Thus spake antispam06@xxxxxxx (antispam06@xxxxxxx): > On Sat, Aug 11, 2012, at 00:14, Mike Perry wrote: > > .onion is another thing that is tragically failing to reach its > > potential because no one tries to make it useful for normal stuff. I > > rather intensely dislike the way it is being used now, but I also know > > that good use cases exist, and amazing ones are possible. > > > > Anonymized communication endpoints have the potential to revolutionize > > how people communicate. The ability to transmit a message to a hidden > > endpoint inside an overlay network allows for chat, email and social > > network sharing mechanisms that do not disclose your social network > > activity to observers or to infrastructure maintainers. This is an > > incredibly awesome and powerful tool. I worry deeply we'll lose it > > before it has a chance to develop away from just being used for > > thoughtcrime. > > The non technical, non freak population doesn't really see the use in > the developed World as Facebook marketing is way past advertisments and > into the actual news. Just the other day I have read a fascinating > article in one national newspaper about how the parents who have teens > should advise their children to check up on FB the people they meet > on line as (and that is an proximate quote) only freaks and weirdos > won't have a public profile. They went even further as how to check on > their FB activity for the sake of âsafetyâ. In short they really bought > the if you don't have anything to hide... Yeah, I know. I saw that. Pretty amazing, especially given that it came out right around when Face book's user's numbers declined by 1%. Someone saw their portfolio about take a pretty big hit I guess. I bet I can also guess why the article was written towards making kids get accounts, too. I think Facebook is losing cool among the Young's. The good news is that parents telling teenagers they *have* to do something is the /fastest/ way to make it uncool. Let's hope it starts an epidemic. I hate being the only weirdo without a Facebook account ;) > Also, to generate a .onion is not trivial. And it's not a one click plus > a form like getting a hot-mail account. Make it as easy as getting a > Wordpress account and the numbers will rise. But I'm not sure the > quality will rise. Yeah, but it's not like wordpress blogs are the bastion of great Internet content, either. The thing that makes published Internet content useful is the search index, and that thing *could* just memory-hole all the scum, and maybe even the stuff that links to the scum, too. But I'm also not even talking about self-publishing. These things are arbitrary communications endpoints. What if you could call them and use voice? Ok, that's a bit far off. But chat and email could work today, if someone built the software to support it and people used it. It would be costly and our current network and protocols might need several upgrades first, but we could build out a whole platform on this technology. Steve Jobs built the most valuable company in the world around a computer that has adoption rates smaller than the 10% of people who probably *really* want private personal communications at least sometimes. The secret sauce is in how the integration works between devices and technologies, and how much is sucks to use versus centralized and non-private solutions. It wouldn't be easy or quick to get there and existing players may be sorely tempted to manipulate the legal system to keep new decentralized technologies out. That would be depressing for a while, but ultimately I think the space aliens would probably think of something to handle that scenario. They appear to be pretty smart and strangely determined, for some reason... -- Mike Perry
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