Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 255 posts

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#151

Post by scholia »

Razengan wrote: post #112
elbigbad wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this just an opinion, or do you have any data on this?

Opinion. I mean we tell kids to be wary of strangers, but we can't assign a policeman to every stranger. Easier to teach people that they can be deceived or that bad things can happen, than to prevent any deception or bad thing from ever occurring.

How do you cope with the fact that a large slice of the population seeks out bad things and refuses good things?

The obvious examples are US news sources such as Fox News, Breitbart and Infowars [1]. However, it could also apply to fast food eating habits.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/conservative-media-trump-drudg...

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#152

Post by _yosefk »

ue_ wrote: post #100
_yosefk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Defenders of democracies" live in democracies. Defenders of dictatorships and monarchies, from Jeremy Corbyn (who had kind words for Castro) to neoreactionaries, also live in democracies, presumably because they're not actually stupid enough to believe what they say. Democracy is a lesser evil, which many people born into it fail to appreciate because their imagination does not render the greater evils realistically…

>Defenders of dictatorships and monarchies, from Jeremy Corbyn (who had kind words for Castro) What gives you the impression that Corbyn is against democracy? In fact, he participates in the 'democratic' system of his own party and of the UK. I personally refuse to participate at all in the bourgeois democracy, but that doesn't mean I'm against democracy as a principle.

I only said he had praise for Castro, a dictator whose soldiers shot people trying to escape his rule in thd back and drowned their boats. I didn't say he was against democracy, only that he said very nice things about a dictatorship that he sure isn't dumb enough to live under.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#153

Post by jsilence »

ethbro wrote: post #129
k__ wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the law only works with companies. The Internet as whole never forgets

The Internet also has to make money at some point, which means there's usually a corporate entity in the chain, one whose money (for better or worse) eventually touches Western banks. So yes, the Internet never forgets (things it can make a buck off of).

Actually no. Saying the internet needs to make money is just as wrong as saying the roads need to make money. The net is just an infrastructure that has to be maintained and paiyd for. "Making money" is absolutely not a neccessety.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#154

Post by jessaustin »

sweeneyrod wrote: post #86
holografix wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what you mean. Frankly I think the Kardashians are a force for evil. Promoting selfishness, superficiality and female independence through hyper sexual objectification. Why are they so popular? Total mystery to me.

"selfishness, superficiality and female independence" One of these things is not like the others.

The implication seems to be that female independence gained at the price of "hyper sexual objectification" is not as noble as that gained through e.g. hard work and responsibility?

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#155

Post by Silhouette »

pdimitar wrote: post #145
Silhouette wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

truth is that most people simply don't care and are entirely clueless on the impact of the continued centralization and surveillance of the Internet on their lives That's a common assumption, but I wonder how true it really is. I've certainly talked with friends in their 20s and maybe early 30s -- people who have grown up with the Internet and ubiquitous mobile devices -- and had them express a sentiment that was mor…

> However, they've never known technology to work any other way and assume there's nothing they can do about it, and they value the social aspects of sharing stuff online so they keep using these services. I'd argue that how did the modern people end up indifferent to the growing centralization and surveillance is largely irrelevant. The sad result is still there. We all have anecdotal evidence and mine isn't more im…

I suspect we agree on more than we disagree on here, at least as far as the principles go, even if I might lack your flair for the dramatic. :-)

That said, I really don't think developing standards for interoperability and federation is such a big deal in the grand scheme of things. After all, modern networking -- including the Internet -- is built on numerous such standards, carefully designed and documented, widely implemented and effective. If we can develop a stack of protocols for totally unrelated systems to talk to each other, from the lower levels of LANs up through things like TCP/IP and SSL to application level details like sending email between SMTP servers or requesting web pages using HTTP, surely we could standardise sharing content like messages and photos from friends without relying on some mysterious centralised service.

I don't know whether most people do prefer to have only one source for their information; I'd like to see more data before forming any strong view on that one. But let's assume you're right for the sake of argument. Is that a problem? We've had systems that collected and combined multiple streams of data for ease of reference for a long time, from the earliest days of e-mail lists with digests and Usenet newsgroups and RSS feeds up to modern Web-based aggregators like Reddit, the Facebook news feed, and indeed the site you're reading right now. Modern smartphones already combine even these feeds from multiple sources into a single stream of news and communications for ease of access. Is it really so far-fetched that we could cut out the middle-man in some of these cases and move back to a more peer-to-peer, decentralised system with neutral infrastructure?

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#156

Post by h2hn »

unicornporn wrote: post #58
crystalPalace wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend NoScript(Firefox plugin) for blanket or selective JS removal from web pages.

Browsing with NoScript is fine if you just visit the same websites over and over. If you actually like to _surf_ the web, the experience is reduced to a never ending configuration nightmare. At least that's my experience. Nice in theory, but a terrible UX.

Seriously, I'm been using it for more than 5 years and I've only enabled it for local sites and everything is working.

It depends on what sites you browse. I don't do any social, use google or any other crap, so it's enabled to 0 internet sites with no problem.

If I need to activate it I have a shortkey (vimperator) that opens a new firefox profile (private and prepared to load crap) for the current site so I don't load any terrible UX in my default profile.

NoScript, ublock and SDC are a must for the current state of Internet. It's like drop the garbage out the window than in the garbage bin, you need to put care into it. :)

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#157

Post by tomohawk »

Silhouette wrote: post #150
tomohawk wrote: post #74

It's interesting that one of the great things about the web is the promise of it distributed nature, and yet his prescribed 'fix' for misinformation sounds like the establishment of some sort of central authority to regulate content.

I thought he was saying exactly the opposite: "We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem, while avoiding the creation of any central bodies to decide what is “true” or not."

Sounds like doublespeak to me. Google and Facebook both took partisan positions in the past election. Why should we trust them as 'gatekeepers'?

And who gets to decide who the gatekeepers are?

An oligopoly made up of elite companies is no better than a monopoly, especially when the members are demonstrably partisan.

This whole idea that we need some sort of authority to act as the Ministry of Truth is misguided.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#158

Post by paradite »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #80

Surprised that no one mentioned the new EU data protection directive, which goes a long way to fix the first issue mentioned in the article, the loss of control over our personal data (only for users in Europe though). I studied it in detail as I work in data analysis and consult companies on this, and I honestly think it is one of the best laws produced by the EU so far: It gives users a multitude of rights such as…

Sounds quite similar to Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in Singapore:

http://www.pwc.com/sg/en/personal-data-protection.html

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#159

Post by sly010 »

matt4077 wrote: post #56
white-flame wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers. What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.

I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.

Just 90% of it.

Re: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

#160

Post by [deleted] »

matt4077 wrote: post #56
white-flame wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web wasn't built on an economic foundation of ad revenue. The web was built on the economic foundation of both university-provided and personally/privately funded servers. What ad revenue did was wildly expand the number of people trying to exploit the web for revenue, by generating sheer quantity regardless of content. I agree that that's a shaky foundation to base the web on.

I don't think you can just throw out everything produced by professional newspapers as useless content.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN