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As someone who grew up alongside the internet, I wonder if this is just part of the bigger picture of where the internet has always been heading... The bigger,
by random878 8y ago
As someone who grew up alongside the internet, I wonder if this is just part of the bigger picture of where the internet has always been heading...
The bigger, more popular, and ubiquitous it became the more corporate and political powers were going to seek to rule it. Now were are at an age of internet giants with the GDP of small countries, and political elections being swayed by the bovine herds of Facebook and Twitter users (or useds as Stallman calls them!). The internet has come so far from my happy memories of the late 90s.
My prediction is that we will see multiple 'internets'. Whether for political reasons (e.g. China), or commercial (someone like Facebook or Google providing their version of internet to a 3rd world country).
Then of course we have things like dark web. I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation.
It's an interesting point in history.
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(I'm a bookwork so please share any recommendations on this topic!)
- naveen99 8y agoThe internet is already by definition a collection of separate networks...
- random878 8y agoI'm speaking more about the publics perception, rather than a technical definition that most on HN know.
- _bxg1 8y agoOther than VPNs and Tor (which can be blocked), how would people circumvent the fact that the pipes are still owned by the same players? We can't physically lay out "another internet". Maybe there's potential in radio mesh networking, but the wires we have are the wires we get. As depressing as it feels right now, I think the only real option is to continue pushing in the democratic channels we have. Governments can stop anything if they care to; we have to work with them.
- gpm 8y agoEven if some trillionaire decided to lay out all the wires for a new internet it wouldn't matter with respect to things like this. It would still be subject to the same laws. The same applies to radio mesh networking.
- tachyonbeam 8y agoWhat if, you had a worldwide mesh network of internet satellites, too many of them to take down...?
- Daniel_sk 8y agoCountries could jam the signal or find you easily since you would also have to transmit data to the satellite.
- karoofish 8y agolaser uplink.
- naniwaduni 8y agoArms race against state-level actors is not a good position to be in.
- avmich 8y agoRight, but not unwinnable. George Soros vs. Bank of England comes to mind as an example, but you can have other options, if, say, you have a technological edge (easier for you to "attack" with data than for them to "defend") and a sympathetic population. Doublespeak could be popular under less than free regimes.
- hokus 8y agoThe postal service can send a box with say 10 * 6 TB hdd quite fast. Say 2 days for delivery. 480 000 000 000 000 bits / 86400 sec = 5555.56 mbit/s And you can send as many boxes as you like in parallel.
- neves 8y agoYou can try any book of Evgeny Morozov, a opinion writer for Slate. Some of his articles: https://slate.com/author/evgeny-morozov https://slate.com/author/evgeny-morozov
- random878 8y agoThanks!
- mirimir 8y agoYes, the Internet caught many "corporate and political powers" by surprise. But now they're getting it locked down. > I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation. You mean Tor, I presume. But Freenet is still around, although it's too risky to use it, except via Tor. And there are other overlay networks. Some basically just use VPN connections (such as tinc). And they were always about being "free from regulation". It's just that hobbyists, activists and people into recreational drugs and CP were early adopters. If you haven't read Vernor Vinge's True Names lately, I highly recommend it.
- smush 8y agoSorry, I'm not familiar with Freenet. Why must you use Tor to browse it?
- mirimir 8y agoIt's a ~20 year old P2P network that relies on traffic obfuscation for plausible deniability. But peers see each other's IP addresses. There's lots of child porn on it. In recent years, investigators have been using customized clients to serve child porn, and track which peers receive it from them. For IPs in their jurisdiction, they get and execute search warrants. Although there is arguably plausible deniability, most defendants lack the will and resources to fight. So they typically plea bargain. Anyway, if you use Tor, they can't find you. But it's not as simple as that, really. Basically, you lease a VPS, working ~anonymously via Tor. You run a Freenet node on the VPS, and access the webGUI as a Tor onion service. They can take down the VPS, if they like, but won't know who was using it.
- cgtzczykldpq 8y ago> It's a ~20 year old P2P network that relies on traffic obfuscation for plausible deniability. But peers see each other's IP addresses. Traffic is not just obfuscated, it is encrypted. Sure, you see the IP of a peer which transfers stuff across your client - but you do not know what the stuff is as it is encrypted. So the IP address is worthless unless you figure out a way to guess what the stuff is, and who requested is. See my other reply in this thread for further details.
- ghewgill 8y agoBook recommendation: The Master Switch by Tim Wu. It's a few years old now but it lays out where we may be headed with the internet based on experience with previous information industries (radio, telephone, television, and film). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switch https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8201080-the-master-switc...
- random878 8y agoThanks!
- nkkollaw 8y agoVery interesting. If the dark web becomes popular though, won't the same people try to regulate it? They could make .onion link illegal for ISPs to load and kill it overnight.
- TomMarius 8y agoIsn't one of the main points of Tor that other than by knowing that an IP is an exit node, no one is able to tell you're using it? And .onion resolution is entirely client side, no?
- majewsky 8y agoThe ISP can see your traffic going towards entry nodes if I'm not mistaken.
- tgragnato 8y agoTLDR: You can use pluggable transports. It's super difficult to build a low latency mix-net that covertly works inside an adversarial network. In addition to the current models over which onion/garlic routing are based upon you would (at least) need to add to the core of your software traffic obfuscation, a series of covert channels, NAT bypass, ... Tor and other mix networks simplify the problem assuming that there's a portion of the Internet that is free and introducing censorship circumvention mechanisms. Of course, the assumption is increasingly untrue.
- maxxxxx 8y ago"I think many will stop seeing the darkweb as a place of CP and drug dealing, and more of an internet free from regulation." I think it's more likely that most people will forget that the internet was once wide open and will accept the locked down state as normal.
- HNLurker2 8y agoBut how can a normie get into it? Without becoming like a trend "top10 Scary things on dark web"?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jeremyboom8 8y agoBook recommendation: 'The Future of Money' by the co-architect of the Euro - Bernard Lietaer