Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
February 8, 2011

Eben Moglen is usually an inspiring speaker, and his keynote at FOSDEM 2011 did not disappoint. Free software remains, as always, at the core of his talks, but he has adopted a wider political vision and thinks that the community should do the same. Our freedom, he said, depends on reengineering the network to replace vulnerable, centralized services with alternatives which resist government control.

The publication of Larry Lessig's Code, Eben said, drew our attention to the fact that, in the world we live in, code increasingly functions as law. Code does the work of the state, but it can also serve revolution against the state. We are seeing an enormous demonstration of the power of code now, he said. At the same time, there is a lot of attention being paid to the publication of Evgeny Morozov's The Net Delusion, which makes the claim that the net is being co-opted to control freedom worldwide. The book is meant to be a warning to technology optimists. Eben is, he said, one of those optimists. The lesson he draws from current events is that the right net brings freedom, but the wrong net brings tyranny.

We have spent a lot of time making free software. In the process, we have joined forces with other elements of the free culture world. Those forces include people like Jimmy Wales, but also people like Julian Assange. Wikipedia and Wikileaks, he said, are two sides of the same coin. At FOSDEM, he said, one could see "the third side" of the coin. We are all people who have organized to change the world without creating new hierarchies in the process. At the end of 2010, Wikileaks was seen mainly as a criminal operation. Events in Tunisia changed that perception, though. Wikileaks turns out to be an attempt to help people learn about their world. Wikileaks, he said, is not destruction - it's freedom.

But now there are a lot of Egyptians out there whose freedom depends on the ability to communicate through commercial operations which will respond to pressure from the government. We are now seeing in real time the vulnerabilities which come from the bad engineering in the current system.

Social networking, he said, changes the balance of power away from the state and toward people. Events in countries like Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt demonstrate its importance. But current forms of social communication are "intensely dangerous" to use. They are too centralized and vulnerable to state control. Their design is motivated by profit, not by freedom. As a result, political movements are resting on a fragile foundation: the courage of Mr. Zuckerberg or Google to resist the state - the same state which can easily shut them down.

Likewise, real time information for people trying to build freedom currently depends on a single California-based microblogging service which must turn a profit. This operation is capable of deciding, on its own, to donate its entire history to the US Library of Congress. Who knows what types of "donations" it may have made elsewhere?

We need to fix this situation, he said, and quickly. We are "behind the curve" of freedom movements which depend heavily on code. The longer we wait, the more we become part of the system. That will bring tragedy soon. Egypt is inspiring, but things there could have been far worse. The state was late to control the net and unready to be as tough as it could have been. It is, Eben said, not hard to decapitate a revolution when everybody is in Mr. Zuckerberg's database.

It is time to think about the consequences of what we have built - and what we have not built yet. We have talked for years about replacing centralized services with federated services; overcentralization is a critical vulnerability which can lead to arrests, torture, and killings. People are depending on technology which is built to sell them out. If we care about freedom, we have to address this problem; we are running out of time, and people are in harm's way. Eben does not want people who are taking risks for freedom to be carrying an iPhone.

One thing that Egypt has showed us, like Iran did before, is that closed networks are harmful and network "kill switches" will harm people who are seeking freedom. What can we do when the government has clamped down on network infrastructure? We must return to the idea of mesh networks, built with existing equipment, which can resist governmental control. And we must go back to secure, end-to-end communications over those networks. Can we do it, he asked? Certainly, but will we? If we don't, the promise of the free software movement will begin to be broken. Force will intervene and we will see more demonstrations that, despite the net, the state still wins.

North America, Eben said, is becoming the heart of a global data mining industry. When US President Dwight Eisenhower left office, he famously warned about the power of the growing military-industrial complex. Despite that warning, the US has, since then, spent more on defense than the rest of the world combined. Since the events of September 11, 2001, a new surveillance-industrial complex has grown. Eben strongly recommended reading the Top Secret America articles published by the Washington Post. It is eye-opening to see just how many Google-like operations there are, all under the control of the government.

Europe's data protection laws have worked, in that they have caused all of that data to move to North America where its use is uncontrolled. Data mining, like any industry, tends to move to the areas where there is the least control. There is no way that the US government is going to change that situation; it depends on it too heavily. As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama was against giving immunity to the telecom industry for its role in spying on Americans. That position did not even last through the general election. Obama's actual policies are not notably different from those of his predecessor - except in the areas where they are more aggressive.

Private industry will not change things either; the profit motive will not produce privacy or defense for people in the street. Companies trying to earn a profit cannot do so without the good will of the government. So we must build under the assumption that the net is untrustworthy, and that centralized services can kill people. We cannot, he said, fool around with this; we must replace things which create these vulnerabilities.

We know how to engineer our way out of this situation. We need to create plug servers which are cheap and require little power, and we must fill them with "sweet free software." We need working mesh networking, self-constructing phone systems built with tools like OpenBTS and Asterisk, federated social services, and anonymous publication platforms. We need to keep our data within our houses where it is shielded by whatever protections against physical searches remain. We need to send encrypted email all the time. These systems can also provide perimeter defense for more vulnerable systems and proxy servers for circumvention of national firewalls. We can do all of it, Eben said; it is easily done on top of the stuff we already have.

Eben concluded with an announcement of the creation of the Freedom Box Foundation, which is dedicated to making all of this stuff available and "cheaper than phone chargers." A generation ago, he said, we set out to create freedom, and we are still doing it. But we have to pick up the pace, and we have to aim our engineering more directly at politics. We have friends in the street; if we don't help them, they will get hurt. The good news is that we already have almost everything we need and we are more than capable of doing the rest.

[Editor's note: as of this writing, the Freedom Box Foundation does not appear to have a web site - stay tuned.]

[Update: Added link to The FreedomBox Foundation]

Index entries for this article
Conference	FOSDEM/2011

to post comments

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:02 UTC (Tue) by maniax (subscriber, #4509) [Link] (21 responses)

There was one question I was unable to ask there (as it was somewhat a political lecture, and the question is a technical one) - is there any protocol or any study that shows it's possible to have such a mesh network with more than a 1000 nodes? It's all fine and dandy in books (like "Little brother" by Cory Doctorow), but in the real world is this actually possible and workable?

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:08 UTC (Tue) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

Or a way to peer different mesh networks. I've been skimming existing methods for a way to start local mesh networks and have those chat, but I haven't seen anything.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:34 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link] (5 responses)

"is there any protocol or any study that shows it's possible to have such a mesh network with more than a 1000 nodes?"

Perhaps you'd consider UUCP or BGP routing as a positive example.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 20:59 UTC (Tue) by maniax (subscriber, #4509) [Link] (3 responses)

UUCP is a hierarchical network (people configure a few paths to neighbors and they take care of the rest of the delivery), and BGP also requires pretty specific configuration and setup. Here we're talking about a single broadcast domain that automagically configures its paths and takes routing decisions.

There are such protocols (like BATMAN) that can create such mesh networks, but they still fall short of that many nodes. Not to mention the whole hell of assigning IP addresses (it would work with v6 and SLAAC, but ipv4/rendezvous and the similar things will be a problem), level of trust for neighbors, etc., etc. In the end what we would need is BGP's policy routing with zero need for configuration and convergence times that are less than a minute, which might be just too hard to do.

(and there's a reason I say this has to be automatic, just think of a bunch of average users doing policy routing and the resulting mess)

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:26 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (2 responses)

UUCP is a hierarchical network (people configure a few paths to neighbors and they take care of the rest of the delivery)

It was worse than that, the sender had to specify the full path. In the mid-80s you had to know the topology of the UUCP network to send mail. This was later automated, so you could send mail to enduser@utzoo.uucp instead of oliveb!ihnp4!decvax!utzoo!enduser, but this required your local machine to have a copy of the connection map so it could compute the path. Many people chose very bad paths, because they replied to Usenet postings and sent their mail back along the circuitous delivery route (requiring, say, 10 hops instead of 4).

As it got easier to get on the real Internet, sites with only UUCP connectivity could get MX records for mail delivery from the Internet with normal domainized email addresses instead of the fake UUCP domain, and they only needed a path to a "smart host" to get their mail sent.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:29 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (subscriber, #40059) [Link]

I was referring to the automated uumaps-based routing. While 25 years ago, not many uucp hosts could undertake to compute the full routing table, machines now are somewhat faster.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:32 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

But maybe you're thinking of Usenet and not UUCP, which used a flooding algorithm and recorded paths. When two machines connected, each would offer the other a set of messages, by message ID, excluding any that had the other machine's name in the delivery path. The delivery path could be used to trace not only the origin of the message but also who's connected to whom.

Usenet had a "cancel" control message, allowing any user to delete a message. It was completely insecure, but it was the only thing that kept Usenet alive once the spammers discovered it. If cancels were made cryptographically secure, there would need to be some mechanism to control spam or vandalism.

FIDONet is even better example

Posted Feb 9, 2011 7:49 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

FIDONet is better example, it's a network with very little hierarchy and possibility of direct communication between ALL nodes if necessary.

As for full mesh networks, it seems that they are not possible technically for large uses.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:33 UTC (Tue) by sspr (guest, #39636) [Link] (7 responses)

I was there too, I think all developers in there had this same question: can this be done ? How would this scale ?

Look at routing of car traffic: if highways are lacking (or are obstructed), the secondary roads get congested quickly. Or would people settle for a 'degraded' network in difficult times. Maybe starting to offer telephony over meshes could be the offer that pulls people over the line to buy these devices.

I was also thinking that this must be running ipv6, but as I understand, ipv6's routing is very hierarchically and designed to fit todays global routing infrastructure, not meshing.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:58 UTC (Tue) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (6 responses)

IPv6 routing isn't hierarchical, the address allocation is though. The idea being that by giving everyone enough space you can have major ISPs still having only having one prefix instead of dozens.

Additionally, by grouping a bit based on upstream providers it avoids people having to maintain routes for entities on the other side of the world. Instead you can have a general "north-america thataway" route.

I think that for mesh-networking you practically can't avoid having everybody know about everybody else. Unless you can find a way to based addresses that encode a location somehow. Suppose you assume that the mesh is approximately a 2D space, you could somehow make addresses correspond to your location. Then each node only needs to know exactly how to route to the nodes nearby and faraway nodes can be intelligently "guessed".

The trick would be to make the addresses an emergent property of the network. But there's no way to deal with "wormholes" which would be a (wired) connection which connected some point to some faraway point without passing though the nodes in between.

I'm sure this is an area that needs a lot of research.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 1:38 UTC (Wed) by imitev (guest, #60045) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, there's already a lot of research done in this area, just do a google query for "routing in ad-hoc networks". For instance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ad_hoc_routing_proto...

I worked on routing and security in ad-hoc network 10 years ago, when it was still "academic bleeding-edge" (but was a technology already well known to military: I remember one application where they would drop many sensors from a plane and these sensors would manage to communicate with each other and route back data to a central station).

The key thing is that nodes do not know the full network topology, only their first neighbors (ie, in the radio range perimeter). Then, if you want to add efficiency to the routing protocol, nodes can also discover 2nd range neighbors (neighbors of your neighbors), and even 3rd range but then it's not very efficient: you begin to have a lot of traffic only to update each node database when nodes move in and out of radio ranges.

Then, routing has a lot to do with graph theory, only that you just know your neighbors. So based on some logic you decide to send to the neighbor you think is the best, this neighbor does the same, etc. You have to record the path in the packet, to avoid loops, and know which nodes to avoid if the packet gets back to you. There's also a handful of other problems (eg. rogue nodes dropping packets, ...) that makes all of this a poor-performance network.
However, for "static" networks with no moving nodes like sensors, alarm transmitters, ... it works much better since you can learn a lot more about network topology (Xth range neighbors) and just do path discovery when your didn't receive ACK your packet reached destination (in a very dynamic network you would do it almost for each packet).

For sure a lot has changed since 10 years, but by that time, "real-world" application that would Just Work were with static ad-hoc networks, while dynamic ones were just a geek/academic research area with too many shortcomings. So, yes, a static ad-hoc network could be used in a city, but then you still need to get "out" of the city and for that you'll need uplinks to internet, and these can be switched off (not so easily if - say - you use several satellite uplinks).

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 6:32 UTC (Wed) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (4 responses)

> but was a technology already well known to military

Were any of those (or any since) designed to work in an environment where all of the nodes weren't ultimately under one command and control authority? As in, sure you can airdrop a load of self organizing sensors or repeaters IF they are all equipped with common keys. But what if the op force gets their mitts on one for a few days? Detecting a node sending bogus (hacked or just malfunctioning) route information doesn't sound easy even in a controlled situation like an airdropped network, doing it in a 'download this .deb and install it on your plug computer' setting is a nightmare.

Making a network of semi-reliable links work isn't that hard, see FTN networks from the pre-Internet BBS world for just one example. Making them work in a real time Internet like environment is a little harder. Making them work without any central authority (even IANA can become a central Internet chokepoint in any situation longer than a few weeks) at all hasn't been done yet. Then add the design requirement that it stand up to rogue nodes, spam gangs, criminal organizations trying to hijack the network and/or individual nodes for identity theft, credit card harvest, etc. and finally the dedicated physical and R&D might of nation state actors is asking a bit much of a rag tag band of hackers. 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.

> these can be switched off (not so easily if - say - you use several
> satellite uplinks).

I can't believe anyone clueful enough to have written the rest of the post added that. Sat links are the easy chokepoint if one of the very few nation states that operate the birds become involved. For example, just how many ground control stations are responsible for every sat with a footprint covering Egypt? In the case of the US I'd bet ~100% of Internet or video capable birds with a footprint on the US are ground controlled from CONUS.

Yes it would work in the current case of Egypt since one could probably find a bird willing to sell you airtime as all of the other Middle Eastern despot regimes haven't circled their wagons and there are probably a couple operated from Europe, Israel, India or the US with footprints covering some or all of Egypt. But depending on them is only a false sense of security since if the poo were ever truly in the fan, the exact sort of situation this sort of planning is intended for, it will fail.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 7:11 UTC (Wed) by imitev (guest, #60045) [Link]

> I can't believe anyone clueful enough to have written the rest of the post added that

I still don't think that was a clueless example.

How to cross international borders: cables, or radio (or people moving their arms with pre-agreed movements, or sending Morse code, but let's say that's not convenient). Forget about cables since they're so easily cut/switched off by any government with any decent control of their borders. That leaves us with radio, which is (just) a bit harder to cut off. But, either you have a PtP wifi link crossing the border from one country to the other, or you have full ad-hoc connectivity, meaning a very dense node network even up to the border, or, you use satellite links. All examples assume that the other side of the link is in a friendly country.
Because of geographic reasons, any city closer than a few miles from the border can't have PtP links. It's also not realistic to think you can go "ad-hoc" all the way through a country's border. That's why I mentioned having satellite uplinks.

You understood that, since you mention you have to rely on an operator covering many countries which are not necessarily so easily shut down by request of a single country (see for instance [1] for the whole Europe). And yes, you're right it's not suitable for large countries like US, Russia, ..., but they're not the only countries out here.

Maybe your post and mine differ in that you're thinking about a 100% failsafe network, while I'm only looking at how to use existing and available technology to mitigate the risk of a global government "switch".

[1] - http://www.tooway.com

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 8:44 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (2 responses)

"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.

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 (guest, #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.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 0:13 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

creating large mesh networks is relatively easy.

the problem is creating high density mesh networks (where each node can hear hundreds or thousands of other nodes), that's where they fall apart.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 3:48 UTC (Wed) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (1 responses)

If bandwidth was adequate for the application (short messages), and quasi geographical prefixes were used for ease of routing, what other technical criteria would prevent a mesh network scaling to tens of thousands of nodes?

It seems to me that the real problem with mesh networks is that the links can't carry enough bandwidth to support anything resembling broadband access on a large scale. But if you only need narrowband access, it ought to be much more practical.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 17, 2011 19:14 UTC (Thu) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

Well, as suggested in another thread, there is a very real difference in performance if a fair fraction of the routing topology changes frequently v. if it is otherwise relatively static.

Imagine a node somewhere in the middle of "the action" and where there are many inefficient paths or changing paths in the mesh. Then, at any point in time, besides trying to access what it wants, it has to deal with potentially routing queries and actual data from a number of end points that can cover almost all n nodes, and it might have to pass each of those data/query chunks through multiple times since the potential number of paths being tried out (in a very bad case scenario) could be something perhaps as ridiculous as n factorial. To avoid all of that duplication, we might need to do a lot of accounting per node (trade space for time).

I think we should consider dynamic meshes for small local areas. In the case of a revolution, this would suffice to have locals communicate. Then we'd need to share key information among such clusters. This would be limited to high content information based off noisy decisions taken at local levels. At the highest level, we'd want broadcasting but of largely noncontroversial organizational decisions or news.

The mesh, for wide-scale Internet purposes, may never come close to substituting for an efficient network with a relatively static central core on an efficiency measure. But an inefficient mesh system can still be very useful in a more limited capacity during real emergencies. We also have car and 2 way radio and a whole framework that can leverage these albeit much less efficiently than would be the case with a full Internet.

[Note, that if we have very limited bandwidth generally between any two neighbor nodes, then we have to have some sort of relay or p2p system for efficiency purposes, at least in order to access highly desirable data.]

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 15, 2011 16:00 UTC (Tue) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link] (1 responses)

There's some very interesting research on truly decentralized routing. Check out Matthew Caesar's publications on "routing on flat labels" or "virtual ring routing".

It should also be possible to have *secure* decentralized routing, but I'm not aware of good published research on that. Maybe Bryan Ford touched on it at some point.

I have some ideas about how to accomplish that, but I'm rather busy with Tahoe-LAFS, $dayjob, and so on at the moment. :-)

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 15, 2011 17:27 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Re secure routing:

Have a look at Radia Perlman's byzantine-robust protocl: PhD thesis "Network layer protocols with byzantine robustness", MIT, 1988, http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/14403; and "Routing with Byzantine robustness", Sun tech report TR-2005-146, 2005. The latter is more a brief description with extensions on the original, but I don't have a URL to hand.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 15, 2011 21:38 UTC (Tue) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

> is there any protocol or any study that shows it's possible
> to have such a mesh network with more than a 1000 nodes?

http://olsr.org/?q=about

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 21:47 UTC (Tue) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link] (32 responses)

As much as I'd love this to be a technical problem, I think it's a social/legal/political problem. Sometimes governments and corporations can screw you and you can't do much about it other than change those governments and corporations. (Or in this case, go off the grid, I suppose.)

So, vote intelligently and educate your neighbors...

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 8, 2011 22:33 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (30 responses)

> So, vote intelligently and educate your neighbors...

We've been trying that for decades. In fact, that's what got us into this mess :-)

Voting is usually worthwhile, but it's impact is minimal, and the wielders of power have made a science of ensuring the result is one of a few permitted outcomes. Changing society is something we do ourselves, not something we elect someone to do for us.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 2:26 UTC (Wed) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link] (29 responses)

How do you change society without voting (or something like voting)? Do you just accede to the wishes of the most well armed group?

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 3:05 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

I do it by getting involved in legislative processes - writing to, phoning, and meeting politicians and finding and encouraging others who also want to do this. I'm a lobbyist, by hobby and by profession. Mostly against software patents.

Others do it by writing free software. Eben's talk (which will soon be online) talks about a particularly necessary change we need to make to society, which can be done mostly by software development.

Voting will never give us a freedom-respecting social network :-)

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 3:41 UTC (Wed) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link]

Lobbying sounds good too!

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 3:12 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (25 responses)

How do you change society *with* voting? The act of voting does not change society; it just tells you (or, more importantly, that "most well-armed group" you alluded to) what a majority of the active voters prefer out of an extremely limited set of predetermined choices.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 4:21 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (24 responses)

Democracy, they way it defined in a modern sense, is worthless at protecting freedom. Anybody who thinks otherwise is completely deluding themselves. The ability to vote is no guarantee or protector. Public opinion is far too easily manipulated. The politicians and major corporations are now far far far more sophisticated in their ability to manipulate then they ever were in the past.

True freedom for society at large will be realised when things like governments, laws, and taxes are voluntary. True democratic government means you, personally, choose. Not the majority, not your grandfathers, or founding fathers, or anybody else... But YOU. YOUR CHOICE. Your choice to belong, to pay your dues, to obey their laws or to just drop out completely and move some place else that has something more of your liking. THAT is true Democracy.

The reality, though, is that freedom is still to far of a radical concept for most people to accept in its entirety. People prefer to be ordered about by threat of the gun rather then depend on themselves and others in a society without strict controls. Other human beings being able to exist without external controls are far too frightening of a concept.

The internet is a good at helping progress, however. Human beings are now, for the first time in history, to be able to freely and cheaply communicate with one another without government intervention and censorship. Information and knowledge is becoming free. Educated populations are much more difficult to control. Knowledge and educational opportunities previously only accessible for only the richest people in the richest nations are becoming within reach of the rural poor of the world.

People will begin to realise that the governments and major corporations depend on them for existence. They will begin to understand that the ruler's goals are not to benefit individuals in society, but are primarily designed protect and benefit the people in power. They may even figure out that major international corporations can only exist because of government controls and regulations of the markets, not in spite of them.

Or maybe they won't. Hell if I know. Either way it's not going to happen in my lifetime.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 8:30 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (15 responses)

True freedom for society at large will be realised when things like governments, laws, and taxes are voluntary. True democratic government means you, personally, choose. Not the majority, not your grandfathers, or founding fathers, or anybody else... But YOU. YOUR CHOICE. Your choice to belong, to pay your dues, to obey their laws or to just drop out completely and move some place else that has something more of your liking. THAT is true Democracy.

There is nothing preventing you from picking up your belongings and moving to some other country more to your liking. I think the problem is you don't actually like the other places any better than where you are now. So you already have the above situation, except you don't like the choices presented to you.

Also, find the use of the phrase "freedom for society at large" useless since it's completely vague what you mean by that. Governments by and large are accepted by people because they solve actual problems. Infrastructure simply doesn't get built out of the goodness of people hearts. Taxation is actually an extremely efficient way of paying for the million and one things the government does. If everything had to be individually calculated for each person, no actual work would ever get done.

Also, as pointed out elsewhere, this is an extremely American oriented view. ISTM the corporations are screwing you over far harder than the government ever will.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 9:29 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

There is nothing preventing you from picking up your belongings and moving to some other country more to your liking.

Apart from the fact that most countries have immigration controls.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 18:57 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

Not to mention that your belongings may include such items as land, a home, etc., which are kind of hard to pick up and take to another country.

Even so, it might be worthwhile *if* there was a place one could move to where your natural private property rights would actually be respected. Unfortunately, governments (even ones with a history of "freedom") have an even worse track-record regarding rights outside their borders than they have inside. Basically, if moving outside the country would solve the problem you probably wouldn't have to move in the first place, as your liberty would already be assured right where you are.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 21:35 UTC (Wed) by ofeeley (guest, #36105) [Link]

QUOTE: "ISTM the corporations are screwing you over far harder than the government ever will."

The corporations _use_ the governments to screw us over.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 0:47 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (11 responses)

> There is nothing preventing you from picking up your belongings and moving to some other country more to your liking.

Hmm, some people would like to live by their own rules on their land. If the country doesn't like it, why doesn't the country pick up and move to land it actually owns (and did not steal from someone else) or where the country is more to people's liking?

If a person (instead of a group of people) were doing the bullying, would your first suggestion be that the victim pick up and leave? I would think that maybe you would feel for them and try to change the situation for them? Maybe you would deride the bully and even stand up for the victim? It sounds like you believe people should be happy with being bullied and never wish for a better environment, and if they do, that they are ungrateful.

> Governments by and large are accepted by people because they solve actual problems.

That is one possibility, I can think of many other possibilities. Perhaps it is habit, perhaps it is lack of imagination, perhaps it is acceptance of the status quo. Perhaps they are not accepted but are simply too strong to beat. Perhaps it is like evolution, survival of the fittest, the strong just get stronger and dominate the weak. I think both of us are just guessing.

> Infrastructure simply doesn't get built out of the goodness of people hearts.

Ironic that you should feel that way on a site for free software. :)

Surely, there are more than 2 ways of this being accomplished, no?
a) goodness of heart
b) theft
c)...

> Taxation is actually an extremely efficient way of paying for the million and one things the government does.

Yes, theft if very efficient. Hardly ethical though.

Not to mention that a large portion of those million and one things includes many things I wish they never did... fighting wars, enforcing horrible laws: copyright and patents..., creating/upholding monopolies, imprisoning people unjustly, supporting foreign dictators, being the largest polluters... I suspect that you would disapprove of some of them too.

Sadly many of those things tend to be the most expensive too. Eliminate them and perhaps one of the many less efficient ways than theft could fund the remaining ones we care about?

> ISTM the corporations are screwing you over far harder than the government ever will.

Funny, I can't think of anything else put together, corporations, sleezy salesmen, thieves, foreign dictators... that steal 30% of my income yearly.

Lots of people are evil, yes. But your claim is bold. What is your rationale? What is your evidence for this claim?

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 8:32 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (2 responses)

Hmm, some people would like to live by their own rules on their land. If the country doesn't like it, why doesn't the country pick up and move to land it actually owns (and did not steal from someone else) or where the country is more to people's liking?

Your problem here is that you're seeing the country separately from the people living in it. It's not, you can't move a country without moving the people in it. So the choice becomes you moving or everybody else (who have just as many rights as you) moving. The choice seems pretty clear, don't you think?

Infrastructure simply doesn't get built out of the goodness of people hearts.
Ironic that you should feel that way on a site for free software. :)

The total value of all free software is peanuts compared to other infrastructure. For example: Total estimated value of software in Debian: $1.8B, Total cost of US highway system $425B. Which is but a tiny portion of the costs of all the infrastructure in America. Building software is also a somewhat different proposition to building roads.

Taxation is actually an extremely efficient way of paying for the million and one things the government does.
Yes, theft if [sic] very efficient. Hardly ethical though.

I'll think we'll have to disagree on that. Theft implies you get nothing in return, which is clearly not the case. Also, I said efficient. If you were sent an individual bill for every service the government provided, you'd spend your entire day paying them (or not) rather than doing any work. The only people happy would be the mailmen and the people visiting about unpaid bills. When you're talking about a system of hundreds of millions of people efficiency becomes extremely important.

Not to mention that a large portion of those million and one things includes many things I wish they never did... fighting wars, enforcing horrible laws: copyright and patents..., creating/upholding monopolies, imprisoning people unjustly, supporting foreign dictators, being the largest polluters... I suspect that you would disapprove of some of them too.

That, however, is a particularly American problem. That the US government is fairly broken is well known. It doesn't appear anyone is doing anything about it though. I just disagree that what you're proposing is the only alternative. There are plenty of governments that function better. There are none (AFAIK) that function like you appear to want it too, which indicates to me it's not practical in some way.

ISTM the corporations are screwing you over far harder than the government ever will.
Funny, I can't think of anything else put together, corporations, sleezy salesmen, thieves, foreign dictators... that steal 30% of my income yearly.

That 30% was agreed upon by your elected representatives. Clearly people think its important. (Also, given the budget deficit it doesn't appear to be enough).

The other 70% of your income is being spent on other stuff. Paying tax is just money, which you barely miss. Other than that, you barely interact with the government on a day-to-day basis. Businesses can screw you on a day to day basis. Overpriced crappy broadband. Providing loans to people they know they cannot pay. While a government in theory could screw you over, they're far to busy doing other things. There are more important things in the world than money.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 17:55 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Your problem here is that you're seeing the country separately from the people living in it.

Actually, in this case "the country" refers to the government, not the people living under its thumb. The people can stay; *they* aren't the ones acting aggressively. If the government stops violating others' natural rights, i.e. effectively stops being a government at all, it is welcome to stay as well.

> So the choice becomes you moving or everybody else (who have just as many rights as you) moving.

False dichotomy. No one needs to move. All that is required is that everyone respect their neighbors' natural rights.

> Theft implies you get nothing in return, which is clearly not the case.

False. Theft is when someone deprives you of your property without your permission. It makes no difference whether they leave something in return--something, moreover, which you clearly value less than what was taken, since they resorted to theft rather than a mutually-voluntary exchange.

> That, however, is a particularly American problem. That the US government is fairly broken is well known.

The problems listed are common to all governments, not just the USA. Aggression and corruption are in their nature. Without aggression they wouldn't *be* governments, and the power to get away with "legitimate" aggression invites corruption on a grand scale. Some are certainly less corrupt or intrusive than others, but that isn't much to boast about.

> There are plenty of governments that function better. There are none (AFAIK) that function like you appear to want it too, which indicates to me it's not practical in some way.

It's more than impractical; it would be a contradiction. An organization which respected others' natural rights and did not practice aggression could not reasonably be called a government at all. It is the institution itself which is flawed, not any particular implementation.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 18:33 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

> So the choice becomes you moving or everybody else (who have just as many rights as you) moving.

No, they do not have any rights over any land they don't own. Any claim that they do is illegitimate. A country is an abstract thing, it can move anytime the people controlling it want it to. And it does, it's usually called invasion or annexing. But, of course, it could move the other way too, but I forgive you for overlooking that since there is very little precedent in history for it. At any point, it could agree to stop exerting force over any place that it currently does. I am not asking anyone else to move (that is your suggestion), I am asking the country to move, to stop exerting force over any land which is owned by someone else.

>>> Infrastructure simply doesn't get built out of the goodness of people hearts.

>> Ironic that you should feel that way on a site for free software. :)

> The total value of all free software is peanuts compared to other infrastructure. For example: Total estimated value of software in Debian: $1.8B.

$1.8B? The linux kernel itself is likely worth close to that.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/24/linux_kernel_rand...

> I'll think we'll have to disagree on that. Theft implies you get nothing in return, which is clearly not the case.

From websters, theft:

"a: the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property"

Do you think that someone should be able to break into your house and take what they want? Do you think that if they decided to leave something behind as compensation, without agreeing with you what it is, that it would suddenly make it not theft?

> If you were sent an individual bill for every service the government provided, you'd spend your entire day paying them (or not) rather than doing any work.

I never was suggesting sending a bill for services that people did not request, you are. Being asked to pay for services you didn't request is called extortion, it is what the mafia does.

>> ...list of evil government undertakings...
> That, however, is a particularly American problem. That the US government is fairly broken is well known.

Say what? Everything that I mention is/was done by almost every nation's government in the world. Of course, it is broken, but it by no means is an American problem. Every organization which rules people by force is "broken".

> That 30% was agreed upon by your elected representatives.

Who the hell cares, I didn't agree to it. If the mafia bosses agree to extort you, does it make it OK? Under what weird (but obviously common logic) does an act become ethical simply because others agreed to it?

> The other 70% of your income is being spent on other stuff. Paying tax is just money, which you barely miss.

Believe me, I miss it. Your condoning of theft is abhorrent.

Not to mention that the simple 30% number was the real obvious IRS tax, but that every other bit of that 70% is likely taxed 10-100 times before I get any products out of it.

> Other than that, you barely interact with the government on a day-to-day basis.

Again, just because the mafia has such a tight control over the neighborhood, that people don't have to deal with them much (only when they pickup their extortion checks, or when they tell people to stay out of certain businesses) doesn't mean they aren't screwing people constantly. Just because most people learn to live with the problem and ignore it (they are sane, they realize it is not going away soon) doesn't mean it isn't there.

I suspect that people tend to get most angry at the problems they know that they could have avoided if they really cared. The bad deals you talk about below, that they could have been smarter about and simply not taken. On the other hand, the bad deals which they have lived under since birth, they are harder to acknowledge. Doing so is painful, and would likely lead to the realization that they might have to deal with them forever, and yet they did nothing to choose them.

> Businesses can screw you on a day to day basis. Overpriced crappy broadband. Providing loans to people they know they cannot pay.

No, sorry those are simply bad deals. People can choose to avoid them. Those are not criminal activities. The ones which are, of course, are the ones which are mandated by government, the ones people cannot avoid.

But, if you do the math and pretend that 30% is all I ever pay in taxes. For all the rest of the lot who get my 70%, to screw me over more than the government, they would have to screw me of more than %30 of my income, that would mean 30 out of 70, that's 42%. I can guarantee you that I do not pay more 42% than I am willing to on everything that I pay for, I am simply too cheap. Oh, believe me, there are plenty of people willing to take my money if I am not thrifty. It's just that I am not in a habit of entering voluntarily into horrible deals, but the government takes it, involuntarily, even when I am thrifty.

> While a government in theory could screw you over, they're far to busy doing other things. There are more important things in the world than money.

Of course, there are more important things than money. I listed plenty of very important evil, non monetary crimes, and governments have a pretty good monopoly on those violent/extortive things in most parts of the world. The list of things that corporations can do to screw me over, is almost purely financial. To go beyond the financial, they usually have to enlist the help (and protection) of a government.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 18:40 UTC (Thu) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (7 responses)

and did not steal from someone else

Please find a piece of land not stolen from someone else. That would include your own.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 18:59 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (6 responses)

> Please find a piece of land not stolen from someone else. That would include your own.

Of course, most land has been stolen form someone at some point. But, what is your point? That it is therefore OK to steal land at any point?

The relevant question, is, did the organization called a government legally purchase the land they are ruling over, with funds that they legally owned? Please find such land! Very little government ruled land was purchased legally, and the little that was, was likely purchased with stolen funds. That makes most land rightfully someone else's, certainly not rightfully owned by the government.

I purchased my land, and when I did, a land title search was done. At least some effort was made to say that the person I purchased it from legally owned it when I purchased it. As far back as is traceable, no one else has a claim to the land. This is normal, most people have to do this. Why can a government land on a continent and proclaim that they own all the land that they see (and can't see), while all the while it is obviously inhabited? Why, when land is purchased and sold on a daily basis from individual to individual, does some external agency still claim rights to this land? This is absurd logic, does the queen of England still own everyone in England?

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 20:29 UTC (Thu) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link] (5 responses)

I purchased my land, and when I did, a land title search was done

That title search was done in government records, tracing back to the original grantor, the government, which keeps the records. You know all this.

The relevant question, is, did the organization called a government legally purchase the land they are ruling over, with funds that they legally owned

Good question.

But, what is your point?

That you're living on stolen land, and you were aware it was stolen when you purchased it. That you're claiming title granted by the organization you name as the thief.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 21:19 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (4 responses)

> That title search was done in government records, tracing back to the original grantor, the government, which keeps the records.

Who happens to be the entity keeping the registry of the land titles, has little relevance on ownership, as long as it was a trusted record keeping place. Most of the time land title's are registered at town halls, local places where people went to register local homesteaded or purchased land (not be granted land).

But, I think that you are confused. In the US, most land was likely homesteaded, not granted. Some of it was homesteaded before the government laid claim to it, some of it before the gov. existed. Either way most of it was not owned by any government to "grant". A grant is a gift, and was sometimes done, such as when the R&R companies were granted land for building the cross continental rail. But this is the exception not the rule. Either way, the land would no longer be owned by the gov. and likely any previous ownership of it would be hard to backup. Land which cannot be traced to a legitimate owner (even after theft) falls under the same terms as abandoned land and can naturally be re-homesteaded legitimately.

> That you're living on stolen land, and you were aware it was stolen when you purchased it.

When the record of ownership dies, so does the claim. Unless another record can be proven beyond it, at which point the land will gladly be given to them, that is after all why I paid for title insurance. But, baring that point, that last known owner was the most legitimate owner (not the gov.). And since then, it certainly has been sold many times. And none of those sales magically give the gov. ownership of it. I am not claiming that this stuff is clear after 100+years, but there is a fairly good chance that I am currently the most legitimately known owner of this land.

So, to claim that "I am living on stolen land" is disingenuous. I am living on land that was "likely once stolen, but that has since then likely been legitimately acquired". Those are two very different statements.

All this said, there is no evidence that this land should even remotely be considered owned by the U.S. gov.

> That you're claiming title granted by the organization you name as the thief.

Again, it was likely not granted to the last traceable owner, it was likely simply registered to that owner in a related organization's records. There is a big difference.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 21:42 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

it;s only the government that you claim is a thief that has defined 'legitimately acquired'

this same government is the organisation that defined 'legal' homesteading

so all your claims to legitimacy all boil down to 'the government says this is legitimate'

this is undermined by your claim that the government is not legitimate

Off-topic

Posted Feb 10, 2011 21:44 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

If the truth be known, I'm as interested in libertarian politics as anybody. But this discussion has gone rather off-topic for LWN, and there are plenty of other places where these issues can be talked about. Perhaps any further discussion could be moved somewhere else?

Thanks.

Off-topic

Posted Feb 17, 2011 18:54 UTC (Thu) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

To address the technological issues, we need to know context such as what it is we are trying to solve. There is quite a difference between virtually no central government where everyone must defend what they call "theirs" than if we have some sort of democratic collective body with very large military controls, and where the latter may be hostile to large groups of individuals to varying degrees.

As imitev's comments suggest (in a higher up subthread), we might face a much more tractable problem if we can focus situations where the dominant force is only likely to get very aggressive against the people it "serves" when it is a governmental unit of force small in relative size to the overall global community.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 21:52 UTC (Thu) by jthill (subscriber, #56558) [Link]

Who happens to be the entity keeping the registry of the land titles, has little relevance on ownership, as long as it was a trusted record keeping place

Please name some organization everyone in the area trusts regardless of who they work for or who they married or where or whether they worship, that isn't their government. If they didn't have such an organization, they'd have to invent one.

most land was likely homesteaded

as in, the government decided to grant them title based on them living on land that had somehow been cleared of competing claimants?

When the record of ownership dies, so does the claim

So we agree, then: ownership isn't some ineffable aura, not some magical bond between owner and owned, then, but just a matter of agreed rules and record keeping. And some handy pals to call on when thieves try to break those rules, of course. See paragraph (1) above.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 12:31 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>True freedom for society at large will be realised when things like governments, laws, and taxes are voluntary. True democratic government means you, personally, choose. Not the majority, not your grandfathers, or founding fathers, or anybody else... But YOU. YOUR CHOICE. Your choice to belong, to pay your dues, to obey their laws or to just drop out completely and move some place else that has something more of your liking. THAT is true Democracy.

No, that is anarchy, and it's the worst possible outcome. The only thing worse than government is no government.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 12:32 UTC (Wed) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

> True democratic government means you, personally, choose. Not the
> majority, not your grandfathers, or founding fathers, or anybody
> else... But YOU. YOUR CHOICE. Your choice to belong, to pay your
> dues, to obey their laws or to just drop out completely and move
> some place else that has something more of your liking. THAT is true
> Democracy.

Nope. This is called Anarchy (meaning "A social state in which there is no governing person or group of people, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder)"). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy

And yes, this is of course a desirable state, but terribly difficult to achieve, and even more difficult to maintain in presence of hostile foreign actors. In fact, all historically existing "anarchist states" have been invaded by (mostly dictatorship) neighbours.

In contrast to this, democracies are relatively easy to enact, can defend themselves against foreign agression, but on the other hand have a tendency to evolve into oligarchies and even fascism (as seen last century in Germany, and this decade in the USA and Europe).

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 13:10 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (2 responses)

Other human beings being able to exist without external controls are far too frightening of a concept.

In the late '90s the Albanian government collapsed. What was the first things its citizens started to do? They grabbed guns and started to kill each other. There is a reason we need those external controls. This is where most utopist get it wrong - humans by their nature are more than willing to settle differences by violence.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 20:05 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (1 responses)

In what utopian world is a government not violent? That is after all, a very defining characteristic of a government, it is violent. Take that characteristic away and, it will cease to be a government, it will be nothing more than a committee, a steering group, a club.

Perhaps you have this perception because people are so unbelievably overwhelmed by the force of government, that they usually do what ever it takes to comply with it, to avoid the utterly complete and overwhelming threat of violence the government holds over their heads daily? In other words, a well controlled mafia neighborhood where no one dares to confront them, may seem less violent on the surface, than one where a new gang is attempting to takeover power by scaring people into submission. But I would hardly claim that perception to be an accurate assessment of the relative violence of the mafia.

Living with successful extortion (living in compliance to a real threat of violence to avoid it) is still living with violence.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 17, 2011 19:38 UTC (Thu) by hozelda (guest, #19341) [Link]

Like with the mesh technological concerns, the question is not of inefficiencies (violence) existing but of total inefficiencies when contrasting competing models. The ideal case includes cooperation at a high level, but cooperation in order to defend "good" principles.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 9, 2011 13:19 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Democracy means a lot more than just a public vote, at least in the common academic sense of the word. There is also the criteria of open discussion and free media. Some definitions include the justice system, abscence of capital punishment etc.

Many of our western societies leave some things still to be desired, but there are people working on it. It may be a cliché, but everyone and anyone can make a difference.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 11, 2011 0:36 UTC (Fri) by ras (subscriber, #33059) [Link] (1 responses)

I have a slightly different view. Public opinion isn't that easy to shift, if you define the public as all people eligible to vote. The problem you have in most countries is that isn't who votes. Voting is optional, so only a self selected population votes. It appears to easier to influence voting patterns of that self selected population.

I am not sure how I would characterise the voting intentions of "all voting public" versus "people who choose to vote", except to say they are less likely to vote for radical ideas. Which isn't surprising I guess, as people who don't vote are probably happy with the status quo. If they weren't, they would vote.

Thus in Australia, where it is compulsory to go to the voting booth (although as a practical mater it is not compulsory to vote), there are far less "out there" politicians. Thus in the US a fundamentalist church group organising to political drive to get evolution cast out of schools has more of a hope, as they can get all their members to vote but only 50% of the opposition will vote. In Australia they have no hope, unless the anti-evolution mob truly has a majority. Naturally they don't, and almost certainly never will.

This is probably why the internet filter proposal in Australia failed to get up in the end. There were a lot of very noisy people supporting it. In the US, they might of had a hope. In fact many very poorly thought out internal censorship proposals in the US have made it into law, and would still be there were it not for your constitution. In Australia we don't have such a strong constitution. But such proposals have no hope because they are up against the silent majority, and that is because in Australia the silent majority are forced to make their opinions heard at the polling booth.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 11, 2011 1:32 UTC (Fri) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> Which isn't surprising I guess, as people who don't vote are probably happy with the status quo. If they weren't, they would vote.

That may be true of most, but it certainly isn't true of everyone. For example, I don't vote, not because I don't care about what those in power do, but because I dispute the legitimacy of the power itself. Voting would be an expression of support for the concept that *someone* should hold the office, and its power, regardless of who wins. There is no way to vote for eliminating the office, or even simply leaving it vacant, so I abstain in protest to avoid legitimizing it.

A candidate receiving X% of the vote means that approximately X% of those who voted thought that candidate was preferable to the other candidates listed on the ballot. That's all. It doesn't mean X% of the voters support most or (especially) all of that candidate's policies, or that X% of the population at large would make the same choice.

It's going to take more than voting

Posted Feb 10, 2011 12:11 UTC (Thu) by cesarb (subscriber, #6266) [Link]

> How do you change society without voting (or something like voting)?

You change society by changing the people. After all, a society is made of people.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 12:00 UTC (Wed) by AndreE (guest, #60148) [Link]

Kind of useless information for people living in countries with little to no democratic process.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 8, 2011 22:24 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (3 responses)

With the mass media currently praising Facebook for being an enabler of the uprisings, this talk was a good explanation of how social networking might have been an enabler, but the power that Facebook's executives wielded over the events was one of the most dangerous aspects.

The message I took was: don't fight against social networking because of a hatred for Facebook. Social networking is a powerful tool and we a freedom respecting version.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 11, 2011 4:50 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134) [Link] (2 responses)

What power? Facebook wasn't even available to the people in Egypt during most of the uprising.

Besides, these executives haven't used that power the media claims they have. This guilty until proven innocent attitude doesn't really work well with freedom and justice.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 11, 2011 12:52 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Not quite.

Media reports say the protests were organised via Facebook. That's possible because ISPs were only shut down on 27 Jan at 10pm. The protests began 25 Jan, which probably mean they were organised a day or two before that.

Beyond possible, it's also logical - protests being organised by Internet provides a motive for shutting down the Internet.

I haven't heard anyone contradict the claim that Facebook was used. All in all, it's credible. (It's information - it's neither innocent nor guilty.)

> these executives haven't used that power

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. You mean the power of Facebook's executive's to impede the organisation of the protests?

Whether they used it or not isn't the issue here. The problem is that they *have* this power. Uprisings shouldn't be at the mercy of Mark Zuckerberg.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 11, 2011 12:59 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Ah. You were referring to the power I mentioned here:

> the power that Facebook's executives wielded

Maybe you read "wielded" as "exercised"? It can also mean "have and be able to use".

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 2:59 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (3 responses)

Anyone know where I can find a video of this talk (preferably not on a centralised corporate-owned server)?

Those of us who are running Android on our phones should probably look at the Serval BatPhone. It uses WiFi mesh networking for infrastructure-less local phone calls and automatic bridging to cell towers for outbound calls. It seems they are still in the process of releasing the code and the app, but it sounds like a promising project:

http://www.servalproject.org/archives/category/serval/bat...
http://linuxconfau.blip.tv/file/4697375/

Eben delivered a similar talk at DebConf10, which led to Debian folks starting to look at this stuff technology-wise.

http://wiki.debian.org/FreedomBox

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 5:41 UTC (Wed) by rillian (guest, #11344) [Link]

The fosdem page has 'on demand' stream links, but they don't seem to work at at them moment. Video archives are supposed to appear at http://video.fosdem.org/2011/ in a few days.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 8:06 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

The videos will land here:
http://video.fosdem.org/2011/
I do not think BitTorrent trackers will be published, but you could do so yourself.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 15:56 UTC (Wed) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

Egypt has shown us that mesh-networking is where we need to go for sure.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 3:30 UTC (Wed) by jdub (guest, #27) [Link] (1 responses)

A tragically American perspective: That government is the problem and nothing else... like, say, companies (and their representative bodies) that hold vastly more financial, geographical and political power than many governments (and influence over the actors within government to match).

The 'net is a commons built on private infrastructure. Yes, government may cause the occasional problem, but our Internet freedom is mostly in the hands of (terribly regulated, particularly in the USA) corporate interests.

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 9, 2011 15:30 UTC (Wed) by wingo (guest, #26929) [Link]

Moglen did not restrict his criticism to that of government. He was equally critical of corporations. Though, corporations perhaps engage less in the "ripping off of people's fingernails", as he mentioned in the talk. The "military-industrial complex" comprises both sectors.

Transcript Available

Posted Feb 9, 2011 19:22 UTC (Wed) by 10SFLC023 (guest, #58567) [Link]

The full transcript for this talk is now available at http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2011/fosdem/moglen-fosdem-keynote.html

Being more specific on my question...

Posted Feb 11, 2011 3:59 UTC (Fri) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (2 responses)

Let's say on my small property I set up a mesh wireless network of three nodes. It's just a tiny bit bigger than two-node WDS.

Now let's say two neighbors set up one wireless node each, and another neighbor sets up two nodes.

How do I best combine these networks? None of the mesh protocols I've seen (BATMAN, 802.11whatever) handle peering multiple mesh networks. Each will want to prioritize its own traffic to its own egress point (or at least I would for mine).

If one of our egress points goes down, are there any current routing systems for sending packets out through other neighboring mesh networks?

I see this as critical. My example is trivially small. A "mesh" of tiny neighbors can cheat. A 200MHz ARM CPU with 128MiB can handle at most 100 nodes nearly with brute force. But now consider a mesh of these meshes. A neighborhood group can set up one mesh, and a neighboring group can set up another. Each has hundreds of nodes and tens of egress routes at a minimum. I haven't seen any widely supported protocols for this situation, and this is the one I think could help.

I would LOVE to be wrong.

Being more specific on my question...

Posted Feb 13, 2011 21:18 UTC (Sun) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't have a technical solution to your question.

I would however point out a social solution to a similar problem:

the bittorrent protocol depends on people participating. Software was developed a few years ago (2008?) which would allow users to download without participating/contributing in any way. The developer of that program predicted the end of bittorrent within six months.

So there's hope. Not every abusable resource gets ruined.

Another example: people with open wifi routers would quickly put passwords on them if neighbours were really abusing them. The technology to really abuse an open router exists, but the problem hasn't exploded. Maybe meshes would also work despite the possibility for abuse.

Being more specific on my question...

Posted Feb 13, 2011 22:00 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

a lot of this depends on the purpose of the mesh network.

if you are trying to maintain a mesh network to prevent the government from shutting down the Internet (i.e. the Egypt scenario) then vulnerabilities that could let someone corrupt the network are very significant.

if you are trying to maintain a mesh network to extent the network to a wider area for your (and your neighbors) benefit, then vulnerabilities like this probably don't matter

Moglen on Freedom Box and making a free net

Posted Feb 12, 2011 15:16 UTC (Sat) by lwf (subscriber, #57388) [Link]

The website is now live at freedomboxfoundation.org.