutes and 40 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM#t=10m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM#t=10m40s
- ReligiousFlames 9y ago
  This almost assures some quite terrible conclusions in the long-term: When it becomes technologically possible to interface electronics into our brains, corporations will have almost unprecedented opportunities to do some really terrible things directly when the world becomes socially-pressured to be neurally-connected. I say "almost" because the manufacturing of consent and desires exist now and it is popularly believed to "apply other people but never me," a direct connection has the potential to make this manipulation cheaper and stimulate the brain in ways a glowing screen looks like banging rocks together.
  - jerf 9y ago
    https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E And I'll add this text just to say this is very relevant to what you said and not just a drive-by spam drop.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
alistproducer2 9y ago
>Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. My thoughts exactly. A truly new internet would require new pipes, not just another protocol layer.
eveningcoffee 9y ago
>Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you... You have fundamentally misunderstood how Google tracks your visits. If website uses AdSense, they track you, if website uses Google Analytics, they track you, or Google fonts or scripts or what ever, they track you. This means that the problem is much larger and the solution is not very simple.
- openasocket 9y ago
  They can tell that a particular IP sent a request to their servers, but they can't correlate different requests to the same underlying entity without cookies. Simply saying "they track you" is misleading.
  - eveningcoffee 9y ago
    I guess this was about scripts and fonts (because others are obvious cases). I did a test, beside IP address also User-Agent, Accept-Language and Referer headers were sent. Perhaps not good for very precise finger printing but still more that you claimed and can be cross correlated with other requests with more precise information. Google has claimed that they do not use this cases for tracking. One can believe this statement, or one can prefer to not do.
    - openasocket 9y ago
      How can you cross-correlate them? Most people are viewing the internet from behind a NAT, so there isn't a one-to-one mapping between IP address and person.
      - quickben 9y ago
        Plenty of ways, for example: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and from there: https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?#fingerprintTable https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?#fingerprintTable
brighton36 9y ago
You're overthinking this. Blockstack is just throwing out features that the indigent will purchase shares in during an 'ico' the validity of the claims don't matter. This is what blockchains are for.
unoti 9y ago
> Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. I realize this isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it is indeed possible to unplug your WAN connection and plug something else in instead. Amateur radio operators do this amazing and fun thing with self-discovering, self-linking mesh networks. Great fun to learn and explore! A good starting point: http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/
- Whitestrake 9y ago
  HSMM-MESH is cool, really really cool, and people should definitely go check it out, but to quote the website you've linked: it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection being an Amateur Radio network, it can only carry traffic that is allowed under FCC Part 97 rules several types of internet traffic violate these rules also, it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection finally, it is N O T a replacement for your home internet connection and by the way, it most certainly CANNOT be used in any way with your business network I understand much of the traffic you'd usually send over the internet is not permissible over broadband hamnet.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - mondoshawan 9y ago
    Anything of a commercial nature, yes. You can still discuss, talk, etc. about anything else. If you're going to use a mode of communication so drastically different and with completely different content rules, most of your traffic will necessarily fall in those rules. Just don't expect to put up a blog with AdWords about how to run a startup. :-p
    - EvanAnderson 9y ago
      Wouldn't any end-to-end encrypted traffic, regardless of the commercial/non-commercial nature, be illegal?
muneeb 9y ago
Muneeb from Blockstack here. We're not reinventing anything at/below TCP/IP. That stack works fairly well and can function in a decentralized way. We are replacing things above TCP/IP like DNS, Certificate Authorities (CAs), how data is discovered, data silos, and dependence on remote servers for running your apps. http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf has more details.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

lappa 9y ago

I don't follow your argument. You are saying that because we have nearly a tree structure within the workplace, the Internet will approximately have nearly tree structure? Seems that it's just a matter if the most efficient structure being this way for both cases rather than us mimicking the workplace in the structuring of the Internet.

owens99 9y ago

> Sick of Company X and the way their business treats employees? Shop elsewhere, remembering that it won't be as convenient with fewer choices. Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you, remembering that they probably can't pay as much for great engineers. Hard sell. There's a reason why the government has laws against monopolies. Especially when it comes to the internet, consumers tend to choose the best/fastest product over the most ethical one.

andrewstuart2 9y ago
Yeah, that's a good point. The funny part is that it's the very consumer choice we champion that eventually leads to a total lack of consumer choice. We choose the best, they're rewarded, they dominate, choice disappears, they're free to stagnate without repercussion.
- ReligiousFlames 9y ago
  It's a feedback effect of consumer choice with corporate oligopolization and monocultural cost-optimization. Popular, easy and cheap wins most of the time, even if it hides deferred costs like terrible security and engineering choices.
apatters 9y ago
I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonable effort to use ethical software as long as it doesn't make my job too hard, and here are the results: - Ubuntu is my daily driver OS, with Windows getting booted once in a blue moon to play some games - Firefox for 80% of my browsing (the other 20% is Chromium on a Chromebook, which seems to run faster than FF even in an Ubuntu chroot with crouton) - Thunderbird and a plain ol' IMAP mail server for email - Maybe half of my messaging has moved to Signal - Searx.me for web searches, sure I'm using the Google results more often than not, but at least my queries are anonymized, and switching to other providers is easy I started a business on a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack, and I sleep better at night because of that. I gave our latest hire most of the same desktop software I use, and so far no major problems. I'll grant you that the UI of some of this software is a little creaky, but I get by, and overall I'd say most of the nasty bugs we have to deal with in our toolkit are in closed source SaaS stuff. Some notable unethical holdouts include occasional Skype/Hangouts calls, Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Also a bunch of small-time SaaS products. But give me time.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack That's not exactly a unique feature of this stack. Most web stacks are free and open source.

eth0up 9y ago

>Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you.... I do use alternative search engines; however, look at the traffic on just about any website and you'll see Google ip traffic spewing in all directions. I'm quite confident that tracking still occurs, regardless of how I get from one site to the other. This can be locked down a bit, but not 100% and not without effort and maintenance.

yhu 9y ago
I use Baidu. Works well enough.
- guelo 9y ago
  Baidu is good if you like having Beijing filter your results. I just did a baidu search for "tiananmen square" and the top answers all said "Tiananmen massacre a myth".
  - leesalminen 9y ago
    It's all fake news. /s
  - amauta 9y ago
    Lol you think google doesn't do that as well?
seoseokho 9y ago
I think your right on about google tracking. you visit a website and they're probably using google analytics or google ads somewhere, or it's a 3rd party feeding data to some form of google ad network.
ionised 9y ago
Globally block all the Google scripts that are running

adamsea 9y ago

> To that point as well, the internet already "works how real life works." Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Or did you mean, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time ...

TeMPOraL 9y ago
> you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time This saying needs a caveat - sometimes, you can fool all of the people for enough time to complete your evil scheme.
- nickpsecurity 9y ago
  Goldman Sachs. More times than I can know or count.
- zaphar 9y ago
  You version also needs a caveat. It's more like: "You can fool enough of the people for enough of the time to complete your evil scheme".

anythingbot 9y ago

This actually isn't true; you can invent organizations of the imagination and mirror those. This "imagination driven programming" is actually quite dangerous and tends to devolve into state secrets and so on since you are solving the problems created by people who "don't exist" but may in fact have lives that are SURPRISINGLY SIMILAR to the lives of people who are doing jobs that are better kept secret. So you can get around the law...but only by risking the integration of something that should be kept secret into the organizational structure...which makes its way into your system. Most people aren't willing to cross that threshold. So Conway's law is true for most people, just not all. If you want to think about it from the adversarial point of view, you can say that all programs are designed to transform or destroy organizations; programs mirror organizational structures because people want to determine the "resonant frequency" of an organization and understand its "social vulnerabilities" in much the same way a physical structure has structural vulnerabilities.

nilson 9y ago
One person or AI can do such "imagination driven programming" to mirror any organisation. so i guess organisation of n people can also mirror any organization they want, if that organization is more complex than theirs. Organization can also use some kind of obfuscator to change program structure to not mirror their organization and also mirror less complex organizations. I don't understand how this is dangerous. can you please give an example? I guess if you mimic more complex organization it may be dangerous.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

CodeMage 9y ago

Four years ago, Moxie Marlinspike offered a good explanation of why this "vote with your feet" approach doesn't really work, at DEFCON 18. His talk is called "Changing Threats to Privacy" and I highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM If you're impatient, you can skip the first 10 minutes and 40 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM#t=10m40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoeNbZlxfUM#t=10m40s

ReligiousFlames 9y ago
This almost assures some quite terrible conclusions in the long-term: When it becomes technologically possible to interface electronics into our brains, corporations will have almost unprecedented opportunities to do some really terrible things directly when the world becomes socially-pressured to be neurally-connected. I say "almost" because the manufacturing of consent and desires exist now and it is popularly believed to "apply other people but never me," a direct connection has the potential to make this manipulation cheaper and stimulate the brain in ways a glowing screen looks like banging rocks together.
- jerf 9y ago
  https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E And I'll add this text just to say this is very relevant to what you said and not just a drive-by spam drop.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

alistproducer2 9y ago

>Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. My thoughts exactly. A truly new internet would require new pipes, not just another protocol layer.

eveningcoffee 9y ago

>Sick of Google tracking the websites you visit? Use a search engine that doesn't track you... You have fundamentally misunderstood how Google tracks your visits. If website uses AdSense, they track you, if website uses Google Analytics, they track you, or Google fonts or scripts or what ever, they track you. This means that the problem is much larger and the solution is not very simple.

openasocket 9y ago
They can tell that a particular IP sent a request to their servers, but they can't correlate different requests to the same underlying entity without cookies. Simply saying "they track you" is misleading.
- eveningcoffee 9y ago
  I guess this was about scripts and fonts (because others are obvious cases). I did a test, beside IP address also User-Agent, Accept-Language and Referer headers were sent. Perhaps not good for very precise finger printing but still more that you claimed and can be cross correlated with other requests with more precise information. Google has claimed that they do not use this cases for tracking. One can believe this statement, or one can prefer to not do.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    How can you cross-correlate them? Most people are viewing the internet from behind a NAT, so there isn't a one-to-one mapping between IP address and person.
    - quickben 9y ago
      Plenty of ways, for example: https://panopticlick.eff.org/ https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and from there: https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?#fingerprintTable https://panopticlick.eff.org/results?#fingerprintTable

brighton36 9y ago

You're overthinking this. Blockstack is just throwing out features that the indigent will purchase shares in during an 'ico' the validity of the claims don't matter. This is what blockchains are for.

unoti 9y ago

> Unless I can unplug the WAN connection on my router and connect to your product instead, keep in mind that you haven't invented the next internet. I realize this isn't exactly what you're talking about, but it is indeed possible to unplug your WAN connection and plug something else in instead. Amateur radio operators do this amazing and fun thing with self-discovering, self-linking mesh networks. Great fun to learn and explore! A good starting point: http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/ http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/

Whitestrake 9y ago
HSMM-MESH is cool, really really cool, and people should definitely go check it out, but to quote the website you've linked: it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection being an Amateur Radio network, it can only carry traffic that is allowed under FCC Part 97 rules several types of internet traffic violate these rules also, it is NOT a replacement for your home internet connection finally, it is N O T a replacement for your home internet connection and by the way, it most certainly CANNOT be used in any way with your business network I understand much of the traffic you'd usually send over the internet is not permissible over broadband hamnet.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- mondoshawan 9y ago
  Anything of a commercial nature, yes. You can still discuss, talk, etc. about anything else. If you're going to use a mode of communication so drastically different and with completely different content rules, most of your traffic will necessarily fall in those rules. Just don't expect to put up a blog with AdWords about how to run a startup. :-p
  - EvanAnderson 9y ago
    Wouldn't any end-to-end encrypted traffic, regardless of the commercial/non-commercial nature, be illegal?

muneeb 9y ago

Muneeb from Blockstack here. We're not reinventing anything at/below TCP/IP. That stack works fairly well and can function in a decentralized way. We are replacing things above TCP/IP like DNS, Certificate Authorities (CAs), how data is discovered, data silos, and dependence on remote servers for running your apps. http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf http://blockstack.org/whitepaper.pdf has more details.