>The internet has been stole from you.
It was never "stolen" because "you" never owned it in the first place. The internet infrastructure has always been a monopoly.
The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
21–30 of 54 posts
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#22I don't get this article. Other than defining a bunch of new words, what are they exactly saying the problem is, and what are they saying the solution is? Just saying that is complete nonsense. And the problem seems to be but they never really say what.
The problem: > The internet has been stolen from you. Scooped out of your hands without much of a fuss. A small number of corporations are locked in a zero-sum game of land grabs. The solution: > The solution is to decentralize further, relying on a peer-to-peer model...In short, create an app, one that you run on your computer or phone, that writes social data (aka “posts”) into local databases and then replicates t…
You don't seem to have understood my comment at all. In what way is Diaspora, the (failed) 2010 solution to this "problem", at all different from what you say the solution is now? And other than "controlled by corporations", what problem are you even trying to solve?
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. And you read it because you're visiting hackernews (also central, private, for-profit). It's a systemic problem. That's why we need new tools that let us operate outside that system.
I'm not sure what kind of new tools we need ? All the tools to create personal websites existed more than 20 years ago. They haven't disappeared. If anything they're probably cheaper, easier to find and to configure now, and also, more diverse, slicker, have more features, etc... And as pointed out by others, distributed social networks have existed for probably about ten years now. And yes, the fact that the author…
The big shift to mobile, however, means that people can no longer use their computers to host a server. Napster would probably not achieve critical mass nowadays.
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#24For the immediate future at least, federation seems much more feasible than wholly decentralized systems. At least for websites / applications that are expected to gain any mainstream traction.
Building a federated Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, App Store, etc. that does not have a single point of censorship / failure is perfectly doable.
Hell, any of those websites could start federation initiatives today if they so wished (Waiting any day now for a Big Name to experiment with a federated model).
However from my experience p2p services (IPFS / Freenet etc.) still require a combination of technical skill and political awareness (to go out of one's way to use a service that is much less convenient -- and to develop for a platform that will make you no money) that the average user does not have.
Not to say they have no place: the internet itself was a fringe, nerds-only technology at one point. But it only became a mass phenomenon once uses were found that brought 10x improvement on things the nontechnical user already needed (sending a letter, looking up information).
Decentralized technologies (today) offer no such improvement.
And let's face it, for the average Joe, p2p offers nothing: a p2p service can at best be of equal quality as a centralized service. There's no way around it: there's nothing simpler and more performant than talking directly to a central host.
With federation, the user needn't even know the difference.
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#25I have no idea if this project has legs, but I enjoyed reading about the concept of Swedeshi and being reminded that Ghandi successfully sought political independence by pursuing financial independence. I have my own hypotheses about the importance of independent stuff. My confidence in the viability of it sometimes falters. This was a nice read on a day when I have been wondering "Why bother?" about a lot of things.
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you append to a merkle-dag then yes it's immutable, but you can always do the equivalent of a git rebase -- effectively removing a portion of the tree and then selectively re-applying the parts that you want to keep. That creates a new DAG, one that diverges from the DAG that was shared before. For example, if you accidentally commit a database password into your git repository and push it to github, you can go ba…
I don't see a problem with the truth of the internet being reflected in ipfs. Consider the internet to be write only, forget maybe (you are not in control of that). If you accidentally commit a password someplace the correct response is changing that password.
That works for passwords, but not for everything. What happens when someone goes "Oops, didn't mean to drop those nudes into my gallery of vacation photos"? Are they irrevocably published? Or can you unpublish them and hope that nobody noticed while they were up?
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#27We don't need to take the Internet back from the various platforms, we need serious and strict legislation about what they do with both what we share and what we are. There is nothing wrong with a Facebook inherently; the simple fact is we as users have been extremely complacent in what companies like Facebook are allowed to do. I think that's starting to get better as the population gets more savvy but at the same t…
That is what just happened in the EU parlament: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/20160407IPR2...
> The new rules include provisions on: A right to be forgotten, "clear and affirmative consent" to the processing of private data by the person concerned, a right to transfer your data to another service provider, the right to know when your data has been hacked, ensuring that privacy policies are explained in clear and understandable language, and stronger enforcement and fines up to 4% of firms' total worldwide annual turnover, as a deterrent to breaking the rules.
We'll see how that turns out.
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1. And you read it because you're visiting hackernews (also central, private, for-profit). It's a systemic problem. That's why we need new tools that let us operate outside that system.
But how would I discover content if I didn't use HN? Is there a way to aggregate and rank content without an authoritative server? Also, HN isn't for-profit (although YC is). Like, yeah, it's not a non-profit, but it's not designed to make any money either.
Usenet / NNTP
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#29For the immediate future at least, federation seems much more feasible than wholly decentralized systems. At least for websites / applications that are expected to gain any mainstream traction. Building a federated Wikipedia, Reddit, Twitter, Amazon, App Store, etc. that does not have a single point of censorship / failure is perfectly doable. Hell, any of those websites could start federation initiatives today if th…
>Decentralized technologies (today) offer no such improvement
Other than all of the inherent benefits of decentralization, of course.
Re: The internet has been stolen from you. Take it back, nonviolently
#30We don't need to take the Internet back from the various platforms, we need serious and strict legislation about what they do with both what we share and what we are. There is nothing wrong with a Facebook inherently; the simple fact is we as users have been extremely complacent in what companies like Facebook are allowed to do. I think that's starting to get better as the population gets more savvy but at the same t…
To piggyback on this, any strategy that requires competing with these established private web companies is doomed to fail. People will not choose a lesser service for moral reasons. Rather, as you indicate, the key to keeping things beneficial to the community at large will be through political power.
So we don't need another facebook. We need digital tools that organize meaningful political power in an effort to re-establish a government for and by the people.