Eben Moglen's 2011 Personal Democracy Forum talk on the loss of anonymity and privacy on the internet. He proposes building an alternative net of personal servers, the idea behind FreedomBox.
Why Hacker News points people here: Cited in privacy and surveillance threads as an early argument for personal servers and decentralization.
“Eben Moglen talks about how the internet is going to lose what made it great”HN comment, 2011
“Eben Moglen talks about how the internet is going to lose what made it great”
Moglen on the internet losing anonymity and tracking.
Full comment
The power of the internet comes from anonymity, Eben Moglen talks about how the internet is going to lose what made it great when you are unable to connect to it without an authority tracking your every query, every click and every mouse rollover: this video
Cites itivan_ahJun 2013
“Talk by Eben Moglen about the Feedombox”
Moglen's FreedomBox talk cited for personal servers countering surveillance.
Full comment
The modern version of that is "it's just the metadata." I don't think legislation is the solution to this though. The spying is done because it //can// be done. By using a web application administered by somebody else you have implicitly given them your access logs. The right solution is more along the lines of bringing the power home[1], or friendly neighborhood colocation locations. If the Internet has 1M servers, they can monitor transmission at the large ones. If the Internet had 1B servers on it, they wouldn't be able to handle. [1] Talk by Eben Moglen about the Feedombox: this video
Cites itmorphleJan 2023
Listed among resources on trusting your computer.
Full comment
Can You Trust Your Computer? link Eben Moglen: The alternate net we need, and how we can build it ourselves: this video