Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
Best Regards, Matthias
PS: Below some more information by Michiel:
* Michiel Leenaars [2017-07-24 08:07 +0200]:
[...]
please find some information about the consultation for the European Next Generation Internet initiative to pass on to your members. To clarify: we are looking for the 'technical debt' (or put differently, 'skeletons in the closet') of the internet, i.e. what is preventing the internet as a whole from moving forward. And what could be done about it, given that the EC is embarking on a Next Generation Internet initiative and we can try to direct public funding to it. While there is plenty of innovative work happening at the fringes, the core internet technology that is actually being run at internet scale is not actually properly absorbing that work - in a sense creating even more chaos than if nothing would have happened. We are looking for intervention logic to get things going again.
The context is the following:
NLnet foundation (the independent charity I work, which was was set up by pioneers of the European internet) and Gartner were invited by the European Commision to write the vision for their Next Generation Internet initiative, as well as prioritise the key topics for funding.
We are organising the process in a much broader way than previous 'next-gen internet' efforts (of which there were quite a few), as we believe these were doomed to fail from the start because they only pushed for 'innovation' and never involved the right people (= the people that actually design and operate the 'current' internet). Not to mention that you need people from adjacent areas (such as operating systems and browsers) to be involved. Note that many of the people and organisations we think could make the most difference tend to avoid the public funding machinery, because they have their own funding and little need for bureaucracy and forced consortia. However, this leaves many issues unresolved, and we want to change that. (we are also eager to see the unfortunate bureaucracy and forced consortia go away, and likely that will happen too in the context of the NGI initiative - which is really awesome).
We actually went to get support from all the leading European umbrella organisations - besides FSFE we approached RIPE (the European regional internet registry), CENTR (organisation of domain registries), GEANT (research networks), ISP associations, the digital civil rights community (EDRi) and Internet Society, etc. So not just the separate communities that operate different layers of the technology but also what we consider 'ethical guardians' of the internet. And we are not looking to just get their presidents, managing directors or CTO's involved, but also harvest 'bottom up' - under water the iceberg looks rather different, and there are quite some issues that are not in view at the management level. We are therefore very thankful for you relaying this information to your members.
You can either send you ideas (in any shape or form, although written can concise is preferred) by mail to us (ngi@nlnet.nl), or fill out the open online consultation at:
(that is conceptually like an issue tracker, and helps us to isolate the individual actions - we believe by now that no single issue by itself is responsible, the ossification of the internet is more 'death by a thousand cuts').
We feel this is quite a unique opportunity for the internet to get funding to resolve a significant amount of technical debt that has accrued over the years, as well as stimulate new interesting work to hardening the internet and make it more resilient and keep it open - an area I expect your members to be quite interested in.
I hope your membership has time to provide us with some input, and/or relay this to some interesting people (we are open to any suggestions). I have some additional information attached, if people have any questions do not hesitate to let us know - me and my colleagues are happy to help.
Best, Michiel Leenaars
[...]
I have sent my suggestion, mainly about reforming the current HTML standard so as, if the web browsers support a client-side scripting language, they display a message with license information, source files location, a noticeable message about the dangers of non-free software, a buttom to inspect the script source, and a question asking if the script should be "denied for now", "accepted for now", "black listed" or "white listed" --- this dialog should of course repeat for every script except for the black listed and white listed ones.
As basis for my argumentation I cited:
- https://www.w3.org/TR/2016/REC-html51-20161101/.
- https://media.libreplanet.org/u/zakkai/m/javascript-if-you-love-it-set-it-free-54ab/.
But there is even more:
- http://audio-video.gnu.org/video/2015-10-24--rms--free-software-and-your-freedom--seagl--speech.ogv.
- https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/bradley-kuhn-fork-and-ignore/.
- https://sfconservancy.org/videos/2015-01-15_Bradley-Kuhn_Future-of-Copyleft_LCA-2015.webm.
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org writes:
Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
https://nlnet.nl/NGIBest Regards, Matthias
PS: Below some more information by Michiel:
- Michiel Leenaars [2017-07-24 08:07 +0200]:
[...]
please find some information about the consultation for the European Next Generation Internet initiative to pass on to your members. To clarify: we are looking for the 'technical debt' (or put differently, 'skeletons in the closet') of the internet, i.e. what is preventing the internet as a whole from moving forward. And what could be done about it, given that the EC is embarking on a Next Generation Internet initiative and we can try to direct public funding to it. While there is plenty of innovative work happening at the fringes, the core internet technology that is actually being run at internet scale is not actually properly absorbing that work - in a sense creating even more chaos than if nothing would have happened. We are looking for intervention logic to get things going again.
The context is the following:
NLnet foundation (the independent charity I work, which was was set up by pioneers of the European internet) and Gartner were invited by the European Commision to write the vision for their Next Generation Internet initiative, as well as prioritise the key topics for funding.
We are organising the process in a much broader way than previous 'next-gen internet' efforts (of which there were quite a few), as we believe these were doomed to fail from the start because they only pushed for 'innovation' and never involved the right people (= the people that actually design and operate the 'current' internet). Not to mention that you need people from adjacent areas (such as operating systems and browsers) to be involved. Note that many of the people and organisations we think could make the most difference tend to avoid the public funding machinery, because they have their own funding and little need for bureaucracy and forced consortia. However, this leaves many issues unresolved, and we want to change that. (we are also eager to see the unfortunate bureaucracy and forced consortia go away, and likely that will happen too in the context of the NGI initiative - which is really awesome).
We actually went to get support from all the leading European umbrella organisations - besides FSFE we approached RIPE (the European regional internet registry), CENTR (organisation of domain registries), GEANT (research networks), ISP associations, the digital civil rights community (EDRi) and Internet Society, etc. So not just the separate communities that operate different layers of the technology but also what we consider 'ethical guardians' of the internet. And we are not looking to just get their presidents, managing directors or CTO's involved, but also harvest 'bottom up' - under water the iceberg looks rather different, and there are quite some issues that are not in view at the management level. We are therefore very thankful for you relaying this information to your members.
You can either send you ideas (in any shape or form, although written can concise is preferred) by mail to us (ngi@nlnet.nl), or fill out the open online consultation at:
https://nlnet.nl/NGI(that is conceptually like an issue tracker, and helps us to isolate the individual actions - we believe by now that no single issue by itself is responsible, the ossification of the internet is more 'death by a thousand cuts').
We feel this is quite a unique opportunity for the internet to get funding to resolve a significant amount of technical debt that has accrued over the years, as well as stimulate new interesting work to hardening the internet and make it more resilient and keep it open - an area I expect your members to be quite interested in.
I hope your membership has time to provide us with some input, and/or relay this to some interesting people (we are open to any suggestions). I have some additional information attached, if people have any questions do not hesitate to let us know - me and my colleagues are happy to help.
Best, Michiel Leenaars
[...]
Am 16.09.2017 um 22:31 schrieb Adonay Felipe Nogueira:
I have sent my suggestion, mainly about reforming the current HTML standard ...
...
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org writes:
Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
https://nlnet.nl/NGI
I am less concerned with the technology but rather with what people do with it. Every day more and more previousl fine websites are "broken", designed for and by people with vertically held smartphones of the newest generation and very fast flatrate internet connections, and poorly functioning for almost everybody else, in particular people with older devices not using mainstream software.
This is really a political thing, but even the politicians who are for equality and the same rights for all, simply don't get it.
Regards, Theo
Dear Theo,
i was very happy to read your statement. This beause i know it from Latin America.
But the theme is "fixing issues of the internet" and this means the transport and not the application layer. Of course, you can say, if we have a bad transport system, we have many problems in the application layer.
HTML is part of the application layer and have nothing to do with the transport layer, the "internet". Also, how many confuse libraries you use is a question in the application layer.
many greetings, willi
Am 17/9/2017 um 04:48 schrieb Theo Schmidt:
Am 16.09.2017 um 22:31 schrieb Adonay Felipe Nogueira:
I have sent my suggestion, mainly about reforming the current HTML standard ...
...
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org writes:
Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
I am less concerned with the technology but rather with what people do with it. Every day more and more previousl fine websites are "broken", designed for and by people with vertically held smartphones of the newest generation and very fast flatrate internet connections, and poorly functioning for almost everybody else, in particular people with older devices not using mainstream software.
This is really a political thing, but even the politicians who are for equality and the same rights for all, simply don't get it.
Regards, Theo _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
I agree... This is why I think that the HTML standard should demand script supporting web browsers to offer such detailed messages to the users. This at least is an attempt to make website owners/proprietors follow the standards. Of course, during the filling process, I also expressed the same concerns as you: the most challenging part is making the proprietors/owners do the right thing (because the strategy can backfire if these decide to implement their own "future-HTML"-non-compliant web browser, probably inside an "app").
Theo Schmidt sus2006@bluewin.ch writes:
Am 16.09.2017 um 22:31 schrieb Adonay Felipe Nogueira:
I have sent my suggestion, mainly about reforming the current HTML standard ...
...
Matthias Kirschner mk@fsfe.org writes:
Hello everybody,
do you think a certain aspect of the core internet technology is broken? Do you have an idea what could be done about it? This is the time to submit your idea to:
https://nlnet.nl/NGII am less concerned with the technology but rather with what people do with it. Every day more and more previousl fine websites are "broken", designed for and by people with vertically held smartphones of the newest generation and very fast flatrate internet connections, and poorly functioning for almost everybody else, in particular people with older devices not using mainstream software.
This is really a political thing, but even the politicians who are for equality and the same rights for all, simply don't get it.
Regards, Theo _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion