Internet Is Easy Prey For Governments 314
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Douglas Rushkoff writes on CNN that the revolution in Egypt starkly reveals the limits of our internet tools and the ease with which those holding power can take them away. 'Old media, such as terrestrial radio and television, were as distributed as the thousands of stations and antennae from which broadcast signals emanated, but all internet traffic must pass through government and corporate-owned choke points,' says Rushkoff adding that when push came to shove over WikiLeaks in the US the very same government authority was used to cut off "enemies of the state" from access and funding. Rushkoff suggests that we use the lessons of the internet to build a communications infrastructure that cannot be controlled from the top. Back before the internet, many early computer hobbyists networked on Fidonet, a simple peer-to-peer network and now digital activists propose reviving such ideas with mesh networking over Wi-Fi networks that could connect inhabitants of an entire city without anyone having an internet service provider. 'Until we choose to develop such alternative networks, our insistence on seeing the likes of Facebook and Twitter as the path toward freedom for all people will only serve to increase our dependence on corporations and government for the right to assemble and communicate.'"
Re:No ideal solutions (Score:5, Interesting)
Trouble is, of course, that Freenet is a pain in the ass to use, largely because its design has had to take those issues into account. They aren't totally intractable, the system does work, and somebody skilled in the art could probably whip up a cute little 802.11i mesh router/Freenet cache node device that would be set-and-forget and(in mass market quantities) under $200 a pop... It would still be dog slow and hard to navigate, but at least it would be easy to set up. The odds of that actually happening, though, seem fairly remote. A preconfigured m0n0wall or PFsense variant might be more economically plausible, if no more likely to see mass uptake.
The world isn't completely impossible without a set of trusted hosts and backbones and sites; but it sure does make a lot of things much easier....
Re:It doesn't have to be that way ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Treaties and promises are only as secure as the guns behind them can make them. We may demand from our governments, they may make promises and guarantees, but in case of serious civil unrest, they will most certainly kill the internet if they deem it beneficial for them to do so. The only way to prevent that is to decentralize the system. An analog-modem speed internet that always works is worth a lot more than a gigabit internet that doesn't work when it's needed the most.
Re:It doesn't have to be that way ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Twitter and Facebook actually have more impact than you'd think.
To start with, it's not in anyway abnormal for people to visit Facebook all the time, or for facebook to contain all sorts of random inanity, making it a perfect way for people to communicate covertly. The signal is simply lost in the noise. Everyone goes to these sites and so it's not at all unusual for any given individual to be doing it. Some forum, or blog, or chat room specializing in this sort of thing on the other hand would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone looking.
The other important thing is that it spreads information to the outside world. Millions of people are on these sites, so even a small group of individuals can spread information about what's really going on to most of the world.
Essentially yes, Facebook and Twitter aren't doing anything that wasn't possible before, but they are doing it with orders of magnitude more people. I don't like either site particularly much because I don't care about the details of other peoples lives very much, nor do I particularly want to share the details of mine, but to say that connecting millions of people all over the world to the same core data network isn't a fairly big achievement and doesn't change the world is pretty naive.