Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

news.ycombinator.com

191–200 of 444 posts

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#191
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but what about the other 99% of the population who are too busy to completely learn ops and opsec? My mom isn't going to leave facebook to make her own website and host her own email, even if you give her all the tutorials in the world.

Website in a box (docker), put it wherever. This might be a good idea.

So, Wordpress basically?

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but what about the other 99% of the population who are too busy to completely learn ops and opsec? My mom isn't going to leave facebook to make her own website and host her own email, even if you give her all the tutorials in the world.

No one said anything about hosting your own email or making your own website. eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com. She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and fo…

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail chooses not to mine your data (even for spam filtering, they only optionally collect emails you permanently delete from the spam folder). They're a paid service, with no advertising. And they have a very strong privacy policy. ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client access and storage. (Obviously, unencrypted mail sent to or from other servers could be intercepted.) But thei…

>"ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client access and storage." Is this just TLS + block level encryption like LUKS? If so I would be surprised if FastMail wasn't offering the same. But maybe Proton is offering something else at the client level? It was my impression that the big differentiator was Proton Mail's infrastructure was all co-located in Switzerland.

From my understanding, there is no way for ProtonMail's operators to decrypt your mail storage, it requires your own private key. Whereas FastMail is not much different from Gmail in terms of "company's access", except it's privacy policy prohibits it from using it for anything but customer service on request.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but what about the other 99% of the population who are too busy to completely learn ops and opsec? My mom isn't going to leave facebook to make her own website and host her own email, even if you give her all the tutorials in the world.

No one said anything about hosting your own email or making your own website. eg. My wife has a small business with an online store hosted on Shopify and her email provider is Gmail. But her website is www.her_domain.com and her email address is @her_domain.com. She can easily switch out her providers and her contact addresses don't change. No real tech knowledge needed except for how to register a domain name and fo…

I do this as well for my personal email. It's good to decouple your front end from your back end.

The main concern I still have is that I'd lose gchat if I swapped out my email host from Google apps.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#197
post #60

Make your website of record your website. Make social media platforms and others (e.g. Google) secondary to that. Don't let Google and Facebook control how you build your website. I am amazed at companies that take their websites and subjugate them to their Facebook page. You may gain social attention but you are handing over control. Never, ever, ever say to contact me go to facebook.com/xxxx or my email address is…

By making your email something custom instead of @gmail, you're spending some energy, time, and money to protect against a perceived threat. I guess my real question is, what exactly is that threat, how damaging is it, and how likely is it to occur? By my mental math, I can't really justify spending even a few bucks, or more expensively, a few hours, protecting against some consequence that I can't really quantify at…

> The biggest threat seems to be that the government will have my data and I'll be advertised at, but having my own domain doesn't help either way. Am I missing something?

The biggest threat is that Google removes or locks you out of your gmail account.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#198
Is this some sort of attempt to claim Facebook and Google are somehow worse than Ajit Pai's FCC?

I'm specifically objecting to the phrase "closed internet". It sounds like the opposite of net neutrality, but in reality, any privacy options within Facebook and Google have been user-driven.

The focus should be on removing Pai. Regarding Facebook and Google, you can simply choose to not use them if you wish.

You only have one choice for broadband, and Pai wants to extend ISPs' monopolies. Let's not let that happen without a fight.

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#199
I'm convinced of something surprising -- that walled gardens are actually the result of limitations in ... HTTP! And to prove it, I've implemented a replacement for HTTP called Statebus that adds power to HTTP and breaks down walled gardens: https://stateb.us Check it out!

Statebus makes web programming wayyyy easier, and opens up the insides of websites -- you can go to any page, hit a hotkey, and edit the code live to add a feature, or incorporate state from a different site, or re-use the state or code from somewhere else, just as easily as you use your own site's state and code! Because it puts the insides of sites onto the web protocol itself. In Statebus, every piece of state has a URL! And you can synchronize with it as easily as today!

This breaks up walled gardens like Facebook! Today, we have monopolies at the level of websites, because each different website is implemented with a different proprietary stack of web gunk -- MVC server frameworks, reactive view frameworks, networking frameworks, babel, webpack, and -- YUCK! Statebus replaces all this gunk with the web protocol itself -- the statebus protocol -- which opens the state, and itself automatically synchronizes all this state together!

Statebus transforms HTTP from State Transfer to Synchronization:

    HTTP:     Hypertext *Transfer* Protocol
    REST:     REpresentational State *Transfer*
    Statebus: State *Synchronization* Protocol
It turns out that all web frameworks are really just state synchronization libraries, and we only need them because HTTP doesn't know how to synchronize! By adding synchronization to the web protocol itself, we eliminate the need for all these frameworks, and put all the internal state of a website onto the web protocol itself, making it open for other websites to use!

Statebus makes websites wayyy easier to program, and this means that the easiest way to program websites is now the most open way. This changes the economics of the web, and is going to break up the walled garden monopolies that have arisen around websites -- just like the web itself broke up the AOL walled garden in 1995!

Remember AOL? It provided a lot of the same features as the web -- shopping, chat rooms, forums -- but then was outcompeted by the open web around 1995! Why? Because programmers found it was easier to put their content online with HTTP and HTML than by convincing CEO Steve Case to add their content to AOL's garden! In the same way, Statebus is going to make it easier to build social content than by going through Facebook's walled garden! The future will be a diverse, realtime, synchronous symphony of social state!

You can find technical docs here: https://github.com/invisible-college/statebus/ And a demo video here: https://stateb.us

Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"ProtonMail encrypts your email storage in an end-to-end manner for client access and storage." Is this just TLS + block level encryption like LUKS? If so I would be surprised if FastMail wasn't offering the same. But maybe Proton is offering something else at the client level? It was my impression that the big differentiator was Proton Mail's infrastructure was all co-located in Switzerland.

From my understanding, there is no way for ProtonMail's operators to decrypt your mail storage, it requires your own private key. Whereas FastMail is not much different from Gmail in terms of "company's access", except it's privacy policy prohibits it from using it for anything but customer service on request.

I see, thank for the clarification.
Post reply on HN