Job 1: Advertising interests be damned, this mass surveillance thing has got to go.
but what do you want? privacy or security? because you can't have both
The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
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Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#32>Think about some sort of publish/subscribe system, in which a web-page creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes it available for archiving, and various web archives can subscribe to receive updates
This seems like something we could (should?) have right now. Maybe IA should write a Wordpress plugin, if they haven't?
>Think about creating an archive of software as well, that perhaps may have to include emulations of defunct hardware and operating systems to make the Web always backwards compatible.
A site that archives software and runs it in js-based emulators sounds like a great idea. It would probably be illegal, though. And it almost certainly wouldn't work properly for everyone, as long as it depended on the browser. But still a great idea. That any runtime and software can have a URL is incredibly compelling.
Maybe we need to leave the browser model for documents and come up with something else for using what amounts to streaming software?
>Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people were comfortable with that.
YES. No TLDs, just unique arbitrary strings.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#33I think there is a ton of validity in this desire and I've collected a long list of projects, articles, and leaders that are pointing towards a similar conclusion.
Most of us are too deep into the status quo or our view of technology to break in a different direction. Most of the projects so far aim to reinvent "from the ground up" like Urbit or IPFS -- which is an impressive goal but misses what I think is the main point: the average person should be able to grok and contribute to the Internet. We can do that with the simple tools already included with every computer. Ground-up can come later.
I think that posting global knowledge should be as accessible as posting to Twitter. And sharing that knowledge should be as simple as email or Airdrop. This is what I've been working towards with Optik.io. It's in stealth but I'm always looking for like-minded people to join with to achieve such a knowledge freedom for all of us.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#34Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#35Before posting something dismissive about this, please remember how easy it would have been to dismiss the internet and the web themselves as things that couldn't ever happen, nice visions but impossible in the real world, etc. etc. and so on. When the people who actually made these things talk about what needs making next, we should hear them with an open mind, not rush to think of objections.
Yet another example of BS mod's chilling speech.
Government shill.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The web was based on a Western educational reference model In what sense is the web based on a Western educational reference model?
Storing knowledge in written semistatic documents to be referenced is for the most part a higher education model. The vast majority of the planet stores knowledge in people and references it via direct communications.
Historical writings in China, India, elsewhere in Asia, and parts of the middle east are probably worth looking at if you're interested in confirming the validity of your claim.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#37The deep learning is that there are forces that lead to centralization: generally they are variations of human choice and seeking economies of scale.
For instance, it's no accident that we started with hundreds of thousands of small websites and ended with most traffic going to a few. Ask yourself how the internet could have been constructed that would have prevented sites like Facebook or Twitter winning the popularity contest. The 'Power Law' dynamics behind this are the same ones that lead to some airports being hubs and others not, the fact that there is a backbone rather than everything going point-to-point, and many other phenomena.
We can have decentralization but there are costs. Someone has to pay them.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#38The Web has already been reinvented, but not in the direction that Bernars-Lee wants. We have HTTP2 running everything through one pipe to big sites. We have Javascript that puts the site in control of the user's machine and makes web pages display-only, like PostScript. More than half of all traffic is coming from the top 10 sites. The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp,…
I think they are looking at it as "Hmm, the stuff we helped invent had these unintended consequences. If, like us, you don't like that then let's reinvent these low level parts in a way that protect against that". They are looking at it as changing the protocols to change the emergent properties.
But I like your more holistic view as well, in that case just assume they are asking for a re-reinvention then. Or however many re's you think are needed.
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#39> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate and government—what happened to that?”
Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet has proven incredibly useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.
It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).
Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
#40Ok, a lot of people don't know the context for this.
Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them feel like fluff to me. (There are some semi-interesting bullet points buried at the bottom of this one.)
What was interesting, was the level of focused energy that this event was showing. The Internet Archive did a great job organizing it, and the speakers were compelling, but the real drive came from the different teams that were present. The news orgs all focus on "Recognizable name calls for new Web," but those speakers only offered spiritual guidance to something that's moving entirely on its own. And, I think they'd be the first to say so.
There was plenty of self-awareness and open discussion. Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?" What's the big picture? Doctorow, Baker, Kahle, and Lee all talked about values. Cerf talked about Named Data Networking, which is about content-addressing, an idea that's definitely at the heart of the new work. Zooko threw cold water on everybody ("Is this just 1999 again?"). It was very interesting. A lot of it is online [3]
1 IPFS, Dat, WebTorrent, ZeroNet, InterLedger, MediaChain, Neocities, many others
2 Vint Cerf, Mitchell Baker, Tim Berners Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow, many others. RMS even made an appearance.