How's Ubuntu (or hell, any Linux distro) for mobile going to change what I outlined? It's not going to matter what OS you're running once all the important websites and services you use every day (up to and including government services) start requiring some form of attestation or other layers of security that will no doubt only be provided by a few locked-down vendors. Once that happens, your Ubuntu Touch phone will be about as useful as a Nokia 3310, at least online. After all, it's <0.01% of the market and open (therefore dangerous), Google or Microsoft or Apple aren't going to sign off on that. A natural consequence of that will be that "unsecured" devices will be stamped out, perhaps not by force, but just economically. That's the day when what I described will just become mundane reality.

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__MatrixMan__ 9 days ago | parent [-]

When that happens we'll abandon the web as you described it and build a new one that better resists the cancer. Honestly there are a lot of bad decisions baked into out default stack that it's gonna be refreshing to be rid of. Not just malware and corporate overreach, but 1980s thinking that seemed fine at the time and turned out to not be.

So to answer your question: Ubuntu will let you access the next web, and Android probably won't.

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tavavex 9 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why the assumption that there will be a new web?

If you're talking about developing some brand new means of worldwide communications, this seems extremely improbable if done by the 1% of the rest of us (basically, hobbyists and techy people). The internet required tens of billions of dollars worth of development and infrastructure to get to this point, how will it ever happen without the sponsorship of large centralized entities?

If you're talking about leeching off the existing internet infrastructure to communicate with some brand new protocols over them, who's going to let you do that? Both companies and governments would have incentive to put a stop to this in any way possible, because it drives away customers from the manufacturers and signers of all "secure" devices and lessens the amount/value of surveilled data. It may be allowed at a small scale, but I'm not seeing how anything long-term could be established that could threaten the existing powers in any way.

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__MatrixMan__ 9 days ago | parent [-]

Its just a pattern I see repeated. The innovators find a playground, its cool for a while, then it succumbs to grift of some kind or another, and the innovators move on.

There was a time when "pamphlets" were an edgy new social medium, now its just a certain kind of ad. Same thing happened with radio. And now it has happened to the web also.

Why should this be the last time?

As for threatening the existing powers... I don't see what power they have if all they're guarding is a pile of stuff that nobody wants anymore.

It may be a bit inconvenient, but if you really need a device with radios that you can run arbitrary code on, you can get one for something like $4 and you can use your existing phone to drive it over something generic like http (There are plenty of people on meshtastic doing this).

I don't have the answers re: next steps but I know that its far more difficult to prevent people from communicating in novel ways than it is to come up with novel ways to communicate. I figure we've been playing this cat and mouse game with authority for millennia: they always win eventually and we always find a new way to make that victory irrelevant.

We lost. OK. What's left to do but invent the next battleground? We're hackers, its what we do.

	▲	tavavex 8 days ago \| parent [-]
		> There was a time when "pamphlets" were an edgy new social medium, now its just a certain kind of ad. Same thing happened with radio. And now it has happened to the web also. Why should this be the last time? It feels like the last time because the pace of world-changing innovations is slowing. Printing and radio are simple from a physics point of view, the internet was built at the basis of what was known technology at the time (computers in general). To me it seems that we're butting against the limits of simple stuff, and that the pace of rapid monumental innovations has slowed drastically. A new, revolutionary type of communications probably isn't impossible, but it would likely require inventing a whole new kind of communicating between people, or a new type of computing (I'm assuming you're taking the 'new kind of tech' choice from my previous comment - just reforming the internet on its infrastructure probably won't work). And neither of those seem like things that we're remotely close to. It may take decades if not more. > As for threatening the existing powers... I don't see what power they have if all they're guarding is a pile of stuff that nobody wants anymore. It's not about what you want, it's about what you need. Do you ever access your government's services? Do banking, pay people with anything but cash, or invest into anything? Hold a job or are looking for one? Learn remotely? If you need to do any of those things, you will be obligated to use the future internet. That's where the power is. Uprooting all this will be difficult if not impossible, barring some catastrophic internet-wide event.

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jibal 9 days ago | parent | prev [-]

No, that obviously won't happen.