Travel back in time?!? Feh, it wasn't that long ago. I remember it well.

At least, September 1993 was when I started hurling sharp objects....

In some important ways, it is. The process isn't complete, but there is a fundamental change happening, and it will discomfit some of us.

The days of 'Homesteading the Noosphere' (as ESR put it), are coming to a close. Scale, network topologies, business models and legal encroachment on the principles of individual online freedom are all conspiring to make the technological world we live in substantially more constrained than it's been since the internet became part of our lives.

The land rush is over, the cowboys are gone (either buried or rich) and the homesteaders are being bought out by the speculators and tycoons. Community-based governance is under siege by national and international interests.

And this is being reflected in the tech world. The craftsman's approach to software (always greater in repute than in reality) is decidedly more difficult to practice as a trade than it was. Toolkits are giving way to frameworks and apps replace applications. Backyard-mechanic roadsters and dirt-track races are swallowed up by Nascar - VCs get us excited by the prospect of building only big enough to sell out to someone bigger.

The physical networks themselves are being taken back by the telcos and proffered to governments for surveillance in exchange for ever more egregious rent-seeking behaviour. What we used to call sharing is now piracy. The word 'copyright' now means 'don't copy at all, ever.'

And in the midst of it all, we're grateful to lockin-vendors who make Free software difficult, if not impossible, to use. We rent what we used to own. Even our identities are no longer our own.

I grieve to say it, but unless there's a sudden and immense resurgence of the DIY spirit, especially in peer networking and distributed data, we're going to fall back into the bad old days of the dumb terminal and the smart network. And that network's smarts will not exist for our benefit.

I'm pushing 50 now, and do I fear change? Not really. I just regret the lost freedom, the creative anarchy of the '90s, the ability to hack something cool and new, the chance to achieve things never before possible. It's not gone yet. We could still turn things around. But every day we don't brings us a day closer to the day when we can't any longer.

You know what? Fuck your cynicism. (Not you, your cynicism.)

Speaking as someone who lives in a country with a history of consistently corrupt, dysfunctional governments, without any kind of police presence in the community, with disgustingly poor health and education services, this litany of complaint and hopelessness sounds to me like nothing more than childish whining.

It wasn't always this way, and frankly, I don't care what happened that reduced the Americans in this audience to such a useless bunch of wankers. But merciful god, could you please show at least a modicum of intelligence and - yes, I'll say it - hope?

You people really have no fucking clue what it's like to live in a broken society. But if you don't shut the fuck up, learn a civics lesson or two and start fixing things, you're going to find out. And before you tell me it's too late, I'm here to say that if you think that, you honestly don't have any fucking idea how bad things can get.

There are very definite steps you can take to curtail this kind of intrusion on press freedom, only the first of which is to shout loud and long to your representative not to stand for it. So get off your ass, shut the fuck up with the whining, and get to fucking work.

Hugs, from the developing world.

I like B most, with C as a viable option if B isn't possible.

But emphatically: No, I don't ever advise waiting. What I meant to say is that when someone comes to me with a proposal like this (i.e. to give offline wikipedia devices to students) I suggest that they push harder to get internet into their target schools as well. In my experience, having internet connectivity makes computers many times more attractive to people of all ages in the developing world. Besides, a VSAT dish with generating capacity and a wireless network isn't asking for the moon. It's expensive by local standards, yes, but that's what donor money is for. :-)

The thing that drives me craziest in this job is when people see technology as a kind of either/or thing. You either have exactly the same infrastructure as you would in a downtown office in New York, or you have nothing. This idea is kind of a modulation on that problem, where instead of viewing the world in a binary mode, they've simply misjudged the distance of the steps between.

... In my decidedly less than humble opinion, of course.

Anthony Beevor, in his excellent history of WWII, tells a story about Churchill and Truman trying to figure out how to break the news of the successful Manhattan Project test to Stalin during the Potsdam conference in '45. They decided that Truman would tell him quietly, in a public room, in order to take him aback a little.

Thing is, Stalin already knew all the details. So there they are, Churchill hanging in the doorway watching Stalin like a dog watching a cookie, while Truman sidles up beside him and whispers the details into Stalin's ear. Stalin, of course, didn't bat an eyelash.

Afterwards, Stalin asked Beria (who had bugged the US and UK rooms) how they interpreted his complete non-reaction. According to Beria, Churchill asked Truman, "So? What did he say?" To which Truman replied, "I don't think he understood what I was telling him."

Stalin and Beria had a good laugh, took all of Eastern and Central Europe, but cancelled plans to invade Western Europe because they really did understand just how big that bomb was.

The moral of the story is: Don't ever assume it's a secret. Someone always knows.

... And then play a single 'Enhance... enhance... enhance... print that!' scene from CSI and say, 'We do that.'

Not true, I'm afraid. Well, not true in the sense that people where I live (about 20% of the population are on the power grid) don't find themselves doing without. Cost is the major factor, though availability is often limited.

I work in IT policy, and one of the biggest things we've had to accomplish in recent years is to convince the government that access to electrical power has to be factored into their ICT policy. It may seem obvious to you and me, but it actually took a bit of work. Curiously, it was the donors who didn't realise it, not government.

To be fair, most people did not actually say these things about mobile phones; they didn't think about them at all. The impact of mobile telephony on poor, rural areas was largely overlooked until it had already begun to make itself felt. Remember that mobile phone banking began in Kenya completely independently of any outside agency. People just began treating phone credit as cash, and passing it between themselves. The donors and banks only got into the mix after the fact. Same with Ushahidi and other cool SMS-based apps.

They did say that about computers and the internet, though, and yes, we're in full agreement that the old 'how can they have computers if they don't have roads' argument is bullshit.

But... I don't think offline devices are nearly as useful as online ones are, and by the time you've found a place that's capable of using them, you'd really be better off lobbying government and local telcos to build a tower as well. I'm not just speculating about this, by the way, I've spent the last decade working in the developing world on exactly these sort of problems.

I don't think that's required any more - not on Linux or Mac OS X, anyway. I use rsync several times a day and each time it just reads my ~/.ssh/config file for the options, sets up the connection and performs the transfer without any fuss or bother.

I haven't set the RSYNC_RSH env parameter since about 2002.

Well, I hope you feel gouda bout it, because for my part I cheddar at the thought of what's going to become of this thread. Makes me feel bleu....

Or as we in KAOS like to put it:

STARKER! ZIS IS DE INTERNET! VE DON'T COUNTRY ON DE INTERNET!!

Not sure about this. While numerous national laws apply to overseas citizens (e.g. child abuse laws in Canada, Aus and the US), French citizenship is a little different. You cannot renounce French citizenship; it's simply not possible. So secrecy laws and various others which can and sometimes do conflict with human rights might be harder to enforce in a court of law.

But hey, the Napoleonic code on which French law is based differs significantly from Common Law, with which I'm more familiar, so I'm nearly certain to be upholding the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of talking through my hat. :-)

Well, the way you describe it, there's just no defense against that. But consider the following:

Many companies and individuals legitimately use tax havens as a way of keeping money offshore until they need it. The moment it enters their domestic bank account, of course, it can become capital gains/earnings and therefore subject to tax. But because they do a lot of business overseas, they leave a chunk parked in order to avoid unnecessary fees. So they use this as a floating pot they can dip into to conduct business at lower cost, and then pay the taxes whenever they repatriate some part of it.

That, in a nutshell, is the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion, which is what you describe.

The problem is that regulatory oversight is slack-to-nonexistent, and that the entire system (like so many other parts of the financial sector) has been gamed so badly that the entire thing is widely (and justifiably) viewed as a sham.

Ironically, 9/11 put an end to some of the worst abuses. The US got so worried about stopping terrorist financing operations that they created a very strict new set of rules, and enforced them by disallowing anyone on their black list from trading in US currency. Smartened up a number of countries in a hurry.

So yeah, those rich schmucks are still hiding their money, but at least it's (slightly) harder for them to buy drugs and guns.... *sigh*

Heh, that just lens itself to humour, doesn't it.

Sorry I'll f-stop. I know what'll happen if iris one more pun. I shutter at the thought.

It's all in how it's presented.

Note to all: Not a rickroll. It's a masterpiece of symphonic comedy.