FUTO FUBS and the Everything App

From Eron Woolf on Why Open Source is Failing:

I posted something on the FUTO Zulip and thought I'd copy it here:

Hello FUTO types, I was just rewatching the short talk by Matt Mikhailov and Vincent McKibbon on open hardware blues https://youtu.be/YLn4vnfchaE and the discussion with Daniel C. on the Rockchip bringup https://youtu.be/5klMcYG-AP0 and I thought I'd post another ten cents worth here. It's not only the directly connected hardware that's being locked down, it's the network infrastructure too. Looking at the crazy stuff that people have to do to "punch holes" so that they can send and receive data peer-to-peer without publicising an IP address. This is in a sense dual to the problem of locked-down hardware, and they actually exacerbate each other. There are security vulnerabilities in the proprietary hardware and firmware, and the networks will route hostile traffic to compromise the crappy router your ISP installed in your house, but that same router won't let you receive TCP connections from your next door neighbour. So I really wonder about what Raspberry Pi are up to with their https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/connect/ gateway and why they want to be responsible for running that service. So my ten cents is to encourage people to think about routing around this network problem by replacing the whole IP layer with a higher presentation level where services are not located via physical machine addresses and DNS records, but through the software distribution channel. I don't know how FUBS works, but I am just hoping it will do something like this. I posted some ideas on the Freenet announcement https://youtu.be/3SxNBz1VTE0 but I think they were a bit too cryptic.

Here's a slightly more concrete example of what I mean by locating services through the software distribution channel. Most people are familiar with the general idea of name spaces. The DNS system is a hierarchical way to delegate namespace administration, but there are lots of other namespaces that are assumed and de-facto defined through the software distribution channel. Examples are the URI namespace prefixed by protocol strings like http, https, telnet, ftp etc. Others are things like the doi system. These schemes are administered by organizations like the IETF and the International DOI Foundation. But why? What are these schemes other than well-known addresses for authoritative data. But who decides what should be authoritative? Why does that responsibility need to be delegated to a semi-anonymous non-elected extra-national authority? All we really needs is an open, transparent source of reliable knowledge, which is kind of what all genuine knowledge worth having really is anyway. So the way to get this is to make sure that whatever software distribution you use can be programmed to parse a grammar like this:

RULES <- RULE | RULE ?ws? RULES
RULE <- SYM ?ws? '<-' ?ws? SYMSLIST
SYMSLIST <- SYMS | SYMS ?ws? '|' ?ws? SYMSLIST
SYMS <- SYM | SYM ?ws? SYMS
SYM <- '"' ?notdquote? '"' | "'" ?notsquote? "'" | ?AZs? | '?' ?azAZs? '?'

All this does is describe its own syntax. But it can in addition describe almost any other syntax that has a BNF grammar. This is most of the languages and data structures used to define IETF protocols, as well all the ISO/IETC protocols etc., etc. So in principle this is all you need to completely replace the top-level authoritative sources that are being used to 'govern' communications.

 I just realised that the relevance of this to the thread may not be obvious, it's just this: the only reason people need to use platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Teams, Zoom, Zulip(?) etc. is that these are what stand for "authoritative sources" as far as social media goes. It's because it is a monopoly that these companies are able to abuse that makes social media as toxic as it is. It would not be the monopoly that it is if people had access to software platforms that were not part of the whole exploitative system. I don't know what the motivation of the UK/US government's age verification legislation is, but I think if there were other ways for people to communicate than using these giant platforms then it would be much easier to avoid the issues around this, and I think they just wouldn't be an issue at all, just like there are no laws governing association IRL (but maybe that's coming, I don't know. If it is then we will need telecomms even more urgently).

To see what this does for security, technically minded people might be amused by the exercise of defining their own character encoding scheme (you could use an old Microsoft Codepage, or UTF-8 or something you invented yourself) and choosing their own concrete syntax (using terms in your language that mean what I mean by RULE, RULES etc.) for the above grammar, then defining a grammar for translators using the above grammar and using that, define a translation of this grammar I gave above into their encoding, then using that language to define a translator from the grammar above to and from their new encoding. Then post that translation as a reply to this message. Then, when I run my parser over it I should be able to send you a grammar that specifies, in your language, how to translate grammars defined above into parsers that compile and parse your language and translate it into mine. For extra points, define a set of glyphs and a character encoding for Klingon or some other alien language and do it all in that. The point of this exercise to is to see what abstraction really is: it's not about concrete encodings at all. The whole of knowledge kind of floats above any particular representation.

See FUTO FUBS:

See RET: https://github.com/futo-org/ret for some CPU instructions you can use in translations, ... and https://danielc.dev/rk/ for some ideas about things to translate, and one day there might be some secure open hardware to run it on:

See Matt Mikhailov and Vincent McKibbon on The Problem with Open Hardware.

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