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Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

(torrentfreak.com)
234 points gloxkiqcza | 5 comments | 15 Jul 25 14:33 UTC | HN request time: 0.954s | source
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sunshine-o ◴[15 Jul 25 15:47 UTC] No.44572385[source]▶
I came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because:

- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.

- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.

- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies

It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.

As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.

Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.

We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.

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xtracto ◴[15 Jul 25 17:56 UTC] No.44573980[source]▶
The thing is, the Internet was supposed to be P2P initially (in Spanish it had the motto "La red de redes" (the network of networks, meaning that it was supposed to connect several LANs together).

But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.

Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.

The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.

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1. sunshine-o ◴[15 Jul 25 20:49 UTC] No.44575669[source]▶
Something I have always been wondering is: how much was WiMAX a threat to this centralisation and the 3 - 5 ISP per country model?

I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber.

You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense.

Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.

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2. axus ◴[15 Jul 25 21:07 UTC] No.44575836[source]▶
The centralized search engine's AI summary says that LTE became more popular, and the people who would buy WiMax hardware ended up buying LTE hardware instead.
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3. sunshine-o ◴[15 Jul 25 22:51 UTC] No.44576742[source]▶
From what I remember (and I might be wrong) WiMAX was first competing on the "home" Internet market. Mostly against cable & DSL I guess at the time. It was a USB dongle you would put in your laptop.

Having a one WiMAX enabled smartphones was the cherry on top and probably more of a long term goal. The only one I remember was the HTC Evo 4G [0] (the first 4G enabled smartphone released in the US, and by 4G they meant WiMAX, not LTE).

My guess is there was for sure a big battle between Intel, major phone manufacturers, telcos, infra providers and various patents holders.

There was probably a chicken and egg dilemma for mobile phone manufacturer since they had to wait for the network to grow before risking launching their WiMAX phone but having a WiMAX enabled phone would make WiMAX at home really attractive.

My guess is also that since people usually get their phone from their telco, phone manufacturer had to be careful not to go against their interests. And since most telco wanted LTE, WiMAX couldn't take off.

But there might be more to this story, including the fact Intel was also trying to get in the phone SOC market at this time.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Evo_4G

4. wmf ◴[16 Jul 25 05:05 UTC] No.44578846[source]▶
how much was WiMAX a threat to this centralisation and the 3 - 5 ISP per country model?

Not at all. Today there are hundreds of WISPs based on Wi-Fi(ish) or proprietary FWA technology in the US alone.

5. numpad0 ◴[16 Jul 25 15:22 UTC] No.44583277[source]▶
WiMAX was just Intel alternative to LTE. It might have been threat to Qualcomm, and cellular telecom in-groups, but not a threat to centralization trend at all. Range was shorter than existing cellular, so it needed more towers, not less.