Re: [dev] Internet privacy/decentralisation projects

From: hiro <23hiro_AT_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2017 10:21:46 +0100

now that everybody and their kitchen sink has internet it's getting a
bit late for privacy. teaching people not to use android phones is a
nearly pointless activity.
computer security and privacy is now a luxury of the technical elite
and illiterate or offline people.

software has given all the means to individuals, but culture can
prevent you from using software in the right way. the more time people
spend their free-time online the more they synchronize to the global
way of the internet kiddy culture.

decentralization technically works quite nicely as can be seen with
bittorrent and bitcoin. but is incomplete in some sense, because
there's always a central protocol that can be attacked. the faith
people had in tor made them run into the nets of spying governments.
even though the tor network is in a way decentralized the number of
exit nodes is limited, thus easy to observe by one centralized
intelligence entity. also when people use decentralized networks like
tor to access multiple personalized and centralized services like
facebook, google, twitter ebay, amazon, banks, etc. obvious breaches
occur.

in my opinion going only one step is worse than doing nothing here:
the false security people get using end-to-end encrypted messengers on
their automatically updating google phones makes me cringe everytime i
hear about it.
as i said, all the tools are there already, it's up to the masses to
adopt them (they're not). so the work that is left is not technical
engagement, you have to change how people think and how they interact
online, unless you're able to make them stop using other centralized
services you have failed. try with a small group of people first that
actually has a need for privacy.

On 1/23/17, Caleb Malchik <cmalchik_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I was wondering what the suckless community thinks about various
> projects aimed at Internet decentralisation and privacy - some of
> which are listed here [0]. Are there any projects in this area that
> are particularly promising from a suckless perspective?
>
> My personal reason for asking is that I have the opportunity this
> spring to get paid to contribute to an open source project of my
> choosing, which has a "democracy-enhancing" (or preserving) effect. Of
> course all Suckless projects are democracy-enhancing in a way, but for
> this I'm looking at projects with more of a focus on societal impact
> and the potential for mass adoption. Projects I've looked at include
> IPFS [1], cjdns [2], and Tox [3].
>
> I am a relatively inexperienced programmer, so I am eager to hear what
> more experienced folks have to say on this matter :)
>
> Cheers,
> Caleb
>
> [0] https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet
> [1] https://ipfs.io/
> [2] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns
> [3] https://tox.chat/
>
>
Received on Mon Jan 23 2017 - 10:21:46 CET

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