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The "Eurostack" is a (long overdue) project to publicly fund a European "stack" of technology that is independent from American Big Tech (as well as other powers' technology that has less hold in Europe, such as Chinese and Russian tech):
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA.
At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.
Some bad ideas never die. Since the late 1980s, spy agencies and cops have argued that the public should not have access to working cryptography, because this would mean that terrorists, mafiosi…
But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.
In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a *public* internet that the *whole* public controls - not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will *I* see, and which ones can I block?"
A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.
Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.
Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver *billions* of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:
(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable - a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)
The private sector *cannot* deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.
Fiber itself is cheap like borscht - it's literally made out of sand - but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.
Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland.
Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidden mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":
When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it - ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiate called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":
So government have to be involved in fiber, but *how* should they involve themselves in it? One model - the worst one - is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the *cheapest* part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.
In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out.
They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.
They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give *great* service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.
They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations - unlike governments - are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:
Governments can improve on this situation by *regulating* a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they *must* connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage.
All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate mafeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.
That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep it honest.
Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into.
The government builds a data-center with all the switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.
This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities - mostly conservative towns in red states - have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:
(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)
This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:
But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can *also* do something called "essential facilities sharing":
Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.
If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP *and* allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies.
In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to *get* internet access and the right to *provide* internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city - you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.
That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop.
When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center.
A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.
This is a truly *public* internet service - one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access.
It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.
The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services.
That's fair enough, though it *does* require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:
They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector - sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.
The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks.
For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:
The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.
As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban - or Emmanuel Macron:
Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone.
Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?
Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:
VIENNA (Reuters) -Austria's coalition government has agreed on a plan to enable police to monitor suspects' secure messaging in order to thwart militant...
So there's good reasons to worry about having your data - and your apps - hosted in an EU cloud.
To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological *public goods*.
For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices.
The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.
The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:
Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.
Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans.
These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks - they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:
In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.
This is essential facilities sharing for *services*. Combine it with public data centers *and* tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.
In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet.
They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):
In this video, we discuss the forces that keep us using services like Facebook long after we stop enjoying them (hint, it's not because social media is "addictive") and we present a short "design fiction" explaining what it might be like to use socia…
With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers - safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other.
If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed *public goods* that are designed to allow *everyone* to participate in both *using* and *providing* internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago.
Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital soveriegnty" be "national firewalls 2.0" - we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.
Blogger, author, and activist Cory Doctorow is the most provocative, original, and widely admired thinker on the politics of Big Tech in the world today.
In The USA they should make USPS an ISP, call all fibre "post roads" with all the protections and rights this gives them under the constitution (US Art 1 Sec 8), and start building… 😁
The European Union has emerged as a hostile force to Moscow, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has claimed, accusing the bloc of arming the “neo-Nazi Kiev regime” to attack Russia. rt.com/news/620492-russia-eu-e…
A paramilitary is a military that is not a part of a country's official or legitimate armed forces.[1] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.[2]
Support us and check out our sponsor: http://getnativepathcollagen.com/Lauren for 45% off and free shipping!The Dystopian Future of Car "Kill Switches" - Ima...
Just finished another audiobook: @pluralistic 's Picks and Shovels. It's another Martin Hench novel. I do love this series. Keep 'em coming. This one also has been masterfully narrated by Wil Wheaton. Great story! Great listen!
Lara Friedman President of Foundation for Middle East Peace is an expert on U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast, anti-Palestinian legislation, and the weaponization of " antisemitism" to target critics of Israel. I talked with her about all this and more in an in-depth interview for Cutting Through.
Lara Friedman, President of FMEP, is an expert on U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast, anti-Palestinian legislation, and the weaponization of "antisemitism" to target critics of Israel.
From the exact same company that gave us google glasshole glasses. That's just one of the almost 300 spectacular white elephants they're had to date - most of them being in the last five to ten years.
Every company obviously has failures which no one usually gets to hear about. google's failed products on the other hand were heavily marketed before flopping and then being shut down. They're blown through umpteen billions on trail of total lemons which reinforces my belief even more that they're really just a ponzi operation.
Killed by Google is the open source list of dead Google products, services, and devices. It serves as a tribute and memorial of beloved services and products killed by Google.
We can't know, but I'd venture that if Harris was in office the aggression against Iran probably wouldn't have lasted 12 days. The Dems are very committed to the "regime change" goal.
Even with Trump in office, a bunch of Dems supported the aggression and opposed AOC's bill to impeach Trump. If it was Harris that crowd would have sided with the aggression, and they'll prob. wouldn't be complaining about the unconstitutionality of the attack, as they didn't with Obama bombing Yemen.
I've found half a dozen of these neoliberal accounts lately, and I've been blocked by half a dozen: "Harris told you if Trump won we would be at war. Told you so."
These fuckers make my blood boil. Their team is complicit in just as much the red team is, and red/blue team are nothing more than a bipartisan oligarchy doing what it does. They make politics so disgusting and unreal.
We just kicked off the public consultation phase of CC signals, with a few hundred of our closest collaborators showing up to celebrate this milestone with us.
We're opening the doors for public input to help shape the next phase of this work.
« Just as the CC licenses helped build the open web, we believe CC signals will help shape an open AI ecosystem grounded in reciprocity. » Anna Tumadóttir "CEO" of Creative Commons
I love the smell of bullshits in the morning (no) 🙄
Grandson’s went to DC and Tennessee this summer and visited a huge Trump store. They had everything. Here’s what they got. 😀 They know he’s ’the best president ever’!!!
Ali Bagheri, the deputy for political, security, and legal affairs in Gilan Province, announced that air defense forces shot down a small drone on Tuesday evening in areas of Rasht city.
Students attending the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, will have the chance to hear NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station answer their prerecorded questions. At 12:40 p.m. EDT on Tuesday, July 1, NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Jonny Kim, and Nichole Ayers will answer student questions. Ayers is a space […]
Wow had to use my feeding tube for the first time today...sort of.
Been having an issue swallowing small pills over the last few days. Making it hard to get Advil and my prescription pain killers. I can get larger sized food pcs across the blistered area (painful) but small pills are hanging up on it and causing gag/puke reflex (EXTREMELY painful). Got a mortar and pestle and ground up my pills, dissolved the powder in 50ml water, draw up and flush down the feed tube
@Max_Imum yeah it sucks... the hard treatment part is done. the effects will get worse over the next week or so while the rdiation continues to work. i should start getting less pain by end of next week once the tissue begins healing
reports of a massive influx of Hasidic Jews from NY are in NH and VT this week and next - no Hasidim holidays and they don't spend money on hotels unless they really need to or some free gibs are coming their way.
Chatter on Hebrew-speaking Telegram channels show the collective unconscious of the jews is centered on: "Trump/US didn't obey us, so they need to be attacked." Where one of them says it, 1000 of them are thinking it, and Many of them are saying it.
Historically the jews have galvanized the US to go to support their war interests via violence and threat of violence with false flag attacks like the USS Liberty, coordinating 9/11, funding and coordinating the 10/7 Hamas attack. Their literal military motto is: "By way of deceit, make war."
should we expect a false-flag? on Crown Heights, Williamsburg, or Boro Park neighborhoods?
@Otto Pureblood Sure, that's how the got the UN, the UK, US and the USSR to endorse the founding of their terrorist state. They were assassinating British soldiers and murdering Palestinians in the 1930s and 1940s. The British surrendered and started arming them and the slaughter of the Palestinians continued and Israel was born.
"If you have JD Vance meme on your phone you might be stopped at the US border,🚨held in a cell, strip-searched & sent home." -A Applebaum
A 21-yr-old tourist has described the horrendous treatment he allegedly received after being denied entry to the USA due to a meme depicting JD Vance as bald being found on his phone.
A 21-year-old tourist has described the horrendous treatment he allegedly received after being denied entry to the USA due to a meme depicting JD Vance as bald being found on his phone
Madrid, 25 jun 2025 (Lusa) - O Governo espanhol lembrou hoje que os acordos e taxas comerciais com os EUA são negociados e aplicados no quadro da União Europeia (UE), depois de o Presidente norte-americano, Donald Trump, ter ameaçado aumentar tarifas…
Find your next classical guitar in our online shop: https://www.siccasguitars.com Sell your guitar on OhGuitar: https://www.ohguitar.com Join our online comm...
Awesome! My uncle would've said, "He was one of the greats!" He said that about many in the genre. He was composing before WWII, and too messed up after to finish it. My son likes classical, well all kinds of music, and described the theory behind this piece. The pianist was inspired by Guitar Hero to do this, lol. It's wonderful.
Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2Click the 🔔bell to always be notified on new uploads!♫ Listen on Apple Music Classical: http://apple.co/Rousseau♫ Instagram...
WinRAR patches bug letting malware launch from extracted archives
"A malicious archive could contain files with crafted relative paths tricking WinRAR into "silently" extracting those to sensitive locations like system directories and auto-run or startup folders. Although the programs will run with user-level access rather than administrative or SYSTEM rights, they can still steal sensitive data like browser cookies and saved passwords, install persistence mechanisms, or provide remote access for further lateral movement."
در سالهای اخیر افرادی بودهاند که گفتهاند: «آیا نمیتوان بهدور از سیاست فقط روی کد و برنامهنویسی تمرکز کرد؟» که خب گرچه خواستهای معقول مینماید، باید گفت خیر، نشدنی و نامعقول و خیالی است. هرچند هستند کسانی که «نرمافزار آزاد/متنباز» (FOSS) را صراحتاً غیرسیاسی میدانند و تأکید دارند که غیرسیاسی هم باید بماند. اما این تلقی حاکی از ناآگاهی کامل آنها از ماهیتِ «نرمافزار آزاد» است. من در اغلب موارد فرض را بر جهل صادقانه این افراد میگذارم، و بنابراین سعی میکنم در ادامه بهاجمال توضیح دهم که چرا «نرمافزار آزاد» سیاسی است.
«نرمافزار آزاد» سیاسی است
چه بخواهیم چه نخواهیم، اولاً و بالذات سیاسی است. «نرمافزار آزاد» (Free Software) جنبشی سیاسی و اخلاقی است که دست بر قضا روی نرمافزار متمرکز شده است. خود نرمافزار کمابیش جزوی از سیاست است. اگر این ادعا بهنظرتان عجیب یا غیرعادی میرسد، به این دلیل است که شما فقط در معرض متنباز بودهاید. متنباز و آزاد فرق دارند.
ریچارد استالمن «نرمافزار آزاد» را در قالب یک مفهوم و جنبش در اوایل دهه ۱۹۸۰ بهراه انداخت، آنهم براساس باوری بسیار ساده و روشن: «کاربران رایانه باید آزادانه برنامهها را براساس نیازشان تغییر دهند و نرمافزار را بهصورت آزاد بهاشتراک بگذارند، زیرا کمک به افراد اسّ و اساس جامعه است.» این یک باور اخلاقی و سیاسی است. جنبش «نرمافزار آزاد» میگوید: کنترل زندگی دیجیتال کاربر باید در دست خودش باشد، و رایانهها باید از کاربرانشان اطاعت کنند، نه شخص یا سازمانی دیگر. حق کاربران در کمک به دوستان و همکاران و دیگران هستۀ اصلی جنبش «نرمافزار آزاد» است.
ممکن است با این موضع موافق باشید یا مخالف. مشکلی نیست. اما اسواساس «نرمافزار آزاد» است و انکار آن خطاست. نرمافزار آزاد در تضاد آشکار با نرمافزار انحصاری یا مالکیتی۱ است، که تأکید دارد «در استفاده از رایانه شرط اول قدم این بود که قول بدهید به همسایهتان کمک نکنید». حرف نابجایی هم نیست، کاملاً درست است. نرمافزار انحصاری عملاً و قانوناً کمک شما به افراد نیازمند را محدود میکند. اما «نرمافزار آزاد» بر این باور سیاسی است که اعمال چنین محدودیتهایی غیراخلاقی است. شما ممکن است موافق یا مخالف این موضع باشید، اما نمیتوانید انکارش کنید.
از اوایل دهه ۱۹۸۰ تا اواخر دهه ۱۹۹۰ محبوبیت «نرمافزار آزاد» افزایش یافت، چندان که توجه شرکتهای بزرگ فناوری را نیز رفتهرفته به خود جلب کرد. شرکتها بهوضوح دریافتند که انتشار نرمافزار با «مجوز آزاد»۲ (که حقوق کاربران را در اصلاح و توزیع مجدد بهجا میآورد) به همکاری بهتر و بیشتر برنامهنویسان و تولید کدهای باکیفیتتر و کدهای مجانی میانجامد (بالأخص از زمانی که اینترنت توزیع دیجیتال را آسان کرد). شرکتها سخت بهدنبال این دستاوردِ جنبش «نرمافزار آزاد» بودند (شما بگو که نبود؟)، اما با «سیاستِ» نرمافزار آزاد راحت نبودند. بسیاری از شرکتها هم با معنای دووجهیِ کلمه «Free» (آزاد/رایگان) مشکل داشتند و هم با بحثهایی درباره حقوق کاربران.
بنابراین برخی از حامیان نرمافزار آزاد در سال ۱۹۹۷ تصمیم گرفتند عنوان تجاری «نرمافزار آزاد» را به «متنباز» تغییر دهند. آنها تصمیم گرفتند دیگر از اخلاق و سیاست صحبت نکنند و فقط بر مزایای توسعۀ نرمافزار متمرکز شوند. شرکتها تصمیم آنها را پسندیدند، زیرا متوجه شدند که میتوانند بدون نیاز به صحبت از حقوق کاربران [از کاربران و برنامهنویسان داوطلب] امکانات رایگان دریافت کنند. نسل بعدی مدافعانِ این تصمیم نیز صراحتاً بهبهانۀ سهم خالص بازار۳ خواستار حذف «سیاست» از نرمافزار آزاد شدند. محض نمونه، رابرت مکمیلان، سردبیر مجله لینوکس، «تصور میکند که حرکت بهسوی نرمافزار متنباز باید با تصمیمهای فنی تقویت شود نه سیاسی». همچنین مدیر عامل شرکت نرمافزار «کالدرا» بدون رودربایستی از کاربران خواست که هدف آزادی [نرمافزار] را کنار بگذارند و بهجایش به افزایش «محبوبیت لینوکس» کمک کنند. بهعبارت دیگر، حقوق «کاربرانِ نهایی»۴ هیچ مهم نیست. فقط یک چیز مهم است و بس: افراد زیادی از محصولات ما استفاده کنند.
از اینرو، «متنباز روش توسعه است؛ اما نرمافزار آزاد جنبشی اجتماعی است». جنبش متنباز نرمافزارِ غیرآزاد [و انحصاری] را چندان بهینه و مطلوب نمیداند. اما جنبش نرمافزار آزاد نرمافزارِ غیرآزاد [و انحصاری] را یک معضل اجتماعی میداند و نرمافزار آزاد را راهحل این معضل.
حتی اگر بتوان اثبات کرد که محرومکردن کاربران از حقوقشان (حقِ کنترل رایانه شخصیشان) به تولید نرمافزار باکیفیتتر میانجامد، باز هم حقوق کاربران سلب میشود و بنابراین ناقض اصول اخلاقی است. این است موضع «نرمافزار آزاد». نرمافزار آزاد یک اعلامیه سیاسی است.
از آنجا که سالهاست میدانیم توسعهدهندگان از نرمافزارهای انحصاریشان هرچند وقت یک بار سوءاستفاده میکنند، نقش و اهمیت «نرمافزار آزاد» دوچندان میشود. معروف است که مایکروسافت [در سال ۲۰۱۳] قبل از رفع حفرههای امنیتی به آژانس امنیت ملی آمریکا (NSA) امکان «دسترسی زودهنگام»۵ داده بود. هر هفته میشنویم که فلان نرمافزار جدید روی تلفنهای همراه یا رایانههای شخصیمان در حال جاسوسی از ماست و فعالیتهای شخصیمان را بدون رضایت ما به شرکت تولیدکنندۀ آن محصول گزارش میدهد. اگر کاربران به کد منبع نرمافزاری که نصب میکنند دسترسی داشته باشند، همه این سوءاستفادهها اگر نگوییم غیرممکن، دشوار خواهد شد؛ حتی اگر اکثر کاربران از کدنویسی سر درنیاورند کافی است فقط یک نفر متوجه درهای پشتی۶ یا جاسوسافزارهای۷ تعبیهشده بشود و به گوش همه برساند، و نسخهای اصلاحشده منتشر کند و کدهای مخرب را از آن حذف کند.
آیا این بدان معناست که برخی الگوهای تجاری (مانند فروش دادههای کاربران بدون رضایت آنها) غیرممکن خواهد شد؟ بهاحتمال زیاد، بله. نرمافزار آزاد اعلامیهای اخلاقی و سیاسی است که میگوید دفاع از حقوق کاربران مهمتر از الگوی کسبوکار شماست. اگر الگوی کسبوکار شما مستلزم نقض حقوق کاربران است، پس شما الگوی کسبوکار ندارید. ممکن است با این موضع موافق باشید یا مخالف. اما «نرمافزار آزاد» اعلامیهای اکیداً سیاسی است.
نرمافزار آزاد قصد دارد از کاربرانِ نهایی در برابر توسعهدهندگان محافظت کند. زیرا صنعت فناوری اطلاعات (IT) بهوضوح نشان داده است که نمیتوان به آن اعتماد کرد. اگر کاربران برنامهها را کنترل نکنند، در آنصورت برنامهها کاربران را کنترل خواهند کرد. «نرمافزار آزاد» چیزی نیست جز حقوق مدنی کاربران که بر نرمافزار اعمال میشود.
چارهای نیست، متنباز را دنبال میکنم
احتمالاً شما به کاربران اهمیتی نمیدهید. ترجیح میدهید تعداد زیادی کاربر و نرمافزار با کیفیت بالا داشته باشید و اهمیتی ندهید که دیگران را قادر میسازید از فعالیت شما در کنترل کاربران استفاده کنند، آنهم برخلاف میلشان. شما فقط یک توسعهدهندۀ متنباز هستید، زیر بار اخلاقِ «نرمافزار آزاد» نمیروید، سیاست به شما ربطی ندارد و خود را از سیاست برحذر میدارید و میگویید: من فقط میخواهم کد بزنم! کاش میتوانستم بگویم برآوردنِ خواستهتان ممکن است. کاش. اگر ممکن بود زندگی بهمراتب راحتتر میبود. شاید کدها در مقیاس خُرد که امکان تعیینِ الگوریتمهای سریعتر مرتبسازی وجود دارد بتوانند غیرسیاسی باشند ولی نه در سطح برنامههای کاربردی (اپلیکیشنها). بهقول لری لسینگ۸ «انتخاب ما بین “وضع مقررات” و “مقرراتزدایی” نیست. کدها مقررات وضع میکنند. ارزشها را محقق میسازند یا ارزشها را زیر پا میگذارند. آزادیها را ممکن یا ناممکن میسازند. از حریم خصوصی محافظت میکنند یا آب به آسیاب نظارت میریزند. آدمها انتخاب میکنند که کدها چه کنند، چگونه این کارها را انجام دهند. آدمها هستند که کدها را مینویسند».
یک برنامه چه مشخصههایی دارد، چه اولویتهایی دارد، چه دادههایی جمعآوری میکند، چطور در دسترس قرار میگیرد، چه مشخصههای امنیتیای دارد، چه درهای پشتیای در برنامه گنجانده شده است، و هر سؤال دیگری درباره طراحی و دستورالعمل برنامه، سؤالی است انسانی نه فنی. این تصمیمات ذهنی آدمهاست که یک برنامه را تعریف میکند، نه سؤالات بهظاهر عینی طراحی ردهای و ماژولی (هرچند آنها هم تمایل دارند بالنسبه ذهنی باشند).
این تصمیمات ذهنی را آدمها بهصورت ذهنی میگیرند. درست است که برخی از این تصمیمات ممکن است پیامدهای اخلاقی بزرگتر یا کوچکتری داشته باشند، اما هیچ یک از آنها از نظر اخلاقی کاملاً خنثی نیست. طراحی نرمافزار، برخلاف تصور ما، نمیتواند از نظر اخلاقی خنثی باشد.
در برنامههای کاربردیتان چه تصمیمات اخلاقیای اتخاذ خواهید کرد؟ این یک سؤال سیاسی است. چه نوع کاربرانی را عمداً یا سهواً در اولویت قرار خواهید داد؟ این یک سؤال سیاسی است. چه اقداماتی انجام خواهید داد تا اطمینان دهید از ابزاری که میسازید در دستکاری اطلاعات کاربران و کنترل فعالیت کاربران، آنهم بدون اجازه و توافق، و ایجاد مزاحمت یا رفتار غرضورزانه استفاده نمیشود؟ این یک سؤال سیاسی است.
توسعه نرمافزار در گرو پاسخ به این سؤالات است. ای کاش فقط تابع ریاضیات عینی و [تجزیه و تحلیل دادهها] بود. اما اینطور نیست. بهقول لری لسنیگ «ما میتوانیم فضای مجازی را در راه حفظ ارزشهایی بسازیم که معتقدیم بنیادیناند. یا میتوانیم فضای مجازی را بهنحوی بسازیم که اجازه دهد آن ارزشها گموگور شوند. هیچ حد وسطی وجود ندارد. کدها را هرگز نمییابند؛ کدها تا به حال فقط ساخته و نوشته شدهاند، و همیشه نیز بهدست خود ما». نرمافزار بالذات سیاسی است. «نرمافزار آزاد» صراحتاً سیاسی است. همواره سیاسی بوده است.
منبع: steemit
پینوشتها:
۱. نرمافزار انحصاری یا مالکیتی (proprietary software) به نرمافزاری میگویند که در مالکیت انحصاری توسعهدهندگان و توزیعکنندگانش است و مالک نرمافزار میتواند در کاربرد و تکثیر و توزیع آن محدودیت اعمال کند. م
۲. مجوز یا پروانه آزاد (Free license) اجازه بهرهوری مجدد از یک اثر را میدهد. اکثر مجوزهای آزاد جهانی و غیر انحصاری و همیشگیاند. پروژههای جنبش متنباز و جنبش فرهنگ آزاد و مخالفان حق تکثیر و بنیاد ویکیمدیا و گروههای طرفدار مالکیت عمومی با پروانههای آزاد کار میکنند. م
۳. سهم بازار (Market share) عبارت است از درصدی از کل درآمد یا فروش یک بازار که یک شرکت در اختیار میگیرد. م
۴. کاربر نهایی (End user) به کسی میگویند که در نهایت از کالایی استفاده میکند یا بناست در نهایت از آن استفاده کند. کاربر نهایی در برابر کاربرانی تعریف میشود که محصول را پشتیبانی یا نگهداری میکنند. م
۵. بهکمک «دسترسی زودهنگام» (Early access) میتوان به یک محصول پیش از انتشار در چرخههای مختلف دسترسی داشت. م
۶. درِ پشتی (Back-door) در علوم رایانه به راهی میگویند که بتوان از آن بدون اجازه به بخشهای مشخصی از یک سیستم دیگر مانند رایانه و دیوار آتشین یا سایر افزارهها دست یافت. م
۷. جاسوسافزار (Spyware) نرمافزاری است که بهدنبال جمعآوری اطلاعاتی از فرد یا سازمان است که آن اطلاعات را نیز به نهاد یا سازمانی ارسال میکند. جاسوسافزارها مستقیماً اثر تخریبی ندارند و وظیفهشان فقط جمعآوری اطلاعات از رایانۀ کاربر و نیز نظارت بر فعالیت او با رایانه و اینترنت است. از اطلاعات جاسوسافزارها در مقاصد تجاری و تبلیغی و نظامی و نظارتی استفاده میشود. م
۸. از دانشمندان و فعالان سیاسی و طرفداران کاهش محدودیتهای حقوقی کپیرایت اهل آمریکا. م
I should've said shoot while still sitting on the bike instead of getting off and shooting from the side of the bike which does seem to be possible given that this existed before the Italian bike.
For whatever reason, I never thought of hiding my game's debug mode via a command line argument. It's brilliant because you need to know the exact argument to enable the debug mode and most people don't open programs via command line these days anyway.
@beardalaxy Not many people know how to deal with it either. I'm not trying to make it so that nobody can ever use it, that's impossible. I just don't want it to be accessed easily.
"🇫🇷 | ALERTE INFO > 🚨La justice française condamne une militante pro-Hamas pour avoir qualifié un soldat de #Tsahal de « génocidaire » Amira #Zaiter a été condamnée à : 👉3 ans de prison (dont 2 avec sursis) 👉10 ans d’inéligibilité 👉+10 000€ de dommages et intérêts et frais 💶 3 000€ au titre de la diffamation.
⚖️ Le message est clair : accuser publiquement un juif ou un soldat israélien de “génocide” ou de “crime de guerre” n’est pas une opinion / c’est un délit. 📌 Cette décision crée une jurisprudence : toute personne diffamée sur X ou en public en étant assimilée à un “génocidaire” peut désormais se retourner en justice et gagner." (((SIMON WEINBERG))) Via X https://x.com/SlMONWEINBERG/status/1937932477932114332
“The 2023-2024 #COVID19vaccines were associated with additional protection against #COVID19–associated ED and UC encounters, hospitalization, and critical illness beyond existing protection provided by prior vaccination or SARS-CoV-2 infection. “
A friend's right-wing brother heard of a huge Japanese study showing you're more likely to die a few months after an mRNA vaccine! 18 million people....so I looked, saw BS like this...ALL the sites reporting this are right wing whack jobs. Have you heard this?
Japanese researchers say their "shocking" systematic review of research papers on COVID-19 vaccines has discovered thousands of side effects "affecting every po
It’s the vigilant fox. Well known purveyor of 💩. Western standard similar.
I thought the researcher was familiar. As you can see, rehash of 2023 misinformation.
From memory he was an ex-professor even back then and his faculty said “The institution doesn't take responsibility for faculty members and their comments post-retirement."
My chiropractor brother tried the same 💩 on me.
Simply demonstrates how gullible and uncritical they are.
Yeah, it was a good friend's right-wing (and rich) brother who raised the alarm. It didn't take me more than 10 minutes to see it was more garbage a la schmucks like these....THIS is more concerning since these morons have been given more power than ever.
Right? I haven't read it yet either. And I bet the ONE kind of clinical trial that would be helpful they won't mention: head-to-head trials of extant vaccines. With a control group of anti-vaxxer right wingers who opt out. OK that last bit is snark. I think.
On Wednesday, Iran's parliament passed a bill that would effectively suspend Tehran's cooperation with the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a move that came in response to the US and Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Zohran Mamdani's victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.
NASA astronaut Bob Hines took this picture of the waning crescent moon on May 8, 2022, as the International Space Station flew into an orbital sunrise 260 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of the United States. Since the station became operational in November 2000, crew members have produced hundreds of thousands […]
The trees. That's always my main worry when we have a serious storm with high winds. One big tree out front has branches that reach over my neighbor's driveway where she parks her car. Several big old back yard trees have branches that reach over my other neighbor's power lines.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo is a historic turning point for Palestine in U.S. politics. It reflects a growing fatigue with Israel’s role in American life and the slow implosion of Zionism under the weight of its own excess.
Peaceful protest against ban on Palestine Action anti-genocide group suffers vicious police attacks Footage of several incidents of police conduct during Monday’s protests against the Starmer…
If Washington does nothing except leave current tax, spending, and structural deficit policies in place, the publicly-held debt will grow by $102 trillion over the next 3 decades.
Note !! !!: this doesn't require individual donations as much as it requires a collective movement and a governmental/ institutional pressure on #Israel to allow the Life saving supplies to The #Gaza hospitals! Context: For over eight months, the Israeli military has imposed a tight siege on the Gaza Strip, severely limiting the flow of life-saving essential food and medical items into the Palestinian territory.
Dr Yasser Abu Ghalee, head of the children's section at the Nasser Hospital, says that most premature babies were in need of immediate attention after birth. "Most of the premature babies are brought to the incubator section [of the hospitall, and we are trying as much as possible for these children because they are patients in the hospital," he adds. Speaking about breastfeeding, the paediatric specialist says that while they are encouraged to feed their children naturally, mothers themselves face a variety of health concerns, including malnutrition, which prevents them from feeding their babies.
BRICS is an informal group of states comprising the Federative Republic of Brazil, the Russian Federation, the Republic of India, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of South Africa.
Vidéo: Il y a un an, Assange était libéré après quatorze années de persécution par Washington et certains de ses vassaux arretsurinfo.ch/video-il-y-a-u…
Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But "technological soveriegnty" is a slippery and easily abused concept. Policies like "national firewalls" and "data localization" (where data on a country's population need to be kept on onshore servers) can be a means to different ends. Data localization is important if you want to keep an American company from funneling every digital fact about everyone in your country to the NSA.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But it's also a way to make sure your secret police can lay hands on population-scale data about anyone they might want to kidnap and torture:
doctorow.medium.com/theyre-sti…
At its worst, "technological sovereignty" is a path to a shattered internet with a million dysfunctional borders that serve as checkpoints where thuggish customs inspectors can stop you from availing yourself of privacy-preserving technology and prevent you from communicating with exiled dissidents and diasporas.
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They’re still trying to ban cryptography - Cory Doctorow - Medium
Cory Doctorow (Medium)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But at its best, "technological sovereignty" is a way to create world-girding technology that can act as an impartial substrate on which all manner of domestic and international activities can play out, from a group of friends organizing a games night, to scientists organizing a symposium, to international volunteer corps organizing aid after a flood.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, "technological sovereignty" can be a way to create a *public* internet that the *whole* public controls - not just governments, but also people, individuals who can exercise their own technological self-determination, controlling crucial aspects of their own technology usage, like "who will see this thing I'm saying?" and "whose communications will *I* see, and which ones can I block?"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
A "public internet" isn't the same thing as "an internet that is operated by your government," but you can't get a public internet without government involvement, including funding, regulation, oversight and direct contributions.
Here's an example of different ways that governments can involve themselves in the management of one part of the internet, and the different ways in which this will create more or less "public" internet services: fiber optic lines.
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Cory Doctorow
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Fiber is the platinum standard for internet service delivery. Nothing else comes even close to it. A plastic tube under the road that is stuffed with fiber optic strands can deliver *billions* of times more data than copper wires or any form of wireless, including satellite constellations like Starlink:
pluralistic.net/2021/03/30/fig…
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Pluralistic: 30 Mar 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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(Starlink is the most antifuturistic technology imaginable - a vision of a global internet that gets slower and less reliable as more people sign up for it. It makes the dotcom joke of "we lose money on every sale but make it up in volume" look positively bankable.)
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Cory Doctorow
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The private sector *cannot* deliver fiber. There's no economical way for a private entity to secure the rights of way to tear up every street in every city, to run wires into every basement or roof, to put poles on every street corner. Same goes for getting the rights of way to string fiber between city limits across unincorporated county land, or across the long hauls that cross national and provincial or state borders.
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Cory Doctorow
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Fiber itself is cheap like borscht - it's literally made out of sand - but clearing the thicket of property rights and political boundaries needed to get wire everywhere is a feat that can only be accomplished through government intervention.
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Cory Doctorow
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Fiber's opponents rarely acknowledge this. They claim, instead, that the physical act of stringing wires through space is somehow transcendentally hard, despite the fact that we've been doing this with phone lines and power cables for more than a century, through the busiest, densest cities and across the loneliest stretches of farmland.
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Cory Doctorow
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Wiring up a country is not the lost art of a fallen civilization, like building pyramids without power-tools or embalming pharoahs. It's something that even the poorest counties in America can manage, bringing fiber across forbidden mountain passes on the back of a mule named "Ole Bub":
newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-t…
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Cory Doctorow
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When governments apply themselves to fiber provision, you get fiber. Don't take my word for it - ask Utah, a bastion of conservative, small-government orthodoxy, where 21 cities now have blazing fast 10gb internet service thanks to a public initiate called (appropriately enough) "Utopia":
pluralistic.net/2024/05/16/sym…
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Pluralistic: Utah’s getting some of America’s best broadband (16 May 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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So government have to be involved in fiber, but *how* should they involve themselves in it? One model - the worst one - is for the government to intervene on behalf of a single company, creating the rights of way for that company to lay fiber in the ground or string it from poles. The company then owns the network, even though the fiber and the poles were the *cheapest* part of the system, worth an unmeasurably infinitesimal fraction of the value of all those rights of way.
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Cory Doctorow
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In the worst of the worst, the company that owns this network can do anything they want with its fiber. They can deny coverage to customers, or charge thousands of dollars to connect each new homes to the system. They can gouge on monthly costs, starve their customer service departments or replace them with mindless AI chatbots. They can skimp on maintenance and keep you waiting for days or weeks when your internet goes out.
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Cory Doctorow
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They can lard your bill with junk fees, or force you to accept pointless services like landlines and cable TV as a condition of getting the internet.
They can also play favorites with local businesses: maybe they give *great* service to every Domino's pizza place at knock-down rates, and make up for it by charging extra to independent pizza parlors that want to accept internet orders and stream big sports matches on the TV over the bar.
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Cory Doctorow
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They can violate Net Neutrality, slowing down your connection to sites unless their owners agree to pay bribes for "premium carriage." They can censor your internet any way they see fit. Remember, corporations - unlike governments - are not bound by the First Amendment, which means that when a corporation is your ISP, they can censor anything they feel like:
pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/use…
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Pluralistic: How cable monopolists tricked conservatives into shooting themselves in the face (15 Dec 2022) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Governments can improve on this situation by *regulating* a monopoly fiber company. They can require the company to assume a "universal service" mandate, meaning they *must* connect any home or business that wants it at a set rate. Governments can ban junk fees, set minimum standards for customer service and repair turnarounds, and demand neutral carriage.
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Cory Doctorow
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All of this can improve things, though its a lot of work to administer, and the city government may lack the resources and technical expertise to investigate every claim of corporate mafeasance, and to perform the technical analysis to evaluate corporate excuses for slow connections and bungled repairs.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's the worst model: governments clear the way for a monopolist to set up your internet, offering them a literally priceless subsidy in the form of rights of way, and then, maybe, try to keep it honest.
Here's the other extreme: the government puts in the fiber itself, running conduit under all the streets (either with its own crews or contract crews) and threading a fiber optic through a wall of your choice, terminating it with a box you can plug your wifi router into.
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Cory Doctorow
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The government builds a data-center with all the switches for providing service to you and your neighbors, and hires people to offer you internet service at a reasonable price and with reasonable service guarantees.
This is a pretty good model! Over 750 towns and cities - mostly conservative towns in red states - have this model, and they're almost the only people in America who consistently describe themselves as happy with their internet service:
ilsr.org/articles/municipal-br…
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Cory Doctorow
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(They are joined in their satisfaction by a smattering of towns served by companies like Ting, who bought out local cable companies and used their rights of way to bring fiber to households.)
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Cory Doctorow
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This is a model that works very well, but can fail very badly. Municipal governments can be pretty darned kooky, as five years of MAGA takeovers of school boards, library boards and town councils have shown, to say nothing of wildly corrupt big-city monsters like Eric Adams (ten quintillion congratulations to Zohran Mamdani!). If there's one thing I've learned from the brilliant No Gods No Mayors podcast, it's that mayors are the weirdest people alive:
patreon.com/collection/869728?…
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Patreon
PatreonCory Doctorow
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Remember: Sarah Palin got her start in politics as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. Do *you* want to have to rely on Sarah Palin for your internet service?
patreon.com/posts/119567308?co…
How about Rob Ford? Do you want the crack mayor answering your tech support calls? I didn't think so:
patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-par…
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Cory Doctorow
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But that's OK! A public fiber network doesn't have to be one in which the government is your only choice for ISP. In addition to laying fiber and building a data-center and operating a municipal ISP, governments can *also* do something called "essential facilities sharing":
transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Com…
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Cory Doctorow
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Governments all over the world did this in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and some do it still. Under an essential facilities system, the big phone company (BT in the UK, Bell in Canada, AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA) were required to rent space to their competitors in their data centers. Anyone who wants to set up an ISP can install their own switching gear at a telephone company central office and provide service to any business or household in the country.
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Cory Doctorow
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If the government lays fiber in your town, they can both operate a municipal fiber ISP *and* allow anyone else to set up their own ISP, renting them shelf-space at the data-center. That means that the town college can offer internet to all its faculty and students (not just the ones who live in campus housing), and your co-op can offer internet service to its members. Small businesses can offer specialized internet, and so can informal groups of friends. So can big companies.
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Cory Doctorow
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In this model, everyone is guaranteed both the right to *get* internet access and the right to *provide* internet access. It's a great system, and it means that when Mayor Sarah Palin decides to cut off your internet, you don't need to sue the city - you can just sign up with someone else, over the same fiber lines.
That's where essential facilities sharing starts, but that's not where it needs to stop.
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Cory Doctorow
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When the government puts conduit (plastic tubes) in the ground for fiber, they can leave space for more fiber to fished through, and rent space in the conduit itself. That means that an ISP that wants to set up its own data center can run physically separate lines to its subscribers. It means that a university can do a point-to-point connection between a remote scientific instrument like a radio telescope and the campus data-center.
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Cory Doctorow
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A business can run its own lines between branch offices, and a movie studio can run dedicated lines from remote sound-stages to the edit suites at its main facility.
This is a truly *public* internet service - one where there is a publicly owned ISP, but also where public infrastructure allows for lots of different kinds of entities to provide internet access.
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Cory Doctorow
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It's insulated from the risks of getting your tech support from city hall, but it also allows good local governments to provide best-in-class service to everyone in town, something that local governments have a pretty great track record with.
The Eurostack project isn't necessarily about fiber, though. Right now, Europeans are thinking about technological sovereignty through the lens of software and services.
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Cory Doctorow
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That's fair enough, though it *does* require some rethinking of the global fiber system, which has been designed so that the US government can spy on and disconnect every other country in the world:
pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/wea…
Just as with the example of fiber, there are a lot of ways the EU and member states could achieve "technological sovereignty."
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Pluralistic: Underground Empire; The Lost Cause prologue part IV (10 Oct 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
They could just procure data-centers, server software, and the operation of social media, cloud hosting, mobile OSes, office software, and other components of Europeans' digital lives from the private sector - sort of like asking a commercial operator to run your town's internet service.
The EU has pretty advanced procurement rules, designed to allow European governments to buy from the private sector while minimizing corruption and kickbacks.
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Cory Doctorow
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For example, there's a rule that the lowest priced bid that conforms to all standards needs to win the contract. This sounds good (and it is, in many cases) but it's how Newag keeps selling trains in Poland, even after they were caught boobytrapping their trains so they would immobilize themselves if the operator took them for independent maintanance:
media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-…
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We've not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure
media.ccc.deCory Doctorow
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The EU doesn't have to use public-private partnerships to build the Eurostack. They could do it all themselves. The EU and/or member states could operate public data centers. They could develop their own social media platforms, mobile OSes, and apps. They could be the equivalent of the municipal ISP that offers fast fiber to everyone in town.
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Cory Doctorow
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As with public monopoly ISPs, this is a system that works well, but fails badly. If you think Elon Musk is a shitty social media boss, wait'll you see the content moderation policies of Viktor Orban - or Emmanuel Macron:
jacobin.com/2025/06/france-sol…
Publicly owned data centers could be great, but also, remember that EU governments have never given up on their project of killing working encryption so that their security services can spy on everyone.
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Cory Doctorow
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Austria's doing it right now!
yahoo.com/news/austrian-govern…
Ever since Snowden, EU governments have talked a good line about the importance of digital privacy. Remember Angela Merkel's high dudgeon about how her girlhood in the GDR gave her a special horror of NSA surveillance?
bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-2…
Apparently, Merkel managed to get over her horror of mass surveillance and back total, unaccountable, continuous digital surveillance over all of Germany:
hrw.org/news/2021/06/24/german…
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Austrian government agrees on plan to allow monitoring of secure messaging
Reuters (Yahoo News)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
So there's good reasons to worry about having your data - and your apps - hosted in an EU cloud.
To create a European public internet, it's neither necessary nor desirable to have your digital life operated by the EU and its member states, nor by its private contractors. Instead, the EU could make Eurostack a provider of technological *public goods*.
For example, the EU could work to improve federated social media systems, like Mastodon and Bluesky.
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Cory Doctorow
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EU coders could contribute to the server and client software for both. They could participate in future versions of the standard. They could provide maintenance code in response to bug reports, and administer bug bounties. They could create tooling for server administrators, including moderation tools, both for Mastodon and for Bluesky, whose "composable moderation" system allows users to have the final say over their moderation choices.
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Cory Doctorow
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The EU could perform and/or fund labelling work to help with moderation.
The EU could also provide tooling to help server administrators stand up their own independent Mastodon and Bluesky servers. Bluesky needs a lot of work on this, still. Bluesky's CTO has got a critical piece of server infrastructure to run on a Raspberry Pi for a few euros per month:
justingarrison.com/blog/2024-1…
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Run a Bluesky PDS From Home
Justin GarrisonCory Doctorow
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Previously, this required a whole data center and cost millions to operate, so this is great. But this now needs to be systematized, so that would-be Bluesky administrators can download a package and quickly replicate the feat.
Ultimately, the choice of Mastodon or Bluesky shouldn't matter all that much to Europeans.
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Cory Doctorow
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These standards can and should evolve to the point where everyone on Bluesky can talk to everyone on Mastodon and vice-versa, and where you can easily move your account from one server to another, or one service to another. The EU already oversees systems for account porting and roaming on mobile networks - they can contribute to the technical hurdles that need to be overcome to bring this to social media:
pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fir…
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Pluralistic: Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits (14 Dec 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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In addition to improving federated social media, the EU and its member states can and should host their own servers, both for their own official accounts and for public use. Giving the public a digital home is great, especially if anyone who chafes at the public system's rules can hop onto a server run by a co-op, a friend group, a small business or a giant corporation with just a couple clicks, without losing any of their data or connections.
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Cory Doctorow
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This is essential facilities sharing for *services*. Combine it with public data centers *and* tooling for migrating servers from and to the public server to a private, or nonprofit, or co-op data-center, and you've got the equivalent of publicly available conduit, data-centers, and fiber.
In addition to providing code, services and hardware, the EU can continue to provide regulation to facilitate the public internet.
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Cory Doctorow
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They can expand the very limited interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act, forcing legacy social media companies like Meta and Twitter to stand up APIs so that when a European quits their service for new, federated media, they can stay in touch with the friends they left behind (think of it as Schengen for social media, with guaranteed free movement):
eff.org/interoperablefacebook
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Interoperable Facebook
Electronic Frontier FoundationCory Doctorow
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With the Digital Service Act, the EU has done a lot of work to protect Europeans from fraud, harassment and other online horribles. But a public internet also requires protections for service providers - safe harbors and carve outs that allow you to host your community's data and conversations without being dragged into controversies when your users get into flamewars with each other.
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Cory Doctorow
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If we make the people who run servers liable for their users' bad speech acts, then the only entities that will be able to afford the lawyers and compliance personnel will be giant American tech companies run by billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kaw…
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Pluralistic: 04 Dec 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
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A "public internet" isn't an internet that's run by the government: it's a system of publicly subsidized, publicly managed *public goods* that are designed to allow *everyone* to participate in both *using* and *providing* internet services. The Eurostack is a brilliant idea whose time arrived a decade ago.
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Cory Doctorow
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Digital sovereignty projects are among the most important responses to Trumpism, a necessary step to build an independent digital nervous system the rest of the world can use to treat the USA as damage and route around it. We can't afford to have "digital soveriegnty" be "national firewalls 2.0" - we need a public internet, not 200+ national internets.
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Cory Doctorow
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I'm at the end of my 24-city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*!
Catch me in #LONDON with RILEY QUINN from #TRASHFUTURE on July 1:
howtoacademy.com/events/cory-d…
And in #MANCHESTER at Blackwell's Bookshop on July 2:
eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-…
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Cory Doctorow – The Fight Against the Big Tech Oligarchy | How To Academy
How To Academyskribe 🇺🇦
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fairydoctor
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YES! ty for saying this, its always on my mind
especially my trans friends still using facebook
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