Category: Decentralisation and Neutrality

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 2

(Part 1)

But it means so much more to be a viable alternative to the internet giants of today, particularly with regard to being a good steward of public information and interpersonal communication.

Imagine a neutral paid subscription service for the following:

  • Contacts, calendar, reminders/todos
  • Documents
  • Notes
  • Photos

Now imagine that neutral service expanding to include

  • A secure email service and client a la Protonmail
  • A private 1:1 and group messaging service a la Telegram
  • A private video-calling service – there is no good privacy oriented provider today. Telegram has claimed it will add video support later in 2020
  • Collaborative documents, such as that available with NextCloud Hub if you self-host

Let’s talk about self-hosting. Mozilla could improve upon the Nextcloud concept to bundle domain, hosting and productivity/communications right out of the box. We saw a few months ago how web hosting companies could be the new internet giants if only they could be more imaginative of their own role in the internet. Mozilla could be that web host.

The arc of awareness is bending inexorably towards a substitute to the centralised web that came to characterise the 2010s.

Tight bundling of PIM, media and messaging on mobile leaves little room for a third party. Microsoft has tried to be it, but has little to offer by way of differentiation. Mozilla on the other hand has a clear positioning – and two decades of delivering on its promises. It doesn’t need to win the majority of phone users today – it can count on a minority that cares growing into a plurality.

(Part 3 – Mozilla seems rather far from that vision today)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer

Mozilla’s Grand Internet Opportunity – Part 1

Mozilla recently announced that it’d be laying off a quarter of its workforce. This also includes a “new focus on technology” and “a new focus on economics”.

The Verge’s article has the Mozilla Corp CEO say “… Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.”, although I cannot find that in the blog post she authored.

In the original blog post, the CEO stated that Mozilla’s long-term goal was “to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”, which is neither here nor there.

I think Mozilla has a huge opportunity here, but its vision, at least as articulated publicly, is not broad enough.

The opportunity I see is the following: there is a growing section of people who have become aware, through increased press coverage, of the dominance of a few american internet companies and their own dependence on these companies [1]. They aren’t going to be Stallman-like in their use of technology any time soon – the trade off is far too unfavourable – but they are looking for reasonable alternatives and are willing to pay for them. Baker the CEO has said exactly this, that Mozilla plans to “build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech.”

Well to begin with, Mozilla should create a set of paid privacy-oriented products that anyone can setup on their phone to attain a basic level of privacy protection: the Firefox browser (exists), a VPN (available in a small set of countries), an DNS-sinkhole adblocker, a password manager and a second-factor authenticator app. They’ll need great documentation and guides about how to set this up – in this regard the Mozilla community is a great asset.

[1] See the reporter Kashmir Hill’s 2019 attempt to go a month and a half without services from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

(Part 2 – It gets even bigger)

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Making Money Online Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto

The internet’s payments layer

This provocatively titled essay makes an important point about the economics of the online media today and its direct, immediate impact on society:

… the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, New York, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Financial Times, and the London Times all have paywalls. Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Wire, the Federalist, the Washington Examiner, InfoWars: free!

A white supremacist on YouTube will tell you all about race and IQ but if you want to read a careful scholarly refutation, obtaining a legal PDF from the journal publisher would cost you $14.95, a price nobody in their right mind would pay for one article if they can’t get institutional access…

On the other hand, pseudo-scholarhip is easy to find. Right-wing think tanks like the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Hoover Institution, the Mackinac Center, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation pump out slickly-produced policy documents on every subject under the sun.

– The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free

In our series on 21st Century Media, we imagined an operation that was reader-funded: “I am confident that people across income and interest segments will pay for something truly useful”. While 21st Century Media would be paywalled, we also sketched the outline of a micropayments system through which readers would frictionlessly pay for every article they read.

However, when it comes to the issue that this essay writer raises, which is widespread access to truth, the micropayments based system gets in the way – unless it’s widely used. Signing up to the micropayments system cannot be too much friction for the visitor who just wants access to that one article important to them at that moment.

This is a challenge, but also an opportunity – a massive one – to create a frictionless, universal, cheap, privacy-first micropayments system.

It’s tough to check all these off at once:

If it needs to be universal, Apple and Google, who have a browser and mobile OS duopoly, are in the best position to create such a system, and would get the most publishers to sign up. But there’d be serious concerns about privacy, particularly with Google.

A privacy-first browser such as Brave has a better shot at addressing privacy concerns, and has attempted to create one such cryptocurrency-based system built in, but the browser itself simply hasn’t gotten enough traction (and there are concerns about privacy among those that do use it.)

For the system to be cheap, it couldn’t use credit cards on file, which Apple and Google have hundreds of millions of, because the transaction costs are too high. Cryptocurrency-based wallets such as the one Brave implements could work, but adoption is an even bigger problem, although one worth solving.

India’s UPI system is widely used within the country, is natively digital, has near-zero transaction costs, but its use reintroduces privacy as a concern.

It’s a problem in the vein of “fast, good and cheap: pick any two”. But the payoff, a payments layer for the internet, is incomprehensibly large.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality

Yet another smart device rendered useless

More news about an Internet-connected hardware product being rendered unusable as a result of a business decision: “Canadian smart glasses going ‘offline’ weeks after company bought by Google“

North said Focals 1.0, its first generation of smart glasses released last year, will be discontinued. The wearables company also said it has cancelled any plans to ship its second-generation Focals 2.0.

“Focals smart glasses and its services are being discontinued and will no longer be available after July 31, 2020. You won’t be able to connect your glasses through the app or use any features, abilities, or experiments from your glasses,” the statement read.

As of Saturday, users will no longer be able to log into the Focals app and its support services will be discontinued. The app will also be removed from Google Play and the Apple App Store.

We have seen many examples of this happening before: “Smart devices are services, not products”, “More on the inherent temporariness of internet-connected devices“.

If your device or appliance requires an Internet connection to the manufacturer to function, it’s a big risk. Be very conscious of this when you make purchases. Consider devices that work with the open source home automation framework OpenHAB, as an alternative and invest the time needed to make it work – it’s not an out of the box experience but now you alone get to decide how long your device lasts.

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity

The Library of Congress and online archival – Part 2

(Part 1)

Online archival is important to me. I am particularly interested in blogs that still have great value but are no longer maintained – some of these are by people who I had followed in the 2000s. Some of these are friends who have long since stopped writing other than on social media.

If their writings are on third-party services like Blogspot, the service itself can be shut down or they can be taken down because of inactivity. If they are on their own domain, the owner may allow the domain to expire.

In some cases, the owner may deliberately erase posts, asking even the internet Archive to delete its records. The current head of the Microsoft-owned Github, Nat Friedman, used to write a fun, eclectic, useful, and – to me – inspirational blog that blended his personal and professional lives. Some years ago it was wiped clean of the content I used to follow. More recently it was wiped again. Now it’s just a Medium-hosted blog with a half-dozen posts. I respect Nat’s decision to not have his old life displayed online. I just wish I had my own archive of it, one that I of course intend to keep private.

For now I have a short list of sites that I have downloaded using wget, with flags to download images and other linked content, and change URLs to local ones so I can browse the site offline. i’m interested in whether the US Library of Congress’ online archival format, web ARChive, and its toolset, is an improvement.

Endnote: Archiving entire blogs or websites is different from individual articles, of course. We’ve seen my iOS shortcut that both saves a Markdown-formatted cruft-less version of online articles locally as well as optionally saves to one of Instapaper, Pocket or Evernote.

(ends)

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Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Uncategorized

The Library of Congress and online archival – Part 1

This past weekend I read about the US Library of Congress’ online archival system, partly out of simple fascination with the scale at which they operate, and partly to learn from it, to create my own offline archive of web pages and websites that are important to me.

The Library of Congress’ site describes the process:

The Library’s goal is to create an archival copy—essentially a snapshot—of how the site appeared at a particular point in time. The Library attempts to archive as much of the site as possible, including html pages, images, flash, PDFs, and audio and video files to provide context for future researchers. The Library (and its agents) use special software to download copies of web content and preserve it in a standard format. The crawling tools start with a “seed URL” – for instance, a homepage – and the crawler follows the links it finds, preserving content as it goes. Library staff also add scoping instructions for the crawler to follow links to that organization’s host on related domains, such as third party sites and social media platforms, based on permissions policies.

The Library of Congress uses open source and custom-developed software to manage different stages of the overall workflow. The Library has developed and implemented an in-house workflow tool called Digiboard, which enables staff to select websites for archiving, manage and track required permissions and notices, perform quality review processes, among other tasks. To perform the web harvesting activity which downloads the content, we primarily use the Heritrix archival web crawler External. For replay of archived content, the Library has deployed a version of OpenWayback External to allow researchers to view the archives. Additionally, the program uses Library-wide digital library services to transfer, manage, and store digital content. Institutions and others interested in learning more about Digiboard and other tools the Library user can contact the Web Archiving team for more information. The Library is continually evaluating available open-source tools that might be helpful for preserving web content.

It’s extremely encouraging that it explicitly specifies open-source tools. The most interesting part to me is the data format it uses:

Web archives are created and stored in the Web ARChive (WARC) and (for some older collections) the Internet Archive ARC container file formats.

I am now digging into the tools available to save, search and view articles in this format.

(Part 2 – A little more on why this is important to me)

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Privacy and Anonymity

Warfare has changed and we don’t know it yet

Written nearly two years ago, the blogger and writer Venkatesh Rao makes the case that the rules of engagement for warfare have changed from attacks on physical infrastructure to manipulation of information. That the nature of the attackers has changed, their objectives have changed – from destruction of assets to hijacking of opinion and emotions, and that governments in particular and society in general has not yet fully understood this:

Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for;

[But] In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.

We know this is coming, and yet we’re doing very little to get ahead of it. No one is responsible for getting ahead of it.

He draws the analogy to the infamously ineffective Maginot Line built by the French in the 1920s, for future WW1-style attacks that left the Ardennes forest unprotected because it was thought to be impenetrable.

Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship… The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem

Powerfully,

What made democracies strong in the past — a strong commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas — makes them profoundly vulnerable in the era of democratized propaganda and rampant misinformation.