141–150 of 238 posts
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…
How are Facebook & co monopolies?
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…
If it's simple enough to be mobile, it's also simple enough to be static and self-hosted. And there are advantages to that.
Replication, redundancy, and consistent presence, for starters.
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> 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.
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…
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…
> "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…
Maybe this can be solved with good caching.
But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.
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…
Aren't the main reasons everything went centralized: bandwidth and reliability? Maybe this can be solved with good caching. But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.
Without the serialisation of actions that centralisation gives, it's much harder and hence more expensive to create things.
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 t…
An ISP can artificially try to price you under the "business class", but they have to let you send packets out, otherwise what is the point of having an ISP?
My kingdom for some net neutrality!
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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 f…
The Internet today allows/has allowed for the rapid extraction of information/wealth from the masses into the hands of a few. I am totally opposed to the propping up of Mark Zuckerburgs and Larry Pages. Who then get to decide who and how the worlds information shall be accessed. This should not be the point of the internet.
There are too many unintended consequences that a Page or Zuckerberg are struggling to handle by themselves.
We could have handled nuclear tech in the same way we handled the internet "to spur innovation" and propped up a Zuckerberg of nuclear tech. But we haven't. Why? Because we know there will be nonrecoverable unintended consequences.
It's time we handled the internet the same way.
I was shocked with the quality of discussion at Facebook about Trump. Its as if only because Trump appeared in the US the issue has come to the forefront. How many other Trumps and ISIS type orgs(that we haven't heard about) have been propped up around the world? Forget about the national consequences, there are local unintended consequences in every neighborhood and sphere of life when unchecked information is spread too fast.
If people take information out of the system, they have to make it available to everyone else (or some variation of it) has to be a guiding principle.
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…