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

171–180 of 255 posts

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

#171

Post by icebraining »

halflings wrote: post #115
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…

Woah, didn't know it went this far. If anything, this would be great for facebook (which has been anything but transparent when it comes to what they do with your data when your account is deleted). Google already has some relatively transparent controls on what data they have on you, and allow you to wipe all or parts of it.

Max Schrems, an Austrian lawyer, sued Facebook Ireland over this and got them to release all his data. He also keeps a website where he explains how to get yours: http://europe-v-facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data...

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

#172

Post by pille »

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.

"female independence through hyper sexual objectification" is meant as a single element in that list, at least that's how I read it.

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

#173

Post by Silhouette »

sly010 wrote: post #167
Silhouette wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> TCP/IP / SSL / SMTP / HTTP Were all invented long ago and were all first of their kind. Creating a new standard when there are no wide spread alternatives is easy, doing the same where everyone is already invested is hard. E.g. that's why payment systems suck universally.

As someone who does a fair bit of work in networking fields, I think that's a pessimistic view. Most people don't see when the underlying infrastructure develops, in no small part because the standards and compatibility issues are so carefully considered, but that doesn't mean there aren't newer standards and protocols being developed all the time. We're now on something like the fifth mainstream WiFi standard, for example, and while someone buying a new laptop of getting a new box from their ISP might not know what all the 802.whatever markings mean, they still experience much faster speed and higher reliability compared to the earlier technology. An example from much further up the stack is that we're starting to see wider support for Web serving using HTTP/2, which is a big change from its predecessor.

Even with payment systems, we've seen multiple contactless payment technologies become established very rapidly in recent years, and developments like Chip-and-PIN cards a few years before that. Of course online payment processing is also a much more developed and competitive industry today than it was even five years ago, which again is partly because both the technical and the regulatory frameworks have opened up in recent years. SEPA in Europe is a good example here.

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

#174

Post by beaconstudios »

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.

I'm not the OP but I read the third item as being "female independence through hyper sexual objectification".

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

#175

Post by Silhouette »

tomohawk wrote: post #157
Silhouette wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You seem to keep coming back to this point, but the quote I gave before literally advocates the opposite of creating such an authority.

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

#176

Post by Silhouette »

ballenf wrote: post #134
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.

The real test of whether one supports free speech is whether they still support it when voices they don't like get heard. Kind of like the way to judge a person is how they treat those who are less fortunate, not how they treat their peers.

The interesting thing here is that there is no inherent right answer when it comes to balancing freedom of expression with a right to privacy. Both are desirable goals, yet it is inevitable that they will sometimes be in conflict, particularly with the capabilities that modern technologies offer for promoting or impairing either side.

Moreover, in the world today, even cultures with broadly similar values such as the US and much of Europe often take very different views on this particular issue, which makes finding a reasonable consensus for a system that spans these different places... challenging.

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

#177

Post by Kiro »

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…

> You also have the right to demand the deletion of your personal data

How does it work with data you're legally required to keep? E.g. for tax reasons.

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

#178

Post by Silhouette »

phy6 wrote: post #143
Razengan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also subscribe to the opinion that total avoidance of bad things is impossible, and that preparation for handling life's faults is a necessary part of the programming each person should have.

preparation for handling life's faults is a necessary part of the programming each person should have

That's a reasonable position, but sometimes no amount of preparation can give the little guy adequate protection against a big guy seeking to exploit him. That's why we have legal systems and regulatory frameworks in the first place, and providing a deterrent against big guys taking unfair advantage to reduce the number of times it happens and some sort of remedy for the little guy in the remaining cases is generally a good thing even if it's not a perfect solution.

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

#179

Post by schoen »

phy6 wrote: post #141
Razengan wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you for the common sense analogy. I have a 'hunch' that one could whip up a proof based on countably vs uncountably infinite mappings where the number of ways to deceive/offend outweigh the number of authorities which could police them, even assuming such ideals as perfect enforcement and willingness to submit to being policed (i.e. international uniformity of laws). But that's just a first-coffee-of-the-mornin…

It's hard to see how theorems about infinite sets can apply directly apply to human relationships.

Maybe you'll just make a heuristic argument showing that something grows as n² or 2ⁿ? For example, the number of possible relationships among n people grows as n². The world's population of about 7490000000 individuals would support about 28050049996255000000 potential relationships between individuals, or twice that many opinions that individuals have about one another.

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

#180

Post by tannhaeuser »

fiatjaf wrote: post #70

Does anyone else see as problem that web browsers are getting so feature-rich? That means that if anyone wants to write a new web browser he won't be able to.

Yes, you're not the only one to see this problem, but it's not as commonly understood as it should be.

I've long desired for a formal semantics for CSS for example (but I believe flexbox is a step in the right direction in this regard).

If we're heading into a p2p future, my opinion is we're going to have to build it on web (HTML/CSS) technology for being able to leverage browser efforts, and for cross web/postweb publishing.

And I believe the prospect for doing this, from a pure technical PoV, is quite good. While I'm not completely agreeing with everything they do, WHATWG have succeeded in spec'ing a reasonably declarative and rich document language that doesn't need JavaScript for each and everything.

OTOH, more and more CSS ad-hoc syntax, and entirely new procedural web runtimes (cough WebAssembly cough) should be resisted.

Post reply on HN