An ambitious project known as Outernet is aiming to launch hundreds of miniature satellites into low Earth orbit by June 2015 Each satellite will broadcast the Internet to phones and computers giving billions of people across the globe free online access Citizens of countries like China and North Korea that have censored online activity could be given free and unrestricted cyberspace ‘There's really nothing that is technically impossible to this'
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Daily Mail Reporter, February 2014
You might think you have to pay through the nose at the moment to access the Internet.
But one ambitious organisation called the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) is planning to turn the age of online computing on its head by giving free web access to every person on Earth.
Known as Outernet, MDIF plans to launch hundreds of satellites into orbit by 2015.
And they say the project could provide unrestricted Internet access to countries where their web access is censored, including China and North Korea.
Using something known as datacasting technology, which involves sending data over wide radio waves, the New York-based company says they'll be able to broadcast the Internet around the world.
If your daily routine took you from one homegrown organic garden to another, bypassing vast fields choked with pesticides, you might feel pretty good about the current state of agriculture. If your daily routine takes you from one noncommercial progressive website to another, you might feel pretty good about the current state of the Internet. But while mass media have supplied endless raptures about a digital revolution, corporate power has seized the Internet—and the anti-democratic grip is tightening every day.
“Most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet,” says Robert W. McChesney in his illuminating new book, Digital Disconnect.
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Plenty of commentators loudly celebrate the Internet. Some are vocal skeptics. “Both camps, with a few exceptions, have a single, deep, and often fatal flaw that severely compromises the value of their work,” McChesney writes. “That flaw, simply put, is ignorance about really existing capitalism and an underappreciation of how capitalism dominates social life. . . . Both camps miss the way capitalism defines our times and sets the terms for understanding not only the Internet, but most everything else of a social nature, including politics, in our society.”
And he adds: “The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising — all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism — are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop.”
Concerns about the online world often fixate on cutting-edge digital tech. But, as McChesney points out, “the criticism of out-of-control technology is in large part a critique of out-of-control commercialism. The loneliness, alienation, and unhappiness sometimes ascribed to the Internet are also associated with a marketplace gone wild.”
Discourse about the Internet often proceeds as if digital technology has some kind of mind or will of its own. It does not.
For the most part, what has gone terribly wrong in digital realms is not about the technology. I often think of what Herbert Marcuse wrote in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man: “The traditional notion of the ‘neutrality’ of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as such cannot be isolated from the use to which it is put; the technological society is a system of domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques.”
Bruce Schneier & Jonathan Zittrain in conversation
April 4, 6:00pm ET
Langdell Hall South, 272 Kirkland and Ellis Classroom
From Bruce Schneier:
What I've Been Thinking About
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.
We invite five-page long memos that address the role and future of different models of governance of the Internet, presenting recently completed research or work in progress. Papers from any discipline or institution, from emerging as well as established scholars, are encouraged. Key questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following: · What are the long-term implications of the failure of the WCIT? Is talk of an Internet “Cold War” relevant, or misleading?
· How can we assess the role of intergovernmental organizations in Internet governance?
· How can cooperation between intergovernmental organizations and NGOs be structured?
· What are the potential and limitations of multistakeholder models of governance?
· What role do non-hierarchical networks currently play in global Internet governance, and should that role be increased or diminished?
· What is the relevance of sovereignty and jurisdiction when the Internet creates cross-border harm?
“From SOPA and PIPA to ACTA to CISPA to the TPP and now back to CISPA, internet activists have been caught up in a deliberately bewildering game of whack-a-mole with freedom-crushing legislation. Now, ISPs are doing an end run around the whole legislative process altogether and voluntarily collaborating with the entertainment industry to spy on their own customers. All of this is enough to leave concerned netizens demoralized, and in the war of attrition that is exactly the goal. Join us today on The Corbett Report as we explore a real, grassroots, alternative solution to the problem of internet censorhip that can help to end this government/corporate control over our communication once and for all.”
For our interests, if you care to watch this, you could probably just skip to 21.30 ~; as the first half the video is just concerned with discussing SOPA, etc, and general activism that you're likely already aware of. From 22min till the end is where they really dig into pirate internet solutions and mesh networks that are the meat of the issue.
22-28Min: James Corbett and radio-host Jack Blood discuss the possibility for setting up pirate-internet networks as a response to the incessant efforts of internet-fascists and their legislative puppets to pass proposals such as CISPA. Blood mentions his experience/success with localized, pirate broadcasting that circumvents centralized/censored networks.
28-38Min: Clip from a CNet-Trialogue that discusses what are known as Mesh Networks. Mesh Networks, originally conceived of by the Military-Industrial Complex, are a tool citizens can now leverage to liberate themselves and set up decentralized, uncensored internet accessibility. Requiring only a small investment into already-existing radio equipment, people can set up these networks by first adapting their Smart-Phones. Because of their processing power Smart Phones can serve as Mesh Network nodes that allow for the creation of a node-to-node Wi-Fi Network. This allows for the complete bypassing of any potential government lockdown.
38-43Min: Corbett highlights the work of Tony Cartalucci @ http://localorg.blogspot.com/. Cartalucci's article Decentralizing Telecom explains the practical side of implementing these new types of web-networks at a local level.
The future of the Internet may lie in the past. And that's not a good thing.
Nearly 365 years ago, more than 100 warring diplomats and princes got together in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück, in what is now northwestern Germany. There they signed a set of treaties that became the basic framework for our modern world: the Peace of Westphalia. Thanks to these dignitaries, we have territorial sovereignty: nation-states, demarcated by borders.
In the intervening centuries, Westphalian sovereignty has been the basic ordering principle of our societies. Empires have risen and fallen, countries come and gone. The most successful states have established internal monopolies on information and resources and have exerted discretion on what trade, ideas, money, or people crossed their borders.
But 30 years ago, humanity gave birth to one of the most disruptive forces of our time. On Jan. 1, 1983, the implementation of TCP/IP — a standard protocol to allow computers to exchange data over a network — turned discrete clusters of research computers into a distributed global phenomenon. It was essentially the work of three men: two engineers to write the protocol, and one to carry out the plan. It was a birth so quiet no one even has a photo of the day; arecent post by one of TCP/IP's authors, Vint Cerf, was able to turn up only a commemorative pin.
