41–50 of 54 posts
>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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation#Monopoly
>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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Corporation#Monopoly
It is kind of great to think that though the phone lines held all the bandwidth, we escaped those, right? Which means that escaping the most popular and dominating websites should be considerably easier..I like the federation idea.
People act as if Facebook and a few other sites have literally become the web but they haven't. Extremely popular, yes, but it's not as if the web gets smaller when Facebook gets bigger. Even the linked article uses the term "land grab" as if there was a limited amount of "web" to go around.
For 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…
While it's clear that p2p is going to face an uphill battle to demonstrate its value to the average Joe, I would also argue that federation doesn't address the underlying issues with user control of data. Email is federated. Does it give us any more control over our data? No, because one company controls the largest email service and monitors not just that user's emails but also the ones I send to them. XMPP is feder…
Every day I am saddened by enormous drift between what I know is possible with today's already existing technology (we cary supercomputers in our pockets!) and what we are actually doing with it (supercomputers we use as neutered mass-media consumption and ad-delivery devices).
I also know a lot of non technical people. Even young people, smart professional people, politically aware people; just not technical. And to 99% of the public, control is even more of a non-issue than privacy / censorship / security. "This glowing rectangle is a black box, why should I care if company A locks it down with binary blobs or if company B releases it under some GP-I-dunno-what?"
Even technology companies choose slack over improving and extending open standards. Convenience is a bitch.
Sadly, the only selling point I see today for p2p is piracy. The only issue that will get people riled up is when they lose free access to their favorite TV show. Which only further stigmatizes the hacker mindset as a front for would-be criminals. Privacy is somewhat making its way to the general population, but the message is muddled and confusing to most.
I wish I had a solution. How do you sell the inherent beauty of open, hackable technology to non-geeks? Selling it on its social merit alone seems too abstract.
Also, I am surprised the author missed ipfs and ethereum, since they are pretty advanced examples of decentralizing the web.
I 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I think a design goal of IPFS is that if you publish your nude photos to your personal IPFS node, it wont be sent to another node unless they explicitly request it by content-address. So you can use it to share sensitive data, and you can always layer encryption on top. [1]
Funny they mentioned Diaspora. I predicted very accurately what would happen to them sometime around 2011 on Schneier's blog:
"Diaspora is a joke. The thing is being designed, analyzed and implemented primarily by amateurs. A truly safe social network must be designed by people with expertise in cryptography, protocol analysis, secure software design, and low-defect implementation. Throw some testing and UI people in there to boot. I like that there's people trying on this, but I wouldn't trust anything that project produces. The independent reviews we've gotten so far confirmed my suspicions.
As for secure/private social networking, I don't know if there's really a way to do it that would take off. Non-paid internet services depend mainly on ad revenue. An advantage of current social networking sites is that analysis allows targeted advertising & brings in lots of revenue. Take that away & you get very little revenue in comparison. This is a problem if you are running a secure web service with tons of cryptography in it, which takes MUCH more resources to achieve performance of something like FB."
People want these independent, private, secure spaces but are unwilling to pay for them. Most of their friends and family probably are both unwilling to pay and unwilling to use them. Plus, you have to recreate most of the usefulness of modern web platforms. You have to do all that... very expensively to develop and run I'll add... while making almost no money on almost no users. Good luck.
Posted on Medium, a central, private, for-profit publishing platform. Oh the irony.
Some context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro... What the author wants does exist already: Retroshare is a secure p2p communication platform you can install on your computer. It even uses Bittorrent's DHT to speed up connecting to peers. You can also install it on your server and use its web interface (recently rebuilt with Mithril.js). Retroshare development started 10 years ago. PRs wel…
"Retroshare has enough layers of security that the even the nsa will have to work really hard if they want to get in there." (Benni from Germany)
"And it's written in a risky language using shoddy libraries on platforms NSA has 0-days and automated attack systems for. I'm sure that this combination will be "really hard" for NSA to penetrate. ;)" (Nick P.)
It's a nice idea and little project worth some development, though. I agree it's the closest thing, outside Freenet, to what the OP describes. It needs to be clean-slated in a safer, but low-level, language with the risky libraries substituted or improved. The protocols will need to be verified and implemented by high-assurance security community. Covert channel analysis. The works. Then, it will be good enough to stop many high-strength attackers enough to matter.
Of course, anything like that will be throttled and filtered by ISP's. Might be best to start disguising the traffic as HTTPS connections or something like my homebrew solutions did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
RSS doesn't really have a method for 3rd parties to rank content, does it? The thing about HN is voting and comments, both of which require manual moderation to be effective.
Couldn't the moderation be distributed as well? Pick the moderators you want and the posts are filtered with their moderation actions.
We could even automate it so if my post reader notices several of my sources following another source it will ask me if I want to look at or follow that source, etc.