Suprablog HQ

I found this really interesting:

U.S. Enables Chinese Hacking of Google

Providing a backdoor into large technology infrastructure for whatever reason has been shown not to be sustainable over time. The US government originally wanted a cryptographic skeleton key into any widespread encryption, which was abandoned for many of the same reasons that Schneier mentions in the article. Too attractive an attack vector. Open, collaborative science beat the NSA even while they employed drastically more mathematicians and cryptography researchers than any other organization on earth. That war was won a long time ago but some people never got the memo.

When I first wrote SupraSphere I designed it so that it didn’t require a trusted third party at all. It used this authentication protocol http://srp.stanford.edu, and all communication was always encrypted by default, with zero known MITM attacks, with a distributed spheres of trust security model.

I realize such an approach might not necessarily scale to Google size, but then again, it really shouldn’t have to for most cases. The vast majority of applications outside of perhaps search could be handled in a much more distributed way ( Open Online Mapping Helps Haiti Relief Effors). Google is using the leverage they have with search to force the same level of centralization of information across every other social application segment. Google isn’t the only one for sure, just the most successful and aggressive with that model.

That isn’t to say that distributed systems are always the most efficient (they usually aren’t), or that innovation can necessarily happen as quickly (true consent on protocols, especially social protocols, might be impossible in some cases…. see Facebook privacy settings and Google Buzz), but it looks like the whole “cloud computing” model is taking over with very few other approaches being tried any more. I decided a long time ago with SupraSphere to focus against the grain of the web, at least the implied centralization of both DNS and HTTP, and pursue something much more distributed and secure.

For a while to dull the pain and loneliness I convinced myself that I was like Noah building some type of ark. I ran out of every type of credit building the damn thing (a book in and of itself…raise your hand if you’ve ever unsuccessfully pitched an idea to hundreds of different investors), so now I just get driven nuts as a sharecropper on other peoples’ grids like everyone else. SupraSphere was about letting people have their own digital plot of land, not just an Avatar on Farmville. I’m still pursuing other avenues and approaches to achieving similar goals as SupraSphere (focused much more directly on changing the fundamental nature of capital), but as for now, I’m in a fairly stable if anxiety-inducing holding pattern.

I went into the bank the other day. I complained that they were holding checks I was depositing for almost three weeks at a time, which was more obnoxious than anything. Their response, which left me speechless by its candor, “Sir, the computer makes that decision, not us”. Sure, move to another bank, etc., but the unmistakable trend is clearly in a direction of individuals having very little control over their own context. Credit card companies probably have the same policies for the same “natural” reason that local news stations all have the same story segments (competition?), but that doesn’t make them any less offensive. Usury went out of style a long time ago.

When the system achieves a certain level of scale and dominance, it can change rules in arbitrary ways without much redress, especially when any alternatives are all half-finished Arks (but at least they’re open source!). The dude who flew a plane into the IRS building had his whole life turned upside down by some small rule put in by Congress supposedly to help IBM. Of course most people don’t go nuts and get violent like he did, but people have breaking points and when we’re all subject to being controlled by a bunch of centralized databases with very little understanding about how these decisions get made (if humans are even making them any more), with no practical alternatives and little to no redress, it creates a feeling of despondence with results as unpredictable as climate change weather.

I’ve seen the future and it has a kill switch

David