The Internet: Who Owns Cyberspace?

For me, the word cyberspace has a dubious etymology. It is a shortened form of the word cybernetics, concatenated with the word space. The word cybernetics is der­ived from a Greek word which, depending on its context, can mean rudder, steers­man, pilot or governor. The word space refers to a multi-dimensional medium thro­ugh which conscious entities like humans may become aware of each other and int­eract. By consequence, the word cyberspace must refer to a multi-dimensional medium which some conscious entities use as a rudder or steering device through which to govern or control the rest of us. For me, this is pretty close to the truth.

Consequently, the multi-dimensional medium of cyberspace must include, first and foremost, terraspace — the physical biosphere of our planet. After all, our primary means of communicating is by travelling to meet and converse with others face-to-face. The biosphere is filled with air, which conducts the sound of the human voice. It is thus a medium through which human beings may converse. This medium is an ideal channel for human communication. Through it, normal human speech offers a channel of communication with a very high bandwidth over a conveniently limited distance. This facilitates the rapid interchange of knowledge, thoughts and ideas with safe and easy control between privacy on the one hand and publicity on the other.

Cyberspace must also include radiospace — what we know as the electromagnetic spectrum, comprising the full range of radio waves, through which we are able to communicate at a distance almost as if face-to-face. And finally, of course, it inclu­des the Internet. Personally, I question whether or not these relatively recent techn­ical advancements really offer any advantage to the well-being of humanity. My reluctant perception is that humanity certainly has yet to gain the necessary and sufficient wisdom to use them in an appropriate and constructive way rather than as a tool for conditioning, tranquillizing and exploiting gullible populations.

The following discourse is about all three of these aspects of cyberspace and what goes on within them, as perceived by me from where I stand within time, space and the social order.

Who Owns Terraspace?

Perhaps in the misty beginnings of humanity, people wandered unhindered across the bountiful surface of their native planet, able freely to communicate and interact with their peers. But it was not long before kings began to annex the Earth's habitable land, and the resources it contains, as a means to govern and control the majority of mankind and thereby com­mand his labour. This was done firstly by force of arms then by legal instruments such as the "Inclosure Acts" (1604 to 1914) in the United Kingdom.

Nowadays, the only way the individual may move across the surface of our planet is via a transport infrastructure, which is far from free, and within which, the in­divi­du­al's movements are severely restricted, regimented and controlled. The Earth is no longer free to wander.

Today, individuals may communicate and interact across the physical surface of the planet, but only by the leave of its State and corporate owners. And these require payment for their leave. They also impose the rules as to which restrictive routes the individual may use and how and when and under what conditions he may use them. They control all land. Control is ownership. Even in the prosperous First World economies, the individual has no allodial claim over any part of Planet Earth. He even has to pay for the privilege of "owning" his little brick box parked on its post­age stamp lot in suburbia.

In my opinion, this is not an idyllic state for the human species. Each individual is an independent sentient being. Collectively, humanity is not a conscious entity. Neither is a family, a State or a corporation. These have no personal fear or feeling. Con­sequently it is the well-being of each conscious individual that matters. Each in­dividual should therefore rightly have free and unencumbered economic use of his fair share of terraspace, and the right of free passage through all terraspace on the understanding that he does not disturb its economic use by its allotted user. No col­lective has the moral power to take these rights from the individual.

Who Owns Radiospace?

In 1867, James Clark Maxwell formed his math­ematical prediction of the existence of radio waves. Two years later, Heinrich Hertz managed to generate them artificially. Sub­sequent experiments showed that these waves could be made to bounce between the ground and the ionospheric layers high above and thereby propagate around the world. Before these events, nothing was known about these waves, or about the dim­ensions of space-time across which they travelled. And what is unknown can be commandeered by neither king nor corp­or­a­tion. Consequently, upon its discovery, the radio spectrum was an untouched virgin land, wild, unclaimed, free. Anybody could build his own apparatus and ex­periment to his heart's content.

But not for long. As with the open continents of the New World, kings and emper­ors, enterprises and corporations, soon looked upon the radio spectrum with poss­essive eyes. Each mustered his mighty power to divide and conquer it for lucrative gain. The kings of the Earth each soon declared his allodial possession, within his respec­tive jurisdiction, of the newly revealed dimensions of space-time through which travelled the electromagnetic wave. Common man could no longer venture therein, except by the leave of his king. Thus, like land, the radio spectrum had become subjected to what could be viewed as another form of "Inclosure Act".

For king or State, radiospace is invaluable for administration, defence and as a source of common revenue. Thus, today, the king (as an embodiment of the State) reserves some of the radio spectrum for use by his military and civil services. He licenses the use of what remains to his subjects, in return for a fee. He licenses some of it to broadcasters, some to the merchant marine, some to aircraft opera­tors, some to commercial communications carriers, some to private communica­tion, and even some to amateur radio enthusiasts.

As always when a king grants his leave, it comes with terms and conditions. In the case of licence to use the radio spectrum, it comes with very restrictive terms and conditions. The licence holder is restricted not only as to what frequency range and power he may use, but also to what kind of information he may send and receive.

The restrictions placed upon radio amateurs are simply Draconian. Political, religious and commer­cial comments or discussions are specifically pro­hibited. It is probably unsafe even to discuss phil­osophy. In fact, the only topics that radio amateurs are safely able to discuss are their equipment, the weather and signal conditions. This makes for tediously boring conversation. Fur­thermore, however boring it may be, a chat between radio amateurs can never be private. Section 2, Clause 11(2)b of the "Terms, conditions and limitations" of the UK's Amateur Radio Licence states that "Messages sent from the station shall not be encrypted for the purposes of rendering the Messages unintelligible to other radio spectrum users."

Radiospace is thus strictly off-limits to any lowly individual who may wish to discuss — either privately or openly — his own philosophical, political, religious or commer­cial ideas and opinions with his fellow human beings. I sometimes vainly try to im­agine what it would be like to be a member of a group of fictitious egalitarians who alone knew of the existence of radio waves and how to use them to communicate. We would have the unencumbered freedom, without cost, to discuss whatever we liked, unhindered by any restrictions and regulations imposed by king or State. Even if my friends and I had discovered a secret technique, such as chipped digital spread-spectrum transmission, way back in the 1950s, we could have communicat­ed by radio among ourselves without any authority of the time even being aware of our signals.

No State wants individuals to have the unlicensed and uncensored freedom to be able to discuss any and all topics with any other arbitrary individual within its realm. If they could, like minds may connect. Connected they would become united. United they could not be divided. Undivided they could not be ruled. And that would pose a real and present threat to the established order.

Unlike terraspace, radiospace is three-dimensional and is not confined to the sur­face of the Earth. It occupies the entire universe. So, to what extent can a sover­eign state lay claim to it? It cannot be fenced like land. A State cannot stop radio waves from crossing its national frontiers. The only extent to which a State can lay claim to the possession of radiospace is to control its use by its subjects. The only way it can do this is by imposing a legal penalty upon any individual who uses rad­iospace, from within its territorial boundaries, without licence or in a manner or for a purpose that its law forbids. The State polices its radiospace, to see who may be violating this aspect of its "sovereign territory", simply by monitoring the radio spectrum from official listening stations.

Having imposed rigorous control over who may or may not transmit signals from within their territories, some sovereign states even forbid their subjects even from passively receiving radio signals without having paid a licence fee. This was abol­ished in the United Kingdom in 1971, but it still remains for receiving television pro­grammes.

The licence fee money is purportedly used for creating programmes and running the transmission services. Notwithstanding, it places the State's broadcasting auth­ority in the position of receiving unconditional finance to produce what the author­ity wants the people to see and hear, which is not necessarily what the people want to see or hear. More disturbingly, it creates a facility by which the State and its broad­casting authority may steer and manipulate the public mind, making it an effective means of controlling society to conform to the will of the State and the elite minor­ity who actually influences and controls it.

A sovereign state cannot stop radio waves from other sovereign states from enter­ing its territory. Neither can it stop radio waves emanating from within its jurisdic­tion from leaving and entering the territories of other sovereign states. A particular State may wish to prevent foreigners listening to its domestic broadcasts. It can try to do this by limiting power and/or using line-of-sight frequency bands. More likely, though, it may wish to prevent its subjects from receiving broadcasts from certain other foreign States, for conflicting political reasons. This it can achieve by transmi­tting jamming signals on the same frequency as the offending broadcast, as happ­ened during the Cold War. Nowadays, with digital transmission, complete control of who may or may not receive a broadcast can be effected by encrypting the signal.

So, having discovered it, how should mankind use radiospace? The answer, in my opinion, is in a way that is fair to every individual. Every individual, should he wish to, must be free to use radiospace to seek and find like minds and discuss openly and freely his ideas with them. He should also be free to broadcast his ideas to any who may wish to listen. He must also be free to contact anybody casually or for some specific reason. Equally, he must have the right to privacy from being pester­ed by persistent callers, such as with the present unwelcome epidemic from tele­sales call centres.

Technology exists whereby all this could be easily implemented without common in­frastructure. However, for it to work equitably, there must be some form of central coordination. A single entity must exist to allocate spectrum usage and session channels and to maintain search indexes. But such an entity must not be an active authority. It must have no coercive power. Neither should it ever be allowed to fall into the hands of private commercial interests. It must be a passive system, im­ple­mented as a distributed technology within the equipments of all its users.

Who Owns The Internet?

Radiospace is an aspect of the natural universe. The Internet is not. Two radio ama­teurs, in different parts of the world, may communicate with each other over HF radio, using transceivers designed, built and owned entirely by themselves. In this case, their two transceivers are connected by entirely natural means. Two geeks, in different parts of the world, may communicate with each other over the Internet, using personal computers designed, built and owned entirely by themselves. In this case, however, what connects their two personal computers is a vastly complicated and expensive artificial infrastructure.

The justification for the extreme cost of the Internet's infrastructure is that radio­space simply does not have the capacity for the data transfer speeds demanded by all the Internet's users. At least, not the way the Internet is currently implemented. And the way it is implemented has a lot to do with how the Internet was born, de­veloped and evolved.

One part, of what became the Internet, started from the wish of scientists and aca­demics in research centres and universities around the world to be able to rapidly exchange scientific papers and experimental data. They opted for the quick solu­tion of renting the use of cables or packet services from national telecommunica­tions authorities and corporations. Another part started as networks linking govern­ment centres in various countries, again using rented cables. A third part started as sep­arate private international data communications networks, also operated across rented cables, by various large multinationals. These three parts and their various elements all finally, by mutual agreement, became interconnected to form the Int­erconnected Networks or Internet.

Consequently, the connecting cables are owned by national telecommunications authorities and licensed private telecommunications corporations, each within its designated geographical jurisdiction, throughout the world. These may also own the switching nodes (or routers), at the various junctions in the cable routes. Switching (or routing) equipment may, however, also be owned by private corpor­ations who rent the use of the cables connecting their private switching nodes. All these to­gether form what is called the Internet Backbone, which spans the entire globe.

A broad-brush logical view of the global backbone is shown on the left. The width of each coloured line depicts the relative amount of data traffic flowing between each pair of the 5 main regions of the world. By far the busiest route is between the USA and Europe. Practically 100% of Latin Amer­ica's traffic, bound for the rest of the world, flows via the USA. The one glaring omission is a route linking Latin America with Africa. With practically all the world's data traffic flowing via the USA, the USA is effectively able to intercept, monitor, re­cord, interrupt or stop all data flowing around the world.

All private interests operating within the USA, including all owners and operators of Internet cables and routers, through which practically all the world's Internet traffic passes, are subject to US law. Consequently, the government of the United States of America — through its various agencies — is able to control the flow of traffic within the physical infrastructure of the Internet worldwide.

An Internet Router sits at each junction of the Internet. Its job is to forward each ar­riving data packet, down the next appropriate leg of its route, to its final dest­ina­tion. Each data packet contains information about its origin and destination addres­ses. Most routers are located in US territory and are therefore under the jurisdiction of US law.

The US government is therefore in a position to be able to issue a legal instrument to a router administrator forbidding the forwarding of data packets travelling bet­ween a specified [home or foreign] origin and a specified [home or foreign] destin­ation. With appropriate software or chip firmware covertly embedded within a router computer, a US government agency could effect the blocking remotely, with­out the router administrator even being aware of it.

I am not suggesting that they do this. But the general adage is that: if they can, they will. They may be thus able, at will, to determine whether or not a web site in one foreign country be visible or not in a different foreign country.

So forget trade sanctions. The greatest and most devastating form of sanction the USA could impose on practically any country in the world is the IP packet sanction: the refusal to route packets originating from [or destined to] a target country across US territory. The Prism Program diagram above shows that, for by far the most part, the victim would have no other route.

At the time of writing, I don't think the USA is the kind of country to do this. But one must bear in mind that, as a pure consequence of human nature, any country could in the future fall victim to a fascist regime with policies of exclusive national self-interest embodying Draconian attitudes of arrogant disrespect and overt bullying towards the rest of the world.

Notwithstanding, effective ownership of the Internet's physical infrastructure does not procure control over what kind of information it carries, and between who and whom. The Internet is internationally open. Hence, the semantic content of the data traffic flowing through it is outside the direct control of any one sovereign state or legal jurisdiction. To truly control the Internet, it is necessary to construct some means of controlling what kind of semantic content may pass through the Internet and who may and who may not access it.

Because of its central position, within the worldwide infrastructure of the Internet, the USA has, through active selective encouragement, managed to establish multi­ple means of achieving total control of Internet content — or, at least, world public access to it. These means are, for all practical purposes, exclusively concentrated within United States jurisdiction, where, again, they can be regulated by US law. The government of the United States has thereby effected a worldwide "Inclosure Act" upon cyberspace.

Control of The World-Wide Web

A scientist or academic — or indeed, anybody who may want to — can publish his observations, experiences, sufferings and opinions on the worldwide web, as in the example of my own web site shown on the right. All he needs to do is write his thoughts in a text file, mark it up in HTML [the hypertext mark-up language] and upload it to a web server. He can include, within his text, diag­rams, photographs, animations and even running prog­rams called applets. But how do others get to see what he has thus published?

Within the hypertext mark-up language is a container for a list of keywords. It is called the keywords meta tag. The author of the document places relevant key­words into the keywords meta tag of his document. These are words, which he thinks are likely to spring to people's minds, when they are searching for material on the subjects or ideas that his article covers. The words which actually spring into people's minds, when they are thinking of a particular subject or idea, are not ne­cessarily very likely to appear in the actual texts of the most relevant documents. So choosing effective keywords is quite an art.

Certain computers, connected to the Internet, accommodate running programs called search spiders. These continually trawl through all the documents on all the servers on the worldwide web. Each spider looks in the keywords meta tag of each document. It then places references to that document against all the relevant key­words in its vast search index.

Running on these certain computers also is another kind of program called a search engine. This is accessed via a web page, which looks something like as shown on the left.

A person looking for documents on a particular subject types the relevant keywords that come to mind into the search engine's entry field and then clicks "Go". The search engine then looks in its vast index for relevant documents. It then displays a list of the titles of the relevant documents it has found, together with a short sum­mary under each title. The searcher then clicks on a title which interests him in order to display that document in his browser.

Search engines and their spiders were free ancillary services running within large computers operated by academic institutions and other non-commercial establish­ments. Documents were listed strictly according to relevance and nothing else. Everybody could find exactly what they wanted within all that was available. And they lived happily ever after. That is, until business and commerce got their dirty devious hands on the worldwide web and corrupted the whole process.

The natural motive of academics and other thinkers is to make their material avail­able to people who are genuinely interested in the subjects concerned. They have no desire whatsoever to push their material down the throats of people who are not interested in it. Not so the businessman. He wants to attract anybody and every­body to his web site in order to beguile them, by all means possible, into buying his products. And he quickly found an effective way of doing this.

He compiles a list of the most popular search words that people enter into search engines. These are, for the most part, words with sexual, sportive or financial con­notations. Then he places these words — along with keywords that are relevant to his own business — into the keywords meta tag of his web site's home page. So not only do people specifically seeking his products end up at his site, but also a vast number of other people who were searching for something quite different. His hope is that these other people, having arrived at his site, will be beguiled by his eye-candy pre­sentation into buying his merchandise.

The overloading of the HTML keywords meta tag with false attractors eventually became such an overwhelming nuisance to Internet users that traditional search engines became almost useless for serious searching. Something drastic had to be done. The solution was to abandoned the keywords meta tag as the means for search spiders to classify web pages. Search engines eventually ignored the con­tents of keyword meta tags altogether and instead extracted keywords directly from the main body text of the document.

Of course, this practice does not lend itself to the compilation of the most effective keywords. Most words people think of when looking for a document are unlikely to appear as such within the document's text. Keywords are generally big highly spe­cific words. The thought such a keyword embodies is usually expressed much more powerfully within the actual text by a phrase comprising a succinct combination of much smaller words. Thus the process has already lost some of its original effect­iveness. But this is only the beginning of woes.

To compensate for this problem of less effective keyword harvesting, web page authors began to write text that was deliberately force-populated with what they considered to be relevant keywords. This naturally resulted in bland text that was much less interesting and expressive, and indeed much more irksome and tiring to read. So it had to be kept short. The quality of web content thus began to diminish and so viewer interest had to be evermore held by quirky artwork. Web content thus became increasingly trivial.

At this juncture, by powerful marketing, US search engines began to attract the greatest number of web users. European and other search engines quickly fell from popularity and eventually disappeared. But the major players among the US search engines began to think commercially. Before, they had been ancillary services pro­vided internally by academic institutions and large corporations.

But now they wanted to make a profit. Charging the individual searcher was essent­ially impractical. So they adopted a policy for charging commercial web site own­ers. One popular way was to charge for ranking sites within search lists. The more you paid to the search engine provider, the nearer the top of the relevant search list your site would appear. This meant that non-commercial web sites all but disap­peared from all search lists.

In all this confusion, I found that a small search engine called Google still returned good relevant results. I think that perhaps at the time it did not charge for ranking. I don't know. All I know is the results I got were good. Finally, for whatever reason or by whatever means, Google grew and became the de facto means by which prac­tically all the web users in the world searched for sites and pages on the worldwide web. Thus Google has become the single exclusive access point, for everybody in the world, to information within the worldwide web.

This means that Google alone can determine how the entire worldwide web is indexed from the point of view of almost all the web users in the world. Its indexing policy can determine whose web sites can be seen and whose cannot; whose appears in search lists and whose does not. It can use arbit­rary criteria to rank web pages by relevance, and indeed to exclude vast swathes of websites from its index altogether. Thus, one single commercial entity, within the jurisdiction of one single sover­eign state, has almost total control over the flow of intellectual material among all the inhabitants of Planet Earth.

My web site has been on-line since April 1998. That's before Google came to power. Up until around 2004, my site had thousands of unique visitors a month. I received hundreds of emails in feedback from viewers. Now, looking in the access log, I see that this entire vast web site, of articles amounting to about 1·3 million words, re­ceives about half a dozen meaningful hits a month if I'm lucky. And these hits are exclusively to pages about odd technical topics, which are of only ancillary signific­ance. Searching for major topics within this website using any public search engine reveals nothing. Yet I have complied, as best I can, with all the technical standards that search engines currently demand. Why should this be? Statistically, it makes no sense.

The Spider That's Too "Clever"

I speculate that one reason for the dramatic fall in hits to my website is Google try­ing to make its search spider a bit too "clever" for the good of writers like myself. What is known as the three-frame set has been a standard way of presenting docu­ments of the kind that I write since Internet antiquity.

Each of my documents is presented, within the browser window, in three distinct areas called frames. The top frame, shown in pink, is the Heading Frame. It contains the docu­ment's title plus a 4-line extended heading or mission statement. To the left is the Nav­igation Frame shown in cyan (light blue). This contains hyperlinks to the group of doc­uments of which this document is a part. The remaining frame, shown in yellow, is the Body Frame, which contains the main text.

The content of each of the three frames is contained in a separate file: a Heading Fr­ame file containing the title and extend­ed heading of the document, a Body Frame file which contains its text and a Nav­ig­ation Frame file containing the naviga­tion links. There is a fourth file (called the Fr­ame File). This acts as an organiser to load the contents of each of the other three files into its appropriate area of the brow­ser window. The document is display­ed by simply requesting that the Frame File be displayed. The Frame File itself does the rest.

The browser window should be ideally 924 pixels wide: 210 for the Navigation Fra­me and 714 for the Heading and Body frames. The window height should ideally be about the same or a little more. With these minimal dimensions, the Heading and Navigation frames will not scroll. Only the Body Frame should contain a vertical scroll bar. This arrangement allows the reader to scroll down the Body text while the title and mission statement stay permanently in view at the top as a semantic anchor for the reader's mind while reading a long discourse. The Navigation Frame stays put also, keeping the reader always aware of where the document he is cur­rently reading fits into the big picture.

This arrangement is ideal for presenting large documents on intellectual subjects. It is not, however, what they call "Google-friendly". Google seems to be completely flummoxed by frames. Initially, as I understood it, the Google spider could not read JavaScript. I therefore adopted the following strategy to induce Google to index my documents, which exploited the Google bot's inability to see JavaScript.

I needed to induce the Google bot to trawl the Body Frame file of my document for keywords. I therefore pointed all links that referred to the document concerned to the frame­set's Body Frame file. In the Navigation Frame file, the Head­ing Frame file and the Frame File I put an HTML meta tag to tell search spiders not to index them but to follow the links within them onwards to other files. I put a different meta tag in the Body Frame file telling the spiders to both index the document and follow the links within it onwards to other documents.

What would appear in Google's index would therefore be references to each of my Body Frame files. If a searcher clicked on a link in a Google search results list, my Body Frame file alone would be displayed — without a heading, mission statement or contents list. That would look very frumpy and would not be much use. I there­fore included, in the header section of my Body Frame file, the following JavaScript statement:

This tells the browser that if it is being asked to load my Body Frame file as the only document to be displayed in the browser window, then it must load the document's corresponding Frame File instead. The Frame File then presents the three frames in their respective areas of the browser window. And all is well.

That is, until Google decided to make its bot a bit too "clever". It seems they made it able to read JavaScript. The problem is that, although the Google bot may be able to determine what a JavaScript statement is doing, it does not know why it is doing it. And in its ignorance, it assumes the worst. If it could not read the JavaScript, it would blindly continue on through the Body Frame file and extract keywords. But it does not do this.

When it encounters the above JavaScript statement at the beginning of my Body Frame file, it sees that it is immedi­ately being redirected to another page. It assumes that be­cause I am immediately redirecting it to another page, I must be doing something "sneaky" (Google's terminology). What is sneaky about presenting my document in a stan­dard frame­set, I can't imagine. Nonetheless, the Google bot, because it wrongly interprets what I am doing, refuses to index my document. Hence, from thousands of hits a month from interested viewers, my pages began to receive practically none.

If the spider had just stuck to ignoring JavaScript, all would have been well. If it had simply obeyed the JavaScript, executed the Frame File to assemble the frameset as a complete document the way a browser does and then indexed it, then again, all would have been well. But only half-doing the job, the way it does, has caused no­thing but trouble for web writers like me.

My only way out of this was to create a parallel web site in which all my 1·3 million words of articles were re-formatted as single boring documents with no global site navigation. So I had one website for my readers and another for Google to index. What a pain. Hopefully, when a Google searcher finds one of my articles in Boring Format, he will click on a link somewhere within it, which will take him to the properly presented version of my website. This, however, proved not to be an eff­ective solution. So eventually, I had to resort to using non-web networks as a means of providing "back-door" indexing for my website.

My Change to CSS

Once the CSS (Cascaded Style Sheet) system for formatting web pages reached a reasonable maturity, I decided in mid-2018 to re-structure my entire web site using CSS coding to provide the same effect from a single HTML file that Frames had provided using 3 + 1 separate files. This got around Google's hobby-horse of hav­ing one addressable file per document. I then uploaded the new version of my web site to the server, together with an appropriately updated sitemap file, which I then re-pulled via my Google webmasters account. I thought this would solve the prob­lem of not being indexed. How wrong I was!

Six months later, I was receiving only between zero and four valid Google referrals per month, with a little over four times that number falling as '404s' (page not found). This showed that after 9 months, Google had not updated the indexing of my web site to reflect the new structure as specified in the sitemap.xml file. Thank goodness for the indirect Kademlia hits. In all, therefore, changing to a CSS basis was far worse than the old Frames-based site.

On examining my Google webmaster data, I saw that my site had been penalised for two reasons:

1. my web pages were not "mobile-friendly", and
2. my web pages took "too long" to load.

Presumably, "not mobile friendly" signifies that it is not suitable for looking at on a cell phone or such like.

The content of my website is, for the most part, intellectual essays of between five thousand and twenty-five thousand words, which are copiously illustrated with dia­grams, photographs, animations and illustrative Java applets. Of course, the Java applets can no longer run the preferred way as in-text programs. Instead they must be launched as separate Java Web Start applications.

Addendum April 2019: Now, due to the superlative paranoia of the Oracle Java security system, even Web Start applications can no longer be laun­ched. Happily, they can still be run using the Open-Source version of Java with the IcedTea plugin. But from the point of view of web site illustration the Oracle version of Java is now dead.

My question is: who would be stupid enough to expect to be able to read a 25,000 word illustrated intellectual essay on a cell phone? Nobody, I would think. So why penalise a web site full of such essays because its documents are not "mobile-friendly"? I think the old adage "horses for courses" comes in here somewhere.

Taking "too long to load" depends on how long is too long. And too long for what purpose? I can only deduce that Google considers the essays on my web site to be too long to put on the Worldwide Web. Consequently, if I wish such content to be indexed, I must break it up into a staccato of small pieces capable of fitting within the miniscule attention-span of most web viewers. In other words, contrary to what Google preaches, I must write my content specifically to suit the preferences and limitations of the search engine: not to suit the author-determined best presenta­tion of the subject matter.

I must therefore conclude that, contrary to popular belief, Google is not a general search engine but a popular search engine geared to finding only the quippy little pages of commercial web sites.

A Dysfunctional Indexing Policy

Notwithstanding the above exasperating annoyance, the dominant reason for web sites such as mine disappearing from search listings is that all the major search engines have followed suit and changed their criteria for indexing websites. Any little website promoting a commercial entity, right down to a corner shop, gets pride of place in search listings. For anything of an intellectual nature, however, only glob­ally known high profile web sites seem to get listed. Others appear to be classified as being of interest only to their owners and are consequently not con­sidered worth including on a search list. Of course, another possibility could be that the program­mers of search-engine algorithms have suddenly become extremely in­ept. I do not, however, think this to be likely.

From what I understand, from what I am able to glean from the web, the main criterion now for ranking a web page is the number of links there are to it from other web pages multiplied by the "importance" rankings of the web pages contain­ing those links. This policy systemically guar­an­t­ees that the high ranking of web sites that are al­ready established is preserved and that nothing new will ever see the light of day. And this is ex­actly what appears to happen.

I'm led to believe that this ranking policy came from the notion that the relative im­portance of a published academic paper is proportional to the number of other aca­demic papers that cite it. Let's test this idea. Suppose I am a scientist. I publish a new academic paper. It is on a very important topic within a little known field on the very leading edge of scientific research.

Question: how do the authors of later scientific papers on related topics get to know about my paper in order to cite it?

I publish my new paper on the Worldwide Web. It has no importance ranking what­soever because nobody has [yet] cited it. So Google won't index it. So nobody will be able to find it using Google. So nobody will know of its existence. So nobody will cite it. So its ranking will remain forever zero. It will be forever considered unimp­ortant. Hence it will remain unindexed and therefore uncited. Thus, irrespective of how profound and potentially world-changing the revelations in my paper may be in reality, they will remain forever hidden from the world.

But who has decided that my paper is irrelevant? Is it the scientific community? Is it the sharp experienced minds of thinking people? No, because they have never seen it. So they could never make any judgement about it. This is because they were unable to become aware of it because they couldn't know of its existence. And all because a search robot with a flawed algorithm 'pre-decided' that it was irrelevant and so locked it into permanent limbo.

Obviously, a new academic paper does get cited. So it must become known to members of the academic community beyond its author. The process by which it becomes known must therefore follow an algorithm that is very different from that used by the Googlebot. It involves many channels of much greater bandwidth than a web search engine. It involves encounters at discourses and seminars, casual conversations in the corridors, publication in academic institute journals, press and television interviews and a host of other educational and socio-economic channels. These are the only ways through which anything new can become known. All the Google algorithm can do is maintain the status quo.

But what of those of us who do not have — and have never had — any kind of aca­demic or institutional affiliations? How do we share our new thoughts with the world. Certainly the answer seems to be: not through the Worldwide Web.

I painstakingly research and write a new document on what must be, at least to some people in the world, an interesting topic. I upload it to my web site. I link it into my site index and arrange for appropriate pages already on my site to link to it where relevant. My new document has no links pointing to it from external web sites. It therefore does not have any search ranking whatsoever. It will therefore never appear in any search listings. Consequently, nobody will ever see it. Conse­quently, nobody important will ever link to it from their important site. It will remain forever excluded. So those "at least some people in the world" will never be able to find it, no matter how well tuned a set of keywords they may enter into the search engine. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Notwithstanding the above, suppose I already know somebody who is very inter­est­ed in the topic upon which I have written. I give him the URL of my new docu­ment so that he can access it directly without needing to use a search engine. He reads it. He likes it. He tells other people about it. But why should he put a link to it from another web site? He can simply bookmark it in his browser. So even if people get to know about my new document by means that are outside of the worldwide web, it is still not very likely to be linked-to from any "important" sites.

Thus, for the purpose of revealing to everybody the goldmine of information that is available on the worldwide web, this indexing policy is systemically dysfunctional. It simply preserves the popularity of what has already been made popular through other means. But perhaps this is deliberate. Perhaps the intention behind the cha­nge in the search algorithm around 2004 was for the very purpose of creating, strengthening and preserving a worldwide web establishment, while minimalizing or excluding everybody else. Before 2004, I could search the web and find a vast diversity of interesting stuff. Now my searches end up at the appropriate establish­ed mega-site, which shows me only the bland sanitized content that I am meant to see.

The worldwide web has thus become subjected to a passive or inductive form of censorship, effected by the fact that a search engine places references to large established sites at the top of any search results list, pushing other "also ran" sites way down the list, where only the very diligent searcher will bother to look, leaving most not listed at all. But whose fault is this? Is it the fault of Google? Partly. But, in my opinion it is mainly the fault of the vast majority of people who allow a private monopoly like Google to become the only route of access to the vast wealth of information on the Worldwide Web. It is the fault of the lazy and apathetic mentality of common man who, through his unconditional awe and worship of corporate pow­er, always blindly clings to the most promoted option.

An interesting corollary of Google's dysfunctional search algorithm is its converse: namely an algorithm that specifically indexes sites that contain new ideas born of lateral thinking outside of the established mainstream. It is the inverse of Google's search algorithm: simply ranking a web page according to how few referrals it has from other websites.

Of course, there are many other arbitrary criteria used for determining whether or not a web site should be penalised in search listings. One such is the imposition that there must exist an <h1>/</h1> tag-pair in each document (presumably at the be­ginning) and that the content between these heading tags must be con­sistent with the content between the document's <title> and </title> tags. For the most part, this makes the <title> tag redundant. So why use it at all?

The default <h1> tag causes a heading to be displayed in enormous print. Non-commercial and non-journalistic web sites rarely use the <h1> size heading. Hence, in order to accommodate this Googlean imposition, web authors are requ­ired to redefine the <h1> tag to be a sensible size using a CSS class; an enormous chore for a web site with hundreds of HTML documents, which achieves nothing for the content of the document. It is another clear case of having to write the docu­ment for the search engine; not the user.

The content of the <title> tag serves a different purpose from that of the <h1> tag. It could, in some cases, be identical syntactically. In this case the imposition would be met and the document not penalised. In many more cases, however, in my experience, the title content may well contain the <h1> content. Notwithstand­ing, under good writing style, whereas the title tags may contain content that is seman­tically consistent with that of the <h1> heading, it is unlikely to be syntactic­ally so. Since search engines can only look at syntax, they cannot make anywhere near the same range and degree of semantic association as can the human mind. Conse­quently, in such a case, the document will be unjustly penalised.

At a certain time [I think it was around 2018-19] Google 'found' that more than half of all search enquiries came from mobile phones [or, at least, from mobile devices of some sort]. This apparently precipitated another ridiculous imposition that, con­sequently, all web sites should be what Google termed mobile-friendly. The reason or logical dependency between the propositions: 'more than half of all search enqu­iries came from mobile devices' and 'all web sites must be mobile friendly' alludes me, although I can see how impulsive thought could arrive at such a conclusion.

Is Google saying that web sites whose documents — such as this one — cannot be comfortably read on a mobile device shouldn't exist or are of little or no interest to anybody? Who in their right mind would want to read a highly illustrated intellect­ual article of the order of 20,000 words on a mobile phone? But they may well want to read it on a PC monitor or printed out on A4 paper. Again, the term "horses for cour­ses" springs to mind.

The Cease and Desist Order

But there is yet another form of censorship, which the US government — or any other US-based authority, agency or interested party — can impose on web sites. That is a legal instrument called the Cease and Desist order.

Google, which is based in the US at the confluence of all major routes within the worldwide Internet infrastructure, is exclusively subject to, and regulated by, US law. If the powers that be [whoever they are] do not like something that has been written in a web page, they can issue a Cease and Desist order. Not to the purport­ed offender [i.e. the author of the page], but to the search engine operator.

The demand of the Cease and Desist order is not to take down the web page con­cerned or to delete the "offending" content from it, but to cease and desist from placing the page in a search index. Thus it will never feature in any search results. This way, the location of the site's web server, the nationality of the author of the web page and the particular sovereign jurisdiction within which he may currently reside are all irrelevant. The search engine is located in the US and is therefore bound by US law, so the execution of the Cease and Desist order is easy and straightforward.

I once saw a document that was titled as a Cease and Desist order within a search list of my web site. Strangely, it seemed to be nothing more than a template. The reference to the offending web page and the offending content within it were both blank. It had the name and address of what I presume was an American law firm. Apart from this, it seemed to be a complete non-entity. Shortly afterwards it dis­appeared. I have never been any the wiser. I presume that somebody somewhere got their legal knickers in a twist. On the other hand, the inexplicably low hit count of my website (between zero and 4 valid referrals per month) could be explained by the presence of some legal order of this kind forbidding the indexing of my site. Perhaps it is something I said.

The upshot of all this is that general public access to content on the worldwide web appears to be inductively steered, by a single political interest, towards approved parts only of the total content that exists. And the content of those approved parts seems to be becoming more and more trivial. I am neither for or against the United States of America. I would have the same gripe were any other sovereign power in the same singular position. Nonetheless, a situation exists in which one sovereign power alone is able to exert almost total control over something which pertains to the entire world. And it is my firm opinion that any such situation is fundamentally against the best interests of mankind.

Graded Access Speed

Finally, on top of all the above impositions, there is a further inductive form of cen­soring that may soon be imposed by the major Internet Service Providers. They propose to provide higher data transfer speeds for the websites of those who are able to pay higher fees. These will effectively promote the dominant commercial websites backed by large corporations, burying websites — no matter how high the quality of their content — of individuals and smaller groups who simply cannot aff­ord these higher fees.

But this turn of events should be of no surprise to anybody. After all, it is simply capitalism in action. Once the Internet opened itself to commerce, its old egalitar­ian vision of universal freedom to exchange information was destined never to last. It had eventually to enter the real world in which the interests of the malleable many are outweighed by the greed of the favoured few.

Restrictive Browsers

The search algorithm is not the only means by which the American Internet corpor­ate clique is applying passive censorship to accessible web content. Mainstream web browsers are also being used to steer users towards what seem to be their pre­ferred types of website. An example is the Microsoft Edge web browser, which, on my Windows 10 laptop, is set to be the default browser that, consequent­ly, most people will tend to use. When I attempted to access this [http] website with Micro­soft Edge, a statement appeared telling me that this site could not be reached sec­urely. Said statement is, of course, a lie. There is absolutely nothing in­secure about accessing my [this] website via an http connection. Microsoft Edge then refuses to open the site. Its condescending statement then continues by offer­ing to open the site in the older Internet Explorer browser presumably for whoever really wants to take the "risk" of accessing my website.

I imagine that all this would deter most people from accessing my site, even though there is no factual danger whatsoever — to their personal privacy, their computer or anything else — in their accessing it.

The default web search facility for the Microsoft Edge browser is Microsoft's own search engine called 'Bing'. I registered my site with Bing. During the registration process, what I read conveyed to me that although Bing notes the existence of all registered websites, it only indexes https sites. Consequently, anybody conducting a web search with Microsoft Edge will be presented only with https sites in search results.

Thus with Microsoft Edge — the default browser in Windows 10 — refusing to dis­play non-https sites, plus Bing's indexing of https sites only, looks to me as yet another corporate instrument of exclusion aimed against all non-mainstream prod­ucers of web content.

Fortunately, the Mozilla Firefox browser handles the situation factually and pragmatically. It accesses and displays all web­sites [http and https] plain and simply. It only presents a warn­ing message [shown on right] when the keyboard has focus within a text field that POSTs text to the site's server. If you click on the 'Learn More' link, you are led to a web-based 'help' page that gives a clear and factual explanation of the very limited situation in which you may be vulnerable. Of course, at the time of writing, this warning message never appears anywhere on my site when accessed by Mozilla Firefox.

The whole problem of web search exclusion, as well as coming from Google's dys­functional search algorithm, is enormously exacerbated by its practice of extracting search keywords from content text while ignoring the web author's own keywords specified in each page's HTML keywords meta tag. This practice, in turn, came from the propensity of some web authors to pad the HTML keyword meta tags of their web pages with 'false attractors' — keywords that have no relevance to the page content but which many people will tend to use in searches.

Notwithstanding, the only type of website that has any motive to pad its keyword meta tags with false attractors is a commercial site. The only type of website into which the browser user needs to enter sensitive personal data is a commercial one. A commercial site is thus interactive: it involves two-way communication between the browser user and the website. The website displays information about its wares and prices; the browser user returns his name and payment information [such as credit card details] to the website's server. So, of course, to be secure it needs to use the https [secure hypertext transfer protocol]. And, of course, search engines need to use text-based keyword extraction in order to circumvent the inevitable malingering shenanigans of commercial interests. This is clearly a job for the likes of Google and Bing.

On the other hand, what I call an intellectual website is passive. Not all intellec­tual websites are 'academic' or mainstream sources. They include also informative, dis­seminative, interest, personal and other non-interactive websites of any size or au­thorship. There is no need — there is nothing gained — for them or their viewers by using and hence incurring the extra cost of https. And of course, the authors of purely intellectual sites have no motive to pad their keyword meta tags with false attractors. They want to attract only those viewers who are interested in what they have to say. So passive websites can be served safely via http and indexed accord­ing to the keywords that appear in each page's meta tag.

Consequently, there is need for a world-class universally known search engine to index http sites the old-fashioned way from their keyword meta tags.

Web-Based Email Sites

Originally, each computer connected to the Internet had a Post Office server run­n­ing all the time. People from all over the world could send an email at any time to the server. The server displayed an alert on the screen of the appropriate recipient when an email arrived for him. He then accessed it and read it. Thus the email sys­tem of the Internet was distributed and, by consequence, was reasonably priv­ate.

Running an email server requires the recipient's computer to be permanently on-line. This was fine in the day when the clients of the Internet were large Unix mach­ines. Soon, however, small personal computers became the norm for the majority of Internet users. It is not normal, nor is it desirable, to keep these switched on all the time, so they do not lend themselves to running mail servers. The solution is to have a distribution of large computers permanently on-line running email servers. Each personal computer then runs an email client program, which can access its local email server from time to time to download any new mail. This is still a reas­onably well distributed system.

Distributed systems are anathema to authorities. This is because they are difficult to monitor and control. The solution is to lure people to large web-based email sites. These provide an attractive user interface, which is served through a web browser. A user of a small personal computer logs on to his account at a web-based email site to send and receive his email. The US email site providers dress up their user interfaces with lots of attractive artwork and advertise their "free" services. Where­upon, the vast avalanche of new Internet users flock to them from all over the world, like moths to a candle flame.

Email had originally been a channel for serious communication. With the advent of the web-based email giants, this abruptly ended. An ethos of total trivia quickly established itself. Now, people who have no real interest in email adopt a habit of forwarding endless jokes and stupidity to all and sundry. The result is that people's mailboxes become choked each day with truckloads of utter rubbish. Each has to spend ages getting rid of all this unwanted material and seeking out the few proper emails buried within it. This phenomenon is greatly exacerbated by the endless avalanches of unwanted and utterly abhorred junk advertising.

Many people cannot keep up with the necessary daily purging of junk from their email in-boxes. Vast numbers of email boxes therefore become abandoned as giant pus-balls of junk festering within these megalithic webmail servers. The abandon­ers then have no alternative but to establish a new email address. And the cycle repeats. What a stupid waste of resources!

Against this stressful backdrop is the perilous situation in which a statutory comm­unication, such as a payment demand, can legally be sent by email and that its having been sent means that the recipient is deemed to have received it. Consequ­ently, if the recipient accidentally deletes it along with the hundreds of junk emails among which it is buried, or if the email becomes misrouted, or if his Internet conn­ection is down, or if his computer fails, then he is penalized. To my mind, this situa­tion is an impractical absurdity, apart from being thoroughly unjust.

Unlike with the PC-based email client, the user of web-based email does not down­load his email into his own computer. Instead, it is left in his email account on the giant server of the web-based email service provider. Here, it is stored in supposed privacy. This privacy, however, is private so long as US law allows it to be so — either in general, or as may pertain to a specific user at a particular time. So, no matter what your nationality or country of abode, if an agency of the US govern­ment issues a legal instrument to the US-based webmail service provider, to reveal to it your email archives, then it shall be done.

It is well evinced, by the nature of advertisement applets at the edges of my brow­ser window, that the web-based email service provider trawls the content of my emails for clues as to what he is most likely to be able to sell to me. Notwith­stand­ing, it is but a small step from here to trawling the content of my emails to see what political opinions or allegiances I hold and whether these be in or out of line with US government interests.

I find the monitoring and surveillance of the meta-data (such as the sender, recip­ient, subject and date) of an email disturbing. In the United Kingdom, so I am led to believe, the actual content of an email is also monitored. I find this even more dist­urbing. Monitoring, however, is a passive activity. It does not actively interfere with or disrupt the transit of emails.

Active intervention, on the other hand, definitely does interfere with and disrupt the transit of email. I used to write frequently to somebody on the other side of the Atlantic. Recently, however, Microsoft decided to block my emails from its network. Since my correspondent has a Hotmail account, my emails can no longer be recei­ved by him, although I can still receive the emails he sends to me. I also used to correspond with another person across the Atlantic. The subject matter we discus­sed necessitated that we exchange files attached to our emails. My correspondent has a Google mail account. We soon discovered that Google blocks the exchange of attachments of the kind we needed to exchange. This is direct and unauthorized in­terference with personal mail. I believe it would be classed as a crime if it were per­petrated by an individual. It would appear, however, that corporations are above the law.

Notwithstanding, the original email facilities of the Internet are still alive and well. Furthermore, I think the time is nearing when each home will be equipped with a domestic local area network. This will be connected to the Internet probably by a small, low-consumption server, which operates continuously. This server can then run the old-fashioned post office mail server, which can receive and send the home's emails, independently of any megalithic web-based service. This, however, will only work provided the Internet service providers (ISPs) leave open the listen­ing ports required by post office mail servers. Disturbingly, there has been an incr­eas­ing trend, over the past decade, for ISPs to close these listening ports.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking can be done most simply and effectively through open websites and email. This, however, is outside corporate or state control or influence. And this will not do. The powers that be — commercial or political — therefore set their goal to induce the vast majority of Internet users to interact exclusively through a small clique of dominant social-networking sites.

I remember the early social networks as being quite useful. In the early days (circa 2003), I could search MSN for — and find — other people in the world who shared my values, interests and aspirations. But not any more. The dominant social net­working sites today such as Facebook stubbornly inhibit any attempt I may make to link with people of similar values, interests and aspirations. I quickly found that en­tering my interests on my Facebook page was not to help other people with those interests to find me. On the contrary, it was exclusively to help commercial advert­isers target me with products based on my published interests. Understandably, I no longer have a Facebook presence.

The only people with whom I was ever able to link up with on a modern social network were people I already knew and people whom they already knew. These only knew each other through family or casual connections. Of all the "friends" I accumul­ated via social networking, none shared any of my values, interests or aspirations. Their conversation was, to me, always trivial, inconsequential and su­premely boring. For common man, the exchange of information via the Internet has thus become imp­otent, relegating any serious grass-roots thinker to a voice crying in the wilderness where none can hear.

This has left television and other mass-media, once again, free to brainwash the public mind into forsaking its own well-being to serve the self-interest of the global elite. Once again, only those with lots of money — namely the state and the corp­orate — can make their voices heard.

This situation is not surprising. For thinking like-minded people throughout the world to be able to link up via the Internet, to exchange and develop ideas, is inher­ently dangerous for any global elite. So, through social networks, the Internet elite have managed to kill two birds with one stone. They have reduced to triviality prac­t­ically all inter-personal communication between common people, while, at the same time, turning them into a captured audience for their highly-targeted comm­ercial advert­ising.

Centralised Chat Sites

Almost from the beginning, a method of encoding the human voice into discrete Internet Protocol packets was commonly available through a facility called Internet Relay Chat (IRC). There are many free open-source IRC client programs, which can be downloaded and run on practically any computer — at least any running a ver­sion or derivative of Unix. These operate in what is termed peer-to-peer mode. An IRC conversation is conducted actively by only the computers belonging to those who are parties to the conversation. Other computers en-route between them are only ever passively involved.

This allows any two people, each located anywhere in the world, to hold a private conversation, without the data packets carrying that conversation passing through any central server. Neither the identities of the parties to the conversation, nor the content of what they say, can be intercepted, monitored, recorded, interrupted or blocked by any third party interest such as a corporation or government agency. And for the powers-that-be, this again, simply would not do.

Consequently, as with personal web sites and email, large US corporations soon sprang up and pro-actively attracted the exploding base of worldwide Internet users to establish free accounts on their servers. The declared motive of these corp­ora­tions was, again, to turn all the people of the world into a captured audi­ence for their highly-targeted commercial advertising.

On these commercially-based services, at least the initiation of the connection be­tween the two parties to a conversation is done via a corporate server. Thus, the metadata — the identities and Internet addresses — of the parties to the call are known. Information regarding who conversed with whom and when, for subscribers all over the world, is thus available on the corporate server. While this is very useful for marketing products, it is perhaps even more useful for surveillance. And being based in the US, all these corporate servers are subject to US law and so can be forced at any time, by any agency of the US government, to hand over this inform­ation.

The operators of these Internet chat services assure us that our privacy is their pri­ority and that we need not be concerned because all our conversations are prot­ected by strong encryption. Notwithstanding, the session encryption key for each call isn't created by the parties to that call. It is created by the service provider's client software installed in each party's computer. There is therefore nothing to stop the service provider building in to his client program the capability of sending that key to his server if requested.

Furthermore, there is nothing to stop the service provider opting for the method­ology whereby it is his server, rather than the client software, that issues the session en­cryption key for each call. In this case, any agency with access to the service pro­vider's server can eves-drop on any conver­sation between any users worldwide. Here­by, the identities of the parties to a conver­sation, and the content of what they say, can now be intercepted, monitored, record­ed, inter­rupted or blocked by any third party inter­est such as the service provider concerned or — by the appropriate legal in­st­rument — any US government agency. And are we realistically to believe that if they can, they won't?

Cloud Storage Sites

A cloud, in this context, is a large mainframe com­p­uter — or even an array of such computers — which has a very large amount of data storage resources (such as disk drives) attached to it. This computer has very high bandwidth access to the Internet. Any­one may open an account on this computer via the cloud service provider's web site. This gives him an initial amount of free storage space. He may request more than this, but he will then have to pay so much a month for the extra space. To be able to use the cloud service to backup his data, he must download and install the cloud service provider's client soft­ware to run on his personal computer.

I think it was around 2008 that certain corporations started to offer limited amounts of cloud storage to people in general free of charge. Currently (early 2014) I sub­scribe to three cloud storage services on which I'm allowed between 2 and 5 giga­bytes of storage for free. I use each to make an off-site safety backup of my work, which comprises my writing, software and research library. This all amounts to no more than 1·5 GB.

I have a separate folder in my /home directory for each cloud service. I syn­chronize my work folder to each of my cloud service folders weekly, using the Linux utility rsync. The client soft­ware of each cloud service running within my computer then synchron­izes its re­spective folder to my stor­age space in its cloud. I consider this two-stage ap­proach essential in order to avoid any synchronization mishaps in which the cloud service could corr­upt items in my work folder. This in­deed did hap­pen before I adopted the two-stage approach.

Cloud computers are equipped with high redundancy recoverable data storage re­sources. They are therefore super-reliable and dependable. Consequently, if ever my personal computer were destroyed or stolen, along with all my on-site backups, I could download all my work from one of my cloud accounts into a new computer. That is the great and primary value of cloud storage.

What motive do the cloud service providers have for offering people free storage? The amount of free storage they offer is small compared to the normal con­tem­porary amount of storage available within a personal computer. Even my mobile device is currently equipped with a 35GB memory card. The average person tends to use up the space he has available, mainly by not bothering to purge outdated documents and photographs that did not turn out as well as he would have wished. Thus files tend to accumulate on his device and fill up its available storage space. As he uses up more and more of the storage on his personal device, so too he will want to back it up. And cloud storage is the ideal place. Consequently, he will quickly run out of his free allocation and have to buy more space from his cloud service provider. If the cloud service user is a company, then almost certainly the free space allocation will be insufficient right from the start. So the free space is, in effect, a pre-purchase free trial. Of course, there are some like me who keep their storage use well trimmed, even on their personal computers. But we are a relative­ly small minority.

Is this all there is to it? How is it that all these successful cloud service providers are American? Is the rest of the world full of inepts? What catapults these two-geek start-ups to world domination so quickly? There are lots of equally clever people in other countries. They obviously get copious starting capital. They obviously get ad­ministrative assistance and seem to find uncannily obstruction-free routes to rapid growth, which their would-be counterparts in other countries don't seem to get. Could it be, therefore, that what they are doing is extremely useful to certain pow­erful organs, institutions and agencies?

Is my data safe when stored on a cloud? As far as storage integrity is concerned, it's as safe as houses! It is extremely unlikely ever to get lost or corrupted. But is it safe from the point of view of privacy? If I store personal confidential information on a cloud, is it possible for anybody else to access it? "No," say the cloud service pro­viders. Why? Because all my data is password protected. It is also encrypted by an encryption key that has been generated from my password. And I am the one who originates my own password. One cloud service says that even its own staff do not know my password. Consequently, nobody can have access to my information stored on its cloud, unless I deliberately make all or part of my data shareable.

Notwithstanding, all passwords are stored somewhere on the cloud service pro­vider's computer. They may themselves be encrypted. But the decryption mechan­ism must exist somewhere on the cloud service provider's computer. It can thus be found by anybody with root (administrator) privileges. One way or another, the cloud service provider's system administrator, operators and programmers be­tween them have the capability of accessing my data and decrypting it. Govern­ment inst­it­utions and agencies know this.

The cloud service provider and its computers are based in the US at the confluence of the global inter­net backbone. They are thus under the jurisdiction of US law. If, therefore, the US government or one of its agencies has reason to want to see my data, it can issue a legal instru­ment compelling the cloud service provider to provide it with a decrypted copy of my stored data. The US government or one of its agen­cies could even request that the cloud service pro­vider provide it with a back door entrance to the cloud storage so that it could decrypt and in­spect at will any or all data stored on the cloud. In my case, I think they would quickly become extremely bored by what they found.

I remember a blog comment by a coordinator at one of the major non-American (yes they do exist) cloud services. He strongly advised that no file should be placed in cloud storage that had not been strongly encrypted separately by the user him­self beforehand. This is an additional stage in my weekly backup routine that I did not mention above. I create strongly encrypted .pgp files from all my modified work files before placing them into their respective cloud upload folders on my computer. Provided my .pgp encryption keys do not become compromised, this gives me my best shot at maintaining my privacy.

The only further measure I could possibly take would be to copy all my modified work files onto a memory stick and encrypt them using an off-line computer that is never connected to the Internet. But that's a bit too much work.

For most of the inhabitants of Planet Earth, the cloud storage service is probably the one area of cyberspace in which they are most vulnerable to clandestine sur­veil­lance. This is because, within their cloud space, unlike in emails or on social media, they store practically all their personal information in a complete and organ­ised form.

Portent From The Past

The best protection the individual can acquire for the privacy of information he transmits across the Internet is encryption. Current encryption methods are so strong that it is estimated that it would take all the computing power in the world a length of time equivalent to 5 times the age of the universe to crack the encoding and reveal the naked contents of an encrypted file.

The individual may thus encrypt his emails, including attached files, before he sends them so that they can be decrypted only by the legitimate recipient. He can encrypt files he stores on a cloud so that they can only be decrypted by himself in the event that he needs to retrieve the information stored within them. Provided his keys and files are not compromised within his own computer itself, encryption is nowadays invincible.

This does not suit the powers-that-be. It renders them blind. It strikes fear into their hearts. There is only one way they can fight this. That is to make encryption illegal. Remember Section 2, Clause 11(2)b of the "Terms, conditions and limitations" of the UK's Amateur Radio Licence I mentioned earlier. In the UK at least, this worst nightmare has already come to pass in the form of the "Online Safety Act of 26 September 2023", which bans encryp­tion of data sent by private individuals across the Internet.

Of course, it may be permissible to encrypt Internet chats, whether typed or voiced, so long as they are conducted via a centralized server where the powers-that-be can have access to the encryption keys via a back door. But direct end-to-end en­cryption between peers, including the off-line encryption of email attach­ments: no way. Such a ban may not sweep the world at first. But it's coming. Mark my words.

Infiltrating Your Computer

I think of the data storage space on the hard drive of my personal computer as my private territory. I feel sure that most people also think the same about their person­al computers. Before personal computers were connect­ed to the Internet, this was largely true. It was possible to infect a personal computer with a so-called virus via removable media such as a floppy disk. With a little care and a few precautions, however, this was preventable. But the Internet changed everything with regard to the security of one's own personal data within one's own per­sonal computer. Nowadays, who knows who may be snooping around your hard drive poking their noses in­side your personal files? It is as well to beware what you store within your personal computer.

Although it was possible, personal computers prior to about 2004 did not really have the speed and capacity needed to run Unix-derived operating systems. Most there­fore did not have the enforced privacy and protection of Unix's user account system with its individual, group and general file permissions.

From their beginning, personal computers operated mostly with MS-DOS and then Microsoft Windows. I don't know about after 2008, but up until then certainly, these had little or no effective security built into them. Security, if it existed, comprised third-party programs whose job it was to frantically scan the computer's storage for known viruses and "firewall" software that monitored incoming Internet packets for "suspicious activity", whatever that meant. The anti-virus scanners had to be regul­arly updated as the war between virus producers and the anti-virus software raged on. This, of course, resulted in an unwelcome on-going cost for owners of the pers­onal computer.

Operating systems have now long included a built-in facility for automatically upda­t­ing themselves via the Internet. This is well protected from malicious attacks, by the use of strong encryption and the exchanging of digital certificates. Notwith­standing, it does give the operating system manufacturer a secure back door into your personal computer.

The operating system manufacturer could, if he so wished, include additional func­tionality within his automatic update software. This could easily be a program to scan your hard drive for whatever he may wish to look for. The operating system manufacturer is an American corporation, which operates within US jurisdiction. If the US government, or any of its agencies, were to issue a legal instrument requir­ing the operating system manufacturer to provide access to any or all personal computers, then the operating system manufacturer would have no choice but to comply.

With a closed-source operating system running on your computer, you can have no idea of what's really going on "under the hood" — behind the glossy graphics user interface on your screen. It could be passing your personal data, through a back door, to goodness knows where on the grounds of US national security.

The operating system itself is not the only possible source of insecurity to the pri­vate information on your computer's hard drive. Application programs can also snoop on your private data. Perhaps the greatest culprit here is the web browser. There are at least four means whereby a web browser can cause information about you to be gathered and sent to an unknown destination. These are: cookies, brow­ser plug-ins, JavaScript programs embedded in web pages and Active-X con­trols.

Cookies really only gather statistics about your browsing habits, i.e. what web sites you have visited. They probably don't even identify you as an individual. They could pass on your IP address. However, the average user's IP address changes at least every time he starts his computer. A cookie is useful in that it can enable a part­icu­lar web site to "remember" your preference settings and log-in details for that site. However, the fact that it preserves such data leaves your details vulner­able to be­ing picked up by any malicious agent lurking within the browser environ­ment.

A web browser can also have, installed within it, little "helper" programs called plug-ins. These enable the browser to do things like play movies or sound streams through embedded objects within the browser window. However, the producers of these plug-ins could easily include additional functionality that is nothing to do with the task in hand.

JavaScript programs and Java Applets are computer programs that are embedded within a web page and are executable while the page is being displayed. They are useful in that they can automate forms that you need to fill in on a web page. I use them to automate the illustration of certain things in other parts of this web site.

JavaScript programs and Java Applets, according to their original functional con­cept, are perfectly safe. This is because they are confined to run inside what is ter­med a sandbox. This means that a JavaScript program or Java Applet fundamentally can­not access or store anything on your computer outside the browser's own ded­icated temporary folder. It can read data from, and write data to, the server from which the displayed web page was served. But there is absolutely no way that it can look at, add to or modify anything anywhere else on your computer, including your pri­vate files or folders.

I became very frustrated two or three years ago when I noticed, on somebody's Windows machine, that when Microsoft Internet Explorer loaded some of my web pages, it displayed a terse warning message to the user saying that my page could possibly harm his computer. This, of course, was an utter lie. There is no function­al­ity within my code that can possibly harm anybody's computer. In fact, the code concerned simply displayed, in the browser's status bar, the date that the page was last modified. It did not do, nor could it do, anything more. My JavaScript code was clearly there to be seen in the web page's source. Anybody with only a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript could see that it could cause no harm.

So, why the warning? I don't know. I can only speculate as follows:

1. Microsoft extended the capability of the version of JavaScript, which it has im­plemented in its Internet Explorer web browser, to be able to be used in such a way as to harm the operation of, or access the data stored within, somebody's computer, and

2. Microsoft's facility for detecting the presence of JavaScript code in a web page is not sufficiently intelligent to be able to determine what that Java­Script actually does, and

3. Microsoft's JavaScript detector played safe by, in the circumstances, pre­suming the worst and condemning my JavaScript code as potentially malici­ous. This I perceive as a tort of defamation against me, as the author of the site, in that it effectively labels me as being under expert suspicion of hav­ing the malicious intent to harm the user's computer.

Microsoft's version of JavaScript can be used, by a web page, to download and run ActiveX controls. These are, in effect, native programs that run on your computer as if they were applications invoked and run by you. They are thus not confined to the browser's sandbox folder as were Java and JavaScript programs that conformed to the original concept.

Consequently, an ActiveX control can, be it designed to do so, access your entire filesystem, including your personal private data. Why introduce this glaring vulner­ability? Because it facilitates something that many people find useful. It en­ables teams of people to use application programs, like word processors and spread­sheets, seamlessly across many computers connected via the Internet, as if they were a single computer. But was it worth it? In my opinion: definitely not.

The upshot of ActiveX is that danger can come simply by your accessing a rogue web site. The content of the web site itself may be quite benign. Notwithstanding, a web page could contain a program, embedded within it, which is capable of down­loading a native program into your personal computer, and hooking it into the operating system so that it will, forever after, be running whenever your computer is on. Not all downloaded programs do this. But they could. The capability is there.

Exacerbated by Naïvety

The predatory surveillance, by foreign powers and common thieves alike, which takes place over the Internet, is willingly assisted by the incredible naïvety and gul­libility of the general public, who flippantly label all dissenters as paranoid. One part­icular example is as follows.

Recently, the residents of the condominium of apartments where I live decided, at great cost, to install "security" cameras all over the building and its approaches. The camera images are supposedly viewable by all the residents on their home com­puters via the Internet. I have 3 computers, plus a laptop and a tablet. How­ever, the camera viewing software, as supplied by the vendor of the camera sys­tem, is incompatible with all of them.

Fortunately, I discovered an installation of Microsoft Windows XP in an old disused partition on my laptop's hard drive, which contained no personal data. I down­loaded the camera viewing software and was able to view the camera images. The defin­ition was so poor that it would be impossible to identify anybody from the images. So they couldn't be used to catch a thief.

An employee of a security company, who administers client passwords, can access camera views. Such an employee is vul­ner­able to being bribed or threatened into revealing our building's password to a potential thief. For instance, a thief could investigate a particular employee of our building's private security company.

He could find out where the employee lives. He could find out where the employ­ee's children go to school and photograph them. Then he could threaten the em­ployee concerning the "safety" of his family if he did not reveal the password. The thief could then access our cameras over the Internet just as we can. He could then take as long as he likes to "case the joint", seeing who comes and goes and when. And if for our building, why not for many or even all buildings who subscribe to the secur­ity company's camera plan?

The password for the camera views was included with the instruction document on how to install and use the viewing software. This document was in a PDF file kept on a public dropbox server. The condominium administrator distributed the open web link to this PDF file in an open email sent to each of the residents. I know of re­sid­ents whose email accounts are on Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail. Other residents prob­ably have email accounts on many other email service providers. Some resid­ents may download their email into an email client. Others may access their emails dir­ect­ly on the host servers.

It is well known that the email service providers scan our emails for the declared purpose of targeted marketing. And who knows what else for who else? So any em­ployee, of an email service provider, with access to email scanning facilities, can access or pass on the link to the camera instructions and hence our building's pass­word.

Furthermore, each resident doubtless has a cont­acts list, within his email account, listing the email addresses of his friends, acquaintances, colleagu­es and various others. These all, in turn, have con­tacts lists. Using any of a whole range of fairly simple hacking techniques, such as writing an ap­propriate macro for an email client, any one of an open pyramid of contacts could become the route by which any resident's email account could be un­knowingly compromised. Any resident could also inadvertently include the link-bearing email in a "reply to all" on his contacts list.

I recently watched a friend buying something on-line from a vendor's website. The buyer was asked to enter his email address so that the vendor could send an email confirming the details of the purchase. The buyer was then required to enter and confirm a password. We assumed, at first, that this was to be a new password for the buyer to register as a customer at the site. So my friend entered and confirmed a newly made-up password. A message box then opened saying that the password was incorrect. Then I noticed that, underneath the password entry field, a short ex­planation had appeared. It explained that the vendor needed the password to my friend's actual email account, which was necessary in order for the vendor to verify that the email address given was, in fact, the genuine email address of the buyer. My friend decided not to make the purchase.

Of course, my friend could have given the vendor the password to her email acc­ount and then changed the password of her email account as soon as the account had been verified by the vendor. Notwithstanding, once the vendor's automated system had logged into her email account, she would be unable to access it until the vendor's automated verifying system logged out. During that time, such a system could scoop up an awful lot — if not all — the content of all her emails. It could, in fact, should it have been programmed to do so, change the password to her email account and thereby lock my friend out of her own email account. I am not saying it would, but it could.

I wonder if any residents of my condominium building have bought anything from this very large and popular on-line vendor. If so, that company, some of its emp­loyees, its software provider and some of its software provider's employees pot­entially have full access to their email accounts. And hence to the building's cam­era system and to the hard drives of the residents' computers.

Once the link has been acquired and the password discovered, anybody can get the viewing software, as it is a generally available package with minimal configuration required to suit the individual installation.

The viewing software was written as an Active-X control, so I am thankful that I had absolutely no private data in that Windows XP partition. Who knows what back doors the security company or its software provider built into their closed-source Active-X control? Its compress­ed installer alone is over 104 MB. All this merely to select and display a video stream via a browser video plugin?

What could the rest of this rather over-sized program be up to? Technically, it could contain code to enable the security company, its software provider or any of their relevant employees to access whatever information may be stored on the com­puter of any resident of our condominium who has the proprietary viewing software in­stalled.

A Precipitous Event

A so-called security issue occurred at our condominium building on the 2nd of March 2015. The inter-phone in my apartment rang. My companion answered. It was the young man who brings our hot lunch on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fri­days. My companion recognised his unmistakable voice as he said "Marmitex", the name of his employers. She took the lift to the entrance and went out into the street to take the lunch pack. While my companion was on her way down, the inter-phone rang again. A voice simply repeated "Marmitex". But it wasn't the voice of the young man. Apparently, at the instant the young man pressed the button for our inter-phone, a very large muscular man arrived. He was the one who had press­ed the button a second time and repeated the word. The young man gave the lunch pack to my companion and went on his way.

The large muscular man told my companion that he had an appointment with a foreigner to repair some furniture units. He gave our apartment number. I am the only foreign resident in the building. My companion said she did not know about any such arrangement and that I certainly would not make such an arrangement without her knowledge. She told him to wait. She re-entered the building to return to our apartment to ask me. She opened the gate and went in. Before she could close the gate again, the man had slipped in behind her like a slithery snake. There he was, inside the building. My companion had no way of expelling him. He was three times her size and very strong. She had no option but to continue taking the lift up to our floor. The man followed tightly behind her. I heard them talking as they emerged from the lift.

I opened the kitchen door and my companion slipped through. The man tried to snake in behind her. I closed the door to a narrow slit and placed my foot to stop him opening it, trying to look as menacing as I could. The man was quite theatrical. He created a strong expression of having recognized me, by which he tried to induce a complementary reaction from me. I was puzzled at first but affirmed that I had not made any appointment with him and that I had never laid eyes on him before. He then tried to convince me that we had met before and that I should let him in to see about the furniture repairs or modifications that we had arranged. All the time he was dancing around, like an over-sized monkey, with his head almost in the door, desperately trying to get as much a vision of the inside of our apartment as he could. I remained adamant.

Eventually, he gave up and pulled away. He apologized, saying that he was sorry but he had so many people to remember that he sometimes got confused. He said that it wasn't the 4th floor he remembered, it was the 8th floor. My companion then made the mistake of mentioning the name of the person on the 8th floor. The man then in a triumphant voice affirmed that the name my companion gave was indeed the person with whom he had made the appointment. The person on the 8th floor later related to us that the man had gone through the same routine with him, except that the arrangement he claimed to have made was to paint a bannister rail. I wonder why the change of story. The resident on the 8th floor sent him away.

The man then seemed to spend some time wandering the building, with which he seemed uncannily familiar. My impression was that he was neither a carpenter nor a painter. He had a very small light canvas tool bag in his right hand. I was worried at first that it could contain a gun. However, after scrutinizing it, I saw that it could only contain very small light tools such as those used by an electronics, computer or telecommunications technician. He eventually let himself out of the building and slinked away.

Paranoid Reaction

I have related the story of this man to provide context for explaining the inverted perception most ordinary people seem to have regarding cyber-security, as illust­rated by the paranoid reaction to this event by the Clique of Four who make it their self-appointed business to decide how our condominium is administrated. One of the things they decided was that there should be a list of do's and dont's regarding how people enter and leave the building or allow non-residents to enter. This was an excellent and sensible suggestion.

Notwithstanding, this was followed by the proposal that the security company (who supplied the original cameras) should be consulted for advice on how to improve the security of the building. Of course, surprise, surprise, they recommended that the condominium spend more money on more cameras. The innocent motive of commerce. This, of course, provides any band of thieves, with a computer-savvy member, an even better facility for casing the joint.

Then, after castigating my companion for mentioning his name to the man, the inhabitant of the 8th floor (one of the Clique) came up with the brilliant suggestion that all residents should form a group with the name of the condominium on Whats­App (a social media facility popular at the time of writing)! Don't mention any­body's name and apartment number to any stranger in the building but publish an identi­fiable organized list of the names and phone numbers of all the residents to the whole world.

As far as I know, Whatsapp does not have a group search facility at this time. None­theless, there are several bolt-on third-party apps, which facilitate group name search with geographic constraints. Besides, there is nothing to stop WhatsApp it­self adding such a facility at any time. Use an inverted database view of the phone directory to link phone number to address and Bob's your uncle, or rather, Ali Baba's dream. The potential thief thus has the name of the building, a list of resi­dents with phone numbers and hence apartment numbers, plus the facility to watch who enters and leaves each floor of the building and the main door by way of time-stamped video streams.

A Personal Experiment

By the time of this incident, I had long since erased the old Microsoft Windows XP partition from my laptop's hard drive. I desperately needed the extra space for the Linux installation. Consequently, I could no longer run the security camera suppl­ier's proprietary camera-viewing software. Since I was being charged for the secur­ity service anyway, I decided that I had right of access to the camera video streams for our condominium building. I spent 4 hours researching for relevant technical in­for­mation on the worldwide web, constructed the necessary Real-Time Stream Prot­o­col (RTSP) requests, put them into the standard VLC video player and up popped the 12 camera views. All without any of the vendor's proprietary client software. The first thing, of course, that shocked me was that these video streams are unen­crypted. They are completely open.

Reading further, I discover that the Digital Video Recorder (DVR), installed in our condominium building, runs Linux and has only weakly protected telnet access. With this, I can effectively get command of the system as the root user. I thus have access to the full command set, not only for accessing the camera video streams, but also for playing back and/or erasing video from specified past time periods, or even changing the content.

I discovered other information about how to use ping-like utilities to sniff out the IP addresses of RTSP servers. With these I can build lists of the IP addresses of local video stream servers, many of which will be the DVRs of other local condominium buildings. I can then probe Port 554 in these servers to latch into the video streams from these other condominiums. I can also log into these servers via telnet and assume the same command options. The DVRs of other condominiums are, natur­ally, protected by different 6-digit passwords. However, these can be rapidly crack­ed by looping the RTS sniffer command and piping it via a utility such as crack-pass.

And I am certainly not a hacker. Not by any stretch of the imagination. It seems to me that these camera systems are negligently unprotected. The worldwide web is replete with articles about just how vulnerable they are. The only way to make a camera system secure is to make it truly CCTV, that is CLOSED circuit. It should be connected in no way, by either cable or wireless, to anything outside the building. Specifically it should not be connected to the Internet.

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The camera system is not the only way that personal data of residents may fall into the hands of criminals. The condominium administrator sends a bank payment slip for the monthly condominium fee each month to each resident. The bank payment slip is sent as a PDF file attached to an email. The resident has no choice but to receive it this way. The PDF file is not encrypted. It can therefore be read by any hacker who may manage to gain access to the resident's email account. The bank payment slip contains not only the resident's name and address, but also various other identifying codes and numbers pertaining to that person. It is therefore a prime source from which a criminal can build a full profile of the resident. So even if, as I, one would naturally take all sensible precautions regarding Internet secur­ity, one can still be forced, by petty officialdom, to leave oneself vulnerable.

Perhaps nothing bad will ever happen. Perhaps, by luck, no thief will think of steal­ing items from the residents apartments or personal or financial data stored on their PC hard drives. Nevertheless, I think it is very stupid to spend other people's money on a system which undoubtedly reduces the security of all concerned, leav­ing their comings and goings open to view by who knows whom.

Thus, foreign government agencies are not the only entities who can nose around inside the files stored on your personal computer's hard drive. So too can private companies, their employees and whosoever might compromise their employees, in­cluding common thieves. And if they can, they will. As regards the Internet, there is no such thing as paranoia, only naivety. In modern cyberspace, your computer is a house of glass in a savage land owned and ruled by marauding forces you cannot see, as the vast expanse of Asia was once owned and ruled by the fear of Genghis Khan.

A Cyberspace Policy

The highly asymmetric imbalance in the current architecture of the Internet's global backbone facilitates and encourages the totalitarian control of cyberspace by the government of the United States of America and its agencies. In my opinion, this is not healthy for anybody — including the Americans. The distribution of the total data bandwidth among the links of the global backbone should follow much more closely the distribution of global population.

The first and most pressing need in the esse­ntial quest to rectify this imbalance is for a South At­lantic Link. This should be a secure data super-highway between Brazil and South Africa [shown in green on the left]. To ensure its robustness, it should use fibre-optic and microwave technologies with fall-back all the way to a slow HF spread sp­ectrum link as an ultimate recourse. It should also be built from native technology and manufacture: not imported. This is to ensure that no outside pol­itical interest can implant covert back doors within the technology whereby the link could be monitor­ed, controlled or even shut down at will by a fore­ign power.

The South Atlantic Link could then become the first phase of what could become a BRICS backbone for the Internet, linking Brazil, South Africa, India, Russia and China. I think this would go a long way towards rectifying the current imbalance. Nodes within the BRICS backbone would then become natural choices for locating non-American search engines and other Internet service resources. If other econo­mic blocs of the world then further the homogenization of the global backbone, cyber­space should gradually become the common heritage of mankind rather than the private property of those who rule the United States of America.

It is well to note that if any future fascist regime were to apply IP packet sanctions, the rest of the world would undoubtedly react by laying links to circumvent and thereby isolate the aggressor.

The presence and growth of the Internet demonstrates a desire — which has turned into a need — for individuals all over the world to be able to communicate with each other. This includes not only intellectual communication between peer and peer, but also collective communication between broadcaster and audience. The Internet has answered this desire well. It does, however, have a disturbing draw-back. It requires for its operation a large, complicated and expensive high techn­ol­ogy infrastructure. And this infrastructure is currently, for the most part, owned by large private in­terests, all too many of whom have exhibited rather poor behaviour towards the individual user. For example, have you ever vainly attempted to cancel an account with a telecommunications giant?

It would be far more comfortable and far less stressful, for the individual inhabitant of Planet Earth, if he were able to com­municate with any of his human peers by natural means — in­dependently of any intervening artificial infrastructure. A poss­ible solution could be to replace the Internet with a global pat­chwork quilt of ad hoc Wi-Fi networks. The necessary long-reach band­width would be attained through the massively par­allel nature of the quilt.

An ad hoc wireless scheme provides the individual with independence from corpor­ate domination. Notwithstanding, it does place on each individual the public obliga­tion to contribute to, and participate in, the scheme. And it still depends on very complex — if not proprietary — technology.

Another option — which could in any case be used as fall-back — could be based along the lines of amateur radio's 2-metre relay service. With this, a radio amateur, entirely at his own expense, provides a relay transceiver operating on the 2-metre amateur band. It is left switched on all the time and automatically relays calls from other radio amateurs on to the next relay. Thus one radio amateur, in one part of the world, can hold a conversation with another radio amateur, in another part of the world, using the relatively short-range 2-metre band. This scheme could use relat­ively low technology. Equipment could even be self-built by the enthusiastic user. Of course, the bandwidth available is vastly lower than the Internet or Wi-Fi provides. On the other hand, the truck-loads of superfluous graph­ical decoration, which use­lessly flow daily around the Internet, impose an enormous bandwidth overhead, which the naked information content doesn't really need. The bandwidth offered by 2-metre relay is certainly sufficient to carry a Short Message Service or even email.

The 23 cm band of the electromagnetic spectrum is both within the range of maxi­mum atmospheric transparency and is also in the Quiet Band over which the uni­verse is also quiet. At a frequency of around 1·3 GHz, it is also capable of carrying a very high data rate. Long-range point-to-point transmis­sions on this band can be done by moon-bounce. The moon must be in a favourable position, which it is only at certain times. However, messages and files can be queued for sending when the moon is in such a favourable position.

All modes of HF transmission, including a suitable adaptation of spread-spectrum, offer yet another even lower bandwidth option for inter-personal communication worldwide. This too would make an excellent fall-back option in the event that the faster more complex options should fail. Privacy for all these communication op­tions — Internet, ad hoc wireless, VHF (2-metre) and HF — should be effected with end-to-end encryption established and maintained by the individual end-users.

To protect the interests of the individual user within his personal computer, we need to revert to secure open-source operating systems. Then, at least any comp­et­ent programmer in the world — whatever his allegiances — is able to see clearly all that is going on "under the hood". What happens, or can happen, within one's com­puter will thereby be in the public domain, and hence will be open to public scrutiny.

To furnish the individual with his self-evident right of unencumbered access to the entire rich content of the whole of the worldwide web, some kind of global non-censoring search facility is needed. I think that this could best be done in a distri­buted way by open-source software running within a new generation of domestic servers, which are left running continuously.

For the time being, the web search engine is no longer an effective means of diss­eminating intellectual discussion between people of like minds. Other means must be sought. Perhaps the best is to convert web articles to PDF files with file names that comprise a list of relevant keywords. Then place them on various file sharing networks like gnutella, eDonkey and Freenet. Interestingly, since I started serving my PDF files on these networks, the hits to my web site increased several fold. This is probably because my PDF files contain hyperlinks which refer to other pages on my actual web site.

Conclusion

All the foregoing having been said, why should I be perturbed by the fact that the all-seeing eye of the US government and its agencies is able to read my emails and spy inside my private files on the hard drive of my personal computer? After all, as many are quick to retort, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear". Whether or not I have any­thing to fear — and hence to hide from them — depends more on the dubious nature of their motives and ambitions than on the quality of my moral integrity.

I could therefore, unknowingly, have much to fear and consequently, much to hide. I am simply one of those strange individuals who would feel uncomfortable and embarrassed at having to live in a house with glass walls.

Of course, the US government is not the only villain of the piece. Many other coun­tries have clandestine agencies like the Israeli MOSSAD and Britain's infamously secretive and invasive GCHQ. Their motives and ambitions must be, at least to some extent, different from those of the US. However, none of these, at present, sits at the confluence of the global Internet backbone. Perhaps, if and when the backbone becomes more homogeneous, the threat to individual privacy will be­come more distributed, balanced and hopefully more diluted. I think that would make me feel safer.

Cyberspace thus does not have the nature or character of a sovereign state, nor even of a confederation or a political alliance. It has more the nature of the high seas, where dominant maritime powers vie to consummate their respective ambi­tions. But there is a difference. The high seas lie outside all sovereign territories. Cyberspace does not. Cyberspace is everywhere. The upshot is that a dominant sovereign state may rule that part of cyberspace that lies within its sovereign ter­ritory according to its own sovereign law. However, this does not bind it so to do in that part of cyberspace which lies outside its sovereign territory. There it may, should it choose to do so, behave like a marauding buccaneer on the high seas, free of the constraints of its own internal laws — or indeed, of any laws at all. Its be­haviour will therefore be most likely determined by the covert strategies of its sec­ret agencies.

What is the purpose behind these covert strategies? It is to gather, by all means fair and foul, intelligence that will facilitate the ambitions of these agencies' mast­ers. But who are these agencies' masters? Are they the taxpaying citizens of the sov­er­eign state these agencies serve? Supposedly, but no. Their real masters are an in­ter­national faceless elite, who strike dubious deals with warlords and dictators, to take for themselves, from the poor of all nations, all the wealth of the Earth for the price of a banana. This super-regenerative process of escalating disparity is in­her­ently unstable. It cannot be sustained. The time must therefore come when unfet­tered knowledge will blast away the scales, which currently blind the eyes of man­kind from the reality under which they live. Then humanity will rise and take back its lost inheritance.

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© Nov 2013, Jan-Feb 2014 Robert John Morton
An article related to this theme appeared in The Guardian on 4 May 2024