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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

#71

Post by woodman »

pudo wrote: post #42

The argument to re-decentralise the web wildly confuses economic, technical and political concerns. The reason that Facebook runs a centralised system isn't that it cannot figure out a technical alternative, it does so for economic reasons. To assume that making incremental advances in decentralised technologies will somehow fundamentally alter those economics is wishful thinking. Instead, we need to recognise the fa…

> ...there's an existing mechanism to deal with it: government regulation.

Lay your hopes on a monopoly on force to solve an economic monopoly? That doesn't seem like a well founded long term solution.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#72

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

I'm not optimistic for this effort succeeding, but it's doing the right things to make sure that success happens eventually. Instead of having a big get-the-corporations-to-work-with-us feel, this very much had the "screw it, let's do this shit" feel. It doesn't guarantee success, but no technical project ever succeeded by having people sit around talking.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#73

Post by paganel »

pfraze wrote: post #40

Ok, 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 f…

> Zooko threw cold water on everybody ("Is this just 1999 again?")

I have all the respect in the world for people like Vint Cerf, but the fact that he mentioned "copyright" and "intellectual property" twice in his list of otherwise quite interesting proposals make me doubtful about "1999" ever making a come-back. (I personally view the 1999-2005 or so period as a "good" one for the Internet, all of the dreams of that period have mostly been shattered by now).

I only came online in 2000, so to speak, but I distinctly remember that back in those days IP and copyrights were the last things on people's minds. Things like Napster and Audiogalaxy were pushing the Internet forward, and you can look at Wikipedia as "infringing" on the British Encyclopedia's rights to be the ultimate encyclopedia or you might take a second, more cautionary look, at the fact that Google built its business and its current $500+ billion status on stealing other websites' content and storing it on their servers.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#74

Post by pdimitar »

jokoon wrote: post #68

Whatever the solution is, I really believe data must be on user's devices, not on proprietary servers. Open source won the battle of software. The next battle will be about data itself. It surely implies very hard problems when it comes to standardization and how data is exchanged. It might involve something like flatbuffers. How data is exchanged, what rights you have on it, how it is made secure, there are no ubiqu…

This is something that I'd like to see as well. I recently read about IPFS in much more detail than I did before and boy am I excited for that. Unless this technology is heavily sabotaged before it can even gain steam, I believe it'll be a backbone of this new truly decentralized network.

We do have to figure something like GFS2 + encryption, only open-source and NOT licensed / patented by any corporation.

Organizations like Storj I think get it and are a good start. They even offer you small amounts of money if you rent your own disk space for their IPFS / BitTorrent like system.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#75

Post by danjoc »

Have they forgotten an important area in need of decentralization? I didn't see any mention of the internet networks in the article. The network is currently very centralized. Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, etc. Communities need to own their network, not rent it from a giant corporation. I can't run my own server, because my ISP says I have to pay extra for business class. All they've done is block ports on the network to my home. Municipal fiber and wifi networks have actually been outlawed by these big companies in various places around the country. When the network itself prevents running peer nodes, I don't see how any amount of software running on top of that will help.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#76

Post by pdimitar »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #72

I'm not optimistic for this effort succeeding, but it's doing the right things to make sure that success happens eventually. Instead of having a big get-the-corporations-to-work-with-us feel, this very much had the "screw it, let's do this shit" feel. It doesn't guarantee success, but no technical project ever succeeded by having people sit around talking.

"Get the corporations work with us" didn't work so far, I don't think it will magically start working from now on.

It's my opinion (which is somewhat "backed" by a load of tech and economical news; I know that's not an evidence for anything) that the corporations are just fine with the situation right now; if anything, they fight to centralize even more services.

It's true that projects like "the next web" (or however we word it) don't succeed with people sitting around talking, but the way you worded it is really cynical. How do you think ARPANet was born? Surely not through a crowd telepathic effort, right? People sat and talked. A lot.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#78

Post by mark_l_watson »

pfraze wrote: post #40

Ok, 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 f…

I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit (the first 6 hours) and it was great. I hope they have this every year. The Summit was inexpensive, the venue at the Internet Archive building was cool, the speakers and panels were uniformly interesting, and the food was tasty. Good job by the organizers!

I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very few of my non-tech friends & family get why I think government and corporate encroachment on privacy and freedom is an issue in the USA. So, it was refreshing to be with people who mostly have the same concerns that I do.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#79

Post by pdimitar »

virmundi wrote: post #26
zghst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people aren't like they were 20 years ago, they've been trained to give up their privacy for a few shinies.

People can trade for things. They want a service. They are OK with being cattle. Who are you to get mad? It's like when the US got mad that the Palestinians elected Hamas. They get to vote. Let them have their way.

That's a really bogus argument. Many people can be easily misled even if they don't actually support what they are REALLY voting for.

Manipulating masses for votes is a science ever since the ancient Rome, if not even earlier.

This however is an off-topic and I apologize. I simply wanted to point out that voting is yet another deeply flawed but still massively used system and it's part of the problem that this thread tries to address. Emphasis: this is my opinion.

Re: The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web

#80

Post by sdenton4 »

losteric wrote: post #65
ZenoArrow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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?"" To me the answer is obvious. Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your u…

> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers. I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's…

Querying is indeed the real issue. I've between reading up on delay tolerant networking; it seems pretty tough to hit the right balance between making metadata generally available and crushing the network with metadata updates. Centralized directories make it easier, though still not trivial, to make content findable on a network.

There have between a bunch of proposals (eg, grokster) out there which have started off as radically decentralized, but eventually took on a layer or three of super peers to manage that metadata transfer, after the fully decentralized model failed under real traffic.

(Good datasets also seem to be a problem here. The available ones are pretty small or have a lot of caveats, which makes it tough to really see how a solution will play out is the real world.)

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