The United States should back it's (alleged) principles & help develop & spread liberalizing, anti-authoritarian software, like this.
This is still couched as consuming media. The stakes are higher, but I'd have us go further: try to allow person to person, group, & broadcast communication in places where the internet is being subverted & blocked.
"The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore.
Alas the current regimes, bith conservative & liberal, are more focused around demanding things of the internet & making up new regulation, bith as a direct threat to letting people operate & maintain presence they would online. It's extremely hard days seeing one of the greatest emerged possibilities in the world- a universal right to speech & connect- clambored over & shouted down like this. Stories like this & others, of helping people see beyond their oppressive regimes, need much bigger celebration & support.
Well, how does such software currently spread in North Korea? And, what do you think will happen to your average North Korean who gets caught with the current non-US-backed anti-authoritarian software?
But then when we look deeper, it gets more complicated. Could we make software that is easier to use and harder to detect? Probably. If someone gets caught with it, will they be in more trouble than they would with non-US-backed software that had similar functionality? Very likely. If the time comes when NK figures out how to track it, and more people have it on their phones because we encouraged them, and the hammer comes down on them, but more information got into NK because of this, is that a good trade-off or a bad one? (I'm not even going to propose an answer to that question...)
If i had all the answers i'd be doing it. Wifi-p2p, bluetooth-le broadcasts... who knows. We need more trying stuff.
This salty snippy rejectionist behavior doesnt help. Being so certain of failure, convincing everyone not to try to improve things, swearing all attempts are futile... dont you see what vaccuous sucking nihilism this is? It's badgering & bullying to have a stance that is so uncompromising, so mightily assured of failure, that phrases "concerns" so demeaningly. There's no room for any possibility that maybe, just maybe, we could make things better, and that: I hard reject as cruel & unsavory.
I dont know what happens. Maybe we find some fantastic covert plausible deniability systems- launch the tech as a small payload in every top 10 site on the planet. Maybe NK doesnt end up being a good spot for freedomware. Maybe it helps Russia, or Myanmar. Doing nothing will help no oppressed people ever: that I promise. Lets not be cowards, let's find some principled things to explore & advance, lets try.
Ignorantly pushing random solutions because "we need more trying" can be so much worse than not helping. North Korea and many of these regions pose huge geopolitical problems. The potential gepolitical outcome of a misguided "solution" isn't just that we "will help no oppressed people ever", it is mass destruction & conflict on a global & industrial scale.
Deniability based on technicalities and plausibility is really tenuous at the geopolitical level and I think it's outrageously harmful to suggest ignorantly fucking with it, as if the leaders in North Korea and their Chinese allies give two shits about plausibility when they see a coordinated cyberattack from the US aimed at their systems.
If you have no idea what you're talking about, please don't try. You are not playing with VC dollars. Otherwise, the US govt is hiring and they're looking for thoughtful and discreet people.
i'll make sure i practice my beliefs & my values quietly where no one else might see them. sounds smart. very safe. i am too fearful uncertain & doubtful to share my hopes & ideas of betterment: mission accomplished.
Ooh, burn. I feel sorry for Alan Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park, all they could pitifully do was practice their beliefs & values quietly where no one else might see them. It would have been much better if they overcame their fear, uncertainty & doubt to share their hopes & ideas for the world to see, what a shame you weren't there at the time to leak them. Wouldn't want to gatekeep.
To me it seems clear they weren't engaged in grand strategy, that the particulars of democracy & values weren't at the forefront. Simply turning back the tides against onslaught was the move of the day. Facing overrun, they were seeking every advantage they could; they did not have the luxury of advocating their values.
I feel sorry for AT & his colleagues. Because they couldn't share their great work, because incredible advanced & efforts had to be kept secret. Because people had to die, information had to go un-acted upon, to maintain the strategic advantage.
But developing a toolkit for democracy, developing capabilities and potentials: that threatens no one. There's no cost to doing that. We don't have to try to seed democratic technologies to the world. But we should have this arsenal of freedom. We should ennoble & potentiate humanity, so that when the times come, we are ready. Let's try. Let's not be afraid, and worthless. Let's be as brave as Bletchley, let's prepare.
Threatens no one? Toolkits for democracies threaten illiberal autocracies like China, Russia, and North Korea, they present it as a threat to their sovereign power and they threaten retaliation against everyone else in response. With the recent ongoing war against nuclear Russia in the spotlight, with China's looming threat to swallow Taiwan into its totalitarian police state, it's surprising to encounter such ignorance to what's at stake. Strategic advantage is more important than ever.
If you want to be as brave as Alan Turing and his colleagues, then have the bravery to be thoughtful and discreet as they were. They weren't afraid and worthless. Alan Turing had the bravery to do what you now call cowardly, but I can think of worse insults to describe ignorant & reckless vigilantes in the high stakes theatre of geopolitics. If you want to prepare, the US govt (and other democratic countries) is hiring.
Also, wouldn't they be much more successful trying to spread it in South Korea, where they have considerable political influence (they command its military, they have 30,000 troops stationed there, the intelligence agencies are highly interlinked, the defence ministry is almost literally inside a US army base)?
> "The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore.
This is one of those old bromides like Postel's law that just doesn't reflect the reality of the situation in the modern world. Today's modern equivalent would be "The net interprets heterodoxy as noise and filters it out." The most recent example being, a guy asked about what it would take to get Twitter's AS depeered for "disruptive activity" after the Musk acquisition:
It's probably difficult and unpopular among the large telecom firms to do this now, but with the right incentives we may see sites depeered for political reasons in the future.
The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it. I believe in site's rights to maintain themselves as they will, and this is not a contradiction. That's a high-level concern, one the internet infrastructure doesn't notice or care about.
You are absolutely correct that things could get shitty. But I see no indicators on my radar right now that the various anti-internet forces that be in the world are at all embraced or accepted: I think we all still see them as enemy of the common good, quite clearly, and foes to fundamental human rights.
> The internet is still a series of dumb tubes, as I see it.
The internet is a series of contractual agreements between large corporate entities that, till now, have provided an interface that is like a series of dumb tubes. Up till now, they have operated on the principle that everybody has the same color money and should therefore receive the same service.
However.
These days, large corporate entities need to be aligned with the ESG rules established by the major investment banks who provide them with finances and sit on their boards. That includes an obligation to fight back against forces deemed insufficiently progressive, to avoid the rise of another Trump. Nobody wants to be remembered for complicity in the rise of fascism in the USA, like IBM's complicity in the holocaust. If a site on the internet is seen to be a locus for fascist voices, it will soon be acceptable for that site to no longer be on the internet. Better to enter the kingdom with one eye than to be cast with both eyes into Gehenna.
I’m not optimistic, considering the state of democracy in US.
It looks like liberalism and democracy is insufficient to counteract the ill effects of capitalism - the transformation of society from a market economy to a market society.
I'm not sure what you mean by "liberalism" in this context, but over here, it's liberalism that has us relying on billionaires to buy media platforms so that we get access to forbidden media.
This is still couched as consuming media. The stakes are higher, but I'd have us go further: try to allow person to person, group, & broadcast communication in places where the internet is being subverted & blocked.
"The Internet interprts censorship as damage and routes around it". -John Gilmore.
Alas the current regimes, bith conservative & liberal, are more focused around demanding things of the internet & making up new regulation, bith as a direct threat to letting people operate & maintain presence they would online. It's extremely hard days seeing one of the greatest emerged possibilities in the world- a universal right to speech & connect- clambored over & shouted down like this. Stories like this & others, of helping people see beyond their oppressive regimes, need much bigger celebration & support.