Where's the internet headed?

Do we the people have a choice as to allow anything, when it comes to big money or the Government?
People should remember if they don’t want everyone to see what they put on line ,then they should keep it off line.

As long as we are using “their” infrastructure we will have to play by “their” rules.

I like the idea of private radio links and repeaters that users own and control. We can use any form of encryption we desire. Sure, someone can try to listen in but of the 20 hours of encoded transmissions per day they do not know which parts of which frequencies are the real messages and which are noise.

Locally controlled web would be harder to infect and knock out.

I worked for many years in Aerospace and Defense; where the assumption was, even forty years ago, anything and everything was being recorded and stored.

Watching television and using the Internet are activities a person chooses to do. If you don’t like the way the gummint is running them then crack a book or go outside.

plus what the above contributors said about us being tracked in our everyday lives anyway

Why is it only about the government? What about the in order to register somewhere Huffington Post for example:

_*Connect your verified Facebook account
Please connect with your verified Facebook account.
You’ll be able to choose your commenting username in the next screen.
Frequently Asked Questions
By connecting your account, you agree you have read and consent to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Connect with Facebook
How to verify your Facebook account*_

As far as I know the government is not running the television or the internet, @Blondesjon. The question is about electronic data collection and storage via the internet, and people’s comfort level with that.

Exactly, @flo. My reference to government is because they have ways of not only collecting a lot of that information, but use our money to store that information, indefinitely.

All digital data is currently transferred by, and accessible through, the internet. It’s not a matter of switching off your computer. In order to be totally safe you’d have to give up banking, phone use, credit and store card use, etc, etc.

What d’you want for nothing, a global, anonymized, link-encrypted wireless mesh ipv6 network? Yeah, me too.

Let’s build some of those and then hook em together, what say?
Using off-the shelf wifi hardware and cheap old computers (or fancy store-bought bespoke devices, your choice) it’s cheap to put together a local meshnet (where by “cheap” I mean “much cheaper than wiring up your neighborhood.”) It’s technically non-trivial, but pieces of it can be easily achieved.

Anonymization: Tor works over pretty much anything. It adds a bit of latency, which meshnets can ill afford, but there are ways to mitigate that.

Link encryption: CJDNS offers this and a lot more. IMO each hop of a route should be encrypted, in addition to end-to-end encryption. Cycles are cheap these days.

Wireless mesh: Wifi hardware is typically used in one of two modes: Infrastructure mode (like your wireless access point) and Managed mode (like your laptop or smartphone). Another one, Ad-Hoc mode, allows wireless interfaces to connect to each other on a “peer-to-peer” basis. Not all wifi hardware supports this mode, but most does. A “mesh” network is one in which every node in the network (that is, every device which is connected to it) participates in routing messages within the network and to other networks. Currently my personal favorite among the various mesh protocols is BATMAN-adv – largely because lots of devices already support it (it’s built-in to Linux (sort of.))

IPv6: At this point I think we can safely conclude that most ISP, at least in the US, won’t migrate to IPv6 until they are dragged there kicking and screaming. This means that IP addresses will continue to get rarer and more expensive, as the IPv4 address space has mostly run out.
What this means is that it will be more difficult for small operators to get a presence on the Web, and that home users of the Internet will continue to be second-class citizens.
What better way to force a migration to IPv6 than to build out the network ourselves? It’s cheaper to obtain a block of publicly routable IPv6 addresses larger than the entire internet than it is to get one routable IPv4 address. It’s possible that someone out there has already allocated a routable IPv6 prefix for public use. If not, I’ll probably do it- some day when I have a spare minute and an extra dollar.

Global: with these technologies, neighbors can implement a local and reasonably secure network on the cheap. These neighborhood networks (neighbornets?) won’t scale to very large size before latency and routing overhead become a problem. Therefore it makes sense to deploy such networks on a local basis, and provide gateways between them. Such networks are also not a replacement for the global Internet. What’s needed is to link the disparate networks into larger (say, municipal) internets with local gateways and local fiber; and to link these internets into larger (say, county-wide) internets, and so on until global reach is achieved. At this point, the current Internet would be just another internet.

I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time, but haven’t done much with it due to lack of funds, time, and patience. Right now other projects are prioritized ahead of it. If anyone reading this is interested in learning more about it, please feel free to PM me.

Due to privatized infrastructure, failure to adopt IPv6, and a few other reasons, I see the internet leaving the US behind as an overpriced backwoods heap of obsolescence.

Actually, that’s already happening. Has been for years.

Freedom

What is the government or anybody else going to do with the information they have about me? Suppose that they find out that I visit Fluther. So what?

Privacy on the internet is a pipe dream.

We can only hope to keep it open and free as long as possible.

You have been thinking about it a long time, @rexacoracofalipitorius. And I actually understood most of it.

How can the internet leave the US behind, @jerv I’m reading up on IPv6, now.

Supposed the neighbor boy asks to use your computer and then searches for kiddy porn on pipe bomb plans, @LostInParadise? You would, at the least, have that forever recorded on your search list.

I agree, @SecondHandStoke. It scares me how much people are willing to give up and away.

@ibstubro “Supposed the neighbor boy asks to use your computer and then searches for…“_
But not allowing people we don’t know well enough to use our things is our department, not the government’s right? If I let someone borrow my car and the photo radar sends me a ticket for an infraction my friend had committed it is not the city’s problem that it is not me driving my car.

I don’t think it’s the government’s business to be collecting and storing this information, period, @flo. Law enforcement should looking into someone making multiple hits on something illegal (kiddie porn, bomb making), but I don’t think anyone has any business storing our personal digital footprint.

@ibstubro You made that point in your OP.
Is there anything that businesses are doing asking for that irks you?

How about for example, Register/ Log-in to our site using your Gmail, or Facebook, or…?
http://www.fluther.com/172274/do-the-sites-that-ask-you-to-sign-up-using-your/

[ ref Big Data: I can see the enormous amount of data being useful for things only governments could do well, like early spotting of epidemics, traffic management, region-wide resource planning.

But all of the useful things I can think of to do with Big Data on the whole population, that aren’t already done some other way, can be done with anonymized data, ...while ALL of the data we’re hearing about the government collecting has its identity intact, for ‘intelligence’ purposes. ]

But The Internet… by the time we have a couple billion more people getting on the internet on free tablets through free wireless from unmanned aerial vehicles sponsored by google and amazon and the church of latter day electrons, then the whole thing will have become a huge byzantine souk. ... like some scene from Star Wars or Firefly on a planet on the edge of nowhere, or a scene from Idiocracy, or most likely a scene from Burning Chrome.
The global government will be run by representatives from alibaba and baidu and citibank and youtube in one house of representin’ and by RioTinto and SpaceX and TataMotors in the other house of respresentin’. and Oprah and Simon Cowell.

@ibstubro Other nations have more coverage than us; broadband is still unavailable in many parts of the US. And what we have is slower (by a wide margin) than what First World nations have.

Oh, and @flo, if you have wifi, they don’t need to ask. If your network isn’t properly secured, and many aren’t, then the fact that someone cracked your WEP key and surfed nastiness is your problem. Or maybe they don’t even need to do that; MAC addresses and IPs can be spoofed too, so it could look like you did it even if they never accessed your home network.

I refuse to participate, @flo. I had a Facebook account for about 4 days. The only email I use is Yahoo, and I do not use that account for anything but sending and receiving occasional email.

I hear you about broadband, @jerv. Literally, if it rains (as it has been the past few days), I have no satellite internet. An the alternatives are worse.

@ibstubro That seems to be generational, really. I rarely see that attitude in anybody in the 21st cetury except for:
1) Uber-hipsters who think Facebook and e-mail are too mainstream
2) Antisocial people who intentionally try to be unreachable
3) Paranoid people who worry about being tracked by [entity of choice]
4) People still stuck in the ‘90s who just haven;t adapted to how society has changed in the last 20 years as computing technology became more ubiquitous.

Regarding #4, I think that that is also tied into where society is headed. Technology affects society in ways that those who are stubborn or traditional-minded just refuse to grasp. Look at what happened when flight became a commodity, or when the car replaced the horse-and-carriage. Remember when getting news from your relatives across the country took over a month as the mail was passed from horse to horse? How awesome was it when the telegraph came out? That boost in communication speed sent a lot of ripples out that altered how were thought and operated.

I am inclined to agree with @jerv in response to @ibsturbo. The decision to not participate likely is generational in nature, however, I suspect the decision is rooted more deeply in people’s minds. Whether the government or big business is actively collecting data on us is impossible to know with any certainty. So the assumption has to be made that they are. Hence, the decision to participate (in the web, e-mail, etc) really arises out of each person’s ability to handle uncertainty and risk.

I also see a question within the question that started this thread: if corporations are able to erase net neutrality, what happens then? Would the internet as we know it survive in a world where a content provider’s download speed depends solely on how much they are willing to pay for faster download speeds?

@sahID I have to find the link for the taxpayer-owned internet that’s 10 times faster than what the big corps offer.

@jerv Do you mean The Gig in Chattanooga, Tennessee?