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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

#81

Post by epeus »

krapp wrote: post #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…

>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?

I think you just reinvented https://pingomatic.com/

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

#82

Post by kbenson »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #78
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 wh…

> 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.

That pretty much guarantees they will outgrow the venue shortly, if not immediately.

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

#83

Post by wturner »

paganel wrote: post #73
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…

Jaron Lanier has written about the hallowing out of the middle class due to intellectual and creative property being accepted as "free on the internet". As it stands the Googles of the world have private servers, patents and proprietary technology, ( and the money to protect themselves) but Google can scrape the creative resources of billions of individuals without paying them. In that regard a return to creative/intellectual property rights specifically for individuals might be a forward thinking move assuming it leads to payouts. I know the details are more complicated ( and I might be wrong) but I thought I would chime in.

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

#84

Post by skywhopper »

Some good ideas, but I find some of them at odds with the rhetoric. Decentralize the web with new centralized naming and archive systems. Come up with new ways of doing things that there are already multiple failed solutions for.

Separate content and presentation layers, URLs as names, open pub/sub systems--these all have good solutions. They haven't failed to catch on because the technology wasn't there.

Anyway, to a large extent we already have a re-invented, private, encrypted, Bitcoin-funded, de-centralized web. It's called Tor, and it's not always very pretty.

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

#85

Post by pdimitar »

doublerebel wrote: post #53
tsunamifury wrote: post #3

Most of these guys are a disconnected from where the global market is going and are proposing preposterous ideas for west coast tech scenes own problems. The web was based on a Western educational reference model that is not the normal mode for 3/4ths of the planet. The new web would need to be pushed based, not pull based. It would need to be need to be instantly authorable and aware of people and devices, Not docum…

I believe you've identified much of the problem: the way people typically share knowledge is not how the internet is built. It was captured early by marketing and introverted engineers. If instead we give people a couple simple tools, decentralization will happen naturally and facts can surface through a natural web of trust. Just like in the real world. Part of this is letting go of the interface. Right now our inte…

I am unfamiliar with Urbit, but having only recently read in detail about IPFS, I have to say it has nailed the basics. There's much work left there to do but IMO the building blocks are now in place.

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

#87

Post by zanny »

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…

IPFS already does this and exists. It is decentralized, it lets you put your own content in it whenever you want, and anyone can use it.

IE, you can simply drop an html page into your own IPFS directory, and other users of IPFS can browse to it (assuming you put global read permissions on it). It is no more complicated than a daemon and a virtual file system.

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

#88

Post by angry-hacker »

sanderjd wrote: post #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 intern…

Well, even the hackers post their blog posts nowadays to centralized networks. Why every article has to be on medium.com - I have no idea - but it's very similar pattern the regular users of Internet have.

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

#89

Post by zanny »

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…

> Open source won the battle of software.

It has not won critical battles on the hardware, firmware, productivity, or gaming fronts. Your hardware is still holistically proprietary with baked in proprietary CPUs, the firmware is still entirely proprietary and ripe for backdoor exploitation, video games are still by-and-large proprietary and even decades old titles remain so and die in cultural death for it, and companies are reaping insane profits off Autodesk / Photoshop / Vegas etc being proprietary but their consumers "cannot live without them" and thus there is no way to liberate them.

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

#90

Post by icebraining »

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…

Saying "we can regulate" is true, but so vague as to be an empty statement, in my opinion, and previous regulatory actions against tech giants (mainly Microsoft) have been - again, in my opinion - simply exercises of extracting money with no benefit to the consumers.

Which regulations would you like to see implemented on Facebook & co?

And by the way, I'd love to see a definition of "market failure" as commonly used that isn't essentially "the market doesn't do what I consider best". People like to (rightly) criticize the liberal right by pointing out that markets are just a tool, but that should come with the realization that a bad outcome can arise without being a flaw in the tool. If the allocation of goods and services is efficient, the market didn't fail, even if the outcome is not socially optimal. We just didn't use it correctly.

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