LWN: Comments on "Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy"

magic words

nix — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:15:12 +0000

The subject? You're now doing this on every thread where people have the temerity to disagree with you. The subject appears to be 'all subjects'.

magic words

Garak — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 22:07:55 +0000

please don't overlook the subject

censorship

flussence — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 07:44:39 +0000

Don't act like one of those whiners. I was very obviously responding to a thread in which you vocally advocate for individuals relinquishing their ability to host content on the internet to cloud service gatekeepers. Have you never been slapped in the face by cloudflare telling you you're not human and demanding you submit proof to google before you're permitted to read J. Random's blog? Lucky you.

home server prohibition matters i think

nix — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:30:35 +0000

Yeah right. You can tell because nobody uses Google in the UK, or Facebook. The UK has *more stringent* rules than you propose (or, in fact, it has rules that produce extensive ISP competition, and some of those ISPs not only allow but encourage you to run home servers), but I'm writing this on Chromium and I use Google for searching almost to the exclusion of all else: indeed Google has more of a stranglehold here than in the US.

I am in favour of home servers -- I run quite a lot of them -- but all your harping on the subject is doing here is proving your parochialism. Your proposed solution has been tried and it *does not work*. It does not do what you repeatedly say it will do. I wish it did, but it turns out that allowing home servers is not a panacea. It doesn't cure disease or old age either, imagine that.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

nix — Tue, 19 Mar 2019 10:22:52 +0000

Most countries that like to call themselves "democracies" are actually nothing of the sort, they are "representative governments" - we call ourselves a "parliamentary democracy" but, seeing as we vote representatives into parliament who then mostly vote as their party leaders tell them to, that's hardly democratic *or* representative.

Well, this is what you get when things are going as planned, or when it is clear that whatever happens things will mostly still kinda work, or when there is one obvious answer and everyone agrees (e.g. often in wartime, but also most of the time in peacetime too). We are observing at present in the UK what happens when that machinery breaks down because the people in power are inflexible or manipulable enough that they are listening to only small interest groups who are trying to drive everything off a cliff for their own reasons (Rees-Mogg has personally made £7m from Brexit so far: why's he in favour of it? I can't imagine: he doesn't care if it hurts the mostly poor people he represents, since he thinks they're *meant* to be poor and he's their manor lord, yes, seriously). What's happening? Suddenly Parliament has grown teeth and is biting back, and oh look even though rarely used those teeth do in fact appear to be quite sharp still.

magic words

nix — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 16:06:35 +0000

So... you think everyone should be free to respond to whatever comments they like and have unbridled free speech except when *you* disagree with them? You're even using inappropriate legal terminology ("cease and desist") to try to cast a pall of theoretical legalese over the thread-branch you dislike.

This seems like a rather inconsistent worldview (though a common one). Freedom, freedom for everyone who agrees with me! But everyone else can go hang.

'killers' he called them on his 15 season NBC show

nix — Mon, 18 Mar 2019 14:59:37 +0000

I think ale2018's complaint may have been that the *businesspeople* too frequently consider their relationship with their customers to be a predator's with its prey, rather than, perhaps, trying to make money by doing things that would help their customers. Parasitism is a common lifestyle, but it's not one that anyone other than the parasites much likes.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Lennie — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 11:00:46 +0000

I wouldn't say that, we are seeing a lot of new development around IPFS, WebRTC, etc., I can see IPFS ending up as part of the infrastructure for the web.

We aren't at that point yet, but it's getting closer every month.

Now I do expect some kind of commercialization, which could mean: pay for IPFS storage.

Some are developing blockchain coin/IPFS storage solutions.

Or maybe I should say: an other chance to do it right or fail again.

apples and oranges

Lennie — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 10:49:51 +0000

I think this is why you need a 3rd party encrypted backup solution to go with the service you buy.

apples and oranges

Lennie — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 10:36:36 +0000

I think their is a huge difference between:

mom-and-pop hosting provider in the same city or regional large city of which you know where the datacenter is compared to storing your stuff with Microsoft or Google.

One thing that makes life a lot easier in that case is: same jurisdiction.

television 3.0

farnz — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 10:24:16 +0000

In large part, though, that's because the US hasn't built home Internet infrastructure; they have repurposed infrastructure designed for television (cable, DSL) for home Internet service, instead of putting in dedicated networking facilities.

This makes offering service very cheap - most of the civils have been done already in order to provide subscription TV (cable) or telephone networks (DSL - which was designed to let telcos compete with cable networks by offering TV), but also means that the compromises that make sense for TV (limited bandwidth from home to central office, much wider bandwidth from central office to home, more control of signal at central office thus higher modulation rates possible getting more bits/symbol) have to be accepted in terms of Internet access.

Fixing that requires fresh civils that replace the existing last mile networks with either dedicated copper or fibre (probably fibre nowadays, as it's cheaper in the volumes that a new network would need, and has far higher bandwidth in each direction than expensive copper - expensive copper can be good to around 5 GHz at best, but has attenuation on the order of 60 dB/km, while single mode fibre is good for around 100 THz - 100,000 GHz - with attenuation on the order of 1 dB/km).

This, in turn, requires either political willpower to spend tax money on disruptive infrastructure projects, or commercial incentives to do so rather than just providing Internet access on existing (paid-for) infrastructure. It's worth noting that in many former Soviet countries, where TV and telephone infrastructure did not exist, they're doing just that; putting in cheap fibre and running symmetric Internet services on it, because it's cheaper to do that than put in US-style TV and telephone infrastructure.

Similarly, parts of Scandinavia, Singapore, and South Korea are putting in fibre for Internet service because the political willpower is there to say "we want good Internet service, and we'll pay the price to get there, bypassing Internet over legacy installs.

Finally, in countries like the UK, there's a different route being tried to make it work commercially; we're doing fibre-to-the-cabinet (in the form of HFC cable and VDSL2 from telephone cabinets), which effectively moves the central offices closer to people's homes, and reduces the cost of replacing the old TV/telephone network with a pure fibre data-first network by making money from moving the switch to Internet services closer to people's homes. It's a lot cheaper to replace the ~300m of cable from my house to the nearest cabinet than it is to replace the ~5km of cable from my house to the central office.

television 3.0

Garak — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:08:29 +0000

true enough. Perhaps the more important point is that there are less well known dynamics of that engineering/tuning. I.e. if the cable modem provider is offering 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up it is not simply their choice to retune to 14 up and 14 down IIRC. And if home servers were protected by a network neutrality law/policy it wouldn't take such a 50/50 balance to accomplish many usual high bandwidth things. I.e. distributed(bittorrentesque) streaming/distribution is already widely succussfully used as an alternative to paying a CDN to help mitigate the source bandwidth bottleneck issue. While of course many bittorrent peers(cough simultaneous client and server behavior cough) are not home servers with access to greater outbound bandwidth, even if you had to have 10 or 1000 100kbps peers/cdn-amplifier-nodes/homelinuxservers, the method is clearly viable for the key example of an alternative fully decentralized video distribution network able to accomplish the same things as broadcast and cable television networks.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

Wol — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 15:23:24 +0000

> paid reasonably for your time

Sounds like you've never served on a jury ...

Neither have I but everyone I've talked to has said it leaves you rather badly out-of-pocket, as you're paid a miserly daily allowance, plus expenses, which is usually worth far less than the (usually) unpaid leave you're forced to take.

Oh - and over here, getting out of jury service is doable but not easy. Unlike the American system where you just get yourself challenged and thrown off, here it's more like "who's the next twelve? In you go ..." and it's *HARD* for either defence or prosecution to get you thrown off - they need good grounds. If you're lucky, you get a trial that lasts a few days. If you're unlucky, it lasts a few months!

Cheers,
Wol

up/down asymmetry engineering, terms of service, disincentives, supply and demand

mpr22 — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 14:34:19 +0000

I have no particular interest in providing videos or video games with bulky audiovisual assets from my third-floor council flat, but I have plenty of interest in consuming those things, so even with a home server, I'd still have heavily asymmetric bandwidth needs.

(federatable) web overlay commentary/etc

Garak — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 07:19:50 +0000

Are you pointing out that you can't just comment on or modify or add-to most other people's web sites (duh),

Actually that sounds a lot like something I recall g+ having deployed a few years back. The ability to +1 arbitrary pages, maybe comment as well. Of course the non-evil way to go about accomplishing that would be to utilize a federated network of such overlay content stored locally or otherwise under the netizen's control. I.e. no need for a centralized (commercial) big player to have control over the data involved (and utilizing every means possible to extract as much profit from access to the data as well as dominating/influencing the implementation details)

up/down asymmetry engineering, terms of service, disincentives, supply and demand

Garak — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 07:09:07 +0000

I would guess the ISPs would claim they've engineered/tuned the infrastructure to best meet supply and demand. I would immediately follow that up however with the idea that the causality chain starts with the common home server prohibition ToS, leading to demand characteristics, that the ISP can then use to justify tuning their network as they do. But while I believe in the long run that asymmetry factor will decrease, I think there is so much that can be done even as things are now that it's just ridiculous(ly sad how the profiteers get away with rigging the system in that way)

censorship

Cyberax — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 01:07:08 +0000

??
What does reCaptcha has to do with right-wing whiners?

censorship

flussence — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 22:31:03 +0000

Nice godwin. I'll be sure to remind you of it if I ever see you complaining that Recaptcha has unpersoned you from the bulk of the internet for not generating enough capital via free labour.

magic words

Garak — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 19:28:12 +0000

please cease and desist

our conversation ends at the point of implied threats to my Free Speech

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 19:03:49 +0000

> I do remeber your words. I'm wise enough to know when to end a conversation permanently. Please refrain from replying directly to any comments of mine in the future, I will make the same effort.
Sounds especially ironic from a free-speech advocate.

our conversation ends at the point of implied threats to my Free Speech

Garak — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 17:52:07 +0000

[Wol]: I've had my differences with Cyberax, but I see *you* as closer to a troll than him

[Also Wol elsewhere]: And, quite frankly, it seems to me all too often that "freedom of speech" is equivalent to "forcing your views down my throat".

I do remeber your words. I'm wise enough to know when to end a conversation permanently. Please refrain from replying directly to any comments of mine in the future, I will make the same effort.

A wise troll once said "The line between trollness and non-trollness is not a line drawn on a map or in the sand between people. It is a line drawn down the heart of each and every one of us."

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Wol — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 15:25:17 +0000

> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better. The two of us have gone over the issue in as much depth in multiple prior LWN comment threads. The FCC angle was something I added to the article's discussion comment thread.

I'd be careful there ... I've had my differences with Cyberax, but I see *you* as closer to a troll than him...

Remember my "cheap, fast, good" comment? Free speech is no use when you're dying from an easily-cured illness because you're too poor to afford the treatment. Value systems differ, and yours seems badly out-of-kilter with mine, and probably Cyberax's. Free Speech is worthless, if you lack the resources to make yourself heard.

Cheers,
Wol

censorship

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 08:57:21 +0000

> I.e., this is about not running servers *in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit*.
Maybe not this branch of the thread, but its peer is about home servers explicitly.

> I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.
In the US right now the "free speech advocates" almost invariably turn out to be Nazis/racists or crazies.

> I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.
Nope. I saw that the value of self-controlled communication services is pretty much zero. GMail or Facebook turned out to be more helpful.

And if you want to compete about who lived through more civil disturbance then you'll probably lose.

filtered/richlycontextualized perception

Garak — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 04:06:43 +0000

[me]> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better.
[Cyberax]- I'm an FCC bot and I approve this message.

On the subject of

one of my longer term dreams is to see a better federated client/browser for these creativecommons lwn comments that facilitates tagging, tracking, and minimizing troll impact in the reading of these lwn discussions. Using a federated reputation system solving basically the same fundamental issue as brought up by spam-fighting in the federated email universe.

A quick hack that comes to mind would be adding a link to every comment which goes to a page of links to prior comments of that commenter responding to the same individual. Or a generated list of search results based on a search of the commenter's past comments using the current comment as the search terms. Not quite a federated next generation slashdot frenemy reputation filtering, but perhaps facilitating easier gleaming of long term conversational insights.

How to democratize email?

neilbrown — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:56:07 +0000

"Clearly" we need lwn to publish a Grumpy Editors guide to home email solutions.

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:52:16 +0000

> Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better.
- I'm an FCC bot and I approve this message.

network neutrality is related to the issues in this discussion

Garak — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:45:16 +0000

> This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> Don't move the goal posts.
I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME". With the impediment being an FCC rule somewhere.

Don't move your excuses.

Cyberax is a troll or a bot or something and perhaps ought to know better. The two of us have gone over the issue in as much depth in multiple prior LWN comment threads. The FCC angle was something I added to the article's discussion comment thread. Cyberax steadfastly holds the position that my angle does not represent good thinking on the subject. I have come to the conclusion that Cyberax is a troll or has some personal stake that isn't clear to me yet explaining their opposition to my FCC issue.

While I mocked the mocking/hyberbolic reference to unrealistic dreams in the beginning of the article in another comment, it happens to be true that one of my longer term dreams is to see a better federated client/browser for these creativecommons lwn comments that facilitates tagging, tracking, and minimizing troll impact in the reading of these lwn discussions. Using a federated reputation system solving basically the same fundamental issue as brought up by spam-fighting in the federated email universe. We should have the freedom to architect our own 'echo chambers' :) (one of the first domains I registered was 'filteredperception.org'. Empowering people to more efficiently filter their own perception of the internet is worth doing I think)

You might just try ignoring Cyberax until then, or perhaps theorize the account holder has deployed an annoying chatbot. Whatever works...

censorship

jschrod — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:35:22 +0000

> > This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> > Don't move the goal posts.
> I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME".

This thread started with

> A server in the hand is better than a flock of them in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit instead of yours.

I.e., this is about not running servers *in a cloud owned and operated by someone else for their profit*.

I read *in the hand* as *under one's control*, as cited above. Physical location in one's house (a.k.a "at home") doesn't matter. In fact, you're right that running a server at home is usually not desirable in repressive situations.

> Don't move your excuses.

I don't move my excuses. My reaction was to your comment where you wrote

> > fewer third parties that get veto power over your Free Speech.
> TLDR; version - it'll be slightly less convenient to spew neo-Nazi or far-right propaganda.
> When somebody starts moaning about the freedom of speech it's always that.

and equated "moaning about freedom of speech" with "spewing neo-Nazi propaganda". This bold equation was the one that I reacted to.

I'm from Germany, I live in Germany, and I have probably more experience fighting against with "Nazi propaganda" than you, being politically active here since 4 decades. Equating "Nazi propaganda" to "moaning about free speech" (your words!) is a disservice to the quest for an open and inclusive society.

> > Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
> No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

You changed context by deleting your snarky comment that this replied to. FTR:

> > And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

I.e., you cannot see the value of own-controlled communication services in a repressive society when one is on the opposition side.

Well, since that's the case: I retract my expressed opinion that you wrote a complacant comment. That is not a fitting term, and here's not the proper place to express what I think about this. It seems that we live in different worlds, and since that is the case, I'll stop participating in this thread.

How to better federate and decentralize email?

Garak — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 02:07:16 +0000

We can go part-way without going to full centralization. Maybe there is a business opportunity to provide authenticated SMTP services. My MTA-in-a-box connects to the service that I pay a small sum for, [...] I pay about $20 a year for a domain name. I could easily pay a similar amount for trouble-free self-hosted email.

The $20/yr domain name registration factor seems trivial to get around (subdomain registrar, poor people can live with an extra domain, or utilizing alternate dns root servers. I think an important dynamic is that if home server prohibition ToS were cracked down on by the FCC, the lower barrier to operating dns servers, such as those alternates as well as the per-end-user registered subdomain authoritative servers. The price per end-user there should approach approximately zero with no trouble. Your authenticated SMTP servers are more or less common already- I pay <$5/month to a popular provider. However were the home server prohibition ToS forcefully repealed by the FCC, providing that service seems easy enough that it too should drop to practically nothing (maybe $0.05/mo). Likewise you'd want a similar network of service providers facilitating redundancy buffers/queueing as well offfsite online encrypted backup storage. Again, if everyone who wanted to could set up their own linux server at home and operate such a service, perhaps charging in cryptocurrency, or reciprocal service tokens/credits (perhaps in cryptocurrency form), then those services also should become available on the order of pennies per month.

Domain registration prices are a total scam intricately tied to the anti-home-server conspiracy.

censorship

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:58:06 +0000

> This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
> Don't move the goal posts.
I'm not moving ANYTHING. The whole thread is "running services AT HOME". With the impediment being an FCC rule somewhere.

Don't move your excuses.

> Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.
No it's not. It's at best a distraction. At worst it's a diversion.

censorship

jschrod — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:56:04 +0000

> > My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.
> And how a box at home will help it?

This is not about running services *at home* but about running services *under one's control*.
Don't move the goal posts.

> And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

Two days ago, I received the notice that the brother of one of my friends in Nicaragua was killed by government forces. Thanks a lot, but I see in real life what it means "to fix THAT problem" and I don't need your complacant comment about that -- and, btw, independently operated communication services help with the fight for fixing, even if you don't recognize that.

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

jschrod — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:44:17 +0000

My theory: You have never run your own email server, or even one for a reasonably sized community. (I do so since several decades.)

> > Setting up a mail server often is time-consuming, ad hoc, and brittle; despite technical literacy and the hours I poured in, I continue to have problems with my e-mail delivery.
> Suddenly, the problem came into focus: Alyssa Rozenzweig is worthless at basic computing.

Proof: "an email server is basic computing".

qed.

How to democratize email?

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:40:24 +0000

There's a company that does this: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/12/review-helm-perso...

It's not really getting any more popular.

censorship

Cyberax — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:39:14 +0000

> My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.
And how a box at home will help it? It's even worse - your home box can easily be confiscated.

Sidenote, in Russia cloud services advertised that they are police-proof. It's very typical for corrupt local government to confiscate physical servers as a "material evidence" in a drummed-up criminal case. Even if there's no crime committed and the company is cleared in the court, its work can be paralyzed for months.

And on a bigger note, if your government has no freedom of speech then work to fix THAT problem.

censorship

jschrod — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 01:33:44 +0000

My friends in Nicaragua beg to differ. They live in a civil war and they would very much like to have the freedom of speech that you write about so derogatory.

Many years ago, I had acquaintances in China who ended up in prison because they exercised their ideal of "freedom of speech". I think they see it different than you, too.

Please note: Neither the USA nor other 1st world countries are the whole world.

Cheers,
Joachim

PS: I'm from a country where neo-Nazi propaganda is illegal even on your own server, and I think that's OK. We learned the hard way that there are limits to freedom of speech *because* it is so valuable.

How to democratize email?

neilbrown — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 00:34:05 +0000

> ideas on how a viable business model for a more democratic email service could look like.

I see two main issues.

The first is software. Most MTAs are excessively configurable. Most of us don't need that. A packaged and configure MTA that would let me easily try a new version, or roll-back to the old version would remove a lot of the admin headaches that have been mentioned. This would be given away as a loss-leader. It would probably include IMAP service and a web-mail interface (roundcube??).

The second is connectivity and is primarily about trust, though for people who have obnoxious ISPs, firewall-transition is also important.
Allowing every host to send unauthenticated mail to every other host is one of the reasons that email is a pain. We can go part-way without going to full centralization.
Maybe there is a business opportunity to provide authenticated SMTP services.
My MTA-in-a-box connects to the service that I pay a small sum for, authenticates as me, and delivers email. Then it uses the ETRN STMP command to switch roles and starts receiving email addressed for me.
The provider establishes reciprocal agreements with other providers - they promise to only send authenticated and paid for email, and agree to receive similarly authenticated email.
These providers also to spam tagging, and maybe even filtered when they have 99.9% certainty that it is unwanted.
I pay about $20 a year for a domain name. I could easily pay a similar amount for trouble-free self-hosted email.

censorship

hummassa — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 18:43:11 +0000

Ha! You pampered, spoiled first-worlders...

Down here in our small corner of Latin America, some of us still value free speech because some of us have seen (as recently as the 1980s and 1990s) our relatives being tortured and killed for investigating government corruption...

Cría cuervos, e te bicarán los ojos...

Rosenzweig: The federation fallacy

smitty_one_each — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 17:43:36 +0000

Great article. With precisely zero (0) snark, but the issue you raise seems related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labour

Human beings do this with politics as much as technology: let those who really groove on communications electronics figure out how to both design and regulate my handset, so I can bother my pretty head* with other matters.

Possibly what's needful is a discussion on how we manage to put "enough" time into limiting the centralization of information management. Promises to be a challenge.

*It's not actually pretty.

How to democratize email?

Garak — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 17:37:14 +0000

"I wonder if Alyssa or anyone else has ideas on how a viable business model for a more democratic email service could look like."

Step 1: Get FCC to clarify that ToS home server prohibition is a clear form of network neutrality violation (blocking based on type of application, service or device type (server is a type of device)).

Step 2: Watch as the evolutionary pace of traditional FOSS email service solutions increases in correlation with the number of people who can (in clear conscience with not violating their voluntarily agreed to business contractual obligations with their ISP) test and try out new solutions. And just like compound interest, every bit of that advancement compounds through time, leading to my projections of exponentially advanced pace of FOSS home server software evolution.

Step 3: Profit from that much greater societal access to Free Speech independent of unnecessary potential censors.

for-profit ISPs

Garak — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 17:27:42 +0000

"Why? NAT is a significant expense."

For-profit ISPs might believe they could make a greater amount of money differentiating plans and users. The scheme probably works better the less choice of alternate ISP the targeted users have.