Comments on: This is how the government shuts down the internet

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:15:28 +0000

And, again, who pays to support these alternative systems that piggyback on the regular Internet?

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:13:51 +0000

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.

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:08:24 +0000

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!

By: Bob

Bob — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:06:24 +0000

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.

By: hyp3rVigi1ant

hyp3rVigi1ant — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:16:01 +0000

I recommend looking into the OpenNIC project. From their site:

OpenNIC (a.k.a. "The OpenNIC Project") is an organization of hobbyists who run an alternative DNS network. OpenNIC is owned and operated by the OpenNIC community. Membership is open to all who share an interest in keeping DNS free for all users. Our goal is to provide you with quick and reliable DNS services and access to domains not administered by ICANN.'

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.

By: Synergystars Website Development

Synergystars Website Development — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:18:01 +0000

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?

By: Andie

Andie — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:08:24 +0000

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

By: Dave Albin

Dave Albin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:10:07 +0000

Yeah, that sounds about right…..

By: Seattle

Seattle — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 17:14:16 +0000

The state owns space. And they treat the unauthorized launching of things into space as an act of terrorism.

By: Gil

Gil — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 04:35:02 +0000

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.

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:09:57 +0000

How about adaptive mesh networking?

By: Jim Davidson

Jim Davidson — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:31:14 +0000

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

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 21:49:04 +0000

This is why the State needs to be abolished.

By: maybe

maybe — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:47:11 +0000

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.

By: freedom, free software, and open source fanatic

freedom, free software, and open source fanatic — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:35:11 +0000

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?

By: Dave Albin

Dave Albin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:19:18 +0000

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.

By: freedom, free software, and open source fanatic

freedom, free software, and open source fanatic — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:13:21 +0000

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.

By: Seattle

Seattle — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:02:51 +0000

The worst part is? Some of them are probably cheering at this move.

By: Stephan Kinsella

Stephan Kinsella — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:45:54 +0000

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!

By: Seattle

Seattle — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:12:52 +0000

I’m worried about “following the trail” which I guess you could say is the entire network being compromised in a way.