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A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

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Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#291

Post by SXX »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #140
zer0gravity wrote: post #116

So nobody can "give the power back" to anybody, but people can stop giving their power away to others. We all have power, and we manifest it through our actions and choices. Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing. I…

The "People don't understand" is a condescending statement and is exactly the reason why the people who try to build these decentralized systems never succeed, because they don't even understand why people use information silos. If you really think that's the problem and you think you know better than other people, you should quit using every single centralized system out there, like your bank (they take your money a…

> It is these "decentralized" people who are out of touch, not the ordinary people.

There are plenty of countries in the world where "ordinary people" and "political active people" are two different groups.

Ordinary people there have better things to worry about than politics. Many of them also know what exactly going, but do nothing to prevent it. Usually this end up really really bad.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#292

Post by flukus »

rlpb wrote: post #261
sukilot wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget that for email to get popular, it had to be mostly centralized (Hotmail, Gmail, etc), we are lucky it's still at least federated. Bitcoin, same story -- mass adoption turns out to be dependent on service providers hosting the wallet, and most users are not miners, eroding many of the decentralization benefits.

Don't forget that for email to get popular, it had to be mostly centralized (Hotmail, Gmail, etc)... I'm not so sure. Before Hotmail and Gmail, every ISP provided email accounts to its customers. Desktop POP3 clients were the norm, and email was as popular as the Internet was. Centralization wasn't needed for email popularity. Hotmail, Gmail etc. have now taken over, perhaps partly due to the economy of scale in deal…

And most companies still maintain their own mail servers, I'd say the majority of email is through decentralized servers.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#293

Post by [deleted] »

zer0gravity wrote: post #116

So nobody can "give the power back" to anybody, but people can stop giving their power away to others. We all have power, and we manifest it through our actions and choices. Some say knowledge is power, but in order to gain knowledge you have to make that choice. One can try to educate people about the benefits of hosting their own data, but unless they make the choice to listen and understand it's all for nothing. I…

[deleted]

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#294

Post by dredmorbius »

schoen wrote: post #278
dredmorbius wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually fairly certain the fictitious entry concept exists in some shape or form. Even name+company@example.com addresses used for email registration are tells of misuse of registration information. Various honeypot traps utilise similar elements. I'm all but certain financial institutions have at least tracking, if not fictitious entry, accounts seeded within various data lists whose use triggers alerts, though…

Huh, now I'm thinking Cliff Stoll did something like this in The Cuckoo's Egg with making up a fake project that intruders then wrote to ask for more information about... or am I misremembering?

Yes, via Wikipedia:

In order to entice the hacker to reveal himself, Stoll set up an elaborate hoax — known today as a honeypot — inventing a fictitious department at LBL that had supposedly been newly formed by an "SDI" contract, also fictitious. When he realized the hacker was particularly interested in the faux SDI entity, he filled the "SDInet" account (operated by the imaginary secretary Barbara Sherwin) with large files full of impressive-sounding bureaucratese. The ploy worked, and the Deutsche Bundespost finally located the hacker at his home in Hanover. The hacker's name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the Soviet KGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarian spy contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he could only have obtained through Hess. Apparently this was the KGB's method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the information he was selling them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#295

Post by educar »

skybrian wrote: post #200

The problem with this plan is that it doesn't really tackle the first rule of the Internet: spam and abuse make everything suck. The last really popular decentralized service was email, and users migrated to large providers because they had better spam filters. Also, setting up your own mail server has become increasingly difficult, due in part to anti-spam measures. As a side effect, email has become pretty lossy. C…

There are many other players in this space - yunohost.org, cloudron.io etc. https://github.com/Kickball/awesome-selfhosted has a better list

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#296

Post by ekianjo »

stevewilhelm wrote: post #143
ekianjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could easily move tomorrow to another git based service. The only stuff missing would be issue management.

A an enterprise Github subscriber, we would lose user authentication and authorization.

Fair enough but dont other github alternatives provide that?

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#297

Post by ekianjo »

fredsir wrote: post #33
ekianjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could easily move tomorrow to another git based service. The only stuff missing would be issue management.

Many rely on Github for more than source control hosting and issues. It's really not a non-issue.

Care to elaborate ?

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#298

Post by ekianjo »

vamur wrote: post #36
ekianjo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could easily move tomorrow to another git based service. The only stuff missing would be issue management.

Except there are a lot of OSS and side projects hosted on github. It will take a long time for these to find their backups and move to another service. And some will lose source code due to faulty or outdated backups.

When you do a git clone you should always have a copy of the whole git on your dev computer so I am not sure why they would have to look for their backups.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#299

Post by ekianjo »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #32
mioelnir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea about the other things, but the wiki is just an additional git repo that you can check out like any other one.

And then you still need the infrastructure to run it on a site where contributors already have an account or don't mind the extra burden of registration.

People moved away from sf fast enough im pretty sure the same thing would occur if things turn sour for github.

Re: A decentralized web would give power back to the people online

#300

Post by coldtea »

stevenh wrote: post #237
coldtea wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This statement seems a bit condescending, just saying.. It's usually a safer bet to dismiss the assumptions of some small group of people than think that the whole general population are idiots.

Just saying... http://i.imgur.com/oTBYE5r.jpg

I agree, it's usually a small group of idiots that conflate high IQ with not being an idiot.
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