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I give away technologies / products which favor / foster decentralization: * De-anonymize cloud services and make PTR records work again. * "Track the tracker

by m3047 3y ago

I give away technologies / products which favor / foster decentralization: * De-anonymize cloud services and make PTR records work again. * "Track the trackers" email aliasing; since none of the big providers do this well, you'll need to run your own Postfix mailserver to take advantage of it. Maybe you should set up DANE while you're at it? * A decentralized telemetry / SIEM -like platform using the DNS. * "Internet in a box" on your laptop: a wifi access point which doesn't have broader internet connectivity and which takes over all DNS (as well as DHCP) and allows you to run apps on that hotspot that are only accessible via that hotspot. Beyond the utility for remote / mobile de facto geofenced applications, imagine a world where "routers" were nodes with multiple wifi radios and which joined multiple "boxes". If the three phases of consensus are kook / lone gunman, co-conspirators, movement, (...consensus) I'm past the kook phase and into conspiracy. Happy to get on a video call and give anyone an hour of help with any of the above. Things that the RFC (and frankly nobody, really) doesn't cover are that centralization is overwhelmingly good for "free", but this has two sides. What two sides do you think I'm going to point out? There are absolutely awesome proprietary offerings (distributed doesn't necessarily mean open source or free) for doing no-code responsive mobile development by an "army of one" or a savvy user, for 1000 users or less (designed for scenarios where a UI needs to be built for a single person or maybe a half dozen at the most). Centralization favors the Procrustean (I still like that word, thank you commenter for gifting it to me): if the user doesn't fit, kill it trying and if it dies another one will take its place. I'm not sure if I need to see Coca Cola ads intended for an Argentinian or Ukrainian audience. Just let that sink in. Saw a pro-centralization argument the other day that $grandma in a $third_world_country can't view her grandson's football league games without the wonders of centralization (conveniently conflated with not regulating those centralized entities' traffic across international borders)... but this chauvinistically fails to grasp that this requires an international data plan (oftentimes lacking on phones in third world countries) and that grandma has to register for some global nexus of surveillance capitalism that otherwise has little relevance to her life in order to do so.

m3047 3y ago
"But how can an 'international data plan' be a thing, since the whole point is that the Internet doesn't have borders?" (some rando I mumbled to about this) That's because nation states aren't the only gatekeepers. Those centralized services are also gatekeepers. Not only the services, the people who put the brick in your hands. A lot of free or low cost phones in places where people don't have much income are essentially tethered to some AOL-like service, like Facebook. Really, your internet connection is to (or optimized for) Facebook: it's e.g. a "Facebook phone". Anything that's not "Facebook" counts against your data plan.

by m3047 3y ago

m3047 3y ago

"But how can an 'international data plan' be a thing, since the whole point is that the Internet doesn't have borders?" (some rando I mumbled to about this) That's because nation states aren't the only gatekeepers. Those centralized services are also gatekeepers. Not only the services, the people who put the brick in your hands. A lot of free or low cost phones in places where people don't have much income are essentially tethered to some AOL-like service, like Facebook. Really, your internet connection is to (or optimized for) Facebook: it's e.g. a "Facebook phone". Anything that's not "Facebook" counts against your data plan.