How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: “[...] the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. [...]” http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spurred-on-p2p-file-sharing.aspx

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Namecoin is a distributed domain registration system based on the bitcoin concept. http://namecoin.bitcoin-contact.org It is part of the Dot-BIT project. http://dot-bit.org

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This Could be Big: Decentralized Web Standard Under Development by W3C https://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/his_could_be_big_decentralized_web_standard_under.php

http://www.w3.org/2011/04/webrtc-charter.html

Cf. http://newtechpost.com/2011/05/05/starfish-a-user-controlled-network

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Report on non-commercial mutual credit software: “This report briefly covers the field of non-commercial mutual credit software, discussing the issues and challenges they collectively face in meeting the needs of the movement. The author’s purpose is to draw out some themes of collective concern to a few small, under-resourced, and disparate projects which are working along very similar lines, and to encourage discussion. The intention is not to make direct comparisons but to take a higher view, with concrete examples. [...]” http://matslats.net/ijccr-software-review

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Bittorrent over Tor isn’t a good idea: “An increasing number of people are asking us about the recent paper http://hal.inria.fr/docs/00/47/15/56/PDF/TorBT.pdf coming out of Inria in France around Bittorrent and privacy attacks. This post tries to explain the attacks and what they imply. [...]” https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea

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“PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and P2P file sharing device. Simply turn it on to transform any space into a free and open P2P file sharing network. [...] No logins are required and no user data is logged. Users remain completely anonymous – the system is purposely not connected to the Internet in order to subvert tracking and preserve user privacy.” http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox

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Project Starfish: Goal “Enable the creation of a world-wide user-controlled network of both wired and wirelessnodes based on a distributed architecture.” http://kemenczy.at/files/Starfish%20Concept.pdf

http://kemenczy.at/index.php/starfish

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Democracy’s Napster moment: “[...] what really matters is that the disruptive power of the internet has been conclusively demonstrated, and the old order has been provoked to respond.

This is democracy’s Napster moment, the point at which the forms of governance that have evolved over 200 years of industrial society prove wanting in the face of the network, just as the business models of the recording industry were swept away by the ease with which the internet could transmit perfect digital copies of compressed music files.

Napster was neutered by court action in the US, but its failure inspired peer-to-peer services that were far harder to control. The sharing of music is now unstoppable, and Wikileaks and the organisations that come after it will ensure that the same is now true of secrets.

Of course we should never underestimate the power of the state to reinvent itself, just as modern capitalism and constitutional monarchy seem able to do.

Wikileaks has exposed the inadequacies in the way governments control their internal flow of information, and organisations dedicated to transparency and disclosure will observe the tactics used to shut it down and adapt accordingly. But the state can learn too, and has the resources to implement what it learns.

I fear that Wikileaks is as likely to usher in an era of more effective control as it is to sweep away the authoritarian regimes that Julian Assange opposes.

He may look to a day when the conspiratorial power of the state is diminished, but I think we are more likely to see new forms of government emerge that exploit the capabilities of the network age to ensure their power is undiminished.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12007616

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Learning from mistakes: OpenLeaks “Wikileaks.org kann man ein paar Fehler nachsagen:

1. Das feste Verbinden mit einer Person, wodurch die Organisation sich angreifbar gemacht hat, und damit auch die Idee und die Ihalte

2. Überlastung durch Zentralität, die zu redaktioneller Auswahl zwang, womit eine politische Ausrichtung einher ging, Dinge unter den Tisch fielen

3. Angreifbarkeit durch Zentralität (DDoS-Attacken, DNS-Sperren) [...]” http://www.netzpolitik.org/2010/aus-fehlern-lernen-openleaks/

Translation here.

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“Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency. Peer-to-peer (P2P) means that there is no central authority to issue new money or keep track of transactions. Instead, these tasks are managed collectively by the nodes of the network. Advantages:

• Transfer money easily through the Internet, without having to trust middlemen.
• Third parties can’t prevent or control your transactions.
• Bitcoin transactions are practically free, whereas credit cards and online payment systems typically cost 1-5% per transaction plus various other merchant fees up to hundreds of dollars.
• Be safe from the instability caused by fractional reserve banking and bad policies of central banks. The limited inflation of the Bitcoin system’s money supply is distributed evenly (by CPU power) throughout the network, not monopolized by the banks.

Bitcoin is an open source project created by Satoshi Nakamoto [...]”

http://www.bitcoin.org/faq

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Evan Williams on Decentralized Social Networks: “So far that hasn’t taken off, I believe because it hasn’t provided as good a user experience. I think there are advantages to a decentralized system and there are also many disadvantages. The disadvantage is that it’s very hard to innovate and do some of the things you can do with a centralized service with a decentralized service, that’s just part of the trade-off and so far it doesn’t seem like a worthwhile trade-off.”

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/evan_williams_on_decentralized_social_networks.php

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Der Liquid Democracy e.V. ist ein gemeinnütziger Verein, dessen Mitglieder an Ideen und Projekten arbeiten, die unsere heutige Demokratie flüssiger, transparenter und flexibler gestalten sollen. Dazu gehört die theoretische Konzeption aber auch die praktische, direkt anwendbare Umsetzung in Software-Projekten.

Adhocracy ist die Software, die hinter liqd.net steht. Liquid Democracy ist nicht nur als Staatsform denkbar, sondern auch als eine neue Form des kooperativen Managements. In Adhocracy können Organisationen wie NGOs, Netzinitiativen oder Firmen durch einen demokratischen Prozess ihre Ziele, Strategien, interne Regeln oder Positionen entwickeln. Adhocracy ist die praktische Umsetzung unserer Theorie des Direkten Parlamentarismus. Durch das Betreiben der Plattform liqd.net entwickeln wir beides – Theorie und Praxis – in einem offenen Prozess kontinuierlich weiter.

Votorola ist eine LD-Software zur Realisierung von Abstimmungen/Wahlen sowie zur Strukturierung des politischen Diskurses – in beliebiger Größenordnung (lokal, national, global). [Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/votorola-is-software-for-building-consen ]

http://liqd.net/

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Should Obama Control the Internet? – A new bill would give the President emergency authority to halt web traffic and access private data. http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/should-obama-control-internet

Cf.

“Netsukuku is the name of an experimental peer-to-peer routing system, developed by the FreakNet MediaLab (Italian), born to build up a distributed network, anonymous and censorship-free, fully independent but not necessarily separated from Internet, without the support of any server, ISP and no central authority. It does not rely on a backbone router, or on any routing equipment other than normal network interface cards.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsukuku

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The Netsukuku project [FAQ], which has been recently featured on Wired Italia, is based on the idea of linking multiple computers using only WiFi connectivity and a specifically-built address system that allows direct communications between machines without resorting to the HTTP protocol.

What Netsukuku aims to do is to empower local communities by creating private peer-to-peer networks where connecting to the “standard” Internet is possible, but non compulsory to exchange information and data.

You can think of Netsukuku as a scaled, democratized version of the Internet.

But what are exactly the main advantages of such a solution?

Internet-independent: The core idea behind Netsekuku is to get rid of Internet providers. Each machine inside the WiFi network serves as a router that redirects the information towards all other nodes in the network.

* Resource-uninintensive: The Netsukuku protocol is built to handle a massive number of computers while requiring minimal computer CPU usage and memory resources.

* Private: The Netsukuku address system doesn’t work using the HTTP protocol. All computers inside the network cannot be identified outside the local network or remotely-exploited.

* Fast: The Netsukuku wireless network allows fast file transfers between machines because there are no central servers or storage systems. All information is exchanged privately, in a p2p fashion without intermediaries.

* Economical: The Netsukuku network works with standard machines that are WiFi-enabled, thus old machines will work just fine with no need to have last-generation computers, additional hardware or pricey software to install.

* Open-source: The Netsukuku code is released under a GNU / GPL license, it is open and freely editable and redistributable by anyone who wants to build upon on it or fix bugs.

Here is the Netsukuku idea explained in greater depth by Sepp Hasslberger:”

http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-network-the-netsukuku-idea/

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“Main research goals of the Free Haven Project:

Anonymity: We try to meet this goal for all parties: the publishers that insert documents, the readers that retrieve documents, and the servers that store documents. We are in the process of designing and developing a free, low-latency, two-way mixnet for forward-anonymous communication.

Accountability: We consider methods for achieving accountability without sacrificing anonymity. In particular, we’re researching reputation and micropayment schemes, which allow us to limit the damage done by servers which misbehave.

Persistence: The publisher of a document — not the servers holding the document — determines its lifetime. [...]”

http://freehaven.net

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