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The End of the Internet Dream

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Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#191

Post by marssaxman »

k__ wrote: post #142
pspace wrote: post #100

The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creati…

If you look into our biggest open platform today, the web, you see that we have almost won. We got the whole power of our PCs sand-boxed and mostly standardized at our fingertips with ECMAScript, HTTP and company. Most of the old proprietary demons are defeated with so many companies switching from native to "the web". But with the rise of iOS and Android, new problems are rising. And if you look at the better perfor…

Almost won?

If you have to talk to the application over HTTP, then it's not your application: you don't control it, and you don't control the data it works on.

From my perspective, we're very close to losing the whole thing.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#192

Post by pdkl95 »

gue5t wrote: post #171
parasubvert wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web has done more to decentralize networked computing than any other technology, because the web is basically decentralized. Only the agreements (IETF and W3C) are somewhat centralized, but even then we are seeing a proliferation of REST APIs to encourage decentralized data management. These usually aren't exactly "RESTful" of course because we are so busy with our own startups we aren't really working towards in…

The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live. Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with th…

It's not the "web" which causes this class separation - that happened because of NAT.

NAT is what requires a 3rd party to mediate communication. We have some hope that IPv6 will roll back this imprimatur[1] a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of people still confuse NAT with a stateful firewall that push for NAT in IPv6 where it isn't needed.

The core benefit of the internet is that it is media access. Anybody can publish because the network treats all hosts as peers. There are entire categories of software that has never been written because they don't work behind NAT, and centralized solutions became popular as a workaround.

[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#193

Post by loup-vaillant »

parasubvert wrote: post #182
gue5t wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live. Interactions between users are necessarily mediated by a server, which is why the economics encourage centralization. You don't need "major parties" to "adhere to agreements" if users just use the software they like to interact with each other. The problem with th…

"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live." That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine. The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly w…

> Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less.

No they can't. They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them.

No they can't. They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?

No they can't. Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?

No they can't. Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract.

No they can't. In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP).

Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#194

Post by [deleted] »

austerity wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

[deleted]

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#195

Post by simoncion »

runiq wrote: post #60
simoncion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. What are the most significant distinctions between a federated network and a decentralized network? Is one of those distinctions that the latter has a distributed filesystem/datastore shared amongst most-to-all of its nodes?

Yes, that's it. With federated networks, you still rely on another party — the server you connect to. With decentralized networks, you are a part of the thing everyone else relies on.

Two things:

1) In a decentralized network where you are also the client, you also usually rely on another party: the party that contains the resource you wish to access. Not that many decentralized networks give every node a complete copy of all of the data in the network.

2) In a federated network with open federation (Tor, XMPP, email, etc...), you can choose to become a server in that network and be a part of the thing that everyone else relies on.

I'm still having trouble seeing the essential distinction between the two. Is the assertion that "decentralized" networks force you to be a server in the network, whereas federated networks leave the choice up to you?

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#196

Post by yourapostasy »

austerity wrote: post #41
TeMPOraL wrote: post #8

The Internet Dream is sadly not compatibile with profit-driven world. We had some good times back when it all begun, because then nobody besides techies cared. Now that the Internet is a money making machine, there are tons of incentives to make it worse and little to make it better. In order to keep the corruption away, or maybe even limit it, all of us and our coworkers would have to start risking their livelihoods…

You know where those evil profits ultimately come from? People paying to have their needs satisfied. I make a decent living providing people with solutions to some of the problems described in this article (censorship and fragmentation) and I'm not ashamed to say I am driven purely by profit.

As others have so aptly pointed out, externalities are the huge fly in your ointment. Rather than keep prattling on about externalities, I want to direct your attention to a practical example, environmental mercury contamination. [1] As a civilization, we knew from over 200 years ago that various mercury compounds were bad news bears in sufficiently-high quantities and/or cumulative exposures.

Industrial utilization of mercury is incredibly useful, adequate remediation and recovery expensive, and venting mercury-laden industrial waste into the atmosphere so easy and innocuous-looking, combined to land us in a modern situation any 16-18th century fisherman would find utterly absurd and fantastical. Lots and lots of people paid over many decades and centuries to have their needs satisfied with the help of mercury-laced compounds and mercury itself, to dump (and continue to dump to this day) their cumulative externality upon us, despite extremely early knowledge about cumulative effects, so that we go about our day-to-day in a real, live sci-fi world where some fish have so much bioaccumulated mercury that we have to ration our consumption of them.

There is an enormous amount of economic activity in the world today that works solely from finding and monetizing externalities. I expect this only gets worse in the future.

[1] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/272563841_Mercury_in...

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#197

Post by RogtamBar »

pspace wrote: post #100

The internet dream is almost here! Patents and IP have lost their bite compared to the 80's (continuing to do so) and piracy is easier than ever. More countries are participating in the global conversation than ever before. Enhancements in security and privacy are evident and improving (albeit slowly). The internet is becoming a lot less like TV and will continue to do so. People care more about commenting and creati…

>People care more about commenting and creating content. They care about participating more than they ever did and this is increasing.

I'm not sure if that is a good thing. Have you ever been to reddit?

The entire place is practically overran with memes and inanity.

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#198

Post by mdpopescu »

pjc50 wrote: post #174
mdpopescu wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the problem is the existence of SWAT teams?

That was an example; the general problem of people whipping up a mob, hate campaign, harrasment or slander against someone remains as something the victim cannot easily opt out of. Even if they try to go off-net completely. (Trigger-happy policing is certainly its own problem)

Yes; the mob mentality is unfortunately something much harder to fix than even trigger-happy governments. (I am thinking about the recent hoopla about Trump's remarks. For me, the problem isn't what HE is saying - the problem is the fact that he finds people who agree with him.)

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#199

Post by parasubvert »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #193
parasubvert wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live." That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine. The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly w…

> Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. No they can't. They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them. No they can't. They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember? No they can't. Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted? No they can't. Many I…

"They don't know how, in part because nobody teaches them."

Or they don't have software that does it for them.

"They don't have enough upload bandwidth for even a modest web server. Our links are asymmetric, remember?"

Last I checked, BitTorrent was still a thing. IOW, build a killer app and that will change.

"Residential IP addresses are blacklisted by most mail services. What good is a mail server that can't get its mail accepted?"

Then you can't run a mail server unless you have a cloud server that isn't blacklisted.

"Many ISPs forbid their users to run a server —by contract."

Which is a gray area that will fall apart the moment a killer app exists. ISPs don't block Twitch, they don't block Skype (which is P2P), they don't block BitTorrent, they don't block my NEST thermostat.

"In many regions, most people are put behind a big NAT. They don't even have an internet connection (which by any reasonable definition requires a public IP)."

This is barbaric and not my experience in North America.

"Even I can't run my own server, even though I'm technically qualified. Instead, I loan some processor time from a provider I like to run a VM on their servers."

Sure, that's a common workaround and I don't really consider that "centralized" computing in the manner of a Facebook or Twitter.

My point is that everyone having a server for decentralized internet doesn't have insurmountable barriers, it requires software that people want to consume that will change the way the market works. Uber is doing it for a way more regulated industry (taxis).

Re: The End of the Internet Dream

#200

Post by parasubvert »

gue5t wrote: post #187
parasubvert wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The web separates endpoints into two classes: the "land-owning" pays-for-a-domain-name server class, and the disenfranchised client class where users live." That's nonsense. Anyone can get a domain name for $5 and run a server for less. Users in the early web - usually not developers! - ran their own servers just fine. The question is why they would want to? Especially given how big the web has become. They mostly w…

You're right that it's certainly within the financial means of anyone to run a web server; "class mobility" is not terribly difficult here. The problem is, as you state, that virtually nobody wants to have to administrate a server! In-home devices which accept connections are not relevant as they are inaccessible without giving your home network a well-known name. Any device which is not accessible from the Internet…

I agree with your point about search/indexing, but a lot of that has to do with an economic model to fund such a service ... the advertising-driven free models leads towards centralized control and loss of privacy. One interesting way to look at this is the move Apple is making towards more search and cloud services that are funded by device sales, not by advertising and analytics.

Decentralized services have tended to suck because you always need at least a federation of centralized servers for search/discovery. But it's possible to do so in a relatively end-to-end secure way, if it can be funded without requiring spying/analytics.

Anyway I'm just saying that there's a lot of possibility out there, and the barrier really is one of coming up with a big enough application incentive to force change across multiple areas of the current deployed web.

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