Tag: internet

Mesh networks

Over the last 10 years, communities seeking more resilient and responsive infrastructures that are more closely aligned with their commitment to common resources and mutual aid have chosen to build their own networks. Greta Byrum tells the story of their efforts — from Brooklyn to Detroit, Tennessee, and the Hudson Valley — and the lessons learned on the way to a People’s Internet. The process has not been seamless: Their builders must navigate bureaucracy and neighborly tensions, and the connectivity these networks ultimately provide isn’t of the lightning-speed frictionless sort promised by the major commercial providers. Yet local networks — owned, operated, and governed by those who use them — don’t simply link devices together into a mesh; they also link people together into a community of stewardship and self-governance.

Oldest webcam goes offline

In 1994, Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong fired up the San Francisco FogCam. For 25 years, it kept a constant vigil on the San Francisco State University campus, making the FogCam the longest operating webcam in history. At the end of the month, Schwartz and Wong will turn off the FogCam.

Easy VPN

Wouldn’t it be nice though? If you could have servers, like you did in the 1990s, with the same simple architectures as you used in the 1990s, and the same sloppy security policies developer freedom as you had in the 1990s, but somehow reach them from anywhere? Like… a network, but not the Internet. One that isn’t reachable from the Internet, or even addressable on the Internet. One that uses the Internet as a substrate, but not as a banana. That’s what we’re working on.

Instafish

usually cats make all the youtube money, but it can be fish too.

Internet Dark Forest Theory

netizens are retreating from the public square of the internet, resulting in many private and isolated worlds that don’t communicate with each other

50% of the Internet Is Fake

For a period of time in 2013, 50% of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

Data Manifesto

a recasting of “information wants to be free”

Data cannot be owned. By anybody.

The natural habitat of data is in the commons. It is born in the commons, and will return to the commons, even if it is granted temporary monopolies. The longer it spends in the commons, the better.

Data is a shared resource, that only exists in relationship to its sources and substrates.

Any party that touches or generates a bit of data has rights and responsibilities about that data.

Rights always have corresponding responsibilities.

Control of data is both a right and responsibility that is always shared.

Privacy is a misunderstanding that does not apply to data.

Data is made more valuable by being connected to other data. Solitary data is worthless.

Data is made more valuable by moving. Storage is weak because it halts, “Movage” is better.

Both directions of movage are important — where it came from, where it goes.

The meta data about where data goes is as important as where it came from.

Ensuring bi-directionality, the symmetry of movage, is important to the robustness of the data net.

Data can generate infinite derivative data (meta data) but they all follow the same rules.

When new data is generated from data (meta data) the rights and responsibilities of the first generation proceed to the second.

At the same time, meta data has claims of rights and responsibilities upon the root data.

Data can be expensive or free, determined by the market. It has no inherent value.

Data is easy to replicate in time (free copies) and difficult to replicate over time (digital decay). The only way to carry data into the future is if it is exercised (moved) by those who care about it.

Like all other shared resources, data can suffer from the tragedy of the commons, and this commons must be protected by governments.

As the number of entities, including meta data, touching a bit of data expands over time, with claims of rights and responsibilities, some values will dilute and some will amplify.

To manage the web of relationships, rights and responsibilities of data will require technological and social tools that don’t exist yet.

Data Incumbency

Open-data requirements could make it clearer who is providing a valuable service and who is primarily exploiting information asymmetries between creators and services. They could help identify the genuine rip-offs that thrive on opacity, such as the chronic underpayment of artists or the role of concert organizers in ticket black markets. They could help answer the perennial question of whether streaming payments and other licensing schemes are fair to artists, based not on a notional “value gap” but on who else is getting a cut.

Fortnite Concert

People have gathered in virtual worlds for decades. People have attended virtual concerts for years. Yet the Fortnite event represented something different by many orders of magnitude. By one (unsubstantiated) estimate, 10M concurrent users attended the show in the game’s “Showtime” mode. In other words, this was something much more than a concert. It was a peek, albeit a short one, at what an AR- and VR-suffused future looks like: connected congregations of embodied avatars, in mass-scale events that still manage to feel personal.

Censorship factories

Workers like Mr. Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800m internet users in China see every day. Beyondsoft employs 4000 workers like Mr. Li at its content reviewing factories. That is up from 200 in 2016. They review and censor content day and night.