1 HN user recommended this talk1 month2011–2023score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
Cited in privacy and surveillance threads as an early argument for personal servers and decentralization.
Eben Moglen's 2011 Personal Democracy Forum talk on the loss of anonymity and privacy on the internet. He proposes building an alternative net of personal servers, the idea behind FreedomBox.
“Eben Moglen talks about how the internet is going to lose what made it great” (HN, 2011)
The power of the internet comes from anonymity, Eben Moglen talks about how the internet is going to lose what made it great when you are unable to connect to it without an authority tracking your every query, every click and every mouse rollover: [this video]
Moglen on the internet losing anonymity and tracking.
The modern version of that is "it's just the metadata." I don't think legislation is the solution to this though. The spying is done because it //can// be done. By using a web application administered by somebody else you have implicitly given them your access logs. The right solution is more along the lines of bringing the power home[1], or friendly neighborhood colocation locations. If the Internet has 1M servers, they can monitor transmission at the large ones. If the Internet had 1B servers on it, they wouldn't be able to handle. [1] Talk by Eben Moglen about the Feedombox: [this video]
Moglen's FreedomBox talk cited for personal servers countering surveillance.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
3 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes