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As the saying goes: information wants to be free. In a world where everyone can interact with each other completely anonymously that becomes even more true, sin

As the saying goes: information wants to be free. In a world where everyone can interact with each other completely anonymously that becomes even more true, since governments cannot effectively penalize people for distributing said information. For example, imagine a version of The Pirate Bay hosted as a Tor hidden service, combined with a completely anonymous torrent-like P2P file sharing system.

troymc 9y ago
The full quote is: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." - Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review, May 1985
optimuspaul 9y ago
Ugh, I hate that "information wants to be free" nonsense. Information doesn't want anything, it isn't a thing that can want. People want information and very rarely do people actually want it to be free.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  People generslly want information they don't currently have but want to be free for then to acquire. People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.
  - Ajedi32 9y ago
    > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire. I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, pirated copies of media are typically created when someone legally purchases a copy of the work and then publishes it for others to use entirely for free. I find it very hard to believe that the people posting these pirated works want those works to be expensive for others to acquire.
    - vageli 9y ago
      It's the original publishers of the information that want to set a high premium, in this case movie studios.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire. > I don't think that's necessarily true. You seem to have mistaken “often” for “always”.
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  > Information doesn't want anything It's obviously a metaphor.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> As the saying goes: information wants to be free. Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; they hate that.
- mirimir 9y ago
  Sure. He should have said "tends to be" or "gets driven toward being" or whatever. But the key point is the tension, not his languaging.
  - imrehg 9y ago
    whoosh...
    - mirimir 9y ago
      Look, everyone knows that concepts have no intentionality. It was a figure of speech.
      - Ajedi32 9y ago
        You're missing the joke. "Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; _they hate that_." He's saying not to anthropomorphize abstractions, then doing so himself in the same sentence. ;-)
        mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, I got the irony. But I was responding to the criticism of Brand for anthropomorphizing abstractions. And if it was just a joke, with no criticism of Brand, then it was arguably off-topic, no?
    - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
      Ok, an xkcd fan. Apparently a bunch of these commenters don't get it.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
MichaelBurge 9y ago
Free as in beer, not as in freedom. That already happened decades ago.
mirimir 9y ago
Well: http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ It's hard to get "completely anonymous" for large video files. It's the snake-eating-a-pig problem. Torrents anonymize much better than streaming, because users are sharing many small pieces. Torrenting is very popular on I2P. With Tor, it's best to use only onion services, because exit resources are limited. There's potential to multipath transfers among onion services. MPTCP works, right out of the box. That would enable high-bandwidth torrenting. It'd also provide chaff for normal Tor users. And there's currently oversupply of entry guard and middle relay resources.
webmaven 9y ago
Information "wants" to be gratis only in the sense that water "wants" to flow downhill. It turns out that devices that impede that flow (like a cup) are useful. The corollary then to your particular analogy is that since anonymity on the internet was the default, it turned out that much of the commercial value eventually accrued to companies that correlated online activities with each other (searches, clicks, posts, likes, etc.) and tied the bundle to an identity.
- mirimir 9y ago
  The Internet was never anonymous. Especially not at the start, when every computer had its own IP address.
  - webmaven 9y ago
    First, IP address assignment for dial-up users was generally random from a pool, and ISPs usually only kept logs long enough to be useful for troubleshooting purposes. But ignoring the IP address assignment issues, do you remember what website log analysis tools (eg. http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/) were like back then? Most encouraged dumping the raw logs and just keeping the summarizing reports. As a result, for most intents and purposes the data on nearly all user information consumption and interaction was ephemeral. These New Yorker cartoons sum up the situation then and now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg#/media/File:Internet_dog.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg#/media/F... http://68.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/tumblr_njzlcpXjY91qav5oho1_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/...
    - mirimir 9y ago
      At the start, there were no ISPs. Assuming that logs are transient is dangerous. Remember how Kevin Mitnick got pwned?
    - sethrin 9y ago
      Ah, you're talking about the start of the web. The person you responded to was talking about the start of the Internet -- ARPANet or one of its later incarnations. When the traffic started exploding, yes, it became possible to be pseudonymous on the internet, but before then IP addresses were pretty much known and assigned in large blocks to particular universities/agencies/companies. It sounds like there may be some history you missed out on. I recommend reading 'The Cuckoo's Egg' by Cliff Stoll if you've not already done so.

troymc 9y ago

The full quote is: "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." - Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review, May 1985

optimuspaul 9y ago

Ugh, I hate that "information wants to be free" nonsense. Information doesn't want anything, it isn't a thing that can want. People want information and very rarely do people actually want it to be free.

dragonwriter 9y ago
People generslly want information they don't currently have but want to be free for then to acquire. People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire. I don't think that's necessarily true. For example, pirated copies of media are typically created when someone legally purchases a copy of the work and then publishes it for others to use entirely for free. I find it very hard to believe that the people posting these pirated works want those works to be expensive for others to acquire.
  - vageli 9y ago
    It's the original publishers of the information that want to set a high premium, in this case movie studios.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > > People often also want information they do currently have to be expensive to other people to acquire. > I don't think that's necessarily true. You seem to have mistaken “often” for “always”.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
> Information doesn't want anything It's obviously a metaphor.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> As the saying goes: information wants to be free. Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; they hate that.

mirimir 9y ago
Sure. He should have said "tends to be" or "gets driven toward being" or whatever. But the key point is the tension, not his languaging.
- imrehg 9y ago
  whoosh...
  - mirimir 9y ago
    Look, everyone knows that concepts have no intentionality. It was a figure of speech.
    - Ajedi32 9y ago
      You're missing the joke. "Don't anthropomorphize abstractions; _they hate that_." He's saying not to anthropomorphize abstractions, then doing so himself in the same sentence. ;-)
      - mirimir 9y ago
        Yes, I got the irony. But I was responding to the criticism of Brand for anthropomorphizing abstractions. And if it was just a joke, with no criticism of Brand, then it was arguably off-topic, no?
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    Ok, an xkcd fan. Apparently a bunch of these commenters don't get it.
- dragonwriter 9y ago

MichaelBurge 9y ago

Free as in beer, not as in freedom. That already happened decades ago.

mirimir 9y ago

Well: http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/ It's hard to get "completely anonymous" for large video files. It's the snake-eating-a-pig problem. Torrents anonymize much better than streaming, because users are sharing many small pieces. Torrenting is very popular on I2P. With Tor, it's best to use only onion services, because exit resources are limited. There's potential to multipath transfers among onion services. MPTCP works, right out of the box. That would enable high-bandwidth torrenting. It'd also provide chaff for normal Tor users. And there's currently oversupply of entry guard and middle relay resources.

webmaven 9y ago

Information "wants" to be gratis only in the sense that water "wants" to flow downhill. It turns out that devices that impede that flow (like a cup) are useful. The corollary then to your particular analogy is that since anonymity on the internet was the default, it turned out that much of the commercial value eventually accrued to companies that correlated online activities with each other (searches, clicks, posts, likes, etc.) and tied the bundle to an identity.

mirimir 9y ago
The Internet was never anonymous. Especially not at the start, when every computer had its own IP address.
- webmaven 9y ago
  First, IP address assignment for dial-up users was generally random from a pool, and ISPs usually only kept logs long enough to be useful for troubleshooting purposes. But ignoring the IP address assignment issues, do you remember what website log analysis tools (eg. http://www.webalizer.org/ http://www.webalizer.org/) were like back then? Most encouraged dumping the raw logs and just keeping the summarizing reports. As a result, for most intents and purposes the data on nearly all user information consumption and interaction was ephemeral. These New Yorker cartoons sum up the situation then and now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg#/media/File:Internet_dog.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_dog.jpg#/media/F... http://68.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/tumblr_njzlcpXjY91qav5oho1_500.jpg http://68.media.tumblr.com/7a8daddf2030b685e5e776eb9af7a6ac/...
  - mirimir 9y ago
    At the start, there were no ISPs. Assuming that logs are transient is dangerous. Remember how Kevin Mitnick got pwned?
  - sethrin 9y ago
    Ah, you're talking about the start of the web. The person you responded to was talking about the start of the Internet -- ARPANet or one of its later incarnations. When the traffic started exploding, yes, it became possible to be pseudonymous on the internet, but before then IP addresses were pretty much known and assigned in large blocks to particular universities/agencies/companies. It sounds like there may be some history you missed out on. I recommend reading 'The Cuckoo's Egg' by Cliff Stoll if you've not already done so.