Restarting from scratch the whole computer stack is not possible in a foreseeable future. The thing is even if at the processor level things are broken (heartbleed, et al) not all processors are broken (RISC-V?).
I can not imagine things to change overnight, even if **some** people size the means of production. Like you wrote the whole (software) system is built around domination. Sizing production facilities will, in my opinion, change the people in power, not the system. In particular, it will not change people's minds Earth-wide.
FOSS was a step in a good direction. Because the system is the way it is. FOSS has put another oligarchy in power and created new monsters, but those kind of monsters existed before FOSS. The good thing about FOSS is that it exhibits, once more, that **together we are stronger**.
One can swap a processor with another, given enough work.
One needs to give some existence to an alternative system, and that should be done at every level of the stack.
edit: that should be done at *every* level of the stack
@zig @emsenn @theruran I disagree with him about the impossibility of restarting the whole computer stack.
The lowest and medium layers must be fully re-engineered, let's say up to kernel level, and eventually we can easily adapt existing OS on top of this.
You know why I think like this. Hope you did not changed your mind.
This is why I have asked you to participate to the definition of crypto-anarchism & demilitarized technologies. It's a way to adjust goals and clearly remember them, allowing several strategies to reach them to naturaly emerge. Theruran, we've both done a lot of good work toguether with our informal chat on several matters.
We should deepen all this.
Kind regards,
Frederic.
@stman I understand. I was boosting @zig post for visibility since I think it's important to hear different angles on the topic.
yes, we need a decentralized economic system to support the decentralized information system development and stewardship. to the extent possible, these should be designed together.
I sent you a DM earlier about definitions. Lemme know and we can iterate on some things.
Peace!
/cc @emsenn
can testify that we did a nice work, a conceptual and theorical one, leading to what we can call crypto-anarchism situationism, that diffetenciate itself from classical crypto-anarchism, by the enphasis put both on architectures of all known technological layers and time.
Kind regards,
Peace,
Frederic.
Hello,
I introduce to you @mouloud who he is more aware of philosophical implication and sometime technical details of the actual the (sort of) system we have been working on.
I forward a very **serious** question from him, since the convo was not federated on his instance yet:
What is the point of money or crypto-money?
My question is indeed what is the point of money whether it is crypto or not. I know a little about bitcoin (proof-of-work: evil for climate so far) and Ethereum (algorithmic contracts, good idea as far as I understand, but still PoW).
The idea of a single source of thruth is neat, and would be useful to avoid lies or fakes in a distributed system.
Money used to be used a means of exchange something of value for the rich that is gold. That by itself shows how dubious money seems, because gold is almost useless in practice. Nowadays, money has mostly only virtual value, because people trust the system, and the people in power somewhat trust each other and they agree through the market on exchange rates.
Anyway, take of instance "carbon budget" of countries, it can be exchanged for money. And they that "carbon budget" can be used to produce new products.
With the money, a low carbon footprint country can bargain to buy some products.
During this exchange the low carbon footprint might have lost value because conditions of the exchanges and the dubbed added value to the products.
It is far fetched, but to me their should be no money, hence probably no crypto-money.
A single-source of truth is helpful, but I am not convinced it is necessary, and is certainly not necessary in a fully cooperative system with no evil.
Thanks including me in the convo.
They have locked down our ability to change most of the architectures because they know that cyber-powers and cyber-rights models are exclusively the consequence of those architectures, and they want to impose us their own models, by forcing us to play with their architectures, protecting their models, and therefore, their political and failing economical system, in essence, capitalism. Doing so, they are preventing a crypto-anarcho-communist revolution.
Here it is.
But in order to implement this at world scale, we obviously need alternative cyberspace architecture that offer the equivalent of blockchain functionnalities in its core, as a service, scalable to billions transactions per second.
And this cannot be clearly achieved with the current cyberspace architecture design and paradigm, not with current digital system architectural paradigm.
In such paradigm, every citizen would have a kind of multi-wallet attached to him, beside standard wallet and bank accounts, to count those credit left for him on those hundreds of "criterias", and he would not have the possibility to "recharge" a specific line with monay. In order to buy a good or service, citizen would be obliged to have credit left on all fields, beside having the money to buy the good or service. This incentively would force citizen to @zig @theruran @emsenn
By the way, homomorphic cryptography would be very usefull to help create a cyberspace architecture allowing to easily handle for each citizen the multi-wallet holding those hundred "credit lines".
It's typically a functionnality that would require to be provided at cyberspace architecture level in order to be scalable. And this is not possible with the current cyberspace architecture paradigm.
Cybernetics of trust cannot be achieved with current cyberspace.
@mouloud This kind of logic I presented you here is anarcho-communist compatible. It would lead to a money less and class less society, without fascism, just with incentive logic, but it can work only if it is incorruptible.
This is because such functionnalities, scalable, real time, can only be achieved with revolutionnary alternative cyberspace architectures, enabling such cybernetics of trust, that we advocate, as crypto-anarchist situationist, to change of
What is hard, and Theruran knows it, is how to ensure those fundamental blocks cannot be "hacked", and how to garantee they will really work as expected with no treachery possible. This is indeed what we are working on. Globaly, this is called cybernetics of trust, but it is also fulyl demilitarized as it is not hackable, there are no backdoors possible of any kind.
@stman @mouloud @zig Thanks for the discussion. I enjoyed reading so far!
Yes, and about code - that is the kind of knee-jerk reaction that people have nowadays and it prevents everyone else from understanding what they are doing. Documentation of every kind is key, unlike the prevailing software engineering practices that lack rigorous conceptual design development phase. Visual documentation is also of course important, and to maximize the utility it must also be an executable architecture model.
Well - if we can theorize another way of achieving an equivalent security model and utility to Bitcoin without the energy consumption, that would be incredible. As far as I know, there is no alternative yet conceived and the energy consumption keeps the system honest. And unfortunately, no one I have met in the fediverse thus far is qualified to theorize such an alternative. There are real engineering constraints and trade-offs that are glossed over in these kinds of discussion, and I doubt that billions of transactions per second is achievable due to laws of physics. It is my expectation that such a decentralized and trustworthy cybersystem will be slower in many ways but is nevertheless fast enough for us to get real work done and not just mindlessly consume Big Media.
P.S. come to hackers.town - we got 10,000-character toots!
@theruran can be achieved when integrating this natively inti the cyberspace architecture itself. Time will tell. I'm still thinking about this and working on it, exploring possible native implementations a lot. I tend to mix DHT concept with PoW in a native mesh cyberspace architecture to do it for the moment, but I am exploring other possibilities too. Will tell if I find something promizing. @mouloud @zig
@theruran things become fun.... And new possibilities for simpler algorithms, and with less energy consumption than classical PoW become possible, to enable many of the current blockchains functionnalities, at rate reaching billions of operations per second. But the technological digital paradigm is radicaly different, we're talking about fully synchronous time sensitive digital systems and cyberspace architectures. So you see, I'm confident. @mouloud @zig
@theruran There is an anachist saying that also do apply to crypto-anarchism that says "If it (technology) is not accessible to the poors (masses), it's neither social nor revolutionnary". Accessibility here must be understood both financialy to gain access to a technology, but also to understand how it works... You know, this "Horizontalization of the trust model in the development of free technologies"... This famous complexity overdose that ruins most FOSS benefits... @mouloud @zig
@theruran In such paradigm, simpler protocols, with fully distributed small mining capabilities in each node of a truly mesh cyberspace architecture, and within each microprocessor, can bring the time sensitive trust chain needed to replace the current blockchain implementation, with its energyvore mining. That's what I curently think.
@mouloud @zig
@theruran How shall I understand time-server here ?
We are in a truly serverless paradigm. I prefer you to talk about a fully distributed way to create a global synchronous clock. I know it is hard, so much we have been druged and brainwashed with the client-server paradigm elevated to the rank of religion by cyber-creationists, but wipe it from your head, at least when reasonning in those alternative cyberspaces architectures paradigms.
It is called TrueTime
ref: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-consistency
@mouloud @theruran @zig Being able to finaly manage perfectly time is an easy consensus we should be able to easily reach when it is to debate of what kind of new "functionnalities or services" to implement natively in an alternative synchronous cyberspace architecture. But in such paradigm, the whole technological stack and mesh cyberspace chain must be design oriented toward perfect synchronous time management, microprocessors and microprocessors based systems too.
@mouloud @theruran @zig Even for example, crime investigations, having a cyberspace that allow to backward events or transactions precilsely is something that is missing currently. Too many folks really misunderstood me about what I was meaning by crypto-anarchism (cybernetics of trust, enabling true anarcho-communist like societal alternatives), they thought it was crypto-libertarianism, that favor mafia and corruption, and don't favor or incite solidarity, social justice and peace.
@mouloud @theruran @zig Mastering cyber-powers and cyber-rights models, in a garanteed way, enforcing them, through well designed architectures, allows us to choose and fine tune our models, to in the end reach a peacefull crypto-anarco-communist society, without destroying individual liberties, or human rights. I have always been talking about sustainable and efficient global ballance of powers and cyber-powers. Contrarily to crypto-libertarians.
What I want to write has two sides a) I believe there is a slow, smooth path toward libertarian socialism. Stronger claim, it is the only viable path. I believe a brutal change is not possible. Feeding the "revolution" meme as in the french revolution of 1789 is counter productive. If anything like that would happen, that is again the people sitting at the first row that will be taking advantage of it like bourgeoisie has taken advantage of french revolution.
b) I agree there is a need to THINK about the new system but also the think about path toward that system. It is necessary to DOCUMENT and prove, if not necessary, at least that there is sufficient alternatives. And toward that goal, I am confident that one can not just reboot the system with a new operating system. That is, one need an upgrade path, and step by step hotfix, and swap existing cyber infrastructures with better ones.
I might be wrong, but I consider code to be XXI literacy. We can live without code and go back to caves or something. But if we want to human science, say medicine, to progress with need computers and code.
In other words, yes you can try to convince people with free-form text, and think about new socioeconomical systems. But eventually, people will go back to their usual routine business as usual privative tools.
Toward that goal I have been working on alternative "operating system" that is supported by a DHT.
It will allow to not only copy but also improve the user experience of the www.
So far my work has been concerned about offering better alternatives to mastodon, mediawiki and to some extent google search engine.
I have not touched yet, other aspects like factories, production chains, logistic and many others...
what's with this meme of calling things operating systems when they're really application runtimes? if you aren't the interface to the metal, you aren't an OS.
i'm interested in making a p2p native microkernel operating system, but I don't have any illusions that the tracker runtime itself is an OS. its a set of portable libraries that run on top of an operating system.
@xj9 @zig @theruran @stman @toast
The idea of what is an operating system is completely skewed by the domination unix. What I know of plan9 does not bring much new things in that space.
Things like ocaps or distributed ocaps makes me think we, humans, could be locked up outside the "OS".
Like the rest, it is built on what sort-of works (coming from the past), that is itself biased toward reproducing or implementing known systems like hierarchy (conway law).
operating systems have always been a layer between applications and the hardware. there are dozens of examples of this that are not derived from unix. every operating system shares that trait, regardless of the specific architecture. you don't have to have an operating system though, you can use a unikernel approach and run software directly on the hardware, but you have to sacrifice a certain amount of inter-application security if you take this approach. otherwise you have to run a hypervisor which can hopefully contain the unikernels.
a capability based operating system is good for extending the capability model from the runtime down through the userspace servers to the metal. conceptually integrating the entire stack's security design. you could go further and build some capability support into the metal, but I still don't see the point of wasting all of the existing silicon. we should probably work with what we have for now and build a global meshnet of Wii's.
I just feel like there won't be feasible ways of using this hardware in the future. Energy will be scarce, and manufacturing facilities will stop producing critical components such as the RAM. We will have piles of electronics with no manuals/schematics and not enough power to run them but for a short time anyway.
so there's not going to be enough energy to repurpose a nintendo wii for networking applications, but there's enough energy somehow to manufacture some new silicon tech? or are you proposing some type of biological compute system?
i don't buy it.
reverse engineering existing hardware is difficult work, but from my perspective a much less wasteful approach. there are metric tons of toxic silicon that we need to do something productive with. i don't have access to the resources to process and recycle silicon, but if that's part of this new cyber thing you might have my attention. otherwise, i ask that you refrain from poisoning the earth any more than we already have.
I lost the URL, but there is at least one project that aims to build a minimal OS that would be very easy to port to any hardware. Well, now that I re-think about it there is many such OS.
The conversation went into several direction. One of them is to create new hardware with the idea of supporting a non-kyriarchy.
I gotta think about that some more, but it falls within the scope. The silicon wafer manufacturing process being developed by #LibreSilicon is a key component.
I'm not sure what to do with the old hardware yet. The best I can think of right now is to use it to virtualize the system we propose.
Consider the path of no action - all that hardware will go to waste anyway. e-recycling is shit. 
@xj9 @zig @theruran @mouloud @xj9 How can't you see the point ? it is obvious : Too many integrated circuits backdoors (secret NSA ones, and official ones like Intel ME) and architectural backdoors (also called security breaches) published these last 3 years. Almost all current integrated circuits being closed source into black boxes.
how can't you see how manufacturing more silicon harms life on earth? not only because of toxic byproducts and the products being toxic themselves, but there are no ethical sources of raw materials that i know of. even megas with massive resources will not fully audit their supply chains because they know they'd find child labor and be sanctioned for it.
@xj9 @zig @theruran @mouloud But this is not even the main issue. The main issue is that its hardware and microprocessors and integrated architectures are fixed, imposed, and this is greatly limiting what can be build with these legos and on top of them at software architecture level in a way you seem to have no idea. You are being forced to perceive code as solething exclusively running on a centralized turing machine.
i'm familiar with FPGAs and i think programmable hardware is an interesting alternate architecture for computers. i question using new hardware in general because of massive amount of toxic waste that any kind of silicon manufacturing produces. even etching PCBs produces toxic waste.
@xj9 @zig @theruran @mouloud And this a much bigger limitation than what you seem to perceive. It is the biggest digital jail your mind is being trapped into, limiting your creativity for designing alternatives in a huiuuuuge way. You're been brainwashed by digital-creationists, also called US military "digital things" industrial complex.
My use of the words "operating system" may be misguided, even if in the grand scheme of things I would like to get rid of the linux kernel or bsd. I do not have a completely clear idea of that yet.
> Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.
> Peter Drucker
@mouloud @theruran @zig But cyber-chaos will strike them all like the coronavirus.
Everybody on earth is ready to contribute to save the earth and ecology, but the accounts must be right, trusted. Without recreating trust between everybody, novody will cooperate, but instead, fight to death to survive.
Demilitarized Cybernetics of Trust is not an option, it's vital for collective survival and global true & fair cooperation.
@mouloud @theruran @stman TrueTime requires special hardware it was (somewhat?) replicated by cockroachdb and TiKV without the specific hardware. Apparently, foundationdb bypass that requirements completely.
Speaking of hardware and OS, read http://rumpkernel.org/
@zig @mouloud @theruran Sincerely, very sincerely, the Kernel concept as we know it, fully dependent of microprocessor's programming model, is to me fully outdated. The OS concept is outdated too, and must be re-engineered. Both concepts, kernel and OS, suffer a centralized aspect that nobody ever managed to get rid of, because nobody ever asked himself if these centralized conceptions where necessary, and why we had better prefer decentralized approaches. To me, kernels will disappear, and OS
@zig @mouloud @theruran concept will be seriously re-engineered in a decentralized way.
Of course, the cyber-powers that be and rule, crypto and cyber creationists (It's another way to politely say cyber-imperialist hegemonist) will disagree, but I don't give a fuck.
May I ask all of you a question ?
What is the most important constraint to ensure an alternative cyberspace architectures belongs to, and servs, equaly, all the people on earth ? I will answer last.
@zig @mouloud @theruran And what is responsible of such disaster ? The MMU/PMMU concept IMPOSED by microprocessors architects & vendors to software kernel designer, that have choice but to play and do what they can with this fully outdated concept that are MMU/PMMU as we know them. Even ARM TrustZone falls into this category. I'm saying this because ARM folks tend to pretend conceptual superiotity with TrustZone, which is completely false.
What is the most important constraint to ensure an alternative cyberspace architectures belongs to, and serves, equally, all the people on earth?
Thinking about this at first it seemed that decentralized governance of a copyleft architecture specification and implementation would be the deciding factor its sustainability. I don't think this is what you're asking though.
Even with a successful global multistakeholder cooperative that provides architecture governance, the architecture itself could still be shit. We see this today already and we should be aware that people like to pile on their CVs because they're careerists and don't care about doing great work. A co-op would look nothing like the Linux Foundation of today though, but that's a topic for another time.
The deciding factor in ensuring the alternative cyberspace architecture remains free to everyone forever -- I am convinced -- is that the architecture model is fully self-documenting. We don't see this anywhere except in aerospace / military industrial applications which are obviously classified and proprietary. Even there it is extremely expensive and not widely practiced. Fully model-driven engineering is extremely powerful but again, every model element needs to be richly documented so full documents and books can be generated from the model.
Part of the problem is the garbage tooling available. The rest is the capitalist culture of withholding information for profiteering. When only an elite cadre of engineers understand the system, everyone suffers. We see this today with our computing systems both proprietary and FOSS. Public domain or strong copyleft are of course important but useless without the effort spent documenting the architecture.
We may understand constraints differently, so I still don't know if I am answering your question as you intended. Constraints have a specific engineering definition and are dealt with differently by systems engineers - I am just learning they may be recast as optimization goals.
What is most dangerous centralized aspect in software kernels like Linux in terms of cyber-security model?
The MMU is provided by the microprocessor, so do you mean the virtual memory / page tables managed by the kernel? Linux' fault is that it's a monolithic kernel of C code. But even advanced separation kernels are not saved from the vulnerabilities of the microprocessor microarchitecture. Then the idea of an Abstract C Machine is all about sequential processing so that's why things like the MMU exist and there's your architectural bottleneck - Achilles' heel right there! So yeah - there is software maintaining security barriers around memory and that software sucks; and the microcode and hardware architecture of the microprocessor also tries to place security barriers but due its unmanaged complexity creates more side channels instead.
I am impressed by your answers, not only because they are according to me fully true, but because I was desperate to find some people able to write such thing.
As promized, I am going to give mine, very close from yours, you will see, and another one I got from a sociologist that is also computer hacker & FOSS + Open hardware entousiast, as his answer was mainly driven by his sociological culture and he through a very interesting idea in how to answer the question.
You and I are mostly influenced by our technical skills, therefore taking care of architectural and implementation aspect of the question, but a sociologist sees such question differently, and this is why such question should be asked to other motivated people who have different skillset than ours.
Going to generate a pic as writting them doing doesn't fit in a post. Plus definitely going to move to your instance because I am fed up about this.
Now we can start prioritizing more things, and open some collective pads to do it, but at least between the two os us, the consensus is huge, is indeed total. We both intellectualy stimulate each other's creativity very efficiently, and I am personnaly very satisfied by the conceptual work and innovation and exploration we are doing. We are more than complementary.
Kind regards to you,
Frederic.
@theruran Yes it is. And designing these synchronous systems is not a complex task. It's a KISS approach that don't require so much use of complex crypto, indeed it makes everything much more simple, and would consume much less energy. This is why I always remind everybody that blockchains are not the nirvana, it may be the best implementation possible in the current cyberspace and computer systems architectures paradigm, but we can do much better. :-) With infinite scalabily. @mouloud @zig