Category: Autonomous Internet

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Liberation Technology Stakeholders…

09 Justice, 11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, IO Technologies
Venessa Miemis

Preliminary List of Stakeholders

Appropedia
Brave New Software
Creative Commons
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Network Movement
Free Software Foundation
FreedomBox
Future Forward Institute
New America Foundation
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium
Tor Project Anonymnity Online
Unhosted–Open Web Standard for Decentralizing
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Phi Beta Iota: We disagree on the inclusion of the New America Foundation–they are not stakeholders as much as beltway “think-tank” opportunists, and too heavily reliant on proprietary hooks going nowhere.  New Software Foundation has been changed to Free Software Foundation.  We would add to the above list:

Autonomo.us
Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference
Cook Report on Internet Protocol
Free Internet
GNU Operating System
Liberation Technology Project (Standford University)
NetZero Free Dial-Up Internet Access
Technology Liberation Front

Many others will be identified over time.

See Also:

Autonomous Internet [Open, Free, Distributed]
Next Net, Transitional Net, Autonomous Net
Charles Wyble: Autonomous Free Internet
Reference: Internet Freedom–and Control

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Next Net, Transitional Net, Autonomous Net

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

Transitional Internet

by jonl on April 13, 2011

I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.

The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up “free culture” approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.

Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.

I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.

There’s also the work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which I’ve followed for several years. The P2P Wiki has relevant pages:

Phi Beta Iota: A great deal of the credit goes to Doug Rushkoff, the originator of ContactCon, for whom Venessa Miemis (also a contributing editor here at Phi Beta Iota) works.  Using Doug Rushkoff's social capital, and Venessa Miemi's inspired scouting on emergence, they have quickly become a hub for innovation and information sharing about the needed Autonomous Internet.

See Also:

Reference: Cook Report Network Rennaissance

Reference: Emergent Democracy

Reference: Internet Censorship Circumvention

Peter Thiel (PayPal) on Education Bubble

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Reference: Internet Censorship Circumvention

Autonomous Internet, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Tools, White Papers
Venessa Miemis

Global Voices Blog Critique from Jacob Appelbaum: My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.

The reporting methodology is sloppy at best and the information in the report is often inaccurate or poorly written. The report demonstrates a general disconnection from the language used by the projects and the circumvention community as a whole.

Read full critique.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Internet censorship poses a large and growing challenge to online freedom of expression around the world. Censorship circumvention tools are critical to bypass restrictions on the internet and thereby to protect free expression online.

Circumvention tools are primarily designed to bypass internet filtering. Therefore, the core principle behind these technologies is to find alternative paths for data packets. These alternative paths use one or more collaborative servers in order to bypass the network of blocking mechanisms.

This document provides a comparison among different circumvention tools, both in terms of their technical merits, as well as how users of these tools describe their experience with them. The countries included in this report are Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran.

Source: Freedom House

Phi Beta Iota: Within the emerging Autonomous Internet, these tools assume use of the existing grid, and can in turn be used by the authorities, sometimes with the collaboration of the Internet Service Providers, to identify dissidents.  The Autonomous Internet seeks first to bypass local interception points (local solar-powered nodes using leased satellite communications), and ultimately to permit all individuals everywhere to enjoy the Internet for free and in liberty.  Novices forget that anonymous is not the same as invisible, and that security is needed at the point of receipt as well (counter-intelligence outside the denied area is focused on identifying dissidents on the basis of leaks outside the denied area).  NOTE:  Freedom House has a trojan virus–if you don't see the deletion notice your security program is not up to par.

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Charles Wyble: Autonomous Free Internet

Autonomous Internet
Charles Wyble

Hey folks,

I have really enjoyed the discussion on the list over the past few days. Great stuff.  Got me thinking.

I suppose I owe you folks a big long post on what I think the “next net” should look like, just like I posted my vision and work towards implementing the FreedomBox vision.

Below the Line

Phase 1:  access layer and the distribution layer via mesh networks

Phase 2: Linking up regional networks (at least one per state, probably one per city/county).

Phase 3: Linking up with the rest of the world.

Continue reading “Charles Wyble: Autonomous Free Internet”

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Reference: Internet Freedom–and Control

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, Methods & Process, Mobile
Click on Image to Enlarge

Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media

Freedom House 30 March 2009

As internet and mobile phone use explodes worldwide, governments are adopting new and multiple means for controlling these technologies that go far beyond technical filtering. Freedom on the Net provides a comprehensive look at these emerging tactics, raising concern over trends such as the “outsourcing of censorship” to private companies, the use of surveillance and the manipulation of online conversations by undercover agents. The study covers both repressive countries such as China and Iran and democratic ones such as India and the United Kingdom, finding some degree of internet censorship and control in all 15 nations studied.

Phi Beta Iota: Although somewhat dated, the report is worth a look.  If overlain with the countries where poverty makes Internet access or control moot, the global picture is clear: despots and poverty are coincident with the physical and digital impoverishment of the people.  The emergence on multiple fronts of movement to create the Autonomous Internet using the Open Source Tri-Fecta is encouraging.

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Event: 12 April 1200-1400 Freedom House DC Internet Circumvention Tools & Methods–Comprehensive Review

Autonomous Internet
Venessa Miemis

hey all,  saw this on liberationtech message board. it will be broadcast live online next tuesday. may be interesting to hear what they've come up with and what their evaluation criteria looks like.

– venessa

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http://goo.gl/mnGmC

Freedom House invites you to the official launch of Internet Circumvention Tools and Methods: A Comprehensive Review, Tuesday, April 12, 2011 12:00pm- 2:00pm, Freedom House 1301 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 400 Washington, DC, 20036. Lunch will be provided

As the recent shift in political landscape within the Middle East has shown, the Internet is increasingly influencing the way that citizens around the world gather and distribute information. While these changes occur, it is vital that people are aware of how to protect themselves online and how to access information, news, and facts, when the Internet is censored.

While there are sites that recognize the effectiveness of circumvention tools, there are none that assess the effectiveness of circumvention tools systematically. Freedom House has used its expertise and relationships with leading academic experts on information technology security, censorship, and software development to conduct a systematic assessment of how censorship circumvention tools perform in practice inside the countries they are designed to serve.

Freedom House’s Internet Freedom Project Director, Robert Guerra, will join major report contributors Cormac Callanan, director of Ireland-based Aconite Internet Solutions with experience in international computer networks and cybercrime, and Hein Dries-Ziekenheimer, the CEO of VIGILO consult, a Netherlands based consultancy specializing in Internet enforcement, cybercrime, and IT law, to discuss the findings of the report and its implications in the world of Internet privacy and censorship circumvention.

The event will be broadcast live over the Internet.  A link to the broadcast will be sent out prior to the beginning of the event.

If you are interested in attending the event (in person and/or virtually), please RSVP – Details here : http://goo.gl/mnGmC