For a fun side project recently I needed to put a linux computer’s wifi card into “access point” mode. I was working from Rust and so, even though I could probably have just called out to the nmcli command line tool, I wanted to try to do the whole thing from within my binary. Fortunately, NetworkManager has a D-Bus API that exposes basically all the configuration options available. Also fortunately, Rust has an extensive and fairly well documented D-Bus crate called zbus.
I recently bought a Synology DS220+ NAS for my home network and I’m really liking it so far. Setting it up was very easy and getting my phone to sync photos was a breeze with the Synology Photos app for Android. I also set it up as an Network File System (NFS) server so I could mount the files on my desktop and laptop computers, and therefore removed my reliance on Syncthing.
The recent announcement from Mozilla Corporation that it is laying off almost a quarter of its work force has many, including myself, thinking about how we as a society go about ensuring the continued existence of the fundamental digital infrastructure on which so much of modern life depends. The continued funding of open source software, and therefore its long-term sustainability, has been a perennial question for developers, the for-profit companies that rely on open source libraries, and even some of the large philanthropic foundations.
Internet users have been trained over the past decade or so to believe the argument that the services we have grown to think of as “the internet” are expensive to run and that the only way to pay for those services is to let ourselves be tracked everywhere in the service of advertising. Our concepts of privacy, particularly when we talk about laws and regulations, are often presumed to take place solely within this frame.
The past months have been a whirlwind of scandals, Zuckerberg testimony, and Twitter discussion about privacy online and the prospects for competitors to the major internet platforms. Much of the conversation on competition has centered on the prospects for data portability and standardized interoperability, to make it easier for users of one social network to pull up stakes and move to another and bring their data and access to their friends with them.
Earlier this year, a group out of the MIT Media Lab published a research paper called “Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?” which is well worth reading. The paper recognizes the threat to the open internet posed by the growing centralization of services and data within a handful of companies. The same group, consisting of Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman, also published an opinion piece in Wired called “Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great.
Its all too easy as 2017 draws to a close to simply call the whole civilization thing a failed experiment and plan to hibernate for 2018 (at least). The world, it appears, is coming apart at the seams. In politics, we seem more divided than at any time in the past few generations. This is true here in the US, of course, but also abroad in Brexit, the Russian “liberation” of Crimea, and the flaring up of feelings of independence in Catalonia.