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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

#191

Post by Natanael_L »

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 Internet (including their imagined markets!) would be entirely dead without the likes of Google search. Those who see these technologies as infringing and as leeches have no understanding of where value comes from.

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

#192

Post by Natanael_L »

edraferi wrote: post #185
toyg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, distribut…

You should read his book, "Who Owns the Future?" He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed. I agree there's a technology gap…

That problem is entirely disconnected from the concept of IP. Draconian enforcement would kill Internet virality, not enable anybody to make money from it.

The real problem is to incentivize payment. As Valve says, piracy is a service problem. First your service must be wanted, then it must be valuable enough to pay for, and payment has to be easy too.

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

#193

Post by Natanael_L »

brokenmachine wrote: post #120
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…

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.

Trivially with robots.txt, which is standardized and so well known among anybody doing webservers that not having such a rule ought to be considered as consent.

About the same as the rule here in Sweden on filming - you're free to film in any private venue until told not to.

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

#194

Post by Natanael_L »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #56
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…

> "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…

More people thinking about how servers! Great :)

I like the concepts of Namecoin & Keybase, IPFS and Tahoe-LAFS, etc, Tor and I2P, CJDNS, PHB's Mathematical Mesh, and so on...

Having your own server or cluster that your own devices connect to for anonymization, identity, syncing, federation, etc, would simplify so much.

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

#195

Post by zero_iq »

zkhalique wrote: post #181
zero_iq wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The discussion point of the article is how we can build such technologies for the kinds of things you just listed as needing a centralized domain. You claimed that they were describing your platform. But in the 'macro' sense, your platform is nothing like that -- it's a different flavour of Web app server, and fits in with the existing paradigm. Yes it may be part of a decentralised system (the Web), but any large We…

" It does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article " Really? It seems that many of the actual quotes from the Fathers of the Internet in the article apply to existing web client-server architecture: “We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are afraid to.” - Tim Berners-Lee “People have their friends on Facebook and some photos on Flickr and their colleagues on LinkedIn…

I'm not talking about serverless, I'm talking about decentralised. The article is talking about decentralised. You're talking about decentralised, even.

But your platform is a centralised platform just like most other Web app platforms. It is not at all like what the article is discussing, contrary to your claim.

How would a Facebook or WordPress clone built on your platform be any more decentralised than regular old Facebook or WordPress?

In fact how would it address any of the questions raised?

Is your platform distributed and decentralised?

Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress and without a central service provider?

Does your platform prevent government snooping?

Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information silo?

Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised than it already is?

Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?

Does it unlock published Web content when copyright expires?

Can it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?

Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of the Web?

Because those are the things the article describes.

And that doesn't sound at all like your platform, which is another Web application stack, very much the opposite of what is suggested in the article on fact.

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

#196

Post by workingwriter »

doublerebel wrote: post #33

I think there is a ton of validity in this desire and I've collected a long list of projects, articles, and leaders that are pointing towards a similar conclusion. Most of us are too deep into the status quo or our view of technology to break in a different direction. Most of the projects so far aim to reinvent "from the ground up" like Urbit or IPFS -- which is an impressive goal but misses what I think is the main…

As a relative newcomer to this approach, but becoming enthusiastic about its potential, I'd love to see your list.

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

#197

Post by lubujackson »

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…

Freedom and privacy might not have instant appeal to the masses, but I will tell you what does: attention-shaping. Google, FB, etc. all shape what information you are exposed to and provide limited or no controls over how to control that exposure. DuckDuckGo got a lot of traction on this issue alone, but I think it remains a key element for any open web advancement. Not to simply say "this replaces Google" or "this is an alternative to Facebook" but to say "how about looking at things from this perspective? What if you want to control these aspects of what you see?"

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

#198

Post by lubujackson »

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…

The vision of the Internet was that the power of the Everyman would expose his insight to the world, incrementally making the Web and the world a better place. But most people use the internet to tighten their bonds with those they are close to, and at best megaphone their thoughts into a canyon where usually no one is listening (cough Twitter cough).

Most people don't want to make the Web incrementally better, but simply use it to speak and be heard. This desire is WAY more baked-in to the human race than any desire to "better the world".

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

#200

Post by diyorgasms »

pjmlp wrote: post #190
edraferi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Maya, Poser... Doesn't Adobe continue to charge big $$$ for Creative Cloud? I don't understand how these statements mesh..

Yes it does. "Don't bother" as in like most professionals they see a value in paying for their tools and don't mind having to pay them.

Just FYI that's basically opposite how the phrase "doesn't bother" is idiomatically used in at least American English.
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