The Battle for Power on the Internet
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The Battle for Power on the Internet
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Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#2I am not convinced that the solution to criminals increasing their power with technology is purely political. There are technological solutions as well. Criminals are raiding bank accounts by tricking people into divulging secret passwords or other information? Banks can issue smart cards, thus ensuring that secrets cannot be inadvertently divulged (because the cards cannot divulge their secrets). Governments are abusing their surveillance powers? We can build systems that encrypt messages and send the ciphertexts through mix-nets (or more complicated approaches for things like social networking [1]).
The political side of this should be encouraging or at least not discouraging the deployment of such technologies. Laws can be changed more easily than technologies. Deploy a secure infrastructure now; if the law changes later, the technology will still protect us.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/social-ne...
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#3The other side of this is countrys using the NSA furor as an excuse to create a more balkanized Internet fire walling off themselves form those nasty furineers.
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#4The other side of this is countrys using the NSA furor as an excuse to create a more balkanized Internet fire walling off themselves form those nasty furineers.
I would hardly call "other countries" reactions just an excuse... If the internet becomes more balkanized, it is on the NSA and American government's head, nobody else's.
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#5[deleted]
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#6The other side of this is countrys using the NSA furor as an excuse to create a more balkanized Internet fire walling off themselves form those nasty furineers.
I would hardly call "other countries" reactions just an excuse... If the internet becomes more balkanized, it is on the NSA and American government's head, nobody else's.
Really you are very naive the ITU and the usual suspects have been trying for this for decades as they say "dont waste a crisis"
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#7This is a great piece that should go to top of HN.
We can reverse the trend as consumers, by questioning our consuming behaviour. And as hackers, by building tools that the users like and which make the web more free.
Power is where the money is. And power makes legislation. It will only get harder from now on..
But on the upside, software is a very malleable thing. New applications can be developed quickly. And they can replace established ones.
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#8The other side of this is countrys using the NSA furor as an excuse to create a more balkanized Internet fire walling off themselves form those nasty furineers.
I would hardly call "other countries" reactions just an excuse... If the internet becomes more balkanized, it is on the NSA and American government's head, nobody else's.
Considering such a thing has been underway since well before the recent Snowden revelations, I'd say you're buying the convenient excuse that has landed in their collective laps.
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#9"Our e-mail, photos, calendars, address books, messages, and documents are on servers belonging to Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and so on."
That's not a given. Not only is it trivially easy to host your own email, there are a number of very positive side-effects of doing so. For instance, when I email my wife, it's just a local copy operation - no network traffic is generated, and thus nothing can be intercepted by third parties.
Further, although I have not done it yet, it appears to be only slightly more technically challenging to provide your own dialtone.
In 2013 the Internet traffic I actually do generate is much more secure than the Internet traffic I generated 20 years ago. Now I have a VPN to various endpoints around the globe. That's much better than telnet to tc.umn.edu :)
The disconnect here is that he is talking about particular consumer properties (walled gardens) that happen to exist on the Internet. It surprises me, given who the author is.
Re: The Battle for Power on the Internet
#10This is a great piece that should go to top of HN. We can reverse the trend as consumers, by questioning our consuming behaviour. And as hackers, by building tools that the users like and which make the web more free. Power is where the money is. And power makes legislation. It will only get harder from now on.. But on the upside, software is a very malleable thing. New applications can be developed quickly. And they…
"We can reverse the trend as consumers"
No, you can't. You can reverse this trend as a peer on the network, but not as a consumer.