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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

#111

Post by mtVessel »

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…

Nobody wants their data on their own device. Nobody knows how their devices even work, let alone wants the responsibility of managing them.

What they want is what they're (sorta, kinda) being given. My device takes my data and puts it somewhere where all my other devices know how to get it. I don't wanna know how it happens, I just want magic.

We, who know how our devices work, and don't want anyone else managing our data for us, are in a vanishingly small minority.

The big companies are putting their money on clouds and centralization. And that's where it'll all go, because they have all the leverage. Twenty years from now, I'd love to reflect on how wrong I was to say this. But right now, I doubt it.

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

#112

Post by nickpsecurity »

Pxtl wrote: post #91
losteric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

People struggle with routers because they're terrible. Buggy, inconsistent, and their UI is full of detailed technical questions they don't know the answer to. I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group share…

Apple proved your point with Rendevous on Mac OS X. I actually got burned by its easy setup when I bought a Mac laptop for air-gapped use. They used to advertise WiFi as an optional feature, which this ad didn't have. Turns out, it did have WiFi, activated when I turned it on, and Rendevous already had it setup in the background on an open connection. I remember being confused at just how up to date the Apple Store looked. Very, briefly confused followed by eye roll and sigh that an $80 device was already compromised for use case.

Nonetheless, things like it and Time Machine illustrate just how much use one can get out of certain features if the UX is bulletproof or nearly so. Routers might be done as easily depending on the circumstances. I'm almost certain ISP's could pull that off. Give them username and password to use on a HTTPS site that downloads the right configuration into an OpenWRT router they supply with any configuration software built-in. It then prints locally-generated password and other configuration data on form for customer to safely store. Any recoveries can be done with it or through ISP.

What you think?

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

#113

Post by nickpsecurity »

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…

"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's interesting that you mention this point. There was a social network designed specifically to leverage the phenomenon by limiting the number of your friends. Here it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(social_network)

We also saw this in the Friend-to-Friend model of decentralized schemes, esp crypto- or privacy-heavy. Freenet with F2F is probably best example today that has a mature codebase.

https://freenetproject.org/about.html#philosopy

So, it might be worth seriously considering what you brought up when evaluating alternative architectures for the Internet. Probably be an overall boost for efficiency in such architectures.

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

#115

Post by nickpsecurity »

angry-hacker wrote: post #88
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.

It gets more interesting when you think many post ideologically against surveillance states, ad ecosystems, insecure systems, and so on... from Facebook and Twitter. ;)

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

#116

Post by lgierth »

tracker1 wrote: post #94
angry-hacker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because when you create content, you don't necessarily want to create, or host the system to manage that content. By the same not, more and more projects are just using gh-pages... it's useful, out there, free (of cost to those publishing) and in general works. In the end, there's a lot of options, I think seeing IPFS support baked into the browsers will see a new wave the likes that we saw in the late 90's of custom…

Hey -- one of the IPFS devs here. You can actually already use DNS to point a human-readable name to an IPFS hash.

Try out `dig +short TXT ipfs.io`, take the `/ipfs/` from that record, and go to " rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io/ipfs/. Then try https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io :)

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

#117

Post by toyg »

wturner wrote: post #83
paganel wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/int…

The middle class has never been involved in creative IP in huge numbers. What they were involved in is a lot of officework which has been automated away, and union-protected jobs that have now disappeared. Stuff like designing presentations now done in Powerpoint, typing up reports now autogenerated, doing typographical work now completely removed, manning and stocking a shop you can now bypass with Amazon, distributing products to such shops which are now gone, raising ads for now-dead newspapers, managing factory processes that are now in China, working for local authorities now so cash-strapped they're literally bankrupt...

The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.

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

#118

Post by lgierth »

tracker1 wrote: post #92

I'm thinking that there is a lot to look forward to when the browsers start supporting the likes of IPFS, along with some DNS hints for IPFS nodes... perhaps something similar to a CNAME record, that points a DNS name to an IPFS published directory... Although, that would need a relatively low TTL, as it should be possible to publish, then update said reference quickly.

Mentioned this in your other comment too, but this time with name and link :) We "invented" dnslink for that, which is a TXT record of the form `dnslink=/ipfs/` or `dnslink=/ipns/` -- https://github.com/jbenet/go-dnslink

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

#119

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues.

In real life, I also often feel like I am alone in caring about privacy and freedom issues. Sometimes I feel like a crackpot when trying to explain to people who don't care why privacy is important.

However I am hopeful that us techies who are actually the ones creating the future of the web are aware of and give weight to those issues.

It seems from reading the comments on slashdot and here, that privacy issues certainly are considered by techies.

I'm not in the US, but it is almost beyond belief to me that anyone in the US could not consider the wholesale spying on their own people without judicial oversight a privacy issue. I feel like those people have very little knowledge of history and even less ability to extrapolate from that knowledge.

You are not alone, I just hope there are enough of us to make a difference.

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

#120

Post by brokenmachine »

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…

Google built its business and its current $500+ billion status on stealing other websites' content and storing it on their servers.

Can't anyone exclude their pages from being scraped by google if they so desire?

If you post something on a site that allows itself to be scraped, only then it will go on google.

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