Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets

http://chronicle.com/article/Fear-of-Repression-Spurs/129049/

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

65 6 15 years ago

More like fear of getting caught illegally downloading the latest Batman screener is the driving motivation for alternate Internets.

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

I disagree, but I think the real motivation may share a common root (again, talking about "most people" here, not the actual people doing the development). The common root is the invasiveness that governments have turned into standard operating procedure, much at the behest of big copyright holders (but not all; in the USA, the "war on terror" has been a huge motivator as well).

If you are going to throw a straw man out, do it right: child porn is the driving motivation for alternate Internets. Think of the children and don't let that happen!

drcube• 15 years ago

Right, the free flow of information scares some people. The lack of it scares others.

muuh-gnu• 15 years ago

Many people think that non-commercial, private sharing of arbitrary files with each other should not be illegal in the first place, and that enforcement of copyright is a form of for-profit censorship.

Those alternate internets are built with the general intent to guarantee informational freedom, disable censorship or at least make it more difficult, regardless whether it is Iran-style religious censorship, North Korea-style political censorship or US-style for-profit censorship.

peterwwillis• 15 years ago

Technically the "residence" that Project Byzantium is being built at is HacDC (http://www.hacdc.org/), your friendly neighborhood hackerspace. Alpha should be ready by October 16th. If you'd like to volunteer your time or skills just jump on the mailing list at http://hacdc.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/byzantium

(personally i'd like to see mesh networking become a simple cross-platform desktop application which handles all the heavy lifting of routing and connecting ad-hoc clients, but that's more difficult than tying together some open source software on Linux)

amatus• 15 years ago

I'm hoping that GNUnet's (https://gnunet.org/) wlan transport will be used for something like this.

Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets

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