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I have a bad feeling about this

raganwald.posterous.com

11–20 of 184 posts

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#11
post #7

I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity ( http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book... ) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people. It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists. Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

Mozilla has good creds as a stalwart member of the Rebel Alliance and the work on https://browserid.org/ does in fact lay some of the needed groundwork for a changing the ground of debate when it comes to identity on the internet.

That said. Corruption, like rust, never sleeps; and we must be careful to not fall to the lure of the dark side ourselves.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#12

Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.

Not sure about China. They do avoid IP rules but for purposes of bringing things under Chinese companies. Once these companies have enough value to protect in their IP (regardless of how they came to have it), they tend to look to their government for protection.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#13
post #7

I think things like a serious implementation of the Laws of Identity ( http://www.ipc.on.ca/images/Resources/PrivacybyDesign%20Book... ) are one of the missing pieces in giving back control to the people. It's funny because the biggest players lately (Zynga, Facebook, Google etc) are building up these walled gardens like a bunch of wannabe imperialists. Who exactly is leading the Rebel forces?

What is that paper talking about? I'm sorry but aren't all these things already in place? You can generate your own certificate, you can have them issued by certificate authorities... you can sign up with facebook, you can have your own domain from a registrar, you can have your own email address, etc.

At the end of the day, who really cares about your unified identity? Only advertisers, and even they don't really care about ALL the aspects of what you do. Everyone just needs to see the relevant "user" that you have on their particular network. While YOU need to have a secure and private machine that gives control over your data verifies others' access to it, by relying on their identity relative to you. That's all.

The only really important part of identity is that the account should not be transferable to one or more unauthorized users. Authorization should ideally be granted by both sides. "What you know" is transferrable, which is why "who you are" or "what you have" is often better. If you lose "what you have", you can invalidate that account, and transfer your identity to another one, with the permission of the identity issuer.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#14
This artical is dead on. With this as motivation, we should all be more like Stallman and un-marginalize his point of view. His point of view is also mostly dead on, and always has been ... We can not let the mighty few rule the majority, it is not the way the internet was envisioned to be, and we should fight for it to remain as envisioned.

In response to tnicola, $10 a month, max, if I do not get that much out of an internet service, it should be free. Unlike Stallman, I do believe in a bit of capitalism, but a majority of freedom.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#15
post #6

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrel…

> Vote for a party that will better the world, not the one that will serve your selfish desires

Good luck finding one of those.

More generally, it's like this. You can argue all day about "good" and "evil", but what people respond to are incentives.

If you have a system in which businesses which do good and not evil are the businesses that thrive, then people will create businesses which do good. If your economic system rewards "evil" practices, that's what you're going to get.

If you allow these "evil" companies to continue to re-design the system to reward patent trolling, snuffing out competitors with lawsuits, spying on Internet users, etc etc etc etc etc, then -- you will get a system in which the more that a company does these things, the more they thrive.

If your political system allows companies that thrive to pay to bend the rules of the game in their favor, then they will not only continue to thrive but actively accelerate their success, to the detriment of the rest of the world.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#17
post #6

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrel…

don't overcharge just bacause you don't have a lot of competition.

But that partly encourages new competitors. If a market is dominated by a good product at a good price, it's harder to compete than if it is grossly overpriced.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#18

I have only one question. Who are the ewoks in this analogy?

Thinking back to the collapse of SOPA/PIPA, perhaps the everyday user of the Internet? Largely ignored by the "evil empire", until the sheer magnitude of their numbers outweighed their simple techniques (phone calls, faxes, letters to legislators) and proved overwhelming. That might be a bit of a stretch -- but in this case, I think it's warranted :)

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#19

Don't worry. Once China and India have a sufficient manufacturing, services and consumer base, I fully expect them to formally declare IP to be a nonsense and an impediment to growth.

Exactly. GOod luck enforcing IP rules in China. Your only choice is to out-innovate, not out-sue

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

#20
post #6

Great post. But, like all good rebels, I do believe that the cooler heads will prevail and that we will not have to surrender. For the past year, I have been touting that the future of business is benevolence. We are too smart and too savvy to be able to carry on indefinitely in a malevolent way. Google started it with the whole don't be evil philosophy and whether or not they are still following it, is largely irrel…

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