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sudo wrote

OP, can you edit your post to include a transcript of this article? CNET won't load for me unless I enable javascript, which I'm not about to do.

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evilsjw wrote

Mozilla: This $2M is yours if you can 'decentralize' the web

It's not a "Silicon Valley" plot line. The Firefox maker and the National Science Foundation are aiming for a free and accessible internet for everyone.

Mozilla and the National Science Foundation want a new internet. And it should be free and accessible for everybody.

They'll pay $2 million for it.

On Wednesday, the two organizations issued a call to action for "big ideas that decentralize the web" as part of the "Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society" challenges. The challenges include getting the internet to communities off the grid, with proposals like a backpack with a computer and Wi-Fi router inside.

The internet was born decentralized, actually, and it remains a family of networks, with traffic distributed over many routes. That Netflix film you're streaming gets broken into lots of little packets that are reassembled on your end for a (generally) smooth viewing.

But still, the web reaches only so far in some places, or not at all to others. And there are pinch points -- individual companies that route such a heavy flow of traffic that a single incident can mean a widespread outage.

Solving the access problem may seem like a fantasy. It's even a major plot in the latest season of HBO's comedy "Silicon Valley." Richard Hendricks, the stumbling genius founder of Pied Piper on the show, played by Thomas Middleditch, proposes using every phone on the planet to create a new internet.

About 34 million people in the US don't have access to the internet, and even that pales in comparison to the digital divide in the rest of the world. Globally, 4.4 billion people don't have internet access -- more than half of the world's population.

Infrastructure is the largest obstacle, and that's provoked some crazy-seeming projects. Just ask Facebook and Google about their plans for, respectively, a giant Wi-Fi drone and internet-beaming balloons.

Mozilla hopes its new push will lead to a more accessible internet for everyone.

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ziq wrote

That site is filled with bloat. It would be useful if raddit auto archived linked articles and added them to the body of posts.

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sudo wrote

That would indeed be useful, but it might be difficult to isolate only the article text. I know firefox has something called reader mode that does just that, so it might be worth looking at the source code for firefox to see how they do that.

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sudo wrote

Interesting. I'd say in addition to what they said, we should decentralize the domain name system. As it is, one corporation (ICANN) controls the domain name system for the US, and a few other countries, and you have to pay one of their approved registrars to register a domain name. I know that OpenNIC exists, but I don't know anyone who uses it.

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zer0crash wrote

I hear the guys at Pied Piper are working on this.

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