Remediating the Internet’s outstanding SPOFs

Remediating the Internet’s outstanding SPOFs

Mike Masnick writes a little article forecasting the engineers re-writing the single points of failure out of the internet. He entitles his article, Building A More Decentralized Internet: It’s Happening Faster Than People Realize. He cross references to two articles written by himself back in 2010, Operation Payback And Wikileaks Show The Battle Lines Are About Distributed & Open vs. Centralized & Closed and The Revolution Will Be Distributed: Wikileaks, Anonymous And How Little The Old Guard Realizes What’s Going On in which he, more accurately, recognises the current and future power of distributed and private networks. It should be remembered that these predictions all occurred before the Arab spring and the recent protests in Turkey and the state responses to the use of networks. One of the key initiatives proposed in my mind, is to develop a P2P name service resolver, while others propose a P2P file system.

I wrote a wiki article, called “Ruggedising the Internet” which points at several further resources and projects. I might even join in. … …

Privacy

The next session, called “Naked Citizens! The Data Protection Regulation and why you should care about it”.

The speakers were Anna Fielder from Privacy International, David Smith, the Deputy Information Commissioner and Kasey Chappele, a Lawyer from Vodafone. Fortunately for Kasey, no-one asked about about Vodafone’s Tax Affairs. She went through some of Vodafone’s route to where they are today, and they are quite proud of where they’ve got to. Critically, she argued that while Privacy is seen as a compliance issue, it won’t improve, it’s only when companies start to compete on Privacy that managers will treat Privacy as more than a burden. …

Tim Wu speaks

I got there late, but in time to hear the end of Tim Wu’s opening  key note. His comments about the failure to build a peer-to-peer internet stimulated an interest. His book, “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” examines the evolution of information networks from radio through TV and Cable to the Internet, so I have ordered it. It’ll be interesting to compare, contrast and possibly integrate his ideas with those of Benkler and Perez. While researching for the article that eventually became Municipal WiFi, now over 1½ years old, I was interested in the funding and technology problems faced by public sector organisations. Some hackers have considered making wireless access gateways peer-to-peer, particularly in France while the Hadoopi laws were being debated and passed, but we are still running an internet of hubs and spokes, in the words of the Register, modeled on the command and control systems used in the Soviet Union. …

Defeat ripped from the jaws of victory or what do you call two ex monopolists?

After last night’s triumph in replacing my home hub with a third party gateway,  I was musing about BT’s ability to support their Hub and my suspicions that there is a DHCP bug on the home hub and how large organisations really need to understand the software they use and how open source products make skills acquisition easier; although  BT have no excuse, since the hub is a Linux derivative, hence open source but they outsourced the development, and for months have denied any knowledge or responsibility for its functionality. …

Back Online with BT Boadband

Since I need a new broadband connection, I have been struggling with BT’s home hub since last Wednesday, which is why this blog has been unavailable. I finally discovered that I had not correctly configured the bliki host’s gateway and dns server addresses. So despite being exceptionally cross with BT because no-one would help me, it turns out that it was all my fault, particularly since I ignored at least two people’s advice to check it. I used this site to organise my notes and asked for help at BT’s forums on a thread called port forwarding/http service. …