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Businesses Communications Encryption Network Privacy Security The Internet

How DIY Rebels Are Working To Replace Tech Giants (theguardian.com) 115

Posted by BeauHD from the behind-the-scenes dept.
mspohr shares an excerpt from an "interesting article about groups working to make a safer internet": Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion whose prime movers tend to be located a long way from Silicon Valley. These people often talk in withering terms about Big Tech titans such as Mark Zuckerberg, and pay glowing tribute to Edward Snowden. Their politics vary, but they all have a deep dislike of large concentrations of power and a belief in the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied. What they are doing could be seen as the online world's equivalent of punk rock: a scattered revolt against an industry that many now think has grown greedy, intrusive and arrogant -- as well as governments whose surveillance programs have fueled the same anxieties. As concerns grow about an online realm dominated by a few huge corporations, everyone involved shares one common goal: a comprehensively decentralized internet. Balkan energetically travels the world, delivering TED-esque talks with such titles as "Free is a Lie" and "Avoiding Digital Feudalism."

[David Irvine, computer engineer and founder of MaidSafe, has devised an alternative to the "modern internet" he calls the Safe network]: the acronym stands for "Safe Access for Everyone." In this model, rather than being stored on distant servers, people's data -- files, documents, social-media interactions -- will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people's computers and smartphones, meaning that hacking and data theft will become impossible. Thanks to a system of self-authentication in which a Safe user's encrypted information would only be put back together and unlocked on their own devices, there will be no centrally held passwords. No one will leave data trails, so there will be nothing for big online companies to harvest. The financial lubricant, Irvine says, will be a cryptocurrency called Safecoin: users will pay to store data on the network, and also be rewarded for storing other people's (encrypted) information on their devices. Software developers, meanwhile, will be rewarded with Safecoin according to the popularity of their apps. There is a community of around 7,000 interested people already working on services that will work on the Safe network, including alternatives to platforms such as Facebook and YouTube.
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How DIY Rebels Are Working To Replace Tech Giants More

How DIY Rebels Are Working To Replace Tech Giants

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  • I hope they fare better, but don't expect it.

    • I was going to say. Punk's solution to what they saw as a corrupt society was to spit at it, swear a lot and hole up in squats. I hope these tech revolutionaries can bring something more to the game than a series of affected snarls.

      • Re:Punk failed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @11:34PM (#56052821) Homepage

        They will bring exactly the same thing to the game as the current tech giants did, when the replaced the previous tech giants, as in the future when the new tech giants who replaced the current tech giants are replaced by future tech giants. Tech giants has much more to do with marketing and public relations than it has to do with reality. They way they crap on about corporations of what ever ilk, is just ludicrous. The only reason it is so loud, is because their customer service is so bad. Seriously I wonder if one day they will wake up an realise that good customer service is cheaper than advertising and far more profitable. I know that wont show up in some psychopath douche bags spreadsheet, as they try to pump up the bonus by saving money cutting service and support but it's a lie and advertising to hide shite service and support is far more expensive than providing service and support, which in reality provides free sales staff for life.

        • Re: Punk failed (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          What would solve so many problems is a more educated populace. Problem is that most people don't care enough to want to learn how to safeguard privacy or security or what makes these large Internet companies tick.
          For this reason, any replacement technology will not only have to solve these problems but do it in a superior way that attracts people for that reason, not just for reasons that they don't know or care about like security/privacy.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CODiNE ( 27417 )

          See the Hudsucker Proxy movie sometime ... eh it's more like a play than a movie. Once a company gets to a certain size it's much easier to tank it's stock than to grow it. So you bring in a known company killer and pretend you don't know their history, and set them loose for a couple of years. Profit on the downturn. Then you get rid of them, profit on the upturn. Then you help them make a presidential bid.

        • good customer service is cheaper than advertising and far more profitable

          Says who?

      • Re:Punk failed (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02, 2018 @07:20AM (#56053999)

        What a totally epic failure of understanding. Punk rock's message was very simple. Be yourself, make it yourself, be self reliant and find your own way. DIY and self determination. All the hair styles, posturing, regulation safety pins, bondage pants etc. was crap tagged on by the establishment media who did their best to dilute and suppress the message.

        Punk is not a dress code. It's not a set list of music to like and it's not a set of rules.

        Be yourself. Do it yourself. Think for youself. ake it yourself. Be free.

    • Re:Punk failed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @09:59PM (#56052501)
      If they do succeed it just means they'll live long enough to become the bad guys themselves. Remember back when Jobs and Woz were starting Apple and acted much the same idealistic way [imgur.com] or Google's early mantra of "don't be evil". Not every company or its founders start out as a complete dick bags, but most of those who become wildly successful turn into them.
      • I think the idea is to set up a system where no one is in complete control. In this way, even if the founders change their minds, it doesn't matter because the system is de-centralized. Whether or not such a system is feasible, or popular, remains to be seen.

        • Re:Concentration of power (Score:5, Insightful)

          by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Friday February 02, 2018 @03:17AM (#56053427)

          I think the idea is to set up a system where no one is in complete control.

          And that's why governments will work to make certain no such system ever gains traction. Government will insist on being able to track, monitor, and hack into individual user's private data as they do now, with any new system. Just look at how crypto-currencies are faring with various governments.

          They'll throw up the usual smokescreen about terrorists and pedos, and it will die stillborn. What, you didn't think they'd simply allow you to walk away from their system of digital surveillance and control, did you?

          Strat

        • Without a charismatic visionary at the helm, a social enterprise of any worth devolves into an aimless, directionless mess.
      • [repost, sry was not logged in last time] A few differences tho, (disclaimer I am in the article), MaidSafe have taken no VC funding and worked very hard (possibly harder than the tech at time, certainly took more time) to maintain that stance. VC funding seems incompatible from doing good as a VC will often seek quick profit and mostly in traditional ways (from customers). So the maidsafe design is such that it cannot know its customers. The problems to solve, I feel, become simpler when you do not have

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's why the system design matters. If they design it right, then the system doesn't depend on them and can be separated from them if they turn to the dark side. Google always favored a centralized, secret or protected system over an open system, even in their "don't be evil" times. That was bound to become a tyrannical system. Likewise with Facebook. These systems are designed to serve their masters, not the people.

      • Jobs was always a sociopathic dickbag himself, though. Remember how he screwed over Woz on the payment for his "Breakout" design? The guy was undoubtedly a visionary, and that vision may have been at odds with IBM's stuck-in-the-past mainframe-centric approach, but that didn't mean he was a nice guy, and his computers-as-an-appliance vision (from early on) doesn't sound that far from where we ended up.

        (For example, Jobs didn't want the original Macintosh to be expandable, and the designers had to effecti

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Punk is back and this time with block chain!

  • Let's see what their ISPs have to say about this.

    Another question is how well it blends in with regular traffic, so that some of those ISP issues and restrictions can be mitigated or circumvented entirely.

  • Isn't the whole file splitting and storing idea a lot like btfs?

    • I thought it sounded like the Freenet Project, which I last saw about 10 years ago (is it still going?). It offered an anonymised browsing experience, and the ability to upload content to the network (which would be split up, encrypted and stored on multiple servers). Clients would find all the fragments and assemble them. It actually worked reasonably well, although had lots of issues (but I seem to remember using version like 0.1.5 or some such, so I'll cut them some slack!).

  • You mean Freenet 2.0? (Score:4, Informative)

    by vix86 ( 592763 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @09:40PM (#56052417)

    This sounds a lot like Freenet except they've made cryptocurrency a part of it. Freenet is incredibly slow because hunting down less used resources can take forever or be nigh impossible. They might be able to interest a few people because "CRYPTO!" but once Bitcoin crashes back to reasonable values, most of these digital tokens will shrivel up and leave a lot of these companies struggling. A lot of these tokens are simply ideas tacked onto a coin instead of coins tacked onto an idea; in other words, if the coin dies, the idea dies because the idea was never the real foundation.

    • But I'd be willing to give the idea another shot if there were no dependency on a particular programming language and the protocol could at least be sufficiently nailed down for backward compatibility.

      (This was years ago. If things had improved, I presume everyone would be talking about it.)

      Fetching some stuff takes forever, but I'm not always in a hurry. There's always the regular Web, or maybe Tor.
    • It does seem basically to be Freenet.

      But Freenet was intended to solve a somewhat different problem: how to share files without getting the copyright police on your butt.

      Not the only purpose, of course. But it was a major motivator.

      I think that rather than distributing data all the way to hell and back, which is very inefficient, instead we need some kind of distributed, decentralized DNS system.

      Yes, I am aware that is far from a simple thing.

    • A lot of these tokens are simply scams tacked onto a coin instead

      FTFY. Seems like a lot of these so called ideas don't peter out and die, they end when the founders liquidize their store of coins and run, I mean of course when the company is "hacked" and the coins are "stolen".

  • Yeah, but no. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @09:41PM (#56052419)

    the kind of egalitarian, pluralistic ideas they say the internet initially embodied

    Completely ignores who developed the Internet, and for what purpose...

    • There's a difference between a TCP/IP network and its funders, isn't it?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nutria ( 679911 )

        There's a difference between a TCP/IP network and its funders, isn't it?

        A TCP/IP network made by egalitarian, pluralistic utopians is completely different from a TCP/IP network created for the Military Mndustrial Complex and the purpose of withstanding nuclear war.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yep... developed by the universities for the military... Oops, should I have included a spoiler alert?

    • Completely ignores who developed the Internet, and for what purpose...

      Universities, for research? How does that conflict?

      The ARPAnet was created for the military; the Internet is the result of repurposing it for peacetime. It was developed from a military project into a civilian project, and the protocol is inherently peer to peer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nutria ( 679911 )

        Brilliant nut air-headed fools may have thought it was the dawn of an egalitarian utopia, but spam is 40 years old. There's no way it would ever be what they hoped.

  • Foolproof isn't. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ElizabethGreene ( 1185405 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @09:41PM (#56052421)

    >> hacking and data theft will become impossible

    muahahahahahahahahhahahhaha.

    That right there is Nevada beachfront property. An app is going to consume that data. To consume it requires access to it. If the hacker steals the keys used by the app to get the data then they can steal the data. To think less of it is naive.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >> hacking and data theft will become impossible

      muahahahahahahahahhahahhaha.

      That right there is Nevada beachfront property. An app is going to consume that data. To consume it requires access to it. If the hacker steals the keys used by the app to get the data then they can steal the data. To think less of it is naive.

      Give it some more time. There will be beachfront property in Nevada soon enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by green1 ( 322787 )

      Making data impossible to steal is easy. Being able to access it again once you've done so, that's the hard part!

  • Slashdot used to be like those guys (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Nowadays, itâ(TM)s like Facebook

  • I'm going to call it a "wheel"

    In other news, someone has re-invented distributed file storage. aka BitTorrent Sync

  • Wasn't this how the net worked in Neal's Stephenson or William Gibson's novels?

  • hacking and data theft will become impossible.

    No, they won't... You will just need to hack a different device in order to steal the data. Hacking an end user's system will typically be much easier than a large provider, but you'll only get one user's data each time and have to hack many devices.

  • What "giants"? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AHuxley ( 892839 ) on Thursday February 01, 2018 @10:34PM (#56052633) Journal
    The brands that helped the clandestine services with PRISM? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    The brands that could not get crypto to work and allowed plain text data to exist on networks that could be seen from the internet?
    The brands that hire SJW to remove links, derank news? Remove accounts and ban movie reviews?
    The brands that demand users allow malware on computers as "ads"?

  • history repeating (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Today's rebels are tomorrow's tech giants.

  • I recently switched to DuckDuckGo. I don't use Google any more except for Google scholar and maps. It works pretty well and I've never wanted for Google for basic search.

  • Headline (Score:3)

    by fubarrr ( 884157 ) on Friday February 02, 2018 @12:31AM (#56052999)

    While reading the headline, my first thought was that this was about Yemeni hipsters making budget medium range ballistic missiles from scraps.

  • There's something quite beautiful about this solution... let's call it Punk-Chain...

  • They are no more "working to replace tech giants" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chrisq ( 894406 ) on Friday February 02, 2018 @04:18AM (#56053565)
    They are no more "working to replace tech giants" than Radio amateurs are "working to replace broadcasting giants". They are doing a lot of interesting stuff, some of which will be adopted by tech giants and some of which will remain niche.
  • We're working on decentralizing the internet too. We're a startup that was founded in Norway who have gotten an international team of highly experienced Tech personalities who also agree that this is the future. This is also partly what's behind the Blockchain movement. We've made an open source operating system that we're inserting into the internet. Autonomous infrastructure that allows for building desktop and mobile apps on decentralized technology. Check out the Friend Unifying Platform. https://friend [friendup.cloud]
    • Not to forget our highly nerdy team of programmers that will help give JavaScript an even bigger push by allowing JS deveopers to built whole apps within a desktop just using JavaScript, including file management, window management, user management.. all you need, open sourced, install on your own hardware or run somewhere else. Client side encryption and DOS drivers to allow integration of arbitrary datasources included. disclaimer: I am part of that team :)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        We're working on decentralizing the internet too. We're a startup that was founded in Norway who have gotten an international team of highly experienced Tech personalities who also agree that this is the future. This is also partly what's behind the Blockchain movement. We've made an open source operating system that we're inserting into the internet. Autonomous infrastructure that allows for building desktop and mobile apps on decentralized technology. Check out the Friend Unifying Platform. https://friendup.cloud/ [friendup.cloud] [friendup.cloud] - https://github.com/FriendUPClo [github.com]... [github.com]

        Not to forget our highly nerdy team of programmers that will help give JavaScript an even bigger push by allowing JS deveopers to built whole apps within a desktop just using JavaScript, including file management, window management, user management.. all you need, open sourced, install on your own hardware or run somewhere else. Client side encryption and DOS drivers to allow integration of arbitrary datasources included. disclaimer: I am part of that team :)

        I think you just defeated your own argument.

    • And security with as strong as possible encryption to keep the user in full control of his/her content and where it is exposed. Preserving privacy even on public servers in the cloud.

  • Protocols can't be monetized (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grumling ( 94709 ) on Friday February 02, 2018 @08:21AM (#56054157) Homepage

    The trend since the early 2000s has been client server because VC backed companies couldn't monetize email. So instead of having an open protocol blogging system (RSS), or open protocol instant messenger (XMPP), we get Facebook and Twitter owning 90+% of the market.

    Just promote protocols instead of websites and this will sort itself out.

  • This really looks like the Holo project. Holo proposes a more human, agent centric internet — where you control your personal data and chose how the applications work. With Holo you share your computer's spare capacity running peer-to-peer apps. When people use the apps you host you get rewarded in cryptocurrency by the apps's creator. Holo is based on a technology called Holochain, a next generation platform for decentralized apps that is more scalable, exponentially faster and far more energy effici

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rgbscan ( 321794 )

      It sorta of reminded me of Diaspora in spirit, with blockchain as a bonus. Of course it was riddled with security issues and never went anywhere.

  • people's data -- files, documents, social-media interactions -- will be broken into fragments, encrypted and scattered around other people's computers

    Hey, this is almost Tahoe LAFS [wikipedia.org].

  • ...same as the old boss.
  • "Balkan and Kalbag form one small part of a fragmented rebellion" How odd that someone named Balkan would form part of a fragmented solution.

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