A post-US world which we are quickly approaching (again, no chud crap, go away) has a lot of complications for standards put forward by regulatory bodies of America, which all countries follow – mostly because when these standards were created, these countries, even the most technologically-advanced (e.g. France) were behind America. Also, America, at the time, was powerful and most importantly, it was a producer of the hardware the software ran on.

Fast-forward 5-6 decades, and this is questionable if the US is going to have enough power to entice other nations to follow its standards. And that is mayhem.

For this reason, and a lot of other reasons, I am in favor of liberterianism because then, it would not be a government ran by octogenarians deciding standards for communication, it would be smart people working for other smart people. But I digress.

Also, again, no chud shit. I am not implying that America will be reduced to ruins in the upcoming years, no nation, whether an empire of a bunch of huts in Siberia, have ever ‘fell’ with no outside force. The much-overrated ‘empire’ which Americans just so love to obsess about, did not blow up, it faded, with its oriental counterpart well-flourishing for 10 centuries after that. So don’t take this as me saying ‘America will be annihilated’, again, no chud shit. What I am saying is, you cannot deny America is losing its power, its wealth, and thus its influence. People are less likely to follow standards set by your regulatory bodies when, you are, well, 2024 US.

The implications of a post-US world is numerous, mostly, the people seeking to take US’s place don’t like liberterianism, and they don’t speak English so all the English I have learned will be useless. But let’s focus on this aspect: What happens to the standards?

Will these substitutes develop better standards? I doubt it. The place in history that created this standard, and the people behind them, are unique. You can’t find another Ken Thompson at the ‘"sea"food’ market in Beijing.

Will we live in a post-standard world? Windows already broke the ‘standards taboo’, when it comes to the operating system at least. What this. But when an international network is concerned, that’s less feasable. What if Jimmy’s computer says A is 65, and Schlomo’s says it’s 666?

Worse, cryptography. Well, for ‘serious shit’, people roll their own crypto because it does not hurt to add obscurity to security. But what about primitives? For every suite, for every protocol, people use the same primitives, which are standardized.

I would have not been worried if the next influential superpower was not a couple of chuds.

Again, US is not going to disappear. It will still have its cultural power, if not its military or financial — and these standards are not going to be sudo rm -rf’d from the world.

In a positive turn of events, maybe, America will be known for being the birthplace of computer and open software, open standards, etc, — and I am not going to say ‘instead of’ because I am not American and the US might be culturally inferior to my nation, but it’s still a ‘better’ place, in an aggregated sense. So America is an ‘ok-er place’ than where i live so I am not going to insult a country where 340 people call home, as much as I despise these people for insulting me over and over for the past 15 years. So whatever, you live your life, I live mine. We’re talking big picture here.

Anyways, I am not very psyched for the future.

  • ulkesh@beehaw.org
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    2 months ago

    Instead of a stream of consciousness, maybe gather your thoughts into a more coherent and succinct post.

    Perhaps a simpler query would be:

    If the US was utterly destroyed overnight, how would these standards continue? Is there a plan in place for such an event?

    Such a query doesn’t rely on conjecture, opinion, or politics to ask the question and get to the answer. It simply poses a hypothetical.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Assuming a John Constantine magic event doesn’t happen and the US doesn’t just poof out of existence. Europe will carry on doing what it does most nations have their own national standards which mimic US standards. I suspect ISO may pickup some of the slack but not everything.
    Other orgs will step up and carry on the work of those orgs that have gone missing

  • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol
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    2 months ago

    Mostly nothing. The Unicode Consortium isn’t run by the US government. Neither is ANSI nor IEEE. The IETF and ISO are international bodies technically headquartered in Switzerland. FIPS picks standards, it doesn’t author them.

    Congratulations, you’re already living in a world where “smart people [are] working for other smart people.”

    Wait hang on…

    did not blow up, it faded, with its oriental counterpart well-flourishing for 10 centuries after that

    How long do you think a century is? Did you mean to say decade? Even then, the US wasn’t really a global superpower until the 1940s. There are people still alive that remember the Dust Bowl. If your question is, “what happens to regulatory standards 100 years after the US is gone,” I’m not sure what quality of answer you’re expecting.

    For someone who doesn’t want “chud shit,” you sure do leave some pretty huge doors open for it. Especially when you don’t go into any detail of what these regulatory bodies do. It reminds me of 14 year olds loudly declaring “I don’t want any drama…” before “…but I think Becky got mouth herpes from blowing Steve at band camp.”

      • shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol
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        2 months ago

        We found out two days later that Becky didn’t blow anyone, no one had herpes, and the entire field hockey team got mononucleosis because they share water bottles.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Imagine thinking the standards are from, or care about, the US.

    You’re the ass-backwards place that still measures things in bald eagles, dingbats and whatchamacallits. You and 2 more countries. Get with the times.

  • palebluethought@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Why would anyone stop using those standards? You seem very confused about the incentives for adopting standards. Sure, maybe US-driven standards were chosen over other possibilities partly because of political environment, but once you have a perfectly good standard adopted you’re not just going to throw it out because the original author isn’t cool anymore. You don’t need a dominant power to adopt standards.

    And for being “slightly political” and “focused on the standards,” your post sure does spend the majority of its time talking about only politics and not about standards at all

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Attempt at serious answer (warning: may be slightly offensive)

    Wow, you are a fucking moron. But, there is an interesting question buried in there, you just managed to ask it in a monumentally stupid way. So, let’s pick this apart a bit. Assuming Trump gets re-elected and speed-runs the US into global irrelevancy, what happens to the various standards and standards bodies? tl;dr: Not much.

    • FIPS - This will be the most effected. If companies no longer need to care about working with the US Government (USG), no one is going to bother with FIPS. FIPS is really only a list of cryptographic standards which are considered “secure enough” for USG use. The standards won’t actually change and the USG may still continue to update FIPS, people would just stop noticing.
    • UNICODE - Right so UNICODE is a code page maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Maybe with the US being less dominant, we see the inclusion of more stuff; but, it’s just a way to define printable characters. It works incredibly well and there’s no reason such would be abandoned. Also, there are already plenty of other code pages, Unicode is just popular because it covers so much. Maybe the headquarters for the consortium ends up elsewhere.
    • ANSI - Isn’t a standard, it’s a US Government Body. So, assuming it stops being good at it’s job, other countries/organizations would likely stop listening to it’s ideas. The ANSI standards which exist will continue to exist, if ANSI continues to exist, it’ll probably keep publishing standards but only the US would care about them.
    • ISO - Again, this isn’t a standard, it’s a Non-Governmental Organization, headquartered in Switzerland. Also, ISO is not an acronym, it’s borrowed from Greek. And ya, this one would almost certainly keep chugging along. Probably a bit more Euro-centric than they are now, but mostly unchanged.

    For this reason, and a lot of other reasons, I am in favor of liberterianism because then, it would not be a government ran by octogenarians deciding standards for communication,

    It’s ok, I was young and stupid once too. The fact is that, while many telecommunications standards started off in the US, and some even in the USG, most of them have long since been handed off to industry groups. The Internet Engineering Task Force is responsible for most of the standards we follow today. They were spun off from the USG in 1993 and are mostly a consensus driven organization with input from all over the world. In a less US centric world, the makeup of the body might change some. But, I suspect things would keep humming along much as they have for the last few decades.

    Will we live in a post-standard world?

    This depends on the level of fracturing of networks. Over time, there has been a move towards standardization because it makes sense. Sure, companies resist and all of them try to own the standard, but there has been a lot of pushback against that and often from outside the US. For example, the EU’s law to require common charging ports. In many ways, the EU is now doing more for standardization than the US.

    Worse, cryptography. Well, for ‘serious shit’, people roll their own crypto because…

    Tell me you know fuck all about security without saying you know fuck all about security. There is a well accepted maxim, called “Schneier’s law” based on this classic essay. It’s often shortened to “Don’t roll your own crypto”. And this goes back to that FIPS standard mentioned earlier. FIPS is useful mostly because it keeps various bits of the USG from picking bad crypto. The algorithms listed in FIPS are all bog-standard stuff, from things like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) process. The primitives and standards are the primitives and standards because they fucking work and have been heavily tested and shown to be secure over a lot of years of really smart people trying to break them. Ironically, it was that same sort of open testing that resulted in the NSA being caught trying to create a crypto backdoor.
    So no, for ‘serious shit’ no one rolls their own crypto, because that would be fucking dumb.

    But what about primitives? For every suite, for every protocol, people use the same primitives, which are standardized.

    And ya, they would continue to be, as said above, they have been demonstrated over and over again to work. If they are found not to work, people stop using them (se:e SHA1, MD5, DES). Its funny that, for someone who is “in favor of liberterianism” you seem to be very poorly informed of examples where private groups and industry are actually doing a very good job of things without government oversight.

    Overall, you seem to have a very poor understanding of how these standards get created in the modern world. Yes, the US was behind a lot of them. But, as they have been handed over to private (and often international) organizations, they have moved further and further away from US Government control. Now, that isn’t to say that US Based companies don’t have a lot of clout in those organizations. Let’s face it, we are all at the mercy of Microsoft and Google way too often. But, even if those companies fall to irrelevance, the organizations they are part of will likely continue to do what they already do. It’s possible that we’d see a faster balkanization of the internet, something we already see a bit of. Countries like China, Iran or Russia may do more to wall their people off from US/EU influence, if they don’t have an economic interest in some communications. Though, it’s just as likely that trade will continue to keep those barriers to the flow of information as open as possible.

    The major change could really be in language. Without the US propping it up, English may lose it’s standing as the lingua franca of the world. As it stands right now, it’s not uncommon for two people, neither of which speaks English as their native language, to end up conversing in English as that is the language the two of them share. If a new superpower rises, perhaps the lingua franca shifts and the majority of sites on the internet shift with it. Though, that’s likely to be a multi-generational change. And it could be a good thing. English is a terrible language, it’s less a language and more three languages dressed up in a trench coat pretending to be one.

    So yes, there would likely be changes over time. But, it’s likely more around the edges than some wholesale abandoning of standards. And who knows, maybe we’ll end up with people learning to write well researched and thought out questions on the internet, and not whatever drivel you just shat out. Na, that’s too much to hope for.

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      That is an acronym comprised of three English words, therefor it must be American, like NHS or RAAF