Also, Signal does supposedly comply with all lawful warrants. They give over what data they do have when properly requested. It is just they don't normally have much useful data to give.
Meanwhile, Telegram supposedly hasn't been properly handling lawful warrants in many countries and does have interesting data on their servers as only private secure messages are (meaningfully) encrypted and not most messages most users send on the platform
Snap out of it.
I don't know what time period you're thinking of with "It's not the good old days any more. Your government doesn't represent you." Seems like the government represents more people better today than it did in the past given before so many couldn't even vote at all and the government was far more active in suppressing minority rights.
And if its about them snooping in on conversations, these days they have to actually ask a lot of communication providers for data. Back in the day there was only one company providing electronic communications and the government was absolutely listening in to the conversations. Tons of those communications were happening over the air for anyone with the right antenna to listen in. US v. Miller was in 1976 and established what we now know as third-party doctrine.
This is what is called out by Polybius, Socrates, Jefferson, Strauss/Howe as the socio-political cycle.
By the way, until convinced, he's not a criminal.
You don't even see the problem that's crept into your own language, do you?
Freud would absolutely approve.
If you can get arrested for organizing a protest (that didn't even start that), do you still think that those people are criminals? Just look at all the people that got arrested recently in UK... It's sad, and telegram, not being a UK company (imho) shouldn't be forced to give UK government/police peoples ip addresses and phone numbers.
Imagine iran requesting all the IP addresses of people who have viewed gay porn from pornhub (=Aylo or whatever it's called now)
Are you really operating in iran? You don't have servers there, you don't have employees there, you're not a registered company there, what ties do you have with iran? Someone from iran "came to visit"? Sure, so do brits with amsterdam and legal weed.
They just get visitors from UK.
They absolutely should if they want to operate in the UK.
Does HN operate in the UK because I can access it here? Should they be subject to UK law?
If so should the government be allowed access to non-nationals outside the country? How about if a non-national is inside the country communicating with those outside? How about if those folks are journalist reporting where journalism is illegal (see Russia's laws on "fake news" on Ukraine).
I'm not saying your point of view is wrong, but I think its easy to jump to that conclusion as this is probably the least sympathetic case to set principle. But this _does_ set principle.
If eg. Iran requested IP addresses from Pornhub (Aylo?) for all the visitors from iranian ip addresses who have viewed a gay video there, people would be changing their view pretty fast.
They might get "visitors" from UK, but so do "coffeeshops" in amsterdam.
How much of what you use today has anything to do with DARPAs original design goals or funding?
> handed off to the National Science Foundation and then awarded to Sprint
The NSF handled links between Universities and their funding not the Internet in general. Sprint was a primary contractor under this system. None of this should be understood as "the Internet."
> would be torn from the common man
You do appreciate precisely how much open source software underpins everything we're doing, even in typing these comments to each other, over the internet, yes?
I mean.. show me the government plan to build a web browser.
> from its rightful owners
Do you pay taxes? Congratulations. You are the rightful owner.
> into the heartless clutches of government authority
Yea. Hacker News. Typical bastion of mindless worship of "government authority." Then again, if it has the natural right to exist, why does it need my taxes?
The IMP was the first gateway doing what you'd think of today as Network Address Translation, isolating "LAN" from "WAN" and using arbitrary computation to rewrite packets between the two. Though at the time, far more work was needed than just address translation. Wholesale network protocol translation was needed, as every site network (and there were already many small site networks) used its own networking equipment; and each vendor's networking equipment spoke some random stack of proprietary protocols invented by that equipment vendor. (There were nascent standards with open reference-impl hardware, e.g. MIT's Chaosnet, but none of these were widely adopted.) This was true all the way up to the application layer — different networking equipment required different application software that spoke the network's supported application protocols!
The IMP was a programmable router, allowing arbitrary CPU packet translation. So each site network could program the very same IMP with the details of its own network — what each type of local-network packet looked like, and what that should translate to for the WAN; and vice-versa.
This allowed these site networks to be glued together into a larger network. The IMP translated packets, and also "wrapped" each (proprietary, site-local) address of each LAN host, giving it a globally-routable name — i.e. an Internet Protocol address. This allowed machines on these networks to — at least in theory — address other networks' machines. All without anyone having to rip out any networking equipment, or replace each network's host application software with new software speaking standardized protocols.
Once the IMP was released, a bunch of universities and corporations came along and said to BB&N, "oh hey neat, I'll buy one of these! Heck, I'll buy one for each campus!" — and promptly stuck them into each of their (existing!) networks. (Some of these purchases were partially funded by DARPA as well — but only if the buyer reached out to ask.)
This didn't actually get anyone any value at first, because the IMPs still needed to be programmed, not just with the details of their local networking standards, but with the details of what the "WAN standard" application packet protocols would/should be for these local networks to translate things into. There were no standards for that yet.
So the folks doing the networking at these orgs, all got together to discuss how to actually get these boxes they bought to talk to each-other — e.g. what application-layer protocols they would need to invent/standardize on, to then get these gateway boxes to translate into from the proprietary site protocols they were using.
That group became known as the Internet Engineering Task Force, and their meeting notes became known as RFCs. (Read https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1 if you don't believe me.)
Note that they called this WAN network formed by these sites through the IMPs the "ARPA Network" — presumably because that's what BB&N referred to it as, in turn because DARPA funded the IMP with the intent of creating such a network.
But DARPA had no involvement in the actual development of the "ARPA Network"! They weren't even a site on it! They didn't attend the IETF meetings! Rather, DARPA just kinda stepped back and said "go ahead, have fun" — and watched as the Internet took shape.
(I would thus describe DARPA's funding of the BB&N IMP as probably the most successful case of "nudge theory" in history. Almost as if someone at DARPA was a time-traveller who knew that that much effort, and no more, was all that was needed to shift the timeline.)
As it turns out, "throwing money at American-owned private companies who are being the [technological] change you [i.e. the state] wants to see in the world, to advance the technological edge America has over other countries" is a large part of DARPA's mandate. DARPA seeks to incubate a healthy private sector in nascent high-tech industries, so that it can later rely on competition in those industries, to produce a healthy, non-monopolistic set of viable military contract bidders for the military as a whole to choose from / set against one-another.
> How much of what you use today has anything to do with DARPAs original design goals or funding?
100%
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States.[1][2] NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,[3] and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation,[1][4] [5] [6] the state of Illinois,[2] the University of Illinois, business and industry partners,[7] and other federal agencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN_httpd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_Mosaic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCSA_HTTPd
Are you even serious rn?
If you're right then I shall take out my equity in the form of SAM batteries. How many will fit on my balcony.
If any of us had the sense that governments would be mostly in control of the Internet as opposed to actual citizens, I'm not sure any of us would have worked that hard to build it.