[HN Gopher] The era of borderless data is ending
___________________________________________________________________
The era of borderless data is ending
Author : prostoalex
Score : 91 points
Date : 2022-05-25 02:12 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Jommi wrote:
| What if we put data servers in space?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| As a privacy geek... good.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| As a fellow privacy geek, I'd rather the laws applied
| universally rather than be split at the borders. Alas, it's the
| lesser evil.
| orwin wrote:
| The industry had a chance to self regulate. Multiple chances
| even. It just doesn't work.
| bzzzt wrote:
| Not a CEO in the world will exit a profitable legal
| business and not get fired.
|
| Besides, the US also had multiple opportunities to fix
| their spying laws to give EU countries assurance their
| citizens data would be protected but actively chooses not
| to.
| jokoon wrote:
| Yes, that's a bit what GDPR is about, so that's a good thing.
| timenova wrote:
| I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to
| isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still
| do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how is
| the application supposed to find which region a user's record is
| stored?
|
| For example, if the user's data is only supposed to be kept in
| the EU, and if the user tries to login connected to a US node,
| should the app forward the request to the EU node (and how would
| it know?), which then accesses the EU database? If all nodes are
| connected to all regional databases, does it even make a
| difference?
|
| Basically, I am very confused about regional separation of data
| while still running a single application.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| _I have a genuine question about this. How are we supposed to
| isolate user data stored in, say Postgres, by region, and still
| do multi-region replication, and restoring correctly? And how
| is the application supposed to find which region a user 's
| record is stored?_
|
| What part of your question is the concern of a bureaucrat? We
| can drop a couple 9s of uptime in the name of local data
| primacy right? (I specifically didn't say "data privacy") :)
| timenova wrote:
| I believe it'll lead to much higher costs, CO2 emissions, and
| other issues, simply because this architecture will require
| more message passing, wasted bandwidth, will be less
| reliable, and have higher operational complexity. I get that
| those in decision-making power aren't usually technologically
| adept at figuring out solutions for these issues, but they
| should invest in solutions first.
| wmf wrote:
| I would predict that data localization leads to data
| traveling shorter distances because most people access
| their local region rather than everything going to us-
| east-1.
| wmf wrote:
| The simple answer is that it's no longer a single application.
| It's a separate copy of the app per country/region.
|
| _should the app forward the request to the EU node (and how
| would it know?)_
|
| You have to add a home jurisdiction field to the account.
| InfoSecErik wrote:
| The word that jumps out (to me) with what you describe is
| "Partition".
| spiffytech wrote:
| Bonus question: what do you do if data needs to stay in the
| creating user's region by default, but users can share data
| across regions, including creating new data associated with a
| record from another region?
|
| For example, American and EU users sharing documents and
| requesting comments be added. How do you manage both isolation
| and sharing? Do you copy such documents to both regions? Do
| comments live in the same region as the document, or in the
| region of the creating user? Do you just give up on foreign key
| integrity for documents, comments, and users because they could
| be in separate databases? If your American servers can request
| data out of the European region on demand (subject to business
| logic), are you really protecting data to the standard the law
| demands?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > are you really protecting data to the standard the law
| demands?
|
| This assumes the law's purpose is to protect citizen's data
| and that it's not just a way to bully tech companies into
| submission by writing impossible to implement laws and
| selectively enforcing them.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| If you need geographic redundancy beyond the European borders,
| what is your threat model trying to mitigate? E.g. Let's say
| you have servers in Norway, Germany and Spain, what would be
| solved by e.g. having an extra one in the US?
|
| Roaming access can be handled through a VPN
| josefx wrote:
| The basic Problem is that if some CCP goon turns up at your
| Chinese branch and requests all data on your US/EU users and
| your local branch is able to do that you failed. Same if some
| goon from the US government wants to access all data on your EU
| users. Or some German guy looking for US data in your German
| data center.
|
| You have to take steps to prevent this.
| coffeeblack wrote:
| Difference is that your US and German branches have access to
| a justice system that can stop the government.
|
| In China, the justice system is part of the CCP and if you
| don't comply, your company is gone.
| [deleted]
| techdragon wrote:
| The whole US / EU safe harbour provisions issue is because
| the EU is not satisfied that in the United States you don't
| in fact have a justice system that can stop the
| government... that there are insufficient powers to stop
| certain parts of the government like the the NSA, CIA, DEA,
| FBI counter terrorism groups etc... who are granted
| extraordinary powers to do questionable shit like sucking
| up as much internet data as possible without a warrant in
| the name off "efficiency" using such flimsy reasoning as
| "it's only a search for legal purposes when we run a
| database query on a US citizens data later" and "we're
| legally allowed to do anything we like with the data of
| anyone who isn't a US citizen... so these EU guys can fuck
| off" (or the appropriate US lawyer speak equivalent)
| fmajid wrote:
| The CJEU explicitly ruled that the FISA courts are not
| independent, I.e. kangaroo courts. I think it's a fair
| assessment.
| null0pointer wrote:
| My interpretation of what GP is trying to say that the way
| forward is to intentionally limit your own capabilities
| such that it is simply impossible to comply with government
| overreach. For an example see Signal and their subpoenas.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > have access to a justice system that can stop the
| government.
|
| Haha, good one.
| codedokode wrote:
| > a justice system that can stop the government.
|
| There might be a law that allows government to obtain the
| data if it is a matter of national security. And what is
| considered such a matter is up to government to decide.
| voldacar wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
| tirpen wrote:
| > Difference is that your US and German branches have
| access to a justice system that can stop the government.
|
| Germany sure, but The US? Do you not remember the Snowden
| leaks at all?
|
| Almost every company I've worked with the past several
| years has had a very strict No-US-Servers-Ever-policy,
| because people don't trusts the US government to not snoop
| around.
| fmajid wrote:
| It should be "No US company, period" because the Cloud
| Act empowers the US government to compel, say Amazon Web
| Services to disclose information they hold on a server
| hosted in Germany even if this violates EU law.
| timenova wrote:
| Encrypting data at rest and in transit will certainly reduce
| the risk. If a branch is deemed at risk, its employees would
| not be given access to any databases. Or don't have branches
| in regions where you have the risk of a government
| threatening your employees for other countries' users' data.
| ramtatatam wrote:
| I am the believer of simple statement - if you don't
| control physical servers then your data is not secured, no
| matter what you do to secure it. Once vault is unlocked and
| you don't control physical hardware your game is over.
| philips wrote:
| It seems a product opportunity might exist to ensure only
| encrypted copies are replicated out of region with the keys
| remaining in region. The side effect is a region might be down
| if something catastrophic happens but data could be restored
| timenova wrote:
| Encrypted copies for some isolated data is a good solution,
| but for a user record when you want to login a user, will not
| work. Then you would need to fetch the data from another
| datacenter anyway, increasing costs, latency, and operational
| complexity.
| antonvs wrote:
| You're assuming the laws would allow for that. I wouldn't
| count on it.
| lstamour wrote:
| In a very small number of cases, regional storage of data
| becomes regional restrictions. You see that already in how it's
| unlikely you will be able to access your consumer account from
| both Russia and the US at the same time unless you have a
| travel history to one or both countries. Similarly, an app
| storing data for EU citizens might indeed say, no, we can't
| share this data outside the EU, we're not allowed. How it
| figures out if you're outside a region is, of course,
| problematic.
|
| But that's rare. Generally the data lives on a regional server
| and gets accessed by a CDN in a region near where the data will
| be delivered. If you're allowed to sign in from that region,
| then you're likely authorizing transfer of data (for the
| duration of that session) to that same region.
|
| As for multi-region replication, it's often the case there are
| multiple regions in the same country - for example, us-east-1
| and us-central-1. No jurisdictional problems to host the data
| in two regions in the same country, after all.
|
| As to how you look up what region the user's data is stored in,
| well, you can keep a list of users and regions. Worst case,
| force the user to remember their region, and use separate
| copies of the website (and DNS) to pick a region to sign in on.
| For example, the same app/website, but at different country
| domains.
| timenova wrote:
| I understand that one way is to block users from logging in
| from other regions, or giving them a region selector at login
| (which is terrible UX IMO).
|
| However, if any of these approaches are done, the operational
| complexity will be immense, and latency for requests much
| higher than they could have been. A lot of message passing
| would be required to build such an architecture, and a lot of
| bandwidth would get wasted, not to mention the unnecessary
| costs.
|
| A simpler approach would to store core business data
| regionally, but peripheral data everywhere. For example, a
| todo app would store all user records, project lists, and
| other data everywhere, but the actual todos regionally. And
| yes this becomes infinitely complex will collaborative cross-
| region applications.
|
| I don't think there are any good solutions yet to this, and
| governments should invest in creating better solutions before
| forcing to go down this route.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| No it isn't. The era of borderless data for normal people who
| don't have time to learn new things is ending. Those of us that
| aren't interested in Facebook and twitter and wechat and whatever
| else are going to keep on trucking along with this "universal
| information availability" thing. We have Tor, VPNs, open source
| communication protocols, encryption, distributed and
| decentralized networks, free publishing and more.
| coldtea wrote:
| Thank god
| enasterosophes wrote:
| While it's disappointing, it's not exactly a surprise. Doctorow's
| been talking about "the war on general computation" for years.
| For about the same length of time, I've been saying that
| governments would eventually seek a monopoly over computation in
| the same way as they currently hold a monopoly over violence: it
| doesn't disappear or become physically impossible, but it
| requires registration, licensing and reporting, along with
| suitable punishments to deter those who would seek to usurp the
| monopoly.
| potamic wrote:
| When I learn about revolutions played out across the world, the
| recurring outcome seems to be measures to ensure citizens are
| not denied the means to usurp authority. Great men of the past
| seem to have concluded that the fundamental problem in any
| society is that power corrupts and the solution to a sane
| society is to provide citizens the means to put power in check.
| Just as freedom of speech, right to assemble or right to bear
| arms gives people the means to challenge authority, computation
| will be tomorrow's weapon of choice. More and more societal
| functions will rely on computation and those who have the means
| to compute will hold power. Data regulations might have good
| intentions, but it's a road to hell that will eventually deny
| citizens the right to "compute" and keep the balance of power
| titled.
| Proven wrote:
| Yes, except that Doctorow has been _promoting_ "the war on
| general computation" for years.
|
| Who's waging that war if not the State?
|
| Who has been calling for ever _more regulation_ and (therefore)
| Big Government if not Doctorow?
|
| One has to be a fool to think that giving more power to the
| government will result in more freedom.
| eqvinox wrote:
| This article is conflating pushes to control and censor data with
| pushes to provide privacy rights. Those are very different things
| that just happen, because they are enacted along nation
| boundaries, to both create these borders.
|
| Providing privacy rights is very much not a "nation accelerating
| efforts to control data", and shame on the NYT for muddling this.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Ultimately this is about many nations pursuing "data
| sovereignty" in lieu of having ability to completely wrestle
| domestic platform supremacy from Silicon Valley / US. Whether
| nations choose to pursue privacy/control is matter of their
| governing interests. And sometimes they're not even mutually
| exclusive, i.e. PRC data regulations calibrated to increase
| privacy from companies but not government. But primarily it's
| national security considerations like no-US servers / exporting
| data directly to NSA pipelines.
| EnKopVand wrote:
| In the public sector of Denmark we suddenly had to view the
| risk factor of America not remaining a safe harbour for data in
| the wake of the 2016 election. I'd like to point out by now
| that what I'm saying isn't that we were seriously considering
| the US falling from democracy the way this may sound. Instead
| think of it along the lines of very long term planning in a
| very risk averse sector where you plan a back up for the back
| up of the back up. The process ended up raising some political
| concerns that I imagine were also raised by similar processes
| all over Europe in that what happens if we can no longer trust
| the American tech platforms with our data?
|
| I think there are two sides to this, as you yourself point out,
| but I also think the concern over data sovereignty is a valid
| one. Just imagine what would have happened if Russia had relied
| as heavy on Azure and AWS as the Danish public sector. Now I'm
| not suggesting that we in Denmark are going to elect a dictator
| and invade Sweden, but as far as national sovereignty goes, you
| sort of have to consider a world where we would do something
| that insane.
|
| Then there is the issue of the wider internet moving from a fun
| playground for geeks to becoming as much a part of our daily
| lives as crossing the street. Most countries have laws
| prohibiting you from crossing the street in your birthday suit,
| even very liberal countries like Denmark don't allow that. It
| would be admirable, but perhaps a bit naive, to think the
| internet would not be affected by legalisation as it's
| importance and influence grew. I think the fact that remains as
| free as it is, is mainly because the current western leadership
| is quite old. I don't expect the coming generations of
| politicians to be as lenient toward the advertising industry
| that the previous ones have been. What the EU has done and is
| doing so far is only the beginning, we will se far more
| legislation on our rights in the future and I wouldn't expect
| major advertising companies like Google and Facebook to have
| much of a future unless they adapt quicker than they are
| currently doing.
|
| With legislation, however, comes complexity and sometimes side
| effects as you point out. We have a filter to guard against
| piracy and property rights in Denmark. As so many other
| countries, and while it was original intended to block the
| pirate bay, child protection NGOs lobbied and eventually got
| sites containing child pornography included in the filter. I'm
| in no way advocating that this was wrong, but maybe it should
| have been two desperate filters as stealing Independence Day
| and Coyote Ugly is hardly the same crime as abusing children.
| Because what followed was that other NGOs and political
| interest groups added more and more things to the filter.
| Leaving it a mixed box of things, most of which should very
| likely be banned, but I think you sort of get my point in that
| nobody really knows what can or cannot be added to it because
| it quickly stopped being a "anti-pirate" or "anti-child-abuse"
| filter and became a "anything the political majority agrees is
| bad filter". Or a very good example of exactly what happens
| when legislators get involved. There are side-effects, but I
| don't think you should fault the NYT for also mixing up things
| in something that is really far more complex, than what I have
| outlined here.
|
| I think data sovereignty, privacy and censorship in general are
| interesting subjects that I hope established media will take
| more of an interesting so that we can have a proper public
| discourse about it that involves non-techies and non-
| technocrats.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > what happens if we can no longer trust the American tech
| platforms with our data
|
| I'm not sure why anyone with "national security" concerns
| ever trusted American (or anyone else's) tech platforms to
| begin with. Everyone spies on everyone, and many current
| alliances are not even 50 years old---a blink of the eye in
| historical perspective. Even if some other nations have
| "better" privacy laws than the US, those are only laws. They
| can be changed rather quickly if the political winds start
| blowing differently.
| eqvinox wrote:
| Great writeup, thanks for taking the time to type out what I
| was too lazy to :)
|
| I'd like to add/clarify/point out that there's two very
| different kinds of law/policy nations can go for here:
|
| 1. passing requirements that anyone processing data needs to
| meet some set of guarantees, e.g. privacy (including against
| state actors, e.g. CIA/NSA), cyberbullying handling, or
| copyright enforcement. This also includes (the absence of)
| safe harbor agreements.
|
| 2. passing requirements that data processing happen in a
| particular place, regardless of intent (could be in the
| belief that place X provides better privacy guarantees, could
| be because place X can censor/control data)
|
| The latter doesn't solve anything from the citizen's
| perspective, even if that's the intention. But it does
| address the issue of "invading Sweden".
|
| I personally consider the former much more important, but the
| latter is sometimes necessary too. But they need to be
| clearly identified in discussion. They are not
| interchangeable and sometimes issues better addressed by one
| are used to try to argue the other.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| What if it's both? What if it is muddled?
|
| China has famously been aggressive at controlling data. We all
| know this and no one thinks it's about privacy. But the EU has
| been pushing to on-shore their citizens data. They have been
| pushing it for privacy AND pushing it as a national security
| issue. The EU has strong privacy laws, but they also have
| aggressive tech laws generally. Cambridge Analytica proved that
| privacy could be security and the whole drama around FB and the
| elections made nations weary of leaving the US laws to manage
| platforms.
|
| Everyone wants more privacy - it's the sugar to the anti-us
| tech pill. On-shoring data or requiring local companies own the
| data (and CX) will help local industries at the expense of
| Silicon Valley bottom lines. Oh and local companies can be
| controlled by local government, which makes censorship much
| easier, a convenient win for power grabbing governments.
|
| TLDR Privacy is one of digital "think of the children" phrases
| that lets governments power grab.
| akie wrote:
| I like privacy. And I distrust Facebook and other big tech
| companies. I'm generally very happy that our democratically
| elected governments makes an effort to protect the citizens
| that elected it. I trust the government more than I trust the
| likes of Facebook, so I really don't see the issue here.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I don't. Governments- even the best ones- have enslaved,
| killed, stolen from, lied to, and tortured millions of
| people. If you get on the wrong side of a government
| they'll lock you in a metal cage for the rest of your life.
|
| Facebook, on the other hand, has sold some of my
| advertising data, and if I piss off Facebook I won't be
| able to share memes on a website. There is hardly a
| comparison.
| daniel-cussen wrote:
| No, just to stop you right there. Allende's government,
| 1970-1976 (interrupted in 1973, but according to La
| Republica de Chile, a country which stopped existing
| having been effectively invaded, he was meant to continue
| in office until 1976) didn't meaningfully enslave, kill,
| or torture anybody. The argument that it stole and lied
| to people can in fact be constructed, but at that point
| they have to fight Henry Kissinger's monstruous and
| cowardly _realpolitik_ with some _realpolitik_ of their
| own.
|
| You can't just say that, you can't just talk shit about
| every single government that ever existed, like there was
| no differences between them. That there was no difference
| in _intent._ Like if you were on a desert island with
| nine other people, would you say that about the
| organization among the ten of you?
|
| Further, I honestly prefer the contracts the governments
| of the countries in which I am a citizen to the contracts
| of practically or literally all businesses and
| institutions I've encountered.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| There's hardly a point to drawing lines between public
| and private in corporate state capitalism. The boundaries
| are becoming less important every day. It's not like
| we've been at war because citizens were demanding it.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| If a government can create privacy directives (which is not the
| same as a privacy right; rights cannot be legislated), they can
| legislate prior restraint at a level way worse than the DMCA.
| throwoutway wrote:
| "rights cannot be legislated"
|
| How so?
| leveraction wrote:
| The basic idea is that rights are given by God, as opposed
| to privileges granted by the legislator. A legislator may
| grant or revoke privileges at any time. A legislator may
| not lawfully take away a right which it did not grant in
| the first place. At least that is the theory. In real life,
| the water gets pretty muddy. This is a very US perspective
| of course.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The can't be _created_ , but legislation can certainly
| _protect_ rights.
| User23 wrote:
| Privileges and immunities are the analog to rights that
| legislation can create.
| jltsiren wrote:
| That's a prescriptive view of what the rights should be.
| According to a more descriptive view, rights are just
| social constructs with an effective enforcement
| mechanism. That mechanism is often regulated by laws,
| which means the legislator can effectively create new
| rights and revoke old ones.
|
| My pet hypothesis is that the US perspective is
| prescriptive, because the ability of the state to enforce
| the rights has not been seriously compromised in a long
| time. The rest of the world is more familiar with the
| idea that the guy with a bigger gun may one day show up
| and take your rights away.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| The term is certainly ambiguous - I don't think anyone
| would argue that the right to legal counsel is 'God-
| given' and people arguing for universal single-payer
| healthcare aren't saying that the right to access a
| national healthcare system is an innate human freedom.
| And many things we call 'rights', like voting or owning a
| gun, can be revoked by the government under certain
| conditions.
|
| In practice in the U.S. we pretty much call things
| 'rights' any time we believe that people should have them
| by default.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| It's a tangent, but you can also subdivide rights into
| two categories: positive and negative freedoms.
|
| Positive freedom is a right to do something. (e.g. free
| speech) Negative freedom is a right to be free of
| something (e.g. violence)
|
| Actually, it just occurred to me that free speech could
| be categorized as both: positive freedom to engage in
| speech and negative freedom to be free of government-
| based silence of that speech. Interesting.
|
| Edit: I guess this is saying the same thing as 'User23
| with so many words; "privileges and immunities" are
| probably better terms to use.
| eqvinox wrote:
| I don't understand your comment. I think you're trying to
| argue something along the lines of law vs. policy, but what
| are you actually arguing?
| jum1p wrote:
| "While the United States supports a free, unregulated approach
| that lets data zip between democratic nations unhindered, [...]"
|
| I think it's no secret that nations with the most market power
| were always for "free trade" and calling it so.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > control data produced within their perimeters
|
| societies, and our regulatory frameworks, need to move beyond the
| idea that "data is produced and resides within a particular geo".
| Not only is it not, it is also holding us back from leaping
| forward / bootstrapping into the beyond-meatspace.
| enasterosophes wrote:
| We did move beyond it, and what we got for it was covert
| operations infiltrating social media to influence national
| elections, along with various large organizations suffering
| ransomware and other hacking over the last few years.
|
| Even if you could go back to the wild west days of the 90s,
| most people these days would just complain about how people
| could go ahead and say whatever they wanted without being
| cancelled.
|
| We started with the dream you're referring to, and it couldn't
| stand up to the crappiness of reality.
| CryptoPunk wrote:
| gjvnq wrote:
| For this to happen, we would need all the world to have
| compatible laws.
|
| Doing that without eroding national sovereignty is essentially
| impossible. We would need something like the European Union for
| all of humanity.
|
| And even the somewhat limited powers delegated to the EU were
| enough to cause serious backslash as we have seen during
| Brexit.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Reality is going to rudely awaken you in the not so distant
| future if that's the way you think the tide is turning.
| bitwize wrote:
| Yeah, we said that in the 90s too, that was the thesis of high-
| minded bullshit from the era like the "Declaration of
| Independence of Cyberspace". Look where it got us.
|
| There is no sphere that is outside the government's control.
| None. Create one, and the government will come round to enforce
| its will on it.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Copyrights, patents, censorship and other kinds of monopolies
| on information are to human civilization as plaques are to an
| Alzheimer's-afflicted brain.
| yardstick wrote:
| Copyrights and patents are quite different to censorship.
|
| Copyrights and parents provide assurances that spending large
| sums of money (millions/billions) to create new technology
| won't be in vain. There are issues with both (too long
| copyright, patent trolls, obvious patents) but they are
| better than not having any protections.
|
| Why would anyone make a movie or game if it's going to be
| almost exclusively pirated? Would anyone invest in new camera
| technologies, computer graphics techniques/algorithms, motion
| capture tools, etc?
|
| Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new
| vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they
| weren't going to get paid for their research. Good will only
| goes so far.
|
| You'd only do it if the budget (risk) was peanuts, and
| unfortunately innovation needs money. People need a roof over
| their head and food on the table. Which would leave only rich
| governments with the means to fund such advancements, and
| their ideology often won't be aligned to such endeavours.
| alexvoda wrote:
| > Copyrights and parents provide assurances that spending
| large sums of money (millions/billions) to create new
| technology won't be in vain. There are issues with both
| (too long copyright, patent trolls, obvious patents) but
| they are better than not having any protections.
|
| That is th biggest lie of intellectual property.
|
| Just having a patent or copyright on something does NOT
| guarantee income. The assurance is a perpetuated myth.
|
| Either are only good if you can find someone willing to pay
| for licences.
|
| In many cases, reality has proven that economic actors find
| it preferable to spend resources to avoid having to pay for
| licences. See all of the duplicate work in IT an patent
| proliferation in pharma.
|
| Many many patents only ever had an impact on the world
| after they expired.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Either are only good if you can find someone willing to
| pay for licences.
|
| Many more patents are created by companies that are
| producing the patented products themselves. They're not
| looking for anyone to pay for licenses, they're looking
| for protection against people copying what they're doing.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| > Many many patents only ever had an impact on the world
| after they expired.
|
| Many trade secrets were lost forever and didn't impact
| the world.
| alexvoda wrote:
| Anything that is worth keeping as a trade secret is still
| being kept a trade secret.
|
| Patents are a tool to disincentivise trade secrets and
| that is good, but they do a lot more than that and much
| of it is harmful.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > they are better than not having any protections.
|
| People keep saying that, but no one comes up with any data
| to back up the assertion.
|
| > Why would anyone make a movie or game if it's going to be
| almost exclusively pirated?
|
| Because they like it? See: 0AD, Nexuiz, Battle of Wesnoth.
|
| > Would anyone invest in new camera technologies, computer
| graphics techniques/algorithms, motion capture tools, etc?
|
| I read someone posing this question and proposing the
| answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they
| want to see.
|
| > Why would anyone spend millions/billions creating new
| vaccines and medicines if anyone could copy them and they
| weren't going to get paid for their research. Good will
| only goes so far.
|
| Wait a minute:
|
| > they weren't going to get paid for their research.
|
| Lack of protection is not connected to lack of
| remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to get
| data from the outer space, despite that data not being
| protected.
|
| > innovation needs money
|
| Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about
| before there was money to spur innovation.
| yardstick wrote:
| > Because they like it? See: 0AD, Nexuiz, Battle of
| Wesnoth.
|
| A drop in the ocean compared to all the other games out
| there. These people could afford to make the games
| because they have other income sources. So sure, if you
| can do it, great. They are the exception not the norm.
|
| > I read someone posing this question and proposing the
| answer that yes, patrons are going to crowdfund what they
| want to see.
|
| Most people wouldn't contribute and just rely on others
| to donate. Limiting the amount of development and
| discovery.
|
| > Lack of protection is not connected to lack of
| remuneration. US government spends millions/billions to
| get data from the outer space, despite that data not
| being protected.
|
| Yes as I said it will then end up being the rich
| governments that get to pick and choose what's important.
| Do you see the US government funding research into safer
| abortion techniques? Improved methods of detecting
| defects in babies (so you can consider aborting them?)
|
| Just look at the lack of innovation in Soviet Russia vs
| America.
|
| > Makes me wonder how the innovation of money came about
| before there was money to spur innovation.
|
| Innovation needs money or barter or other form of
| remuneration.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > A drop in the ocean compared to all the other games out
| there.
|
| You're moving the goalposts. You asked why, and I
| answered.
|
| If you show why they can never possibly become the norm,
| you might have a starting point for more discussion.
|
| > Most people wouldn't contribute and just rely on others
| to donate.
|
| And that's cool. Most people don't use any given product.
| It's those who care that are important here.
|
| > rich governments that get to pick and choose what's
| important
|
| I fail to see how that's different from today. The rich
| are the ones who decide what kind of movies we see,
| Hollywood being a prime example. They decide what kind of
| intellectual property laws exist to favor which research
| or medicines, and they are responsible for ridiculous
| insulin prices (just look at USA versus anywhere else).
|
| If anything, forcing people to self-organize by
| crowdfunding or following their hearts provides a chance
| to shift the balance.
|
| > Innovation needs money or barter or other form of
| remuneration.
|
| Have you never done anything because you got a kick out
| of it?
| lazide wrote:
| Good luck with that when if you're going to be prosecuted for a
| felony or not depends on said meatspace location.
| ddingus wrote:
| Take their point of view: why do they need to do any of those
| things? What is in it for them?
| FredPret wrote:
| Here's the opposite point of view: if the bulk of value is
| created in the ether, why are they relevant at all? All a
| rich nerd needs is a protection from criminals - whether paid
| for publicly or privately.
| ddingus wrote:
| The question I posed may speak to how it may be possible to
| get these entities to move toward a more preferable world
| view.
|
| A rich nerd needs more than criminal protection, BTW.
|
| Just a few basics:
|
| Without the machinery of society running well, wealth
| becomes quite burdensome. The nerd needs said wealth
| recognized, means to transact, enforce contracts, currency
| to trade with, and all that depends on courts and
| governments of some kind. And there is more. I just sort of
| stopped.
|
| There will be value in the "ether", but it will also
| intersect real space and there is the relevance.
|
| Talking about this is sort of like those free energy
| machine discussions where everyone excited about the
| machine potential forgets about the initial energy input
| and how entropy will bleed it away however slowly.
|
| Wealthy nerds do not just appear and create in a vacuum.
| And no judgement on the idealized nerd being discussed.
| Could be a wealthy anyone!
|
| A poor nerd needs the same protection as well as the means
| to do all the basic human stuff needed to exist and
| practice nerdery. (I laughed at that being a defined word)
|
| In terms of being a nerd and creating ethereal value, it
| looks to me like assuming wealth just makes it considerably
| easier to ignore where this stuff meets up with reality, a
| lot like some free energy machine presentations end up
| compelling enough to sideline the initial energy input...
| FredPret wrote:
| Fair points all. I meant my comment mostly in terms of
| negotiation.
|
| Rich nerds don't pop into existence out of a vacuum, but
| now that we exist, we can move to the country that suits
| each of us best and do the same work with roughly similar
| incomes.
|
| Yes, we still need the common infrastructure, but for the
| most part, I need a fast internet connection and a lack
| of bullets coming my way. This drastically reduces the
| hold any one country has over me, which is what allowed
| me to wave goodbye to my country of birth and move to a
| country where I like the tax/spend pattern more (Canada).
|
| Theoretically, one could site all earning, investing, and
| banking in some tax haven and just use a credit card to
| transact. We'll still need countries, but they will be
| more like regular infrastructure providers (civilization
| as a service?).
| bethecloud wrote:
| Decentralized cloud storage will keep data borderless
| kkfx wrote:
| A different point-of-view: on one side _people_ and so _some_
| institutions who happen starting doing a very little part of
| their job start to wonder how "safe" is living on someone else
| computer-systems and want something "more local" under their
| control. On the other some wannabe dictatorships start to think
| that covering their back parts from others propaganda can be good
| for them.
|
| That's NOT at all the end of borderless data, it's just the
| beginning of the end of GAFAM dominion since most States in the
| world and few Citizens start to want their own systems under
| their own control. Witch is actually _mostly_ VERY good, the not
| good part is censorship but the west world authorities can only
| remain silent since their own censorship on their own people from
| Assange to present censorship and mud machines of "third
| parties" subjects they dislike (no matter the reasons), the
| missed part is popular reaction that so far AFAIK is _hyper_ low.
|
| My fellow HNers if we want, for good reasons, a homeserver with
| our data instead of someone else services that can be banned,
| changes overnight in unpleasant manner, ... why someone else
| should want differently? Does this means the end of borderless
| internet? IMVHO _DEFINITIVELY NOT_ it means just the end of some
| hyper giant players witch can be observed elsewhere like the end
| of mega-ships, mega-planes, mega-projects etc or just the passage
| from mainframes to clusters.
|
| The negative part is that we still not get much freedom simply
| because ways to control us are so many that even dropping
| smartphones and IT giants accounts to the bin (witch means GAFAM
| in the west, Yandex in Russia, Tancent in China etc) does not
| change anything since now digital controls is done _by private
| parties_ (the aforementioned giants) under States laws like
| digital payment push, social scoring etc witch is the actual real
| dangerous and disastrous thing. For that the real missed point
| is: people need a basic IT culture to understand because now IT
| is a basic component of our society and to be Citizens we need to
| know a bit our society OR we can only be subjects /parasites.
| Only with such basic culture people in sufficient mass would push
| against certain dangerous aspects ON TIME.
| rglullis wrote:
| Startup idea: mini-datacenters that can be installed in someone's
| basement or apartment building. Residents can run SOLID pods on
| these computers. Instead of user data going to the cloud, the
| cloud providers run their workloads directly on the user pods.
| wmf wrote:
| Just use a regular data center.
| rglullis wrote:
| Maybe I was too subtle. Let me fix it.
|
| As an _user_ , do I really care whether my data is in the US,
| Germany or New Zealand, if all of Big Tech can exploit
| anyway?
|
| The only way for _privacy_ is to have systems that never
| collect the data in the first place.
|
| A lot of the applications that we use today _do not_ need to
| take your data to offer you functionality, but they _could_
| simply push their code to a computing environment controlled
| by the user, and run from there.
| anthropodie wrote:
| Nope. No cloud providers.
|
| My data, my network, my choice how it becomes available to me
| when I'm away from my home. I don't want cloud in between.
| ne0flex wrote:
| Recently, I've received an email from Google saying that my
| account was going to be switched over from Canada to US. I
| created my account in Canada and moved to the US 7 years ago.
| Google determined that since I mainly access my account from the
| US now that the "ownership" of my account should be transferred
| to Google US from Google Canada.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Z2aVm
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20220525122909/https://www.nytime...
| bhewes wrote:
| How I read this is now you need to put data servers in each
| country and follow the local rules related to data control. Says
| nothing about the insights you pull from the data. And the
| internet was built to withstand a nuclear war not some kind of
| utopia borderless data access.
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