«In 1993, John Gilmore famously said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." That was technically true when he said it but only because the routing structure of the Internet was so distributed. As centralization increases, the Internet loses that robustness, and censorship by governments and companies becomes easier.»
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/06/russian_censors.html
@kensanata
> only because the routing structure of the Internet
At that time, the Internet was Usenet, a multicast system with distributed routing mechanism builtin. Now it's the World Wide Web, a unicast system with no distribution, not even Mastodon. It's the time for a distributed infrastructure to take control the Internet again.
@niconiconi @kensanata I’m going to say it.
No, I won’t. I won’t say.
Oh, alright...
What we need is... blockchain!
(Ducks from flying objects.)
@Shufei @niconiconi you definitely need to duck! 😂
But regarding resilience of the network: I really like the Cold War idea of the Internet. It can take blows. You connect to friendly nodes you trust. You disconnect misbehaving nodes. Nodes are small and postmasters are real people that help run the system.
@kensanata @niconiconi It’s still the only foundation level model which makes sense. And yet, vetting that web of trust is one of the key weaknesses which needs a real fresh look.
And soon. It looks like we may need a Fidonet reboot just to do anything we used to outside the corporate state panopticon.
> Fidonet reboot
many people want to literally revive the old protocols and networks beyond retrocomputing purpose, e.g Gopher, NNTP, but none of them supports things like global hash identifier, public key cryptography, onion routing, P2P/Mesh net, <joke>blockchain</joke> or any modern inventions at the protocol layer.
IMHO, old protocols are dead, and we should leave it alone, what should be revived is __the philosophy__ of the old protocols, in our new systems.
@niconiconi @Shufei Actually gopher over Tor works, @tomasino does it; and gopher over TLS also works, I do it; but yeah, other things don’t work like that. And securing emails is super cumbersome and people rarely do it. And I don’t even know about people trying to revive nntp. I agree about the philosophy of the old Internet.
> Actually gopher over Tor works, @tomasino does it; and gopher over TLS also works, I do it
I already expected this perspective, so in the original post I mentioned "protocol layer" to nullify it...
You are just replacing the transport layer. Yes it's a neat hack, and a good way to retrofit protocols on the modern Internet.
But does not really incorporate any new inventions to the protocols. If this protocol is going to be the next BBS, it is not enough IMHO.
