“The Dream of Internet Freedom Is Dying”

I would add that the &quot;Secret law&quot; also encompasses the private deals struck between various organizations that have the full force and effect of law.<p>For instance, I am often asked about the standards for DMCA takedowns and monitoring of content. I cannot turn to laws and cases. I have to glean information from patterns of activity. Youtube does X, and the MPAA aren&#x27;t screaming mad about Youtube these days, so perhaps we also need to do X. Or, megaupload was doing X Y and Z. But a dozen other website were doing X and Y without a peep from US authorities. So I guess Z is the touchstone even though Z isn&#x27;t mentioned anywhere in any law or case and wasn&#x27;t even around when the laws were written.

The dream could come back. In my opinion.<p>Defeating legal threats:<p>- Design server architecture so can be migrated from one country to a different one without censorship. Now is easy, with VPSs, you can move infrastructure in few hours, if you do automated deployment.<p>Defeating cost threats (&quot;run your own software like a &#x27;megacorp&#x27; &quot;):<p>- Services running on cheap hardware handling 10-100x more users per server than current high language implementations (back to CGIs&#x2F;Fast-CGIs on native code, instead of PHP&#x2F;.NET&#x2F;Java&#x2F;NodeJS&#x2F;Python&#x2F;Perl).<p>- Filesystem-less storage (start server, load filesystem to optimized in-process RAM DB), so following steps can be avoided: disk cache, filesystem tree search, multiple memory copies, etc.<p>- Separate persistent and non-persistent data, so most operations don&#x27;t need to hit the disk.<p>- Abstraction over those low-level systems so people with high-level capacitation can build a massive-scale web application.

Publishing has been decentralized by the web.<p>Communication has been decentralized by email.<p>Money and contracts has been decentralized with bitcoin.<p>Social hasn&#x27;t yet been effectively decentralized, but it will be.<p>Decentralized is better when it comes to individual choice, curbing abuse of power, and resilience (no single points of failure).<p>But it&#x27;s way worse when it comes to security. And no one&#x27;s been able to decentralize security effectively yet, because a single top-down entity with an economy of scale has more resources to secure itself than expecting EVERY little host and their dog to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress.

I don&#x27;t have the energy nor the motivation, but I would really love to make a p2p internet which could be as easy to use as bittorrent.<p>Of course security is a problem, but I&#x27;m sure that making things public by default would make it easier, and security is not always mandatory, you can always use something which isnt entirely secure and use it well within its limits.

Wu users need to also accept responsibility. We handed over control to &quot;Facebook, Twitter, GMail, Amazon, etc&quot; as part of our Faustian bargain to get everything for free and put advertisers in the drivers seat. The invisible hand works for the customers, not the products.

I think it&#x27;s a side effect of the eternal September. There was a time in my life when I had to convince people that email was important. Now, it&#x27;s old news and even the slowest adopters have seen the light provided by the internet.<p>One day, someone will invent something cooler than the internet, and no one but the super technically minded will use it, and it will be a new spring. But September will still be a few months away.

It&#x27;s ironic to read about Granick advocating a free, open and decentralised Internet the same day we&#x27;ve been discussing how we&#x27;re heading Straight for AOL 2.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10008769" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=10008769</a><p>The writing&#x27;s on the wall.

Apparently the Black Hat audience is very conservative and pro-government. And likes Keith Alexander.<p>I guess the author has been attending a different conference than me.

I&#x27;ve just had a simple idea while thinking about the conflict between privacy, freedom, law and democracy and its effect on the Internet. How about designing a new set of protocols that would be using the highest degree of available cryptography and obfuscation, minimizing leaking of traceable information, but having a democratic voting mechanism in its core (Paxos-style?) for &quot;de-privacing&quot; sources of information&#x2F;traffic shall the majority of users decide (in cases clearly violating laws in grave matters etc.)? Direct democracy-style. How much of a pipe-dream would that be? What would be deficiencies of this approach and how could they be addressed? Is this even technically doable in a de-centralized fashion? Would apathy or malice of general population be the main risk?<p>The motivation is that nobody would like to have all their private matters out in the open (which is a fact nowadays), but we need an efficient way to enforce reasonable laws (like preventing child abuse, selling hard drugs, illegal arms etc).

We&#x27;ve been helping to kill that dream when we pushed for net neutrality. We played right into it. Getting to the circus on time (i.e. watching king of thrones after torrenting it) was so important we had to hand over the Internet to the FCC.<p>We no longer route around the damage. We intend damage.

Has anybody found the speech?