Internet Socialism

...It's already possible to find some very annoying CAPTCHA that makes you feel bad about subscribing to a given service. Things will even get worse from here...

But with captcha being broken, how will you prevent bot-automated subscription in the future ?...

Shelby wrote:Solution is of course is that nothing is free.



(Translation: Everything has a cost, and when we try to give away things for free that have a cost, there are side effects. When the side effects become too great, then malinvestment (e.g. centralized ad supported model of the current web) die. It applies to bandwidth sharing as well:

http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=166#p166

This concept that we can't share equally has enormous implications on internet, society, what is money, etc... read my forum at GoldWeTrust.com to come up to speed.)

...explores the underlying motivations of people involved in the open source movement. He seems to settle on the idea that striving for a great reputation within the 'tribe' is a key motivational feature...

Eric Raymond wrote:...what anthropologists call a `gift culture' in which members compete for status by giving things away...

Eric Raymond wrote:...so patch author J. Random Hacker is left with two choices: sit on the patch, or throw it into the pool for free. The first choice gains nothing. The second choice may gain nothing, or it may encourage reciprocal giving from others that will address some of J. Random's problems in the future. The second choice, apparently altruistic, is actually optimally selfish in a game-theoretic sense...

Eric Raymond wrote:...John Gilmore's famous observation that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it...

Eric Raymond wrote:...Go active whenever there’s a political debate about “unlicensed spectrum”. More of it is good. Oppose any efforts to make UWB (or any other technology that doesn’t cause destructive interference) require a license anywhere on the spectrum. If you are capable, contribute to the development of mesh networking, especially wireless mesh networking...

...Until relatively recently I would have agreed with you. I used to rant at my friends about how the 1934 power grab by the Feds aborted a property-rights system for radio frequencies in given broadcast areas, treating them analogously to homesteaded land with interference being interpreted as trespass. Yes, the courts had been heading in this direction.

More recently, I have been convinced that frequency scarcity is an artifact of stupid radios. That is, if you have software-defined radios doing spread-spectrum packet protocols, it’s possible for two radios to negotiate a channel-hop sequence and get data through even under conditions of extremely high and time-varying noise from other transmissions. As a side effect, communication is unjammable. Yes, there’s an aggregate upper limit of total over-air bandwidth, but it’s ridiculously high and not a practical constraint.

Under these circumstances, spectrum is effectively non-rivalrous, and you therefore don’t need any analogue of property rights. The radios will stay out of each others’ way in order to minimize power expenditure per transmitted byte.

Final note: This is not a blue-sky possibility. It is nearly certain that this is the way U.S. military radios already work. What’s novel is that today the hardware to do it can be manufactured in bulk at near-throwaway prices...

...You are correct that use of any given frequency band is a rivalrous good; that’s why, when we had to think of transmission in terms of fixed-frequency bands, property and homesteading was a good model. But when your radios are doing adaptive spread-spectrum, there’s no point in contesting frequency bands - if one is too noisy, you just jump to another.

Thus, while individual frequencies are still rivalrous, total bandwidth is not. The upper limit on where you can jump to wouldn’t be scratched if you had a billion nodes on your network...

Jim Thompson wrote:...> are colors scarce? If colors are not scarce, and colors are a wavelength, and radio spectrum
> is comprised of those same wavelengths, then how can spectrum be said to be scarce?

Spectrum ’scarcity’ is driven by the current models and definition of ‘interference’. The thing is, ‘interference’ is an artifact of receiver design. Not unlike the duality of light (is it a ‘particle’ or a ‘wave’? Its *both* until you observe it), there is *no* interference until some receiver attempts to recover a signal.

But of course, we can do far, far better than current receiver (PHY) design (and make a better MAC-layer protocol too.)

I refer the readers of this blog (again) to TIm Shepard’s MIT thesis.
http://publications.csail.mit.edu/lcs/pubs/pdf/MIT-LCS-TR-670.pdf...

There’s only really one metric to me for future software development, which is — do you write less code to get the same thing done?

Shelby wrote:Net neutrality must come via natural selection (an economic model), and I think P2P at the protocol layer (i.e. protocols on top of TCP/IP, UDP) may be the best candidate, because it can be faster and more reliable than the (undistributed, centralized manager) server/client model, so once all content is served distributed, then who can the last mile players send a bill to, other than directly to the end user? People can be tricked by silent taxes, such as inflation, but they usually seek out competition when the bill has their name on it. This then renders 666 (fascist money), patents, copyrights impotent if it is anonymous (e.g. MUTE, but with some necessary improvements I have recently in mind, not yet documented publicly), which will of course remove Linux from it's media codec conundrum (and a zillion other magnificient prosperity effects for mankind, e.g. making gold trading anonymous, etc).

http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=166#p166
http://ncannasse.fr/blog/captcha?lang=en#comments (find my comment)
http://lists.motion-twin.com/pipermail/haxe/2008-November/020935.html

Shelby wrote:I just discovered the work of Nicolas Cannasse in past 2 weeks, and I am becoming increasingly impressed. I think he may eventually accomplish what Java was all about, "write once, run every where"...

Shelby in email wrote:Have you looked at haXe?

...I have blogged about haXe (and future of internet) a bit:

https://goldwetrust.forumotion.com/economics-f4/internet-socialism-t45.htm

The lamba (everything is a unary function, mutiple arguments accomplished with closure currying) concept is interesting. haXe tries to integrate the type and untyped language world elegantly. The Neko concept of low-level VM seems it might be the winner over Java and CLR (Microsoft's .Net VM layer). Read the links in my blog thread above for details.

Currying enables mapping recursive event chaining to sequential logic:

http://notes-on-haskell.blogspot.com/2008/08/arrows-in-javascript.html

....Btw, I no longer believe in copyrights and patents, and precisely because I am *NOT* a socialist. Dig into my writings to understand...I've come a long way in my understanding of nature's mathematical laws since we last communicated...

Shelby wrote:I used to read this guy over at the anti-migration vdare.com, and he was consistently writing such nonsense. He argues against Coase's Theorem (nature routes around artificial costs and barriers) over and over again. But he is simply wrong.

The reason we don't have perfect service is we don't yet have a free market. For example, the govt still sells licenses for electro-magnetic sprectrum. And since the 1980s, we've gone from 1000s of owners of major media, to 5 families that own everything.

Luckily we have abundant choice on the internet, and the internet is wiping away all those old media and communications paradigms.

Roberts is apparently a dinasour, don't listen to him. And he is a fake libertarian. He apparently doesn't understand the free market, entropy, the exponential function, or the key theorems that apply.

During the most properous period in USA (1800s), any one was free to migrate any where. Don't listen to nonsense.

Shelby aka Jocelyn wrote:@Jeff Read
> Don’t count trusted computing out yet. Intel is going to have another go at it.

Intel's version of trusted computing is not trustworthy. Real trust means each person is in control of the security of their device. Code signing and virus signature databases (aka "security theater" because it isn't secure) means some central authority is in control.

The proper way to eliminate the security theater (follow sub-link) and get local control over security, is for the core OS to be a provably secure micro-kernel so that full disk encryption and inter-process memory protection (and other resource protection) can be employed with certainty. Then it doesn't matter if applications are viruses, because they won't be able to do any harm.

This big gain would be a proliferation in application diversity ("granularity of real-time user choice") and destruction of lockin economic models and oligopolies, by a proliferation of real-time user changes.

@grendelkhan
> general-purpose computing being a dead end for most people?

Never. Users have diverse needs, and I explained why less choice is actually more complex perhaps O(n^2) or maybe even O(n!). Misunderstanding of complexity. If ever it happens that users no longer have diverse needs, then humanity is dead (so that evolution is not).

esr> Don’t over-focus on Aunt Tillie

You might be surprised how diverse her needs are.

esr> attempts to shut it down that’s not going to fold up short of a systemic breakdown in civil society

Afaics, if we don't bust out butts now on good globalization with the termite model of dis-intermediation and creative destruction, the math of the macro-economics is headed towards that systemic breakdown due to the delayed effect of perpetual halving of interest rates.

Eric I don't think the key work is done yet. You know precisely I came back to this blog to try to get that message out (note my personality type). Afaics, the threats loom very large still, not from the middle echelon (e.g. network access carriers), but from the systemic fiat model death star. I am interested in reading your analysis perhaps in your future blog reply to Codevilla. I think there is enormous profit potential for those who succeed in good globalization. You know I wouldn't be expending effort here, if I didn't have immense respect for you and your readers.