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A retrospective of my time on the internet

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Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#301

Post by hypfer »

Panda_ wrote: post #297
hypfer wrote: post #12

It might be that we just have to accept that the internet and us simply grew apart. But right now, we still seem to be lacking the imagination to engineer new spaces beyond it. And the stamina, probably. Convenience bred laziness. It might change though. Change through disruption. Disruption that will not be without collateral. As always. I for one am curious how hostile of a place the internet will become before the…

Reticulum uses AES-256 encryption, which is considered quantum safe due to the sheer number of extra combinations adding 128 bits to AES 128 creates, including by NIST[1]. It uses AES because AES is extremely well tested and vulnerabilities have not been found. The new quantum safe algorithms are still mostly in beta and a few have already been broken. They also have extremely large key lengths which breaks the funda…

It's not that he's wrong in that assessment, but that doesn't really change anything about the fundamental problem of the cost of being wrong being a completely collapsed infrastructure.

We do not know if the quantum safe stuff is actually quantum safe, but we also don't need to. We just need to have a mechanism to use something else in the future if that should turn out to be a problem.

That mechanism is (from my understanding) lacking.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#302

Post by hypfer »

Panda_ wrote: post #298
hypfer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto. The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure. This.. apparently(?) was…

> share a single secret to become that specific closed network No? Pretty sure that isn't true. You get an address by creating a random private key public key combination (no collisions are ensured by entropy). You then send an announce packet over all the connections to other nodes you have. This packet tells everyone else how to reach you and that you exist. To send packets to you they send to the connection they g…

Uh idk man. Saying "no that's not true" followed by "I actually have no idea how that works" followed by "read the manual."

Maybe just don't?

You clearly did not understand what I said, because whatever routing stuff you've mentioned is unrelated to my point.

Which, if I wanted to be snarky, I would say could be found in the manual you've pointed to: https://reticulum.network/manual/understanding.html#network-...

___

Look, I want reticulum to be cool as much as you do, but this is not the way. Reality unfortunately isn't that.

___

And, frankly, the docs are not necessarily _complicated_. They're just not good, because they're meandering prose written by Mark for himself. Which is, again, fine, but not by itself an indicator of "clever".

The guy clearly _is_ clever but not because of his writing being near incomprehensible.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#303

Post by BLKNSLVR »

noja wrote: post #272
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does uBlock Origin block this by default? If not, what are the counter-measures?

No and none.

Well that sucks, but my pihole still makes a huge enough difference to my internet experience that I can usually immediately tell if I'm not behind it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#304

Post by Funes- »

teekert wrote: post #47
Funes- wrote: post #46

I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.

Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.

You might think to look for it through a smartphone app; I certainly wouldn't. That's some projection right there. And no, it's not there, still. If you knew anything about the deep web, you'd know it's quite different from the Internet of old, as well as much less populated.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#305

Post by teekert »

Funes- wrote: post #304
teekert wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the weary giants of steel have taken up a very visible part. But what you (we) remember is still there. It just won't come to you via a Smartphone app.

You might think to look for it through a smartphone app; I certainly wouldn't. That's some projection right there. And no, it's not there, still. If you knew anything about the deep web, you'd know it's quite different from the Internet of old, as well as much less populated.

Ok, so let me ask you this: What is stopping you and a bunch of people like you (ie me) to party like it's 1999?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#306

Post by nicbou »

alex1138 wrote: post #248
nicbou wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the "annoyances" filter lists. Takes a few seconds to turn on in the settings, works like a charm.

I have them all enabled yet still get them

That's odd! They're practically gone for me. AdGuard works well on iOS too.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#307

Post by chasd00 »

someonebaggy wrote: post #239
chasd00 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots to be fair, I found eggdrop on almost every single corporate Linux server in all my clients in those days.

eggdrop responds to explicit commands, yeah? Very different from the ones that infest the modern internet.

yes, fair point. hah i was a jr admin at the time. i remember removing eggdrop and closing the holes (or so i thought) only to see it back within a few days. i put a txt file in the directory saying something like "look, you can have eggdrop here just don't mess up the server". I really didn't want to ignite the ire of a hacker way more competent at Linux than me.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#308

Post by scrapcode »

goodroot wrote: post #175
scrapcode wrote: post #149

I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC. I really…

Love the post. It brought me back. The layer of builders and hackers is still there. But now the vast majority of people have their own hyper lanes on the Worldwide Information Superhighway. And geez, isn't that a noisy highway? We're somewhere way under that thing.

> The layer of builders and hackers is still there.

Further underground indeed. It's obvious dev for a career and dev as historical dev are already two wildly different things. My fire was certainly extinguished quite a while ago.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#309

Post by gspr »

hypfer wrote: post #31
gspr wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It could be so cool. Decentralized, medium-agnostic, meshing. The spirit of the old web, transported partially via LoRa radio, partially via fiber and partially via pigeon (optional) without you as the user noticing. I dream of these things, too. Could you recommend a solid summary of why Reticulum is broken by design? I've only viewed it from a distance, and the idea looks great. But I see a lot of comments like y…

I am by no means an expert, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong. But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto. The network collapses permanently and very much un-gracefully once that cryptography is no longer secure. This.. apparently(?) was…

> But the problem is that the whole core identity mechanism is built on asymmetric crypto, that is safe now but will not be safe in the future. And because it's in that core layer, you cannot just "upgrade" your crypto.

Alright, but that's fine for now. It's still really cool as a basis for resilient, decentralized networks. Maybe one day it'll have to be replaced by something else. Right now, it looks really valuable as an experience-gaining tool the way I see it.

> but that makes the whole thing a forever prototype that can never truly be used beyond being a niche art project.

Prototype, maybe. Niche art project? Disagree! It looks like a very interesting exploration of an underexplored space to me.

> You also don't really have a way to kick bad actors out without completely recreating your network, which is.. not ideal. You can make that work, but as soon as a single node is compromised, you have to re-provision all of the rest within the network.

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure I understand.

> That's because they just share a single secret to become that specific closed network.

Is that really true?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#310

Post by ProllyInfamous »

scrapcode wrote: post #149

I used to pride myself on being the first redneck in our neighborhood to have high-speed interwebs. Sweet sweet DSL, baby. No more disconnection from my Delta Force 2 game when my sister picked up the phone to call her boyfriend. The days of waiting 4 days for Limewire to download that new *.mp3.exe? Over! When I drag and drop the index.shtml into CuteFTP, it's INSTANT! Couldn't wait to tell the boys in IRC. I really…

DSL v. CableModel crew, checking in. Also got online in early 90s, first with a 14.4k via several janky adapters (none intended for interwebs). Also first with cable internet, circa 1998, in my redneck part of the world (Texas) – Dad got tired of the phoneline never working.

Decades later, I worked datacenters, including those with the last gasps of usenet – what a time to have been alive on the internet. Back then, it truly was a place where nobody knew you were a dog/kid/disabled/whatever (primarily text-based experience).

I remember at DefCon (LasVegas hackercon) ~2010, I ran in to somebody that had run a competing tech corner of the mid-90s internet; we chuckled that we both were obviously younger than our childhood text-based personæ had even purveyed having been, back then – we met, decades later, still in our twenties =P

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