I'm working on a manifesto and a set of blog posts to influence people that use closed internet services to think differently about it. What I believe we need to do to fight this is to make people care about who we give our data to and have organizations share their machine learning models so that we can have a more secure and open web. One of the ways we can do this is to allow people to execute machine learning models so that everyone can restrict it to the data that they own
Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
221–230 of 444 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#223Make 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…
> to protect against a perceived threat...
It might be too romantic these days, but it you might be better if you see it as a matter of principle...Doing the right thing (Backed by your own thought ofcourse).
Think of it as selling your identity off to a thrid party. If you see that as an improper thing on its own, then you shouldn't do it no matter how much value the third party provides, right?
Things like facebook are essentially saying. "Give us your identity, secrets and your whole life, we will save you some cash and make some (nonessential?) things (slightly?) easier for you"....
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#224Make 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…
Adding to that: don't host your content on other domains either. Beware of insidious threats to the WWW, like AMP.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not use another single sign on service? Why do you have to use Google? Google is the largest advertiser in the world, and is more and more encroaching on the free and open web.
> Why not use another single sign on service? Look. I'm not an idiot. I write open source. I love free and open web. Google login works. We use use Gmail - it works. We use google classroom - it just works. Most websites offer Google Login - it just works. When you have 30 students and you waste 2 minutes logging into a website -- that is 2 x 30 == 60 minutes of student learning lost. Little things like that add up.
Perhaps you should consider being less defensive. I believe (could be wrong) OP asked a genuine question and was interested to hear a response. S/he didn't call you an idiot or question your love for the free web.
I think your last paragraph would be sufficient to explain your reasons along with a single, "it just works."
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#226Brendan Eich, the inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla, launched this recently: https://www.basicattentiontoken.org/index.html It's a token for advertisement that rewards the user, to be used at Brave browser: https://brave.com https://github.com/brave
I love the idea but if we can't get 70% of the population to use ad blockers, what chance do we have of people moving over to a new, unheard of browser?
People switched to Chrome because Google told you it was a better experience every time you made a search. I don't see how people of my parents generation (60s) will ever hear about Brave.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
"What if we don't pay them at all?" What if your employer didn't pay you? I'm sorry, but this idea that one shouldn't be allowed to make money being a "youtuber" or anything else just because you don't like it doesn't hold water.
I didn't mean to offend you if you are a content creator or want some content creator to be funded. I just don't think it's much of a technology issue. It's a signal that the content isn't worth the money where walled garden doesn't work. Also, I think you've misread my comment - I can't see any association between your reply and my comment.
I meant to say paid-walled-garden, maybe that was the confusion.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#228There is no going back, this 'battle' was lost a long time ago. We've tried so hard to make technology ubiquitous and accessible to everyone . We thought that that was a good idea at the time, except we didn't really understand it entirely. The consequence of ubiquitous technology is that the majority now has access to powerful tools to 'express' themselves while being subjected to constant brainwashing into behaving…
just look at the number of 'zombies' on the streets Get used to the zombies...they are going to become far more prevalent. When Neuralink or whatever technologies converge to directly project experiences mind-to-mind, people will not be broadcasting selfies...they will be broadcasting self , as in their current, total sensate experience. People will tune in and live the most exciting virtual life that they need...whi…
To be honest, many people live lives of "quiet desperation" so to them this doesn't sound much more dystopic than the cards they were already dealt.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would my mother do that instead of just using Facebook which is already there and already had all of her friends and family on it?
Because maybe Facebook nukes her account, for whatever reason.
I am an advocate of having your own domain and having control. But most people don't care as much as the hacker news crowd does. "Phone broke, here is my new number..." really? For business it's critical to maintain any form of communication you have ever offered. But for personal, a lot of people don't care if they change their [email] and inconvenience their friends and family.
The internet is not crucial to everyones daily life. And honestly, it probably shouldn't be as crucial to ours.
Re: Ask HN: What are we doing about Facebook, Google, and the closed internet?
#230We need local bookmarking and indexing tools that can become primary to search. You have no idea how many times I end up searching the same thing over and over again. I'm using the search engine as a bookmarking tool. If there were more streamlined, humane, well designed local bookmarking tools, that wouldn't be an issue.
As a matter of fact, the fact that the browser by default sends everything I type into that bar up to some 3rd party, whether I've pressed enter or not, is pretty scandalous. It's not necessary.
I want local copies of pages that are important to me, for offline viewing, and I want to be able to bookmark specific parts of them in annotated, searchable, useful ways. I want to be able to share these. I want to be able to upvote and downvote their relevance as I use them again and again. I want human readable formats for storing these things. I want them on my filesystem, but not in a bunch of jumbled, strangely named files hidden deep somewhere on the computer. And I want to be able to share them peer to peer.
Remember the good old days, when people had WWW hyperlink indices? It's 2017 and centralized search/social platforms have all but destroyed the artform of digital curation. It is an artform that deep learning will clumsily fumble again and again. This website is a perfect example of how powerful human curation can be. The articles are curated and annotated collectively by human beings. The protocols and the web standards are more or less masterfully designed. We have unlimited programming languages.
I want to subscribe to notable peoples public web-bibliographies. I want them available in formats that are interoperable with my web browsers bookmarking and annotation tools.