5 ms·

Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, int

by mlyle 4y ago

Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links? Perhaps we can mechanize the selection of important content. The real question is how you do this in a way that doesn't encourage one-sided propaganda, sybil attacks, etc. I'm reminded of systems like Secure Scuttlebutt and the Othernet satellite transport. https://othernet.is/ https://othernet.is/ I know the internet is fundamentally two-way. It seems there's always a few competent users who know how to get information out of a conflict zone or disaster area... getting information in beyond a few choke points seems to be the hard part.

lazide 4y ago
This isn't really a technical issue, per-se. It's a social one, because social means are what are used to enforce the lockdowns - and those social means exist because of socially justified purposes in the societies. Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  Generally speaking, any kind of radio transmission is detectable. It's why radio silence is a thing when stealth is important.
  - lazide 4y ago
    The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable - and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393]
    - mlyle 4y ago
      > The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic. > and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
      - lazide 4y ago
        Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.
        mlyle 4y ago
        Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
        lazide 4y ago
        Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
        mlyle 4y ago
        > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
  - 7373737373 4y ago
    Spread spectrum, and especially pseudo-random noise codes are pretty hard to detect i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectru...
    - lazide 4y ago
      The more random it is, the harder it is to have certainty, but at high enough transmission rates and powers the raised noise floor is impossible to miss and is definitely something that can be triangulated. If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow. Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?). Yah, these types of things would be hard to detect (just point an LNB at the southbound sky... no dish... cheap electronics...) What it's not is turnkey or filled with a good feed of information that people would want at baseline. There's no adoption model besides being a dissident, and people tend to start planning for that too late.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    Starlink dishes are trivial to detect with even 1990s military technology when active. There's no way any satellite uplink can be hidden from a motivated adversary.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Yes, but we're not talking about Starlink. I'm talking about Othernet, which I mentioned above. It is receive only-- not an uplink. (I'm sure a tiny bit of RF leaks out of the LNB, but that could be mitigated as it is not designed for stealth).
      - lazide 4y ago
        Sounds useless for the internet (where every protocol is fundamentally two way), but great for ‘Radio America’ type broadcasts. Of course, so is shortwave. definitely not solving the same ‘problem’ at all though.
        mlyle 4y ago
        You're replying to a thread where I started by saying "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable."
        runsWphotons 4y ago
        could you say this seven more times?
matthewdgreen 4y ago
We now have the ability to train entire language models that contain information, can regurgitate it in the form of articles, and can even interact through conversation. Right now they’re big, but with continued improvements we could likely have useful and accurate models that fit on USB sticks and can be distributed through Bluetooth.
- avh02 4y ago
  If you're sneaking in USB's, why put an LLM on them and not just articles/data/wikis? (Curious if I'm missing something here)
  - int_19h 4y ago
    You aren't. The entirety of English Wikipedia (sans history) compressed with zstd is currently ~93 Gb from https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/. If you exclude the images, it's ~13 Gb. It's a much better bang for the buck than any LLM storage-wise, and that's before we even consider the hardware requirements to actually run an LLM vs an offline wiki reader.
    - matthewdgreen 4y ago
      Storage is effectively free. I can fit the entire Vicuna LLM on a $5 (US retail) SD card right now, and in a decade that’ll be less than $.50. LLMs will also presumably get more efficient at storing fact data outside of the network parameters. People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t. They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and easier to distribute in a censorship-resistant manner. That’s why Tor is much more popular than high-latency censorship resistant networks that share static blobs, even though low-latency networks are relatively insecure and much easier to block. The question then is not how to save $3 of storage media: it’s whether you can simulate the interactive experience of the Internet in a satisfying way without a reliable low-latency network connection. Maybe the answer is no, maybe it’s yes. Imagine a really high-quality future LLM that you can actually interact with and ask questions about specific topics, maybe even using voice communication, and that can play games with you and generate other types of “web like” experiences. Is that really less compelling than a download of Wikipedia?
Scoundreller 4y ago
I think Othernet is really cool. Don't even need a big dish. In 2kbps, they fit in RSS news feeds (BBC, Al Jazeera, Boing Boing, and others), APRS messages, WikiNews, global winds report, a daily Voice of America news report. Currently only works in Europe and North America, but nice to know there's a middle-of-no-where service that doesn't require a sub that gives you some barebones info from the outside world. There's a post a couple posts below on their forum with someone that put their system on the internet so you can see what it pulls in: https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2 https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2
- mlyle 4y ago
  > I think Othernet is really cool. Yup! I'm looking forward to them having equipment available again (so I don't need to homebrew). > Don't even need a big dish. With a decent LNB, you don't need a dish at -all-.
  - syedkarim 4y ago
    It's available now.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      !! So it is! You have my order. Just FYI, somehow I'd been ending up on this page: https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board And believing it when it said it was not available yet.
- syedkarim 4y ago
  Wow, thanks for the compliment. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to make it useful to a wider audience.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Upping awareness. Last Youtube video by Tech Minds was 3 years ago. Maybe not a lot has changed, but youtube punishes old content :( Maybe a Starlink status feed. I can imagine some Starlink customers not having any back-up link to the world in some places. Text weather forecasts. CBC news feed if it can fit: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks Maybe just include in the North American feed.

by mlyle 4y ago

lazide 4y ago

This isn't really a technical issue, per-se. It's a social one, because social means are what are used to enforce the lockdowns - and those social means exist because of socially justified purposes in the societies. Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?).

Dalewyn 4y ago
Generally speaking, any kind of radio transmission is detectable. It's why radio silence is a thing when stealth is important.
- lazide 4y ago
  The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable - and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. [https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5699393]
  - mlyle 4y ago
    > The tricky thing is that receiving radio transmissions is also usually detectable A LNB is pretty quiet to begin with... and the LO is on the same frequency whether you're watching satellite TV or tapping into Othernet. You could, of course, make it much quieter still. Just because a lot of receivers leak a lot of oscillator and mixer frequencies doesn't mean it's intrinsic. > and a transceiver has to, by it's nature, transmit. Which is why I was talking about a receive-only approach. (Well, also for reasons of scalability).
    - lazide 4y ago
      Well, that is also fundamentally not an internet.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        Well, I thought I made that pretty clear in what I posted. "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable. But perhaps we can get a meaningful digest of snapshots of the important stuff that can work over slow links, intermittent links, and one-way links?"
        lazide 4y ago
        Since the whole point of the internet is, you know, people can request what they want and communicate with others, and they already HAVE people shoving ‘important stuff’ their way, what exactly do you think that adds to the picture?
        mlyle 4y ago
        > what exactly do you think that adds to the picture? - Othernet is already a system out of local control that can be received with relatively trivial equipment. - 2000bps feels perhaps a bit too slow, but with an order of magnitude more bandwidth, you could have a -lot- of textual communication. It could carry a big cross-section of what everyone is saying and allow people to choose what they see. - An ideal system would support multiple transports; Othernet, intermittent wifi connectivity, sneakernet, etc. It would do the best with what it can to get data in or out, and allocate the scarce resources to the traffic which is most likely to be useful to others (this is tricky, with sybil attacks, etc... but I don't think it's necessarily intractable). That is-- I love the interactive internet, but wouldn't it be cool if it gracefully degraded to still provide "postcards" and "broadcast radio" and a bit more as capacity went down, intermittency went up, and inability to return traffic was sometimes a factor?
        MichaelZuo 4y ago
- 7373737373 4y ago
  Spread spectrum, and especially pseudo-random noise codes are pretty hard to detect i think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-sequence_spread_spectru...
  - lazide 4y ago
    The more random it is, the harder it is to have certainty, but at high enough transmission rates and powers the raised noise floor is impossible to miss and is definitely something that can be triangulated. If a normal radio transmission is a point light of a specific color, truly random spread spectrum is a grey glow. Direct sequence spread spectrum being many different color flashing lights here, I guess.
mlyle 4y ago
> Unless it was literally impossible to block internet access at all (some kind of unjammable starlink with undetectable receivers/transceivers?). Yah, these types of things would be hard to detect (just point an LNB at the southbound sky... no dish... cheap electronics...) What it's not is turnkey or filled with a good feed of information that people would want at baseline. There's no adoption model besides being a dissident, and people tend to start planning for that too late.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Starlink dishes are trivial to detect with even 1990s military technology when active. There's no way any satellite uplink can be hidden from a motivated adversary.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Yes, but we're not talking about Starlink. I'm talking about Othernet, which I mentioned above. It is receive only-- not an uplink. (I'm sure a tiny bit of RF leaks out of the LNB, but that could be mitigated as it is not designed for stealth).
    - lazide 4y ago
      Sounds useless for the internet (where every protocol is fundamentally two way), but great for ‘Radio America’ type broadcasts. Of course, so is shortwave. definitely not solving the same ‘problem’ at all though.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        You're replying to a thread where I started by saying "Maybe the internet as a whole is intractable."
        runsWphotons 4y ago
        could you say this seven more times?

matthewdgreen 4y ago

We now have the ability to train entire language models that contain information, can regurgitate it in the form of articles, and can even interact through conversation. Right now they’re big, but with continued improvements we could likely have useful and accurate models that fit on USB sticks and can be distributed through Bluetooth.

avh02 4y ago
If you're sneaking in USB's, why put an LLM on them and not just articles/data/wikis? (Curious if I'm missing something here)
- int_19h 4y ago
  You aren't. The entirety of English Wikipedia (sans history) compressed with zstd is currently ~93 Gb from https://www.kiwix.org/ https://www.kiwix.org/. If you exclude the images, it's ~13 Gb. It's a much better bang for the buck than any LLM storage-wise, and that's before we even consider the hardware requirements to actually run an LLM vs an offline wiki reader.
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    Storage is effectively free. I can fit the entire Vicuna LLM on a $5 (US retail) SD card right now, and in a decade that’ll be less than $.50. LLMs will also presumably get more efficient at storing fact data outside of the network parameters. People can download Wikipedia pages but weirdly they don’t. They prefer the interactive web to big downloads of static encyclopedia data, even though the latter is better and easier to distribute in a censorship-resistant manner. That’s why Tor is much more popular than high-latency censorship resistant networks that share static blobs, even though low-latency networks are relatively insecure and much easier to block. The question then is not how to save $3 of storage media: it’s whether you can simulate the interactive experience of the Internet in a satisfying way without a reliable low-latency network connection. Maybe the answer is no, maybe it’s yes. Imagine a really high-quality future LLM that you can actually interact with and ask questions about specific topics, maybe even using voice communication, and that can play games with you and generate other types of “web like” experiences. Is that really less compelling than a download of Wikipedia?

Scoundreller 4y ago

I think Othernet is really cool. Don't even need a big dish. In 2kbps, they fit in RSS news feeds (BBC, Al Jazeera, Boing Boing, and others), APRS messages, WikiNews, global winds report, a daily Voice of America news report. Currently only works in Europe and North America, but nice to know there's a middle-of-no-where service that doesn't require a sub that gives you some barebones info from the outside world. There's a post a couple posts below on their forum with someone that put their system on the internet so you can see what it pulls in: https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2 https://forums.othernet.is/t/what-happened/7647/2

mlyle 4y ago
> I think Othernet is really cool. Yup! I'm looking forward to them having equipment available again (so I don't need to homebrew). > Don't even need a big dish. With a decent LNB, you don't need a dish at -all-.
- syedkarim 4y ago
  It's available now.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    !! So it is! You have my order. Just FYI, somehow I'd been ending up on this page: https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board https://othernet.is/products/dreamcatcher-circuit-board And believing it when it said it was not available yet.
syedkarim 4y ago
Wow, thanks for the compliment. Let me know if you have any ideas on how to make it useful to a wider audience.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Upping awareness. Last Youtube video by Tech Minds was 3 years ago. Maybe not a lot has changed, but youtube punishes old content :( Maybe a Starlink status feed. I can imagine some Starlink customers not having any back-up link to the world in some places. Text weather forecasts. CBC news feed if it can fit: https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks https://www.cbc.ca/lite/news?sort=editors-picks Maybe just include in the North American feed.