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Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free netMoglen on Freedom Box and making a free netPosted Feb 9, 2011 8:44 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227)In reply to: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net by jmorris42 Parent article: Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net
"A way needs to be found to level the field a bit. We probably need a nation state or other similar empowered actor involved in the design, they have the resources."
Not necessary. That's the thing about software. Or math. You don't need lots of expensive resources. You just need a sharp mind and some inexpensive commodity resources.
Remember, all software can be "executed" by a human with pencil and paper. Even full .h264 movie decoding could be done by hand on paper, if you give a human the algorithm in English, a stream of paper tape with the raw digits of the encoded movie, and a stream of paper tape to write the decoded frame color values to. It'll be god-awful slow, but it's 100% possible.
Wireless networks can be replaced with people using mechanical means of communication. Displays can be replaced with paint and canvas. Input devices can be replaced with vocal cues or hand gestures. Storage can be replaced with paper or stone. Compases and gyroscopes can be replaced with simple mechanical devices. Even complex electronic interfaces like a GPS can be replaced by an external GPS unit with a digital display read by the human "interpreter" of the code.
This is different than physics, in which the laws and math we are given come not from thought but from observation, with increasingly accurate physics formulas requiring increasing intricate and expensive equipment (like the LHC) to observe things we can't otherwise see.
It's also different than engineering, in which the thoughts cannot be executed by a human. Even if you think up the perfect catapult design, at some point you need to gather the wood and metal and stone to actually build a catapult if you want to launch rocks.
When it comes to software, resources have always been pretty much irrelevant. All you need is the right brilliant person trying to solve the right problem. Software is just math, and like math, the big breakthroughs in software almost never come from governments or megacorps. They come from universities or often even just independent minds working towards an interesting problem that piqued their interest.
When it comes to manufacturing chips and devices that encode software, you need resources. That ceases to be pure CS/math and becomes engineering. If the world simply needs new algorithms and protocols and designs that run over existing wireless hardware to get these new mesh networks, though, then the engineers don't need to get involved, nothing but commodity hardware needs to be paid for, and big resources cease to be relevant.
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Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net Posted Feb 9, 2011 19:27 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
Projects requiring large resources do not require nation states either, that is what the concept of a corporation is for, to pool together resources. It's just a lot easier to waste money on something that costs more than it returns indefinitely with a nation state (so we, naturally see more large projects for vague things such as: "for the good of mankind, for everyone, ...", than we do in the commercial world), since a nation state's projects do not have to be sustainable (for real, not via propaganda) since you can always tax more.
Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net Posted Feb 15, 2011 5:37 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (subscriber, #2203) [Link]
> nothing but commodity hardware needs to be paid for,
> and big resources cease to be relevant.
Really. Creating Linux/GNU/X/etc was basically a rewrite project for the first decade, even now most of the work is more improving the existing codebase than inventing major new things. Yes some major new things do happen these days but it isn't the majority of the effort.
Now compare to this proposed 'Internet as it was supposed to be, nuke proof, private, perfected' idea. There aren't even any good theories in the academic world to take and run with. So phase one isn't even something for code monkeys, it if for math geeks, network and game theory nerds, etc. And remember that the final product has to withstand active attack by the almost limitless resources and manpower of nation state actors.
So what is the biggest Free Software organization currently. Does it have the resources to build thousand node test networks and then fund thousands of man hours by 'the best of the best' to trying to break it? If any did is it not reasonable to assume they might would have made such a hardening effort at things like Firefox, Glibc, Apache, BIND, etc. already?
That is the big problem with this notion, it not only requires a new breakthrough in network design it will almost certainly require a level of software reliability in the face of an unprecedented level of active attack that has never been achieved to date. Children break Windows and IE, serious Black Hats break LAMP servers. Is there anything the NSA couldn't break if they were desperate? Or the Chinese intelligence agencies? If the final proposed system can't, with a high confidence backed with hard maths, claim to be resistant to such determined attackers then it isn't worth a damn.
To deploy a system as is under discussion that isn't secure will only get a lot of people killed when they foolishly rely upon it and at the critical juncture the secret police round them all up. So either the required miracle in design has to also be a design that can be 100% private, untracable and yet verifiable regardless of implementation bugs or compromised communications links or the fielded implmementation has to prove 100% reliable when the day comes.... and it will probably be put to the ultimate test at most one or two times.
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