By pretending to enforce property rights.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/13306/this-is-how-the-government-shuts-down-the-internet/
This is how the government shuts down the internet
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I think we need a truly decentralized, anonymous, uncensored, self-governing, cryptographically-secure, cut-off-one-head-and-ten-more-appear DNS system. Cut the fat cats at ICANN out of the game entirely.
I would base it on the wikipedia model, create a domain registrar that anyone could edit. Only I would have a large group of anonymous contributors, each having their own PGP key for signing their edits. If one contributor had a nasty tendency of registering a large number of known spam servers, the other contributors could vote to ban that one contributor and delete what entries he made.
Since it would be easy for the government to shut down an unruly DNS server, we would need a number of mirror servers scattered around the globe. And since edits would be anonymous, if the government didn’t like some of the domains, it would be impossible to trace who created those domain names, giving plausible deniability.
Is that awesome or what?
You can’t have anonymity in an authentication model. How do you assure spammers and the like don’t just sign each of their edits with a different key? And if you’re not worried about that, then why do signings need to be made at all?
Leaving the problems of democratic management aside for the moment, how would banning someone even be possible within a model of anonymity?
First of all, plausible deniability is a mechanism of the monopoly justice system run by… guess who? Do you seriously think the state will cave in to its own rules? Especially when it prevents them from doing such popular things as shutting down kiddie porn sites?
Secondly you forget a very big problem with the TCP system itself: All domains must lead back to an IP address. It doesn’t matter who registered it, all the State needs is the physical location of the server and the person who runs it. Ultimately this information has to be trusted to the ISP (or they won’t be able to provide internet access at all), and with ISPs becoming more and more dependent on the State every day…
I don’t really think you’ve thought this through: The anonymity problem is one of the current structure of the internet itself. Solving it would require its complete reinvention. Or, at least, the building of a second, anonymous structure on top of the current, non-anonymous one. I have my own ideas on how to do this but that is a topic for another time.
And finally, would doing this really be so much easier compared to dealing with the real problem at the root of everything: The state? Get rid of the state and the idea of an anonymous internet becomes the discussion topic of budding entrepreneurs and academics, not the discussion topic of political radicals trying to preserve their lives.
You can’t have anonymity in an authentication model. How do you assure spammers and the like don’t just sign each of their edits with a different key?
Actually, you could:use the Chaum digicash protocol to get a signing key that is anonymous but signed by an authority that knows your real ID (but can’t link it to your key)
You can’t really do a “secure DNS”, though: the whole point is that anyone can look up name-address mappings, so you need an “open” protocol to supply those mappings, in which case you can’t avoid spoofing (you can only check signatures if you already know who should have signed it; which you don’t, for general web sites).
Or, at least, the building of a second, anonymous structure on top of the current, non-anonymous one. I have my own ideas on how to do this but that is a topic for another time.
Too late: it’s called tor.
And if the authority is compromised? I wouldn’t be surprised if encryption itself (by a non-government entity of course) is punishable by execution within the next 10 years.
You’re still trusting your IP address to someone.
And if the authority is compromised?
Compromised how? It doesn’t hurt you if the CIA runs the authority. (-ies — unlike the Highlander, there can be more than one)
You’re still trusting your IP address to someone.
No you’re not (unless the entire network is compromised). The node that knows your IP has no idea what you’re sending or whom you’re sending it to; the node that knows that information doesn’t know your IP address. If you send cover traffic or act as an intermediate node, the node that knows your address can’t even tell whether you’re sending anything at all!
I’m worried about “following the trail” which I guess you could say is the entire network being compromised in a way.
You can’t have anonymity in an authentication model. How do you assure spammers and the like don’t just sign each of their edits with a different key? And if you’re not worried about that, then why do signings need to be made at all?
Obviously, we would need some barriers to entry. Maybe when somebody makes their first edit, it would need to be approved by a majority of the other users.
Leaving the problems of democratic management aside for the moment, how would banning someone even be possible within a model of anonymity?
It wouldn’t really be anonymous, it would be pseudonymous.
And finally, would doing this really be so much easier compared to dealing with the real problem at the root of everything: The state?
Of course it’s easier. You think you can get rid of the U.S. government easily? Can you get rid of the Chinese government, or the Russian government, or the Israeli government easily? Without any way to organize or spread your message to the masses without fear of retribution?
What have you been smoking anyway?
Ever heard of this? Anyone can use other providers for DNS. You can have your own top level domains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
There are only two kinds of Data, backed up data, and data not lost yet.
Got something hosted? Back up regularly and often, then just set up elsewhere if needed. Let them try shuting down that.
what they just did is instructive. out of the market for all wordpress blogs, they were only able to cut the centralized website that hosts other people’s content. they are unable to so much as find all the other wordpress blogs on the internet, because the source code is free.
so just ask: what part of the internet is not free in the same sense?
a government that wants to shut down the internet will cut the power to tier 1 and 2 hosts until they play along with this fake “rights” game. net neutrality, or its successors, will be the vehicle for these destructive intrusions. they will sell it to tier 3 providers, who will lobby to get themselves taken care of. that is what it will look like.
once it starts to go downhill, fancy DNS will not get you anywhere so long as you peer through this system. the solution will not require “stealing bandwidth” in some future, hobbled, internet, although i guarantee there will be suckers who will try it. the solution is peering outside of the system, in a vast, invisible-to-government, more or less ad-hoc network.
you can run whatever services you want, and they can hit all the kill switches they want. they can’t even discover that you’re there without coming to your house. wireless segments of it won’t even have to be in the 2.4ghz band. they’re going to come around triangulating for anything at all, so you might as well use any bands you feel like. possibly you can get your town or city behind it now, get a network in place, and then nullify future attempts by state/federal enforcers to touch it. then just peer it with another town, or internet2.
i hear tell quantum entanglement is quickly becoming reality. imagine the NIC you could build with that. time and space will no longer limit an 802.3 link like it used to. and just how do you triangulate that signal? (pro tip: you don’t).
How about adaptive mesh networking?
The Internet costs a huge amount to equip and operate. Someone has to pay to support it.
If the Web was made totally anonymous, spammers and pornographiles would clog the Web worse than they already have.
From Good Magazine – this is in 2007 and it has gotten nothing but worse since:
89% of porn is created in the U.S.
$2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006
$89/second is spent on porn
72% of porn viewers are men
260 new porn sites go online daily
I will not quibble about what constitutes porn. I know it when I see or read it (Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, 1964). It is not very definable.
Pornography is defined in law as
Obscenity is defined as graphic material that focuses on sex or sexual violence, and it includes lewd exhibition of the genitals, close-ups of graphic sex acts and deviant activities such as group sex, homosexual acts, bestiality and incest.
Now what is “lewd?” There is legitimate nonpornographic, nonobscene, nonlewd exhibition of the genitals. There is legitimate nonpornographic, nonobscene, nonlewd close-ups of graphic sex acts. There is even legitimate nonpornographic, nonobscene, nonlewd depiction of homosexual acts, bestiality and incest. It is hard to imagine some of the above in a legitimate context but it is possible, such as evidence used in court against pornographers. Perhaps others.
Lewd is showing, or intended to excite, lust or sexual desire, esp. in an offensive way; lascivious; obscene (here begins circular definition).
Yet for a husband or wife to excite his wife’s or her husband’s sexual desire is not considered offensive at all but commendable. For an unmarried man to be attracted to an unmarried woman, accompanied by honorable intentions, the sexual desire is integral and honorable as long as it is accompanied by those honorable intentions.
Lewd conduct is any UNLAWFUL act committed by an individual with the purpose of arousing the libido or sexual interest of themselves or the person towards which this action is directed.
“Our experience since Roth requires us not only to abandon the effort to pick out obscene materials on a case-by-case basis, but also to reconsider a fundamental postulate of Roth: that there exists a definable class of sexually oriented expression that may be suppressed by the Federal and State Governments. Assuming that such a class of expression does in fact exist, I am forced to conclude that the concept of ‘obscenity’ cannot be defined with sufficient specificity and clarity to provide fair notice to persons who create and distribute sexually oriented materials, to prevent substantial erosion of protected speech as a byproduct of the attempt to suppress unprotected speech, and to avoid very costly institutional harms.” — Sup.Ct. justice Brennan, 1973 dissent
“(a) whether the ‘AVERAGE person, applying CONTEMPORARY community standards’ would find that the work, TAKEN AS A WHOLE, appeals to the PRURIENT interest,
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a PATENTLY offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, TAKEN AS A WHOLE, lacks SERIOUS literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” — Miller v. California, 1973
So the highest lawyers cannot define obscenity, lewdness, pornography accurately enough for one who wishes to skate on the edge of legality to know whether his act or work will be ruled obscene or not five or ten years from now when his case gets to the Supreme Court at an expense of hundreds of thousands.
Yet we can still say that porn (and spam) are clogging the Web and it’s getting worse. And to a great extent they do not pay for the bandwidth they use.
Wow. In other words all the paranoid conspiracy type worries about various secret or stealth bills to allow the President the power to shut down the Internet — they’re missing the boat. IP, which already exists, can be used for this purpose. Another problem with IP: It’s the Internet Kill-Switch!
The worst part is? Some of them are probably cheering at this move.
You’re missing the point, Steve: intellectual-property is a legal killswitch. A legal killswitch doesn’t matter, unless there is a technological killswitch to back it up. Any libertine who knows how to use alternative DNS roots, proxies, deniable encryption, and long-range wifi (with signal amplifiers and high-gain antennas), or RONJA, can effectively sidestep any technological killswitch the government may see fit to impose.
Sadly, another example of the modern day “wild west” being slowly shut down. I remember talk of the internet tax, maybe in the 90′s, and I knew these types of things were coming.
Or a mere frontier that was free when it was first sparodically settled by first comers only to be formalised into rules once everyone else gets there. I believe Daniel Boone saw the same thing with the first wave of frontier folk and the second wave of city-loving folk.
Yeah, that sounds about right…..
Maybe what we need is some entrepreneur to launch satellites into space and sell uncensored, encrypted internet access to everybody on the planet. With all that money he can bribe into silence any government bureaucrats powerful enough to stand in his way.
He wouldn’t be able to accept checks or credit cards, which have people’s names on them. Instead he could sell airtime cards (on the tracfone model) which could be sold at retail outlets, or even on the black market.
The state owns space. And they treat the unauthorized launching of things into space as an act of terrorism.
Don’t charge those porncards to your credit or debit card. Nor use your affinity store discount card. Pay for the porncard with cash only!
This is why the State needs to be abolished.
Yeah, yeah. And replaced with what? Go back to the clan or tribe system? Settle all disputes with the trial by ordeal (not good – death proves innocence). Or trial by combat. Big guys who can swing big swords or halberds win. Oops. Forgot. Guns have already been invented. First guy to shoot, and hit, wins. For that matter, first guy to hit his enemy with an arrow wins. Or rock in the head.
No, this is not how the government shuts down the internet. What an amusing thing to write on a blog…on the Internet. Given that you are writing about how the government shuts down the Internet on a blog that is published on the Internet you must have been expecting…no one to read what you wrote. Very droll. Apparently, from the comments, many people have been reading.
Some years back a friend of mine from Rayservers.com developed an essay on a self-extending wireless network. It was predicated on a successful micro-payments model which, at the time, was then ten-year-old e-gold. Of course, a year later, e-gold was destroyed by government action.
Quite a lot of people are working on alternative structures. I think Ray calls his current version “Web 4.0″ I think his overview on that topic is found here:
https://freedom.rayservers.com/Web+4.0
Y’kno when I trying to find a perfect way to get hits with my affiliate marketing i found a funny thing I was trying to optimize for business cards but it was too great and too many so i broke it down to a city. my city business card searches was very low so I tried “business cards toronto” so that’s a nice number, but when you search for other american cities (I’m canadian) it doesn’t show anything.. why do they want us to stop doing business with the Americans? this limits the ability of using the internet in order to find a market, how else can you find out where people are looking for your product?.. in many ways the google search based keyword tool can be used in economics. Posted by Anonymous 1 day 47 min ago
A domain registrar anyone can edit? I can’t imagine how that would work. I hate the situation now, but wouldn’t it get even worse then?
I recommend looking into the OpenNIC project.
From their site:
The OpenNIC DNS servers resolve ICANN domain names as well, so when using their DNS servers (many of which either do not keep logs, anonymize them immediately, or delete them after 24 to 48 hours) you can still access the rest of the internet like normal, along with sites on the various domains supported by OpenNIC.
I think this is the beginning of a truly free market DNS system.
And, again, who pays to support these alternative systems that piggyback on the regular Internet?
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