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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

#151

Post by freshhawk »

gallonofmilk wrote: post #140
freshhawk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is a form of security. This view of them as opposing forces only makes sense if you view "security" as only meaning the security of those in power against those they have power over. That's one type of security, and the security of your state isn't unimportant, but it's not the only kind and for those in the western world it's not even close to the most important.

I think you're missing the point. In the modern world there comes a point where we either have to sacrifice some privacy for increased security or we can have total privacy (encrypt everything) and lose our security. If you think it is any other way you are foolish.

I get the point, I just think that the idea that total privacy would "lose our security" to be completely unconvincing. Encrypt everything would only be a real problem for mass surveillance technologies.

I guess the difference is that I see mass surveillance and any movement towards a panopticon as much more dangerous than terrorism or espionage have ever been. There is no rolling back a panopticon as that's very close to complete and unlimited political power.

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

#152

Post by maus42 »

quadrangle wrote: post #136
wturner wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Jaron Lanier also talks about a mythical 20th century that was good for middle-class artists and musicians, completely in contrast to evidence from reality. He's 100% right that hollowing out of the middle class is a serious problem for a free society. His prescriptions about IP are mostly nonsense.

I suspect some perception bias. There weren't that many artists and musicians around to have significant effect on the middle class whole (and artists and such weren't especially middle class).

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

#153

Post by freshhawk »

galistoca wrote: post #126
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…

Ever thought about whether the assumption that having control over what your see on your Facebook feed might be incorrect? If we're talking about the ideal world that may be true, but the real world is far from perfect. If you ask 100 people do you want to live a meaningful life, probably 99 of them will say yes. But do they? Probably 1 out of those 100 will live a meaningful life. If you ask people do you want to be…

I think it's just about network effects. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook.

Although network effects work the other way as well, when people start leaving social networks they collapse exponentially just like they grew exponentially.

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

#154

Post by cageface »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #105
mark_l_watson wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 Privacy and Freedom are values. The web (along with Facebook et.al.) is a product. I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting di…

I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting distinction to make.

He might have actually been correct if Apple could make iCloud work properly. As it is you'd be crazy to trust your data to it and Dropbox is a no-brainer product.

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

#155

Post by freshhawk »

Animats wrote: post #129
walrus01 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook Ease of use by the vast hordes of hundreds of millions of completely non technical endusers and thousands of person-hours by highly paid UI/UX designers have trumped decentralization and autonomy. point, click, drool.

I know it's a rant, but open source people do not know how to do user-friendly user interfaces. A few days ago, I posted the home page links for Diaspora, Gnu Social, and Friendica, and commented "any questions". Blatant UI bugs often don't get fixed in open source. There's a bug in Ubuntu on some machines which causes the cursor to disappear after coming back from a suspend. (You can get the cursor back by typing CT…

Definitely, but I look at it from the direction of "No one has pulled in the good UX/UI people to do open source work" and that's simply a social/culture problem.

I also think it's completely fixable, because all the reasons to do open source programming work apply to UI/UX work. Getting your work in front of a lot of people, gaining experience and notoriety, getting to scratch your own itch.

There just was no Linux for design people to jump start that culture. And Mac's always had such nice design that they didn't have as many itches to scratch.

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

#156

Post by freshhawk »

quadrangle wrote: post #138
mtVessel wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking as a not-so-technical (never run a server) reader myself, what people like me want is not whether or not the data is on our own devices (that's an implementation detail) but the real issue of real reliability, privacy, and basically not having all the centralized bullshit that makes me feel helpless. None of the big systems run by the big corporations are actually reliable long-term. They change stuff all th…

The problem is that I'm not sure anyone has a way for you to get reliability, privacy and not having to deal with centralized bullshit without caring about that implementation detail.

Because if you leave it up to someone else, they can make a lot of money by removing all but reliability from what you want. So they do.

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

#157

Post by hiram112 »

Mon_7i wrote: post #149
brokenmachine wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think privacy/freedom issues are symptoms not root causes. 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 con…

>...Trumps and ISIS....

I know election season can make us all a little crazy towards the 'other team', but are you seriously putting Trump in the same camp as ISIS?

Hitler, Nazis, etc. have been used so often in the past 50 years by all sides that it is easy to brush it off as empty rhetoric. But if the left has become so blind in their hatred towards Trump, that these comparisons can be made without a second thought, it is hard to take anything you say seriously.

I do agree with your comments up to that point, and apologize if I misinterpreted the point of the last paragraph.

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

#158

Post by icebraining »

z3t4 wrote: post #28

The web is already decentralized, but lack the convenience of Facebook et al. where you have a virtual identity, a friend list and can choose who get access to your images etc. This can however be accomplished with something like SSH keys, where your "friend" list is basically a list of public keys. And a small daemon that will let "friends" make queries like "is this a friend or a friend", etc. With a identity syste…

What you're describing is essentially the PGP Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

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

#159

Post by ori_b »

mike_hearn wrote: post #110
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.

Well, speaking only for myself, I've thought about leaving medium several times but never bothered because: • I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling. • I don't want to run or upgrade a web stack. I have a few Linux VPS' and frankly they're painful to maintain. I don't have the time or energy to do this unpaid anymore. If Linux was a better OS may…

> I don't want an article that goes viral to give me huge bills or crush a tiny server. I want automatic scaling.

I'm not sure that an article that goes viral can do this any more, if you're running a simple static site. Even a million hits a day on my website would only be something like 150 gigabytes of traffic a month, if it were sustained. (I'd expect a much smaller spike).

At Amazon's current pricing, that's about $15/month.

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

#160

Post by z3t4 »

icebraining wrote: post #158
z3t4 wrote: post #28

The web is already decentralized, but lack the convenience of Facebook et al. where you have a virtual identity, a friend list and can choose who get access to your images etc. This can however be accomplished with something like SSH keys, where your "friend" list is basically a list of public keys. And a small daemon that will let "friends" make queries like "is this a friend or a friend", etc. With a identity syste…

What you're describing is essentially the PGP Web of Trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

No. More like a cookie. It should basically replace user/password authentication.
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