This post skirts right around the already existing conflict points. It shit talks transnational corporations that power our internet (I think it's fair for it to do so), but then doesn't blink an eye at governments interfering with human rights at all.<p>The misalignment of internet (from protocol to implementation) with societal values is infact a problem. But blindly aligning the internet to societal values, especially to values as defined by governments, is also not very respectful of universal human rights.<p>The more I think about this, the more disappointment I am. There are a lot of different human rights out there. The UN declaration has 30 articles. The blog post, and article fail to identify for example what human rights the CDN outages affected. How does injecting human rights assessment into IETF planning framework help mitigate risk against future events like CDN outages? I don't want to be argumentative, the author is the subject matter expert, I just want to hear how he's gamed out this scenario!
This hijacking of the definition of human rights in the last 50 years is a catastrophy. A human right should only be a negative right, something that I cannot be forced to do. It is a human right that I can't be forced to do anything you want.<p>As soon as human rights become things that need work from someone else (healthcare, the internet), you are moving it into the realm of needing taxation and resource allocation by someone (government). You can't make healthcare or the internet a human right without taxing people to build it and provide it. Or in extreme cases, forcing people to work. But by doing that you are taking away the human rights of others to their own time and energy.<p>Human rights should only exist as long as they can't conflict with each other, otherwise they just become laws. But as soon as you create human rights to things that cost energy (money), you create a conflict between people's free choice to live their lives and providing that service to them for free.<p>How do you decide which human right to enforce when they conflict?
> The Internet is often described as a global network of networks, but if this network is truly global, why is it nearly impossible to have an email address in a non-Latin script like Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi? This is not just true for applications, but also for the protocols, programming languages, routers, and pretty much every part of the Internet’s foundation.<p>My big compliant about different languages in UTF-8 is homglyph attacks are easy-peasy to do.<p>And the way non-ASCII (7 bit) character sets were done makes it nigh impossible to tell the difference between in-character set and outside of.<p>There are hacky ways to show some homoglyph attacks, like punycode. Browsers do this... However using homoglyphs in Outlook works as intended and shows the look-alike characters without expansion - *but* the Outlook web access does expand the utf-8 chars to punycode.<p>My recommendation being an infosec professional is to determine if you have a need for allowing punycode usernames or domainnames. If you don't, I suggest to ban them at your gateways.<p>I also recognize the non-english centrism in doing this block. But when hese ranges of attacks are possible, I see this as yet another layer of defense against a really obnoxious attack type that is tremendously hard to discern.
Human rights, sustainability... these are fundamental concepts that the UN articulates and promotes for our collective benefit. But they are just beacons: pointing towards a general humanistic direction that feels... right.<p>The strife starts as soon as one gets down to business. Any more detailed visions, implementation or policy specifics get quickly mired in the complexities, alternative options, inertia, vested interests, historical baggage etc of real life.<p>There is no easy escaping that predicament. The only algorithm that can beat that complexity and find paths towards the beacons we know we must reach are the parallel processed trial-and-error efforts of an informed society that is empowered and free to experiment.<p>The real "bug" is anything that impedes that inherent problem solving ability. Whether it is an overbearing state serving the few insiders rather than the many, out-of-control private interests (ditto), or any unholy combination thereof - which is the more usual case.<p>One thing is for sure: The shape of the internet is not a technical matter but goes directly to the heart of what kind of societies we have.
The title is fine, but you have no new "rights" just because there's the Internet or CDNs.<p>Your rights are still the same: the right to own property. Nothing more, nothing less.<p>You can't invent an obligation for someone out there (to build a better CDN, or provide healthcare for you, for example) to satisfy your needs. They may want to do it - if they want - but that's as far as it goes.