Posted by WaitWaitWha 4 days ago
As technologists of multiple stripes and disciplines - programmers, developers, engineers, architects, designers, product managers, etcetera - we need to collaborate more on the direction of our industry as a whole, rather than just specific niches we find appealing. From my specific perspective in IT, the increasing centralization across every vendor category (three major x86 server manufacturers, two CPU vendors, two GPU makers, three global-scale public clouds, ISP mono- and duopolies, a handful of commercial operating systems, a near-monopoly EUVL supplier - the list goes on) is a dire threat to not just the open internet, but open technology in general.
We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time. Mr. Schneier is merely the latest and largest canary in the proverbial coal mine.
Moral: A good TLA can be surprisingly memorable.
(edited)
No, it isn't just you. I didn't get it either. I never understood why some people use obscure acronyms and assume everyone's going to understand that. It's like complete lack of empathy for the reader.
Now that I know CTA means Call to action, its okay but lets be honest that they could have atleast said either CTA (call to action) or just skip the abbreviation itself since I assume a very significant proportion of people were confused so what's exactly the point of an abbreviation like CTA is certainly up to debate and people are definitely debating it so I am waiting for what the overall consensus on the whole thing is :)
The set of people who know the term "solid state drive" is likely a strict subset of the people (mostly tech enthusiasts of some shape) who know "SSD". Same for "USB" and many other terms that have entered the mainstream primarily as an abbreviation.
So the question is not whether to use an abbreviation or spell out the full term as a matter of principle; the question is whether it's the abbreviation or the full term that's more commonly known. I'd argue that way fewer people recognize "CTA" than know the term "call to action". I personally have done some front-end development, and didn't know the abbreviation either.
Oh, and I also don't know why this needs to come up on approximately every single post that has an abbreviation that someone doesn't know.
Legislation the governor signed last week all but guarantees that it won’t see its hundredth birthday except possibly as a sticker on the side of the busses and trains. Within 5 years the agency will only have the duty to plan routes within the city limits, and maybe do some of the driver hiring.
I don't know why people can't not exaggerate things? Doing it is certainly making their message less reliable, not more
How many industries can prosper by defining what the customer should get and have an endless stream of demand in response?
Isn’t GTM just “business 101”? I really don’t understand how people can use the term and not realize they are screaming “we’re going to do the basics of what we should have been doing all along”.
Imagine if software developers championed a “logic” based approach.
I have deduced that it means "of course," but of course since that expression could of course be sprinkled almost anywhere in a sentence without changing its meaning much, it's of course hard to be sure.
Thousands of people are going to read this thing. The writer could spare thousands of people spending tens of seconds (totaling days of human life), by simply spending less than a second spelling out the obscure term.
"In February 2022, two days after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukraine requested that the American aerospace company SpaceX activate their Starlink satellite internet service in the country, to replace internet and communication networks degraded or destroyed during the war.[2][3][4] Starlink has since been used by Ukrainian civilians, government and military.[3][5] The satellite service has been employed for humanitarian purposes as well as defense and counterattacks on Russian positions.[6]"
"In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.[19][20]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russian-Ukrain...
Last time starlink was used to sank tanker near Turkey. It was miracle tanker was empty, and there was no ecological catastrophe!
Yeah… crimes are crimes.
West uses the same logic to bomb neutral tankers, because they may carry weapon or stuff!
edit: I accept I am a somewhat horrible person to even be able to articulate those thoughts.
No, you’re simply thoughtful and a realist. To acknowledge something doesn’t mean you agree with or endorse it.
> We need to be better advocates for and champions of the technological future we envision, rather than just blindly celebrate startups and tech fads all the time.
There are already groups for these things (W3C, ICANN, IEEE, etc.), so how I interpret what you’re saying is that we need to abandon large corporations and go with... what exactly?
I’m not going rally behind a government administration that seeks dictatorial power over everything. That’s much worse than power spread over FAANG.
You can probably say the same for most of STEM academia. That's why I respect the Berkeley people. They are often insane far-far-left zealots, but they are the least corrupted by corporations. That's why you can see great open things like RISC-V come out of "The People's Republic of Berkeley".
Look no further than to corona times, when the LF wanted to develop a global digital vaccine passport. That's basically helping authoritarians, and completely against the open source and decentralization spirit.
A new foudation needs to be laid, banning global corporations from participating. If not, after a few years, due to their power, money and influence, they will have taken over (again).
No amount of ban or rules will prevent those corporations from carrying out a coup on any foundation or even the society itself. They have enough power, money and influence to find loopholes around them and exploit them.
The only way to stop them is to be eternally vigilant, actively recognize their sleazy tactics and push back together as a determined team. That can be achieved only by a smart population whose basic instincts cannot be easily predicted and manipulated by those corporations.
Take the example of the web. When the bigtech hijacked it and went on their bloat-up rampage, the rest of the community should have just forked the standards, cut out the excess fat and extended it with sane, light and orthogonal designs. Instead, we foolishly let chrome extend their monopoly in web development, market share and future designs of the web.
But the rot extends much deeper. Modern educational system teaches us just enough values and advanced knowledge to be the obedient and productive slaves to these corporations, but never enough to question their motives. It misleads us into believing that we and the world economy owe them our survival. It glorifies personal achievements and hyper-individualism to the extend that we suffer major emotional trauma as a result. Yet, are we even compensated appropriately in return for prioritizing our careers? They programmed us to sacrifice our happiness and relationships to enrich some remorseless and obscenely wealthy strangers.
And given that the tech community trends towards political philosophies like libertarianism, which is inherently anti-organization and anti-collectivist, I’m not sure how you begin to scratch the surface of what a real solution looks like.
Does it though? TSMC's market cap is over a trillion dollars. Likewise Nvidia. What's $10B compared to these numbers? Less than 1%. Maybe we couldn't have a thousand of them, but why couldn't we have ten?
Not only that, this technology isn't a single invention, so why does it have to be a single company? Couldn't some companies make the fabs and other ones operate them, causing them each to require less capital and be easier to compete with on its own? Couldn't the various pieces of equipment in the fabs each be developed by a separate company?
"It costs >$10B to do this as a vertically integrated conglomerate" is bad, so maybe don't have that.
In general it's the opposite: Internal politics destroys value and a single point of failure is a business risk even if you own it because failure is rarely intentional.
As an example of the first, Kodak invented digital cameras but then failed to capitalize on them because it would have cannibalized their film business, and now their film business is dead anyway but so is the entire company. As an example of the second, Intel has vertically integrated fabs but now that their fabs are behind it's sinking the rest of the company. You could tell a similar story about AMD a decade and a half ago and spinning off their fabs is a big part of what saved them. IBM was also a big vertically integrated monster back in the day and they got out-competed by, well, everybody, and now they're a hollowed out consultancy.
The way out of this for a large conglomerate is to not take internal dependencies. So for example, Samsung makes both DRAM and devices, and they typically use their own DRAM in their own devices. But it's industry standard DRAM that they sell to anyone who is willing to pay them for it, and if Samsung's DRAM fabs all got destroyed by a natural disaster or their technology fell behind for some reason, their device units could immediately switch to a competitor until their DRAM unit got their house back in order. Likewise, if their consumer devices became uncompetitive their DRAM unit could still sell to the rest of the market because they're not fully beholden to a single internal customer. And having that serves as a canary; Intel didn't have external fab customers so it didn't notice them switching to TSMC, which would otherwise have been a red flag.
The "problem" is that you need to have some foresight. Everything's great until it isn't. If a company waits until one of the internal units has a problem before realizing that it's a single point of failure for other business units, it's too late to redesign the ship after you've already hit the iceberg.
That's politics.
I deliberately left out specific guidance because I wanted exactly the kind of responses we've seen here: a healthy mixture of takes from different backgrounds and perspectives, as well as the opportunity for fatalists to out themselves with the well-tread "just how it is"/"nothing we can do" schtick these sorts of posts tend to encourage. The discussion was the point, and I love seeing the back-and-forth folks have engaged with here over a very broad opinion of mine.
What I'll leave everyone here with is something that's kept me afloat during my own dark times, far, far darker times than we see now:
Just because everything works that way today, doesn't mean it'll work that way tomorrow. None of today was inevitable yesterday, and none of tomorrow is written in stone today. One individual can't fix the world, but enough of us together, focused on a glut of smaller changes, targeting specific problems, acting in concert despite being individuals? That is what drives meaningful change. That is what defines tomorrow.
Don't fret that you can't overturn colossal problems alone. Stop worrying that things have grown too complicated to fix easily. Focus instead on building a community, a movement, an orchestra of change towards causes you believe in. Build more things and share them with others. Do things specifically because you find value in them, even - and especially - if "free markets" or VCs don't. The more you build that you can share, the wider the audience you can reach with your passions, the easier it is to change things for the better.
Immiseration, complexity, monopoly, centralization: they're choices, not inevitabilities.
Part of the reason why we have seen this absurd centralization is complexity. It used to be possible for third parties to tape out an x86-compatible CPU and in fact there were multiple vendors doing this - but it's impossible these days, mostly from a financial viewpoint (you'll probably need a few billion dollars in R&D plus the licensing cost), but also from a technological viewpoint - you'd need to have feature parity with Intel/AMD x86 CPUs and some material improvement actually enticing people to buy your new CPU.
In the end the "free market" will always lead to such concentration effects and, most importantly, to de facto standards because the dominant actor(s) will always be the cross-section of "offers the most features, is used everywhere else, is affordable".
The fix requires governmental intervention (be it anti-trust legislation, mandatory sharing of resources/access for dominant entities or whatever), but sadly we can't even do regime changes to get rid of kleptocrats like the Taliban any more...
Having grown up in a falling communist state full of state sanctioned monopolies I thought free market will sort it out. Later I realised you need a balance between free market and interventionism, but for the latter to work you need a way to prevent corruption and a good justice system. Things that are very hard to come by in many parts of the world
But the nasty awakening? That came crashing hard and painful, once the dust settled, a lot of assets got looted and progress mostly stopped.
Imagine the political revolutions if the petty tyrants take away the circuses.
If you think that working for people is against corporate interests then I think we should just be dine with corporations.
I like people!
TLDR: There are movements like clippy and projects like scaleway and so so many others with forums like lowendtalks etc. to give value on the fact that there are alternatives with open source softwares so we need people who have the knowledge to spark that knowledge in a way understandable by the normal people and that is okay because normal people cant be expected to be all techie like us for the same reason I or you cant be expected to know all about ping pong.
https://www.scaleway.com/en/news/scaleway-launches-its-risc-...
> Featuring the T-HEAD TH1520 SoC, 16GB RAM and 128GB storage at a price of €15.99 per month, Elastic Metal RV1 is accessible to all budgets
Scaleway :- a non three global-scale public clouds offering riscv from a custom manufacturer from a list might be something of your interest then :)
Sir, I understand that the world is getting centralized since that is the fact but I have started to frequent more on https://vpspricetracker.com/ , https://serverdeals.cc/ , https://serververify.com/ , https://lowendtalk.com/ etc. (sorry for sending more links but I have a whole list of awesome stuff on a yopad/etherpad instance)
Most of these websites come from Lowendtalk culture and most/some of these cloud providers were themselves users (I talked to one owner of a vps provider) / power users
Let me try to be clear as to what I am saying here: The issue is convenience. Choosing these three global scale public scales, so if something falls down, its convenient/easy to put the blame on AWS for falling down. Nobody would get fired for picking AWS whereas something can definitely be said if they were other providers aside from these three
Now you can read my other comments where people say that there are not enough offerings and yes there are and please read those comments in sake of not repeating contents.
So basically the issues are incentives/convenience and other issues which can be fixed
If you really want you can colocate on datacenters.
This may not be the comment you might want and even now after saying this, the fact still stands that AWS contains a huge traffic and half the internet basically goes down when US-East-1 falls
But what does CTA mean? CTA in my opinion means giving business to other than these few restricted companies. To be honest, there really isn't a reason for having on them in my opinion both in terms of pricing and many other things.
I long have this opinion that your wallet decides the CTA. Who you fund etc. can be the easiest way to generate momentum and CTA. If you are referring to something like a political agitation/movement, these sound nice (and maybe we should have it) but they suffer from plethora of issues.
There are two ways of going through, either convincing the masses to have political voting and then create laws which try to protect their consumers only for nothing to quite happen on that front (germany has some of the highest protection laws but I am not sure how that prevents the fact that even now AWS exists and the triopoly of cloud for most websites)
These companies have malicious compliance and they have billions of dollars for every loophole so they always move faster than the speed of laws/ their revisions.
A personal movement where we try to shame companies is good but in the end if businesses/people still use them, then there exactly isn't a point of it then, do they?
So basically a movement where awareness is raised about corporations doing good deeds and giving them business seems the best way moving forward.
But there is a fault where I don't really want to associate with Scaleway (as the example I gave) but rather the idea of similar possibilities (hetzner,netcup,contabo,ovh,upcloud,reliablesite I can go all day long :) )
So in my opinion the best call to action is giving people the notion/possibilities that there are other options
Edit: I think that homelabbing genuinely helps, in a way I see all of these communites, VPS hosting, these hosting providers themselves and homelabbing to even homelabbing some raspberry pi's to homelabbing over that old pc that is scraping dust to even Saas providers who run on vercel all on a spectrum of varying degrees
In my opinion, there are some solid software available too and I had thought about compiling my own list of niche softwares/services/knowledge I know about but the thing is, most people aren't interested exactly per se and with the recent ram price increase, I am kind of left out so I am probably going to be hosting stuff on a VPS but the market is thinking of raising prices too so the barrier to entry in these markets might increase. One of the reasons I am unable to tinker with a rasp pi is that although its cheap, I live in third world country and I still need to genuinely think through it as an investment and so I just ran termux on an android tab lying around or even my phone for somedays but having to constantly power them
The point I am trying to make is that somehow if you want call to action, you want to convince the masses and I have seen this happen but it needs to happen effectively with the message and not have to mess with the details within which I constantly see happen here and I am guilty of it because my comment here has a high noise:signal ratio but I hope that people are able to make effective slogans/things which stick with people about it
Admittedly, the Clippy Movement by rouis lossman is the only one of such "movements" which has gotten movement and I still see clippy heads (lmao) and I have found that basically clippy heads and I and potentially you and other people reading this on hackernews too.
I don't think that we should seperate movements/spin many tho, that seems antithetical to me personally and I am an idealist in many cases so If the new movements get so detached from average person it can be hard to gain base/support in the first place so movements like clippy are good enough to spread our messages too
I was a clippy head on discord and many places but I slowly removed it from discord but I still have it on YT but I think that there are ways to really condense a lot of information for the average clippy protestor / helping them install linux and many other things
There is no catharsis of the whole situation if you want me to have. The world both looks good and bad at the same time and its mixed.
I think that the only thing we can do is be a realist and still try because we must live and trying is the only thing we can do but I (try?) but sometimes we live in our own bubbles so detached from reality and this is something I am going to work on (on how to communicate to the normal population like jeff geerling is a really good example at it too for homelab nerds, hi jeff if you are reading this)
Guess what, by large Russian media is no different to any Western media in terms of propaganda and the "us good, them bad" narrative. Russian media advances Russian interests, American media advances American interests and so on. Take any media openly hostile to the state's foreign policy and it will prosecuted no matter the country. Wikileaks, The Intercept, Junge Welt to name a few.
Is it really your opinion if you're paid to pretend to hold it?
What's particularly insidious is the asymmetry: governments can coordinate offline through military/police radio while citizens lose all communication infrastructure. The $1.5B average economic impact cited in the article is conservative - it doesn't account for destroyed business relationships, lost international contracts, or long-term reputation damage from being seen as "internet shutdown country."
The technical countermeasures are evolving but limited. Mesh networks like Briar or Bridgefy work peer-to-peer over Bluetooth but have tiny range. Satellite internet (Starlink) requires hardware that's easy to detect/confiscate. eSIM switching only works if neighboring countries' towers reach across borders. The hardest problem is the "last mile" - even if you can get data out via satellite/mesh, how do you distribute it locally when cellular is down?
We need international frameworks treating internet access as critical infrastructure with humanitarian protections, similar to water/electricity during conflicts. The ITU could mandate technical transparency - requiring governments to publicly log shutdown orders with specific geographic/temporal scope rather than blanket national blackouts. That wouldn't prevent shutdowns but would create accountability records.
Advantage: You no longer need to fix that leap day bug on your website.
Weinberg’s 2nd Law:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
However, it does heavily relay on the internet for setup and distribution (app stores, or else lots of pip install, git clone, pnpm install, etc.)
I've been working on a virtual machine with all the dependencies preinstalled just so I'll have offline access, and it's surprisingly difficult (though I'm not super familiar with typical webdev stuff). I'd have to think a regular user who really needs to rely on it doesn't stand a chance, which doesn't seem to mesh(ha) that well given how loudly the "off gridness" of it is touted.
Then again, you probably need the internet to be able to obtain the hardware in the first place, but that's another problem.
I wish we had an HF ISM band that could be used for this purposes without needing a license, combined with LoRa radios would yield great results
https://time.com/4150891/republican-debate-donald-trump-inte...
As you may be well aware, Arpanet - the original internet - was designed to be resilient against the deliberate targeting of any of its infrastructure nodes. Of course, it had a military objective. But that design was actually useful to the broader humanity too. We could have sticked to a uniformly resilient multilevel mesh design for the entire internet.
I'm sure that many people will object to this notion with multiple potential problems and several anecdotes. This is something that the corporate world always does. They choose and popularize inferior or suboptimal designs that serve their interests and then insist that it is the only way to do it. But we have numerous individual experiments and projects that demonstrate how effective the original mesh design was - bittorrent, wireless meshnets, IPv6 overlay networks, etc. We just had to put enough effort into it to create a singular cohesive resilient network.
We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
<< We inherited the current mess that we call the internet because several layers of it were centralized to satisfy corporate interests. They are responsible for our current predicament in the first place.
Separately, it does open an interesting question. Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose ( solar system internet -- assuming private space exploration takes off). I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite ( I am assuming a lot now ) communication standard.
Interesting question. I think that the arpanet took that design because it started as a research project. The corporations today are unlikely to have ever adopted such a design. I don't know how the corporations back in the day were. And as for the actual planners, the relevant question is if they had any reason to believe that it wouldn't grow so big so fast. We know so many examples where research labs and academia came up with products that are revolutionary. Perhaps they did imagine the possibility and were generous enough?
> Right now the push is to centralize, BUT lets speculate if they would push for decentralization if it meant it became useful for a different purpose. I wonder if they would try to cooperate vs force 'their' satellite communication standard.
That's a very tricky question too. Here's what I think. They would probably cooperate and create an open standard - but only because they want to compete with the dominant player with the first-mover advantage. And that standard would also be so complex that it defeats the purpose of being open, and only they can practically setup anything with it. This is trend that we see widely today - the web standards, kubernetes, bios (or equivalent) firmware, many parts of the Linux software ecosystem, etc. They don't go for the simplest, most logical, orthogonal and easy-to-implement designs, ever.
Of course, once jamming enters the picture, even that lifeline disappears.
Note that one of the higher-profile deliberate internet shutdowns was Starlink itself shutting down internet connectivity in Ukraine.
Neither option is risk-free; the failure modes simply differ.
A government can shut you off for political reasons, a corporation can shut you off for contractual or geopolitical ones.
As long as the system assumes centralized stewardship for safety or reliability, someone will inevitably hold the switch — the only variable is who.
multiple satellite operators are coming on line. what are the odds all of them coordinate to shut down in one region invalidating using the other providers as fail over?
Starlink is often treated as the reference point not because it is perfect or fully resilient, but because there is no second network at a similar scale that could realistically serve as a failover today.
If we imagine a hypothetical future where three mature operators exist, then yes — absent coordinated political or geopolitical action, at least one network might remain online.
However, even that surviving operator would not necessarily provide full coverage of the affected region. Global redundancy is extremely hard in practice, because maintaining continuous, worldwide LEO coverage is not free — it requires massive capex and opex, ground stations, regulatory permissions, and local political approval.
True worldwide failover remains more of a theoretical construct than an operational reality.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/07/elon-musk...
Probably because it's not actually a truthful characterization of what happened! I know it's popular to find every possible reason to bag on Musk, but you don't need to resort to disinformation to do it.
We need some similar killer application for satellite connectivity and mesh networking. Something that makes the technology so requested and so ubiquitous in such a short time that it couldn't be banned even if they tried.
Is that really? US government has tanks, bombers, missiles and tactical nukes while "a well regulated Militia" have petty rifles and motolovs.
It's very easy for US government to cause state-wide power blackout, effectively shutdown Internet.
>A country’s ability to shut down the internet depends a lot on its infrastructure. In the US, for example, shutdowns would be hard to enforce. As we saw when discussions about a potential TikTok ban ramped up two years ago, the complex and multifaceted nature of our internet makes it very difficult to achieve. However, as we’ve seen with total nationwide shutdowns around the world, the ripple effects in all aspects of life are immense. (Remember the effects of just a small outage—CrowdStrike in 2024—which crippled 8.5 million computers and cancelled 2,200 flights in the US alone?)
>The more centralized the internet infrastructure, the easier it is to implement a shutdown. If a country has just one cellphone provider, or only two fiber optic cables connecting the nation to the rest of the world, shutting them down is easy.
Nukes and tanks weren't built for internet shutdowns, and it's a ridiculous idea that if the US government decided to do an internet shutdown that they would decide to use a nuke for that.
PS: ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons for the TLA-haters here.
It probably has something to do with the strict top-down control structure. It's a Linux vs Microsoft situation. Large organisations, regardless of type, cannot innovate.