> The idea of wanting a connection to a central database is what makes > surveillance effective and in the end will reduce your freedom to noth‐ > ing. So keeping to a more »data packet« approach of spreading informa‐ > tion is something I see as the suckless way of distributing data.
Centralization's prime purpose is not surveillance. It makes some things more efficient and that might *include* surveillance, but the opposite, a lack of centralization doesn't prevent surveillance. If security is your aim then you are taking the wrong approach. Taking out centralization on one layer (here application layer) also doesn't mean you suddenly have sealed your universe from mankind. Unless you're personally moving every electron or photon around on this planet or even micromanaging every energy state of the universe you'll at some point give control to some entity that does the same thing for you at a bigger scale and lower cost. Unless we get something like quantum communication going you will depend on an underlying physical layer system. And even if we get quantum communication you'd still need a similar system to transfer entangled particles around the world in big reserves. Nonetheless I can see at my university that the military is keen on decentralized radios. It's being marketed to students as tools for disaster and emergency management. In some it induces images of suffering, starving women and children and the idea might be that charitable donations would come in really fast if the facebook was properly utilizeable in these areas. I think this is naive, but I understand aliens will attack us and we'll all burn in world-wide atomic blasts while engineers with webscale radios in their backpacks will prevent extinction by seducing the last women alive with their walkie-talkie. "This is peer-2-peer girl, never played it, huh?" I can partly see why military wants it. In contrast to your proposal such technology would be able to serve as the foundation of a self-sufficient system, your's would be on top of some transport (the internet i assume). So yeah, I don't really buy into your Internet of bunkers (IoB). One very good example to realize that centralization is a common optimization used even with distributed protocols is Bittorrent. It wouldn't be as successful if it wasn't used over the internet (hierarchically centralized routing). Nobody would use it without tracking sites, torrent catalogues (centralized meta information) or DHT (this is distributed over many peers but still basically a centralized database with only one instance. You could split it up into sealed networks, but then it wouldn't be as useful for bittorrent as a whole any more.) The bittorrent experience to the user would also be much slower and thus slightly less useful if there weren't all those seedboxes in datacenters or computers with fast uplink (central to clusters of the mesh/internet in terms of bandwidth*delay as a distance representation: so with this definition of distance it's still a centralized bulk data transfer). Counter-example: Having a fast uplink at home might make some want to contradict my opinion. But if you look at it's cost, it's commonness and how much of (for example) bittorrent traffic really goes through these nodes you might find it's not significant at all. Trying to finish up the bittorrent topic: the main advantage of bittorrent over something like a CDN for me today is that low-"distance" clusters get generated inside non-payed peered networks automatically and for virtually no cost (the bigger cost for peers would be to get *out* of a certain ISP's routing bubble). This basically hacks around the non-dynamic business models of ISPs that currently result in many overloaded peering links. Watching something on youtube over Deutsche Telekom is regularly a worse experience for me as a user than streaming a video via bittorrent on some network with even less and shittier peerings links. But what does that mean in context to what I said before: Bittorrent is merely a way of making it east to work around the *lack* of centrally optimized distribution on a higher level. The whole CDN and bittorrent stuff is just about optimizing fundamental infrastructure for the masses. Of course if you just have to suit the needs of select privileged few or just the government or it's enforcement army you can work at higher overhead cause you can make others pay for the higher costs. The suckless way of distributing data should be to create less of it in the first place, and make it so valuable and so compact that the distribution happens virtually on it's own, like diffusion. I wonder what, coming from you, would be more valuable: the information system or the information...
