Internet Control

[TWPonKubuntu]

Warning: Political Topic

FIrst, I recognize that we are an international group.

In about three days, the U.S. is set to release the (arbitrary) control over the "Internet".

What are your thoughts on this?

How will it effect you?

How will it effect we who write code for use in the Internet?

Finally, is this a good idea? Why or why not?

[GreyGeek]

Here is ICANN, a body which WIkipedia describes as

... a nonprofit organization that is responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces of the Internet - thereby ensuring the network's stable and secure operation. ICANN performs the actual technical maintenance work of the central Internet address pools and DNS Root registries pursuant to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) function contract. Much of its work has concerned the Internet's global Domain Name System, including policy development for internationalization of the DNS system, introduction of new generic top-level domains (TLDs), and the operation of root name servers. The numbering facilities ICANN manages include the Internet Protocol address spaces for IPv4 and IPv6, and assignment of address blocks to regional Internet registries. ICANN also maintains registries of Internet protocol identifiers.
ICANN's primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of the global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.[

ICANN says "The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources."

People who control the DNS root control what you have access to, if you are allowed to access the Internet at all. Redirect the IP subnet which interests you to NULL and you will see nothing on your browser. Perfect speech control.

The DNS root is a set of about a dozen servers around the world which hold the the tuplet set of "domain name" - "IP Address" for all assigned IP addresses around the world. So, instead of having to remember the quad 46.51.197.89 and type it into the URL I can enter "DuckDuckGo" and be presented with that search engine's home page.

The Left thinks the US is not giving the Internet away and putting it under UN control is no big deal. The Right believes that control of the Internet would fall into the hands of oppressive governments.

Considering how oppressive the US government has become during the last 16 years, IMO it is a toss up. The CIA, NSA (the two biggest violators of the Bill Of Rights) EPA, IRS, FBI, etc., have all become weaponized against anyone who disagrees with the Administration's narrative. Since when did the Library of Congress need a SWAT team? American Internet corporations? How close to Big Brother wrong-speak do American Internet companies have to get in support of the Leftist political narrative before we say "Hello, Big Brother". YouTube, for instance, has created their "YouTube Heroes" plan which rewards activists for flagging politically incorrect videos. We already can see the results. Videos which criticize Clinton or Obama get "demonitized" or deleted or the poster's account is deleted. Can we say "Red Guards"? Google, FaceBook and Twitter have combined forces to "fight hate speech" which, as the results reveal, is any speech which contradicts the GFT narrative. How many of you who live in America have self-censored your own online posts because of fear of retaliation by the corporations who host them? Yes, you have, and that chilling affect has already reduced your 1st Amendment right. Google, FaceBook and Twitter are public commons, just like bars, grills, restaurants. We do not allow the food service corporations to discriminate based on race or gender or political content (T-Shirt msgs). Why do we allow inline corporations to do that? Saying that they are a private corporation and the BIll of Rights doesn't apply to them is just a dodge. If it applies to a pastry baker it applies to every business. However, governments have forced Google, Facebook and Twitter to censor their content in those countries.

You see, the biggest problem the MNM, Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets have is controlling eyewitness reports (usually smartphone videos and audio) which contradicts their narrative. To meet that challenge of what they call "misinformation" they have combined forces at FirstDraftNews, where they "collaborate" the news they report. GFT have been joined by many other news ouotlets and agencies in their efforts to control news on the Internet. As you can see from the list of partners, their views are entirely one sided.

Could China, Iran, Cuba, or a dozen dictator states be any worse? Well, yes. Besides deleting your posts and your account they can delete you.

So, to me, keeping the ICAAN and the iana in Control of the US is the lesser of two evils.

EDIT: In the interest of balance, I must add that Obama and all future presidents, via the NDAA, have been given the "right" to declare any individual a national security threat and order him killed without due process or trial. So, yes, you can be deleted in America as well. So, how are we now different from China, Iran, Cuba or the other dozens of dictator states?

Well, if we gave a knat's a** about it we could bother to actually vote to improve the situation, not make it worse. We have a 30year history of Hillary's track record, bodies and all, but no one, absolutely no one can say with any confidence what a Trump presidency would be like. Like Reagan, he spent most of his early years as a Democrat. Unlike Reagan, he did not openly switch parties and began working for the election of other Republicans. Up until recently he has been hobnobbing with BIll & Hillary. Either way, I have a feeling that this election will result in a disaster. If Hillary is elected you can kiss the Bill Of Rights goodbye, along with property rights and other trappings of a free society, and say hello to Socialism. If Trump is elected, and survives his first year, you can count on so many harassing lawsuits from the Left so as to make his administration unworkable, if he doesn't turn out to be a troll who immediately turns hard left after saying "I do".

[TWPonKubuntu]

GreyGeek, Thanks, that was very useful and I will spend some time running down the links for more info.

And yes, it is hard to pick which master will beat us less severely... Better the evil you know than the one you do not?

[GreyGeek]

GreyGeek, Thanks, that was very useful and I will spend some time running down the links for more info.

And yes, it is hard to pick which master will beat us less severely... Better the evil you know than the one you do not?

The beatings will continue until moral improves!

[TWPonKubuntu]

Self inflicted moral boosting...

[MoonRise]

Interesting thread. I'll frequent this to read the response. The only change I would make is I would change "Considering how oppressive the US government has become during the last 16 years," to about the past 25 years. Other than that, GG wrote it well I do say.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting thread. I'll frequent this to read the response. The only change I would make is I would change "Considering how oppressive the US government has become during the last 16 years," to about the past 25 years. Other than that, GG wrote it well I do say.

After reflecting I have to agree with you about the government misdeeds starting 25 years ago. Probably much earlier than that.

RICO was supposed to help incompetent government lawyers fight the much better trained (Ivy League) and highly paid Mafia lawyers by using the old English common law called "guilty property". Thus, just the accusation of a crime is enough to allow prosecutors to steal the defendant's money, forcing them to use poor quality or public defenders. You can always tell a poor lawyer -- holes in their shoes and frays on their cuffs and collars, in my experience. And, they often lose. Anyway, RICO, Congress promised us, would only be used against the Mafia. That was in the 1960-70s. Fast forward to day. RICO is used over 10,000 times a year against ordinary citizens. When a police unit raids a suspect's house they already have decided what they are going to steal and how they are going to use the stolen items. RICO states that guilty property taken by police do NOT have to be returned, even if the person who owned the property proved their innocence (innocent until proven guilty in a court of law been turned on its head!). SWAT teams have raided the wrong houses, sometimes killing innocent people, and after taking their property (cars, boats, jewelry, electronics, houses, anything) they don't have to give it back and usually do not. Recently some courts have ruled against the thefts and forced the police to return the property, after "storage and handling fees", and many times the property is too badly damaged to be of further use. However, the "guilty property" of most interest to the police is money. They have a standard excuse for stealing money from motorists, especially if the motorist are carrying less than 10,000. They call it "drug money" and if the motorist protests they threaten them with prosecution for drug running, even if no drugs were found, if they don't just let the cops take the money and scoot. Less than $10K because it costs the hapless citizen at least that much in legal fees to fight the police thugs. RICO abuses.

RICO has also been used by politically motivated prosecutors to punish their political opponents, as events in Wisconsin over the last five years have proven. So, just like the IRS, FBI, EPA, BLM, Library of Congress, and several other agencies, RICO has been weaponized by incumbents for use against opponents. When the opponents get into office expect more of the same. The political and media classes are without honor or honesty. BTW, what does the Library of Congress need a SWAT team for? To collect overdue book fines? The EPA? Can't they just summon the aid of local law enforcement? After all, there is an ongoing process of militarizing local law enforcement. Their assault rifles, body armor, armored vehicles, robots, cobra gunships, grenades and such are as good as what the SWAT team uses. And, considering how many innocent people SWAT teams have killed the training of the locals can't be much worse.

Most cops are good cops, trying to do what they signed on to do at the risk of their lives. But a few bad apples often stink up the entire barrel.

The BIG problem is the criminalization of our laws. Even what was minor infractions (misdemeanors) have been turned by activists into felonies punishable by fines and imprisonment. It is often said that "Ignorance of the law is no excuse". Attempts to count all the active felony laws on the books today have failed. One counter got to over 350,000 before giving up. Pick of a feather laying on the ground as you stroll down the street and you could be subject to fines and imprisonment for violating a protected species act. The online "Illustrated Guide To Law" talks about that here. In the eyes of some people even the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are violations of recently enacted or enhanced laws (usually with a "hate" component designed to "protect" one or more of the seven protected classes in America's politically correct environment).

[TWPonKubuntu]

The question in my mind is "why are so few complaining?"

Perhaps because it (the loss of control of the Internet) is not being fed via the mass media?

If this goes through, my bet is no big changes for several months and the progressive tightening of the screws on everyone who uses the 'net.

[GreyGeek]

The question in my mind is "why are so few complaining?"

Perhaps because it (the loss of control of the Internet) is not being fed via the mass media?

If this goes through, my bet is no big changes for several months and the progressive tightening of the screws on everyone who uses the 'net.

MOPO: apathy and ignorance.

In America, currently, 98 million people of working age either cannot find a job or refuse to work. The claim that the unemployment rate is 4.9% is a ludicrous manipulation that has been used for decades to minimize administrations culpability in regulating jobs out of existence.
One news source stated for last March (because I am too lazy to find a more recent figure):

BLS employment statistics are based on the civilian noninstitutional population, which consists of all people 16 or older who were not in the military or an institution such as a prison, mental hospital or nursing home.

In March, the civilian noninstitutional population was 250,080,000 according to BLS. Of that 250,080,000, 156,906,000 -- or 62.7 percent -- participated in the labor force, meaning they either had or job or had actively sought one in the last four weeks.

Of the 156,906,000 who did participate in the labor force, 148,331,000 had a job and 8,575,000 did not have a job but actively sought one. The 8,575,000 are the unemployed. They equaled 5.5 percent of the labor force—or the unemployment rate of 5.5 percent (which matched the unemployment rate seen in February 2015).

So, 100% eligible workers - 62.7% being those who have OR HAD a job, or are not looking = 37.3% who do not work. (How many of those are living off of the government?) That's a LOT more then 5%. Consider that the BLS classifies those who have lost their job, or have given up looking for a job because they cannot find one, as being part of the "working" group. Only those who are still actively looking for work (~5%) are considered "unemployed". Nice slight of hand with the figures, and very convenient for the politicians.


NAFTA shipped the factories over seas. H-1B shipped cheap technical labor into this country, as quasi-slave labor. American employers are being trained on how NOT to hire Americans so as to fill their jobs with cheap foreign labor. And it has been going on for more than ten years:

With hundreds of thousands of computer programmers and technicians out of work Bill Gates claims there aren't enough workers to fill those jobs so H-1B programmers and technicians have to be imported.

But who is really killing small businesses, which employ more than 60% of all workers?

[TWPonKubuntu]

More information on the pending change:


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/y2k-2-0-is-the-us-government-set-to-give-away-the-internet-saturday/

I'm not sure that I completely agree with the opinion expressed in this article, which basically says "don't worry, be happy", because the US will retain control of the companies who operate the net because they are U.S. based...

How long do you thing it will take before those companies decide to remove themselves from U.S. jurisdiction?

[GreyGeek]

More information on the pending change:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/y2k-2-0-is-the-us-government-set-to-give-away-the-internet-saturday/

I'm not sure that I completely agree with the opinion expressed in this article, which basically says "don't worry, be happy", because the US will retain control of the companies who operate the net because they are U.S. based...

How long do you thing it will take before those companies decide to remove themselves from U.S. jurisdiction?

One day.

I have little doubt that a move out of this country has been planned since the US Administration approved the transition two years ago. With one day left I see no action by the Dems or RINOs to halt the move. After all, A LOT of the DNS root servers, not including the major 13, are in Europe:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer...WzDa4h3BxJcbEo
or here
http://root-servers.org/

and all that has to be done is for most of management to move there. Once out of US jurisdiction they can thumb their noses at US. Now consider how free the European people have become since PES has taken control over all of the Euro governments, until BREXIT. How would you like European style "freedom of speech" imposed on the Internet world wide? Google, Facebook and Twitter are already censoring unapproved speech, which is why I canceled all my accounts with them. With countries like China, Cuba, Viet Nam, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other dictator states having membership on the UN Human Rights Council how long do you think it will take for the freedom we enjoy to be "regulated" with the likes of "YouTube Heroes" working for those social media and governments.
The corruption is already taking place in this country. It can only get worse in those "Human Rights" countries.

[TWPonKubuntu]

So I am looking for alternatives such as local, privately owned, wireless networks. Some communities have already installed these and the hardware is "off-the-shelf".

It doesn't look good from my point of view...

[GreyGeek]

So I am looking for alternatives such as local, privately owned, wireless networks. Some communities have already installed these and the hardware is "off-the-shelf".

It doesn't look good from my point of view...

So was I. Besides Tor, which I think has been totally compromised, I found ipfs and netzero. Both claimed to be a form of P2P but both of them require users to go through their local ISP. When you don't own the trunk-line servers you don't have control over the traffic that passes through them. Both of ipfs and netzero required that your computer act as a node on the P2P network and the bandwidth it took was probably 1/3rd of my 20Mb. The HD space it took gradually increased to a couple GB each, but the size of it can be limited. What you wouldn't know was the type of files being stored, or who owned them. Child porn? Stolen IP or military secrets? ISIS attack plans?

I've been following the D-Wave 2X quantum computer. It's already up to 1,000 cubits. Quantum computers do a form of parallel processing, not serial processing like our common laptops. In conventional computers, to increase speed by parallel processing, problems have to be broken into many components, like solving an algebra problem by using a polynomial equation and giving each term in the polynomial to one of the parallel processors. A summing processor adds up all the terms from the parallel processors when they are finished iterating the sequence. It amounts to integrating a solution over thousands of intervals.

Superposition in quantum computers is when a qubit can hold both a 0 and a 1 simultaneously. Superposition of qubits is what gives quantum computers their inherent parallelism. This parallelism allows a quantum computer to work on a million computations at once, while your desktop PC works on one. A 30-qubit quantum computer would equal the processing power of a conventional computer that could run at 10 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). Today's typical desktop computers run at speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second). The D-Wave 2X Quantum computer has 1,000 cubits. While it is not a true quantum computer because it uses what D-Wave calls "annealing", it probably can crack any encryption algorithm available today, I suspect.

D-Wave's cubits are kept at less than 1mK while setting up their problems. Once configured the qubits are gradually raised in temperature to 45mK, which "anneals" the qubits much the way heating a stressed metal anneals it, allow the atoms of the metal to settle in less stressed states of minimum energy. For qubits that minimum energy is the solution(s) to the problem.

From 8 qubits to a 1,000 qubits in 8 years! There is no telling what their qubit capacity will be in another 10 years. If their rate of improvements are linear they will have 125,000 qubits by 2026. Will the ordinary person be allowed to own a quantum laptop, if such a beast can ever be built? When Hell freezes over.

So, I am just enjoying the computing weather while the sun is shining. Evil forces are not happy with you and I possessing the meager computer power we have today. It threatens their rule. Us expressing to each other our negative opinions of the powers that be threaten their continued rule so they have to constrain those expressions for their own continued existence.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Just found this article about 'net alternatives:

http://observer.com/2016/09/a-second...he-blockchain/

Time will tell, but I'm keeping an eye on all of these options.

[edit] I'm not happy that the browser being used by Blackstack is based on Google's Chromium. This sends warning signals about real security...

[TWPonKubuntu]

It seems that a few are trying to stop this change:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016...t-control.html

Frankly, I'm not sure that this isn't just election politics in action, since it is so late and so little.