Feb 27, 2022·edited Feb 27, 2022Liked by Mathew Crawford
Agreed, but we need to start crowdfunding alternate technology or nobody will ever hear anything about the crowdfunded science. 94% of the platforms we are using could be shut down in a few seconds including this one. We need to convince the Elon Musks and others who appear to support freedom to help us build an infrastructure that is not based on commercial cloud providers - basically a truth web. There is a dark web that is mostly air-gapped away from the Internet and able to function because it runs through virtually private networks, there is no reason why we can't do the same thing. In fact, we can even air gap the physical medium if we could get Elon Musk to support having privatized networks run across something like StarLink.
This is something I'm all over with nearly 40 years of IT experience working at the highest levels providing architecture guidance over the years, but I'm just not getting the support to get this project going and I can only do it in my spare time as I still need to work a full-time job. Most people are simply not aware of the threat. It will hit us like a ton of bricks when the platforms get killed in a moment's notice. This platform runs on AWS which could shut us down with full government support or pressure substack to censor us. DhS has already declared people who spread "misinformation" about Covid-19 as terrorists.
Meh. The "dark web" just means not using DNS and major certificate authorities. Anybody can run their own, it's just a matter of knowing who to trust. All data in motion is encrypted these days.
Of course AWS can pull the plug. They have competitors; the internet is not so completely brittle. Lots of our de-facto basic protocols and infrastructure are terrible, but how do you upgrade it? Network effects. It's easy to come up with better technology. It's hard to get it adopted.
This is a political and economic and social problem. Torba's got the right idea: build a parallel economy, the technology will follow.
There's Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Nobody else has any significant share. And seeing what Microsoft has done with LinkedIn makes me think they may pull be willing to pull the plug also. I worked for Microsoft for 13 years. Big Tech is all about money, they could care less if they need to do censorship to comply with the government. We keep underestimating the censorship levels.
Fauci is already guilty of mass murder by suppressing useful therapeutics and forcing gene therapy on children that are far more dangerous than the disease. What you're saying about the dark web is an oversimplification. VPNs are used typically to access the dark web. The dark web is met to be hidden. We need a platform that can still expose itself easily to the normal web to have influence and not just be an echo chamber.
Encrypted traffic still reveals the source and destination unless you are using VPN. Air-gapping most off the access points eliminates this. A giant VLAN could be setup on a StarLink network with proxy firewalls into and out of the Internet. If we want to live on big tech infrastructure, expect to be silenced. This pandemic is mostly over, but Pandemic V2 is coming. Everybody who saw this coming was labeled a lunatic conspiracy theorist. Expecting it to happen again with even more censorship and devastation is not only prudent but realistic.
Market share doesn't matter like bandwidth and routeability do. Look at the long tail of all the little hosting providers, sum that together if you really care about comparing capacity. But again, I don't think it matters, it just responds to the market. If AWS dumped substack and they were prepared for it, they could be back up in days or less. If they are really smart, they already have alternate hosting ready to go. I'm more concerned about Akamai and Cloudflare.
I've been following alternative network infrastructure for many years, from wireless mesh to cjdns/hyperboria, DAT, IPFS, TOR, even RINA... I agree with you, this is a worthy cause and there's plenty of reason to believe there will be an urgent need soon enough. This isn't the place for an extended technica discussion, though. I left a comment over on your own substack, feel free to reach out by email.
Thanks, agree this is diverting from the main discussion, but I'm trying to put the feelers out there wherever I can. My area is mostly SecDevOps, data science and data lake/big data platform and infrastructure is more something that I do than something I'm an expert at, but I've been doing infrastructure along the way to support those types of platforms so have picked up some ideas. I'm looking for inputs like yours to help formulate a vision for something that those with the capital can refine and implement.
Also, GAB is run on private servers, it's not just a parallel economy, it's parallel technology compared to how most sites regardless of their perspective are run. Gettr, substack, Spotify are ultimately doomed as platforms for free speech. Just a matter of time.
Gab has a long history. Its current incarnation as a privately hosted and incompatible Mastodon fork has weathered a lot of low-grade network warfare. Other initiatives like their blockchain micropayment thing or "Dissenter" browser fork haven't fared as well. But I'm not referring to Gab specifically, rather this (as a recent example):
Nothing about technology in there. Full on religious ranting, Torba's a Christian separatist. I think he's sort of a nutjob to be perfectly honest, but he clearly understands that technology is secondary.
Steve Kirsch was recently complaining about how "institutional science is dead" because his alma mater MIT won't let him give a talk in the auditorium they named for him after his $2.5M donation. I'm like, "yeah, glad you noticed". You and your colleagues are showing the world a viable alternative to these corrupt institutions.
Steve has been waking up piece-by-piece for around 10 months now. There are a number of other "new dissidents" doing the same. They haven't had time to fully absorb some aspects, but Steve is a ferocious learner.
The work is imperative. I haunt a local liberal news outlet, Minnpost.com, taken seriously among the adults in the room in Minnesota, and one can still not post a comment there about Covid, suggesting anything contrary to the CDC/FDA/Fauci, not even the fact that the vaccinated can catch it and spread it. The comments there are full still, of people acting like the unvaccinated are the new untouchables. If a new variant came down no matter how virulent or not, they would support without question, having the bank etc accounts frozen and seized, of anyone not vaccinated and boosted.
I am even of the mind that the current conflict in Ukraine is suspicious in it's timing, just as more people are becoming aware, these gene therapy treatments are an epic fraud.
And of course they are still refusing pre-treatment, still using remdesivir, still "get vaccinated, get boosted."
I will add, I have been listening to NPR this Sunday morning. They are actively glorifying and romanticizing war. And they continue to enforce the idea in the liberal mind, that the vaccinated can only catch Covid from the unvaccinated.
Agreed, but we need to start crowdfunding alternate technology or nobody will ever hear anything about the crowdfunded science. 94% of the platforms we are using could be shut down in a few seconds including this one. We need to convince the Elon Musks and others who appear to support freedom to help us build an infrastructure that is not based on commercial cloud providers - basically a truth web. There is a dark web that is mostly air-gapped away from the Internet and able to function because it runs through virtually private networks, there is no reason why we can't do the same thing. In fact, we can even air gap the physical medium if we could get Elon Musk to support having privatized networks run across something like StarLink.
This is something I'm all over with nearly 40 years of IT experience working at the highest levels providing architecture guidance over the years, but I'm just not getting the support to get this project going and I can only do it in my spare time as I still need to work a full-time job. Most people are simply not aware of the threat. It will hit us like a ton of bricks when the platforms get killed in a moment's notice. This platform runs on AWS which could shut us down with full government support or pressure substack to censor us. DhS has already declared people who spread "misinformation" about Covid-19 as terrorists.
I talk with cryptocurrency engineers weekly, and have been encouraging the prioritization of new tech along decentralized lines. The need has arrived.
Cool, would like to talk some more about it. I'll shoot you an email to your substack.
Meh. The "dark web" just means not using DNS and major certificate authorities. Anybody can run their own, it's just a matter of knowing who to trust. All data in motion is encrypted these days.
Of course AWS can pull the plug. They have competitors; the internet is not so completely brittle. Lots of our de-facto basic protocols and infrastructure are terrible, but how do you upgrade it? Network effects. It's easy to come up with better technology. It's hard to get it adopted.
This is a political and economic and social problem. Torba's got the right idea: build a parallel economy, the technology will follow.
There's Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Nobody else has any significant share. And seeing what Microsoft has done with LinkedIn makes me think they may pull be willing to pull the plug also. I worked for Microsoft for 13 years. Big Tech is all about money, they could care less if they need to do censorship to comply with the government. We keep underestimating the censorship levels.
Fauci is already guilty of mass murder by suppressing useful therapeutics and forcing gene therapy on children that are far more dangerous than the disease. What you're saying about the dark web is an oversimplification. VPNs are used typically to access the dark web. The dark web is met to be hidden. We need a platform that can still expose itself easily to the normal web to have influence and not just be an echo chamber.
Encrypted traffic still reveals the source and destination unless you are using VPN. Air-gapping most off the access points eliminates this. A giant VLAN could be setup on a StarLink network with proxy firewalls into and out of the Internet. If we want to live on big tech infrastructure, expect to be silenced. This pandemic is mostly over, but Pandemic V2 is coming. Everybody who saw this coming was labeled a lunatic conspiracy theorist. Expecting it to happen again with even more censorship and devastation is not only prudent but realistic.
My 2 cents.
Market share doesn't matter like bandwidth and routeability do. Look at the long tail of all the little hosting providers, sum that together if you really care about comparing capacity. But again, I don't think it matters, it just responds to the market. If AWS dumped substack and they were prepared for it, they could be back up in days or less. If they are really smart, they already have alternate hosting ready to go. I'm more concerned about Akamai and Cloudflare.
I've been following alternative network infrastructure for many years, from wireless mesh to cjdns/hyperboria, DAT, IPFS, TOR, even RINA... I agree with you, this is a worthy cause and there's plenty of reason to believe there will be an urgent need soon enough. This isn't the place for an extended technica discussion, though. I left a comment over on your own substack, feel free to reach out by email.
Thanks, agree this is diverting from the main discussion, but I'm trying to put the feelers out there wherever I can. My area is mostly SecDevOps, data science and data lake/big data platform and infrastructure is more something that I do than something I'm an expert at, but I've been doing infrastructure along the way to support those types of platforms so have picked up some ideas. I'm looking for inputs like yours to help formulate a vision for something that those with the capital can refine and implement.
Also, GAB is run on private servers, it's not just a parallel economy, it's parallel technology compared to how most sites regardless of their perspective are run. Gettr, substack, Spotify are ultimately doomed as platforms for free speech. Just a matter of time.
Gab has a long history. Its current incarnation as a privately hosted and incompatible Mastodon fork has weathered a lot of low-grade network warfare. Other initiatives like their blockchain micropayment thing or "Dissenter" browser fork haven't fared as well. But I'm not referring to Gab specifically, rather this (as a recent example):
https://news.gab.com/2022/02/25/gab-go-and-build/
Nothing about technology in there. Full on religious ranting, Torba's a Christian separatist. I think he's sort of a nutjob to be perfectly honest, but he clearly understands that technology is secondary.
Thanks for the discussion - all good points. I'll pick up with you over on my substack.
I thought Rumble was doing this too, its own servers.
I am honored to support your work.
Steve Kirsch was recently complaining about how "institutional science is dead" because his alma mater MIT won't let him give a talk in the auditorium they named for him after his $2.5M donation. I'm like, "yeah, glad you noticed". You and your colleagues are showing the world a viable alternative to these corrupt institutions.
Steve has been waking up piece-by-piece for around 10 months now. There are a number of other "new dissidents" doing the same. They haven't had time to fully absorb some aspects, but Steve is a ferocious learner.
The work is imperative. I haunt a local liberal news outlet, Minnpost.com, taken seriously among the adults in the room in Minnesota, and one can still not post a comment there about Covid, suggesting anything contrary to the CDC/FDA/Fauci, not even the fact that the vaccinated can catch it and spread it. The comments there are full still, of people acting like the unvaccinated are the new untouchables. If a new variant came down no matter how virulent or not, they would support without question, having the bank etc accounts frozen and seized, of anyone not vaccinated and boosted.
I am even of the mind that the current conflict in Ukraine is suspicious in it's timing, just as more people are becoming aware, these gene therapy treatments are an epic fraud.
And of course they are still refusing pre-treatment, still using remdesivir, still "get vaccinated, get boosted."
Thank you for the work you do.
I will add, I have been listening to NPR this Sunday morning. They are actively glorifying and romanticizing war. And they continue to enforce the idea in the liberal mind, that the vaccinated can only catch Covid from the unvaccinated.
Thank you for your amazing work! We are very grateful for all you are doing. Just about finished Tyson and Fareed’s book. True heroes!
"that your continued patronage is currently crowdfunding science." and the hard maths!! :~)
Mayday Mayday... a link from Mariachi Years takes me to a substack post with an image purporting to show a human skull the size of a man?
THAT'S NOT MINE! I don't know whose skull that is.
Hell yeah, go get it!