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This might be where the internet really gets forked, as it's been predicted over and over since the '90s. On one side, we'll have a "clean", authority-sanction

• bestouff 3y ago
  ... until your phone and OS web browser will refuse to connect to the "greynet", or that just attempting to do so has you categorized as being a potential outlaw.
  • readyplayernull 3y ago
    ... that in turn will trigger a new age of open devices, browsers and OSes.
    • RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
      There are only a few companies that can produce state of the art chips and those companies are easily regulated by the government. These open devices would be running slow hot CPUs compared to the newer faster chips that the non-open devices would be running.
      • willcipriano 3y ago
        You don't need state of the art. We had supercomputers in our pockets a decade ago.
        • Jolter 3y ago
          Still most consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for open hardware software. A thinner phone with a faster experience and better battery life seems to be all we care about. C.F. how repairable devices are a marginal part of the smartphone market. Most people are not even willing to pay a few cents extra for a banana that didn’t cause cancer on plantation workers.
          • toyg 3y ago
            "Most people" eat shit food and watch fixed sport competitions. That is not the point. The point is trying to be better.
            • jackvalentine 3y ago
              Right? In the cool indy web who actually cares about mass adoption. There is no way of saying it without being elitist but sometimes you just don’t want everyone in your space.
          • willcipriano 3y ago
            Id watch a black and white TV that is uncensored over a 8k TV that only plays content that falls within corporate guidelines. Content is king.
    • Gazoche 3y ago
      ..which will rapidly be branded as "child porn devices" by politicians, then promptly outlawed after public outcry.
  • duxup 3y ago
    If there is content there people want ... a lot will change then.
• supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  That already exists in some form today, but you’d regardless have to use an attested device to be able to partake in basic societal functions such as filing taxes, logging into your bank account, and so on.
• tamimio 3y ago
  I like such concept!
• danielvaughn 3y ago
  IMO we've had a version of this fork for several years now, though it was more at the social layer. I've imagined it as a social super-structure of the internet, basically a bubble that represents "society". Microversions of it have existed since the 90's but really came to fruition with the rise of social media (myspace, facebook, twitter, etc). I don't think it's a coincidence that "cancel culture" came soon after, because once you have a virtualized public sphere, it's now a matter of deciding who/what belongs.
  • MayeulC 3y ago
    It reminds me of the "cozy web" concept, which is defined as walled gardens with community gatekeepers, such as group chats. Small bubbles where you feel safe and not exposed to outside trolls, corporate or advertisers. https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
    • hgsgm 3y ago
      That's essentially a VPN.
      • danudey 3y ago
        I think you may have fundamentally misunderstood what the concept is.
• luckystarr 3y ago
  Story idea: This will probably result in the "corpweb" not being archived and thus will be forgotten in the next centuries (given we'll not hit a filter), while the "greynet" will survive the ages and only the vague echoes of the "corpweb" will be preserved through it. Digital archaeologists will struggle to uncover the "secrets" of the lost wisdom hidden in the "corpweb". Probably already written by someone, but it fits, I guess.
• Analemma_ 3y ago
  If that happens, governments will just order ISPs and mobile carriers to block greynet access. As cool as 90's cyberpunk dreams are, to me they always seem to ignore the physical reality that your connection to "the net" always has to go through the chokepoint of an ISP, and that this ultimately is an indissoluble barrier on just how anti-establishment the internet can ultimately be.
  • toyg 3y ago
    Maybe it's because I remember when ISPs where fly-by-night operations with a bunch of modems spread on office tables. You say it can't happen again, but IMHO that's not true.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      It happened before because at that time the government(s) didn't give a damn. Not true anymore.
    • saltcured 3y ago
      Of course that exploited the pervasive POTS network over which we could tunnel ISP traffic. What is the replacement? Mesh wifi? Guerilla fiber deployments? Or just a bunch of VPN tunnel brokers trying to evade blocklists on the corp-approved ISPs you have to keep using in place of POTS?
  • WanderPanda 3y ago
    yep, I think it is a miracle that we can still reach almost any IP from any other one. Only a matter of time until this goes away imo. I‘m already increasingly forced to bounce around VPNs to access websites from different countries
    • bamfly 3y ago
      Future routing protocols (already under development) that include end-to-end route verification will be the end of it, I expect. "Democratizing" part of the Great Firewall and building it into the 'net itself. Only way around it will be proxying, and that'll risk getting the proxying-IP partially blocked, if it's caught or any of the traffic is deemed "bad", and requires that you can route to the proxy itself in the first place. Won't be entirely immune to circumvention, of course, but will make selective and region-blocks and throttling more common and more precise, and significantly raise the bar for getting around it (which'll probably be illegal nearly everywhere, too).
• Jolter 3y ago
  Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppers got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit. “Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.” In both cases, this attitude has the problem that they ignore the vast majority of people who would suffer under the new order. Very few people would find their way out of the corporate walled gardens and into the free information superhighway.
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    > Internet anarchists getting excited about the prospect of forking the Internet feels a lot like when a lot of preppies got excited about the potential breakdown of society when Covid hit. > “Finally I can put all my skills to the test, which people have been teasing me about for so long.” Veering offtopic a little, but your comment reminded me, hilariously, that after Stay-At-Home was mandated, my older, "prepper" friends and acquaintances were generally the first to crack and start complaining on Facebook about unfair it was that they were expected to just stay home in their bunkers and not go to bars and shop for their khakis. So much for the rugged self-reliance they loved to crow about! I can imagine the Internet Anarchists behaving the same way. They'll be, in reality, the first to sign up for the AmazoGoogoMetaAppleInternet so they can keep posting to Social Media and doing their online shopping.
    • bamfly 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • WeylandYutani 3y ago
        The US militia that everyone talks about in relation to the 2nd amendment weren't meant to protect the US from Canada. It was in response to a feared slave uprising from within.
        • hgsgm 3y ago
• TheNewsIsHere 3y ago
  The problem I have with this web attestation concept generally is that I really want it _inside_ my shiny SSO-everywhere-Zero-Trust-at-the-edge-mTLS-everywhere business network. I also kind of want it in the public-cloud-meets-private-use home environment (that is, my Cloudflare Access tunnels and MS365 business tenant I use for private stuff). I don’t want it to touch my personal browsing experience or in any way involved in my personal-use browser environments. These are effectively opposed desires at this point, and it’s a cat-out-of-the-bag technology.
  • MayeulC 3y ago
    Are you sure you don't just want client certs? I can also imagine an IPv7 with ephemeral addresses based on private keys (like on yggdrasil), and a way for the browser to remember keys if wanted by the user. Authenticate sessions with the "IP address".
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      Client certs don't guarantee that there is not a rootkit running in kernel space sniffing session tokens, other credentials or data in general from user-space memory. Attestation does a reasonably well job at that, as you now need a kernel or bootloader exploit.
      • saurik 3y ago
        A "rootkit in kernel space" already requires a kernel exploit, unless what you are really up in arms about is a lack of a verified boot chain (which absolutely does not require remote attestation).
        • mschuster91 3y ago
          > A "rootkit in kernel space" already requires a kernel exploit On desktop? Nope, which is the point. Placing a piece of malware is easy without a kernel exploit. On standard Linux distributions that do not use dm-verity and friends, local root is enough - modify the kernel image or initrd in /boot, and you can do whatever you want with very few ways for a system administrator to detect it upon the next boot. The challenge more is getting local root in the first place, especially as a lot of systems now use selinux or at least have daemons drop privileges. Windows is a bit harder since Windows refuses to load unsigned drivers since the Win7 x64 days (x86 IIRC didn't mandate the checks), but that's not as much of a hurdle as most think - just look at the boatload of cases where someone managed to steal (or acquire legitimately) a signing certificate to ship malware. Getting local root here is probably the easiest of all three OSes IMO, given the absurd amount of update helpers and other bloatware that got caught allowing privilege escalation regularly. The hardest IMO/E is macOS, where you have to manually boot to recovery to deactivate SIP and they've been phasing out kexts pretty much already, and you get a crapton of very strong warnings if you mess around with them - you have to manually load them. With attestation and code-signing done right, it's all but impossible to get your code running in kernel space on Linux and macOS without a kernel exploit, the achilles heel will always be who gets signing certificates that allow loading a module.
• gochi 3y ago
  How would that even be remotely feasible when the "corpweb" owns the lines actually connecting the internet?
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • takeda 3y ago
    It would essentially be the same thing that we have right now.
  • sillystuff 3y ago
    > I predict this greynet will be a cesspool of porn, revenge porn, misogyny, racism, bots, and scams. Probably. But, the corpweb will be all that plus being a cesspit of unblockable ads and unblockable corporate surveillance. And, if you are the type to maintain an old school website (not an ad supported SEO blog spam site), I'd guess you'd be more inclined to support the freedom net aka grey net.
  • sircastor 3y ago
    This is what saddens me so much about darknet/meshnet/"open confederated systems". They seem to attract the people and content that are not welcome anywhere, and so they show up here because they got kicked out of everywhere else. With the early web it was first research institutions and then hobbyists and early adopters. Nowadays you can't run your bar without some Neo-Nazis showing up and trying to make your bar their local hangout.
• treis 3y ago
  Even if you run a hobby site it's way easier to do so with attestation. Especially if that attestation will allow you to uniquely identify the device making a request. It will end DDOS and make bans much stickier than they are today making all sorts of problematic content easier to deal with. IMHO, there won't be a split like this if attestation or similar proposals come to pass. Simply put the number of problems that come with anonymous users dwarf whatever legitimate benefits that anonymity provides. Everyone will build sites using it because of the problems they solve. And they will ignore the segment that refuses to use them because that segment will be small and a significant chunk of them will use that anonymity to do bad things you don't want on your site.
• WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Sounds like something straight from Shadowrun.
• fifteen1506 3y ago
  You have access to a ream (ok, some) websites/info hidden behind a toggle in the search engines/Telegram. For anyone reading this, look for the π symbol and CTRL click onto it.
• pessimizer 3y ago
  > on the other, a more casual "greynet" galaxy of porn and decentralized communities will likely emerge, once all tinkerers get pushed out of corpnet. The entire internet is "corpnet." For this fantasy freezone to happen, actual alternative physical networks would have to be built, the parts that those networks require will have to be sold to consumers without the hardware being locked down or nerfed, and if authorities do not approve of these networks, they'll have to be invisible. I don't see a technical answer to that. Sneakernets maybe, but dogs can smell hard drives. Certainly not anything wireless, unless there's some sort of geometric arrangement or algorithm that allows them to hide their locations in other signals. I'm of the clearly minority opinion that the people who run totalitarian governments are neither stupid nor weak. I also believe that the fantasy that there's always going to be an answer (that always looks like teen hackers dressed up like 90s punks in a Gibson Blade Runner urbanscape theme park) is a drug that allows people to take our real situation less seriously.
  • mindslight 3y ago
    > actual alternative physical networks would have to be built I'd say this is an unfounded assumption. Given a choice of two massive changes that I could snap my fingers and will into existence: 1. Grassroots community and individual-run mesh networks of individual dwellings, not controlled by corporate entities, running IP/DNS/HTTPS and other naive protocols already in widespread use. 2. The same corporate-controlled physical Internet we have right now, but with widespread use of protocols that allow for decentralized permissionless identities (nyms), independent of the centrally-adminstered IP/DNS namespaces. Most traffic going to individually-run VPSs or consumer connections. I would choose #2 in a heartbeat. The only reason I would see that we might need #1 is because #2 failed to gain a critical mass before the ISPs clamped down on non-corporate-endpoint traffic while it still only affects a minority of users. It's also not clear how the networks in #1 wouldn't just borg back up into corporate Ma Dell, or at the very least succumb to government regulation (each a different avenue for authoritarianism).
• sircastor 3y ago
  Can the non-authority web be counter-attestation? That is if your attestation comes back as valid you can't visit the "cool kids" web? If there were sufficiently interesting content, maybe it could break attestation.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    "I see you are not running an ad-blocker. Sorry, but I cannot in all seriousness allow you to view this site."
• Gazoche 3y ago
  But the question is, who and what is going to be allowed to connect to the corpweb. Running an adblocker? Sorry. Using a non-Chromium based browser? Nuh-uh. Running an old machine with no TPM? Sucks to be you. Running a Linux distribution? Tough luck. Sure, you can have fun with your free decentralized web. But at the end of the day even tinkerers have to log into their gov website to pay their taxes.
  • fruitreunion1 3y ago
    You can compartmentalize such activities to a dedicated device, much like one may need a Windows device for certain software or an Android device for features in banking apps that aren't available on the website.
    • Gazoche 3y ago
      If it comes to this then desktop Linux will go from viable Windows alternative to obscure hobby OS overnight. The inconvenience factor of having your life split between two devices is just too high. This is the same way that SafetyNet killed alternative ROMs on Android.
      • popcalc 3y ago
        >desktop Linux >viable Windows alternative Coffee just shot across my desk reading this. You are too deep in a bubble to realize that to 99.7% of people desktop Linux is an "obscure hobby OS", on the off chance they even know what it is.
        • Gazoche 3y ago
          Well, I hope your monitor is ok. You're talking about the popularity of Linux as an alternative, I'm talking about its viability. It's viable because it runs web browsers just as well as Windows and that's all the average user cares about. Regardless, the point is that any alternative, Linux or not, will be dead in the water once WEI rolls out. Doesn't matter how good your OS is, if it can't access the mainstream web it will die in obscurity. The same way that Windows on phones died because it couldn't get all the useful apps.