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I agree with most of what you say, but this is a bit pessimistic: > Building an alternative to Gmail? Nope. We can’t do that. We don’t have the resources. Whe

• Retric 13y ago
  The actual answer relates to the email protocol. Sure, you can setup your private messing system and there are plenty of them out there, but if you want to receive email from someones gmail account you need to hook into DNS which is under a government's control you also need a few dedicated machines to handle the load. Granted you may trust .TV or wherever, but as the pirate bay found out when the US and it's allies really want something it's surprisingly hard to find someone that's really willing to stand up to them.
  • higherpurpose 13y ago
    I think the solutions are coming, and we're beginning to see the seeds of that with stuff like DarkMail protocol, TPB's upcoming anti-censorship browser, the P2P Twitter alternative, Twister. However, I think the big problem with these will be adoption. I that first off before the masses move to such services, the current status quo needs to become quite bad. Bittorent adoption grew because the MPAA kept killing stuff like Napster and Kazaa, and then they got the government to seize all streaming website domains, to the point where nobody had an alternative except using Bittorent. If TPB can't be accessed anymore, it will push millions to use TPB's upcoming browser. There's another problem with some of these. They are stand-alone apps. I think what will get us the "encrypted by default Internet" and much better privacy and anonymity will emerge out of the Bitcoin community. Something like http://www.ethereum.org http://www.ethereum.org which plans to build an Internet-like platform might give us that. The reason this might become more popular is that it's not just an app. It's a platform on which you'll see all sorts of very secure and private apps appear, to the point where most of your "Internet usage" is done on that platform, whether it's for visiting your most important websites, or chatting with friends or e-mailing them. I think that's how we'll get that secure by default Internet. I'm skeptical of IETF and the like fixing the current Internet, because I think there are too many stakeholders in the current Internet that will fight against any serious changes to how the Internet works. I fully expect Google, for example, to fight against any proposal for anonymity. So the real changes will have to happen bottom-up, rather than top-down, and grow naturally. Hopefully this won't take too long, though.
    • bad_user 13y ago
      > Bittorent adoption grew because the MPAA kept killing stuff like Napster and Kazaa, and then they got the government to seize all streaming website domains, to the point where nobody had an alternative except using Bittorent. Personally, I ended up using Bittorrent because it was superior to the alternative that's popular in my country (DC++). Because it is peer to peer and because the client can download from multiple seeds at the same time, Bittorent makes it easy to saturate my download bandwidth. From a publisher's perspective for legal torrents (e.g. think of Ubuntu.com) it's better to distribute a torrent link on your website, than it is to provide a direct download link or to upload your stuff on Kazza, or Napster, or Dropbox, or Megaupload, or whatever. Notice how bandwidth and finding a host for popular stuff is a problem, being the reason for why people still use SourceForge. I cannot agree with you - people don't switch because of government-related actions. People switch when the alternative is superior. Let me give you another success story waiting to happen - Bittorent Sync makes it easy to synchronize stuff in your network. It's still rough, but if I were Dropbox, that's the competition I would fear. Anyway, peer2peer when implemented right works better than the server-client model, at least on broadband connections that can afford the upload (sadly, doesn't work so well on mobile phones, either because of battery life or bandwidth limits, but these are limitations that are not going to exist in the future). If you implement something that works and is friendly to users, then it can win in the marketplace.
    • xg15 13y ago
      That's nice and all, but what I always miss on those projects is thinking of how the NSA and others will react? Taking Ethereum or any other "new internet" technology as an example: Suppose this thing is actually sucessful, grows a critical mass and becomes a threat to the survivellance activities. If nothing else helps, someone could just introduce a law that mandates all ISPs to allow incoming connections only to machines on a "national server list" - market the bill as "War against botnets" or something. Getting put on the list is easy for every legitimate business owner - for a moderate fee of $2000/month, subject to renewal every three months. The reactions to this would be mild. Apple/Google/Facebook etc would actually lose competition, so don't expect any protest from them. There'd be no public outcry either since you could still perfectly well watch cat videos, post photos of your dinner on Twitter or buy the latest flappy bird clone on the app store. But oops, no more file sharing, no more Bitcoin, no more Ethereum, no more peer-to-peer networks at all. What I want to say with this is that this is not a problem that can be solved technologically - the NSA or whatever other services take their place have by far the stronger position here.
• curun1r 13y ago
  > When you think about it, most of the internet depends on open source software built by "us". I wonder whether that could be a possible "fix" to get companies to push back harder against the government. If the various OSS licenses were amended to include a clause that forbade the use of the software to aid government surveillance, it would force providers to choose between continuing to leverage open source software and continuing to cooperate with the government.