[LINK] Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin

[Ben Elliston]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 11:08:49AM +1000, David Boxall wrote:

> In the past, the distributed nature of the 'net stymied attempts at
> control. The forces of evil are coming to grips with the "problem".
> Perhaps we need to increase the nebulosity of the 'net - make it
> even more difficult to grasp.

For a while, I've considered one of the problems to be the tendency to
view the net as a television service: producers and consumers of data,
with the bulk of end-users being consumers.  Social media has thrown a
spanner in the works to this argument, but some of my argument still
holds.

We could have a much more decentralised network where people ran
personal web servers, stored their own Facebook data, transferred
files directly between each others' machines, used authenticated print
services to print on each others' printers, etc.  What's been holding
this back has been NAT, IPv4, a lazy approach to network security,
etc.

OK, OK, it's utopian.

Cheers, Ben
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 828 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <https://mailman.anu.edu.au/pipermail/link/attachments/20120417/197f625d/attachment.sig>