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Decentralised Internet

  1. #1
    Okay so net neutrality is fucked in the US, and as everyone knows, the US is the only country in the world. So now that this issue affects us, let's discuss possible solutions for a decentralised interweb.

    What are the most realistic looking solutions available? What are the challenges that those proposed solutions face? What could some possibilities be for addressing those?
  2. #2
    The FCC.
  3. #3
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    Originally posted by Captain Falcon Okay so net neutrality is fucked in the US, and as everyone knows, the US is the only country in the world. So now that this issue affects us, let's discuss possible solutions for a decentralised interweb.

    What are the most realistic looking solutions available? What are the challenges that those proposed solutions face? What could some possibilities be for addressing those?

    decentralized internet will be just like foreign currencies.

    youll be able to get usd in pakisthan ... but only in very limited quantities. and vicey versay.
  4. #4
    Lanny Bird of Courage
    There isn't much of a solution to be had, besides political, but then that's not much of a solution either since democracy is dead in this country.

    Systems that piggyback on the telecoms infrastructure in the vein of TOR work up to a point but they're not hard to crack down on if any one becomes sufficiently popular. Crypto is next on the chopping block of liberties we're going to lose anyway.

    Mesh networks are cool and I totally support them but you don't need to thing very big to see they break down at scale. Ignoring the fact that vast swaths of the american territory don't have the population density to support a route (like literally there is no path of residences within consumer WiFi range of eachother that connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, a purely citizen maintained mesh network can not connect the two largest cities in the most populated state in the US) the prospect of running anything resembling modern internet traffic over a network that requires on the order of 20 hops between consumer hardware to cover a mile is insane. It just doesn't work. I mean the idea of mad max internet does have a certain allure, where the cost of distance is high enough that it motivates locality in internet communities and centralized hivemindery ala reddit and facebook are non-existent but it's not a replacement for what the internet is today and it's going to satisfy the masses.
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  5. #5
    Lanny pretty much nailed it. The only thing you can realistically do is wait until 2020 and then go out and vote for a presidential candidate who isn't retarded.
  6. #6
    mso8 Houston
    Originally posted by inb4l0pht vote for a presidential candidate who isn't retarded.

    lolwut
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  7. #7
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    Originally posted by inb4l0pht Lanny pretty much nailed it. The only thing you can realistically do is wait until 2020 and then go out and vote for a presidential candidate who isn't retarded.

    or you can pray that the internet is going to be unfair to the current precedence that he does something about it.
  8. #8
    Originally posted by Lanny There isn't much of a solution to be had, besides political, but then that's not much of a solution either since democracy is dead in this country.

    Systems that piggyback on the telecoms infrastructure in the vein of TOR work up to a point but they're not hard to crack down on if any one becomes sufficiently popular. Crypto is next on the chopping block of liberties we're going to lose anyway.

    Mesh networks are cool and I totally support them but you don't need to thing very big to see they break down at scale. Ignoring the fact that vast swaths of the american territory don't have the population density to support a route (like literally there is no path of residences within consumer WiFi range of eachother that connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, a purely citizen maintained mesh network can not connect the two largest cities in the most populated state in the US) the prospect of running anything resembling modern internet traffic over a network that requires on the order of 20 hops between consumer hardware to cover a mile is insane. It just doesn't work. I mean the idea of mad max internet does have a certain allure, where the cost of distance is high enough that it motivates locality in internet communities and centralized hivemindery ala reddit and facebook are non-existent but it's not a replacement for what the internet is today and it's going to satisfy the masses.

    What do you think about making a mesh network that is entirely text based and can partially piggyback off the internet as it sits today?

    I'm thinking something like:

    - Local clusters of routers have a normal mesh network.
    - If you can't find the address you're looking for, it can access "the internet" to find the node necessary to get the packet to the tmright place.
    - If you can't access the internet, the packet is jellyrolled into every node on the network you can access like a "carrier" (let's say each router or cell phone or whatever has an allotment of 100mb to carry delayed packets) to be propagated to other nodes it comes into contact with, until it finds a local cluster that can reach the intended recipient.

    Some sort of hybrid solution like that.

    It doesn't have to be modern and fancy, but I figure SOME kind of comms that are put of government control should be possible. Could you incorporate something like shortwave radio to bridge large gaps?
  9. #9
    Lanny Bird of Courage
    Originally posted by Captain Falcon What do you think about making a mesh network that is entirely text based and can partially piggyback off the internet as it sits today?

    I'm thinking something like:

    - Local clusters of routers have a normal mesh network.
    - If you can't find the address you're looking for, it can access "the internet" to find the node necessary to get the packet to the tmright place.
    - If you can't access the internet, the packet is jellyrolled into every node on the network you can access like a "carrier" (let's say each router or cell phone or whatever has an allotment of 100mb to carry delayed packets) to be propagated to other nodes it comes into contact with, until it finds a local cluster that can reach the intended recipient.

    Some sort of hybrid solution like that.

    It doesn't have to be modern and fancy, but I figure SOME kind of comms that are put of government control should be possible. Could you incorporate something like shortwave radio to bridge large gaps?

    Restricting content to being simple text might reduce load issues (and there would be load issues, especially on any node resembling a "gateway" between remote regions) but it doesn't help with the issue of graph sparseness.

    Holding unroutable packets in hopes of the dynamism of the graph generating a connection at some future point is an interesting idea. There's a lot of tough engineering problems that need to be solved to make it work but it's conceivable, the main issue is that it violates so many of the assumptions application logic makes that the kind of things you could do in that environment would look very different than what the internet is today. Like email would still be possible, but that's mostly because SMTP already has this kind of asyncronicity and dynamic network assumption built in. SMTP is actually a really interesting protocol.

    But modern webpages couldn't possibly operate like that, like there's no worthwhile user experience that can be built when you have 6 of the 20 resources you need to paint a page and the other 14 might come back in the next few seconds or that data could be arriving a day from now or might never arrive.

    Shortwave or more expensive radio equipment in general is a step towards solving graph sparseness but there's kind of this fundamental tradeoff between range and bandwidth, coupled with the price making long-range nodes uncommon, what would tend to happen is you go out and buy some expensive radio equipment, set it up, and get immediately DDoS'd because you're a low-bandwidth sole connection to some graph region.
  10. #10
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    or quantumly entangled modems
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  11. #11
    Obbe Alan What? [annoy my right-angled speediness]
    Originally posted by benny vader or quantumly entangled modems

    This. Make this.
  12. #12
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    Originally posted by Open Your Mind This. Make this.

    if you can make good website about this im pretty sure it will attract a few investors easily, considering the rampant ICOs out there.

    throw is some pseudo crypto quanto jargons to make it appear credible.
  13. #13
    It will be like a blockchain but with triangles.
  14. #14
    aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
    https://niggasin.space/thread/4877

    spooky
  15. #15
    SBTlauien African Astronaut
    Radio-mesh seems reasonable.
  16. #16
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    Originally posted by aldra https://niggasin.space/thread/4877

    spooky

    lol.

    you really think TPP would fly.
  17. #17
    aldra JIDF Controlled Opposition
    Originally posted by benny vader lol.

    you really think TPP would fly.

    it very nearly did, all us useful-idiot vassals signed onto it without question, the only reason it didn't get ratified was Trump unceremoniously throwing it out of the helicopter


    in terms of actual enforcement, US bootlickers run the government here so I have no doubt it'd be fairly-well enforced, no idea about the other signatories though. I imagine most of the Asian countries had one arm twisted by the US and the other by China
  18. #18
    benny vader YELLOW GHOST
    Originally posted by aldra it very nearly did, all us useful-idiot vassals signed onto it without question, the only reason it didn't get ratified was Trump unceremoniously throwing it out of the helicopter


    in terms of actual enforcement, US bootlickers run the government here so I have no doubt it'd be fairly-well enforced, no idea about the other signatories though. I imagine most of the Asian countries had one arm twisted by the US and the other by China

    the day trump thrashed TPP was a glorious day.
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  19. #19
    How exactly is the end of net neutrality, which really was nothing but a monetary subsidy to Google, Netflix and PornHub, going to affect the free dissemination of ideas?

    The real risk is the platformisation of the internet, with sleazy outfits like Twitter, Google, etc. deciding what opinions are right (no debate needed), and shoahing people with the wrong opinions from their services.

    Even the likes of AirBnB have shaohed people who they suspected were renting rooms to attend alt-right events.

    The internet isn't going anywhere though, so stop worrying about it suddenly disappearing because you want to project your daddy issues onto Trump or because some gibbering neurotic told you the fascists were taking over. It's Bush derangement syndrome all over again, and it's pathetic.

    If you wanted to build a mesh network it would be remarkably easy, even on a large scale, you just use the sort of point to point tech Wireless ISPs have been rolling out for the last 15 years - stuff like Ubiquiti fixed wireless dishes and the like (don't like the company, but their tech is the best) are super reliable and cheap (around €50) and work over dozens of miles in just about all weather. We have lots of point to point connections out here in the Irish countryside (I'm on one now), and they work great, and because they operate in 2.4 and 5ghz bands are completely unlicensed.

    We also have big-ass hard drives. Even if the Internet went away I could spend multiple lifetimes just consuming stored information.
  20. #20
    bling bling Dark Matter
    1oo year plans
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