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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

staltz.com

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#51

Post by WorldMaker »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #40
niftich wrote: post #15

The IPv4 perspective is a red herring. NATting was indeed necessitated by IP address scarcity, but a domestic installation that does NAT comes with ancillary benefits, like giving you, the home user, a single place to control access to your network. In IPv6 it's nice that you have an address space that's not only big enough to accommodate every device, but large enough to even burn through addresses and treat them as…

firewalling on a router/gateway gives you the same ability, and none of the downsides of NAT. Nat is in no way a requirement for this.

Not to mention that you really need to focus on securing the endpoint anyway because an increasing number of your devices are mobile and aren't "home" an increasing amount of time anyway. The period of central router/gateway/NAT management made the most sense was when the majority of your home were desktops fixed in their locations in the same rooms. In a world of a majority of laptops and hand computers, worrying about the strength of your home router/gateway/NAT is increasingly silly, as those devices may spend as much time or more at your work, or the coffee shop down the street, as they do at "home".

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#52

Post by jl6 »

gregknicholson wrote: post #17

There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…

I can’t help wonder if there is a way for Big Wire to exist in a way that doesn’t cause them to undermine democracy, society, free will and all the other apocalyptic end-game scenarios promised for Google and Facebook.

Is there no way for long distance telecoms to just exist as a legitimate service that people pay for?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#53

Post by dash2 » 

  Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them....
  As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate
  computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown
  too large to remove without killing the host. The technical
  flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world
  where middlemen business models thrive.
The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera? This is an analogy masquerading as an argument.

  It is not fundamentally necessary to have any intermediate 
  company profiting whenever a person reads news from their 
  friends, rents an apartment from a stranger, or orders a 
  ride from a driver.
The author provides no evidence that the services of Airbnb, Uber etc. have no value added. These companies carefully designed interfaces to help us find what we need. If they did not add value, we would still be using newsgroups.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#54

Post by r3bl »

quickben wrote: post #28

Funny. Before DRM, spam, i-have-to-monetize daily 5 minute of bloging into a full time pay, unskipable 30s YouTube ads, profiling every possible user behavior and other shady shit like that: We wondered how can we improve the web. Now, we wonder how to save it.

I would say before algorithms started showing us different content even if we are subscribed to the same feed(s).

DRM is hardly a problem unless you're using a handful of products, unskipable ads were hardly a problem before smartphones and their market stores took off, and spam was there since the Internet started.

What is new is that Facebook, Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and increasingly Twitter are all showing us different content, and our personal preferences (things we follow) are increasingly irrelevant to the information we're receiving.

This all happened in this decade, and this is the decade where we started to fix instead of improve the web. I would point the breaking point somewhere around 2010-2011, when Google, YouTube and Facebook all decided to personalize the things we see.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#55

Post by codeisawesome »

pfraze wrote: post #34

I worked on Secure Scuttlebutt and then founded Beaker. Happy to answer questions.

1. Is there still going to be room for entrepreneurship on this new Web?

2. To what extent will the lack of ability to monopolise, hurt the ability to create large amounts of revenues and profits?

3. Does this community also know about projects like OpenMined which seek to democratise access to data & infra to run ML algorithms on? Any pattern like reason you can think of, for it to have not come up in André’s post?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#56

Post by gaius »

harel wrote: post #24
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

Sorry, but I wouldn't like to lose the ability to build fully custom solutions. I don't want to rely on defaults. One person's sensible default is another's insane one. JavaScript is what it is today because it serves a purpose and frankly, I think it does it well enough for now. And without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same, and stuck in someone's idea of a sensible defau…

without CSS we'll end up with Beige boxed web, all looking the same, behaving the same

Designers generally vastly overestimate how much users actually want "design".

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#58

Post by tzahola »

JohnStrange wrote: post #12
ashark wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML with great default styles and better built-in form and interactive elements (date picker, sortable tables) would be ideal. Screw CSS, it slows everything down, just have good defaults and don't let pages mess with them much. If we must have CSS at least jettison the complex parts with animation and such. Make it very, very simple and weak. No Javascript. Can't be trusted if it has the ability to initiate connect…

I'd like to see a return to semantic markup, accompanied by pragmatic information about the purpose of the data and its intended size. The data should also be strongly typed. Then leave it to the client how to display, how to edit, and how to select the data. The receiver should decide how to best display e.g. a list of 20000 names or a choice between 4 options on his device.

I wonder where this would fail!

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#59

Post by mr_spothawk »

dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

I don't see where the argument is made that there is no added value.

Instead, i think the author rightly points out that it is possible to do it a different way.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#60

Post by gregknicholson »

ashark wrote: post #27
gregknicholson wrote: post #17

There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…

How does a mesh cope with most end-user Internet-connected devices (phones) running on battery power, especially in less developed areas? Would we be back to needing infrastructure nodes with wall power, or solar, or whatever? This is what's keeping me from being over-the-Moon thrilled about stuff like IPFS—it's a bad fit for cell phones, which are most devices.

Each village might have 1 Raspberry Pi attached to a large hard drive and a solar panel, which stores everything — the village library.

Each mobile device would only have to store the subset of data currently relevant to that person — like a backpack.

Maybe there's also an Endless Computer at home keeping the data important to you long term: family history, photo albums, newspaper clippings — the home bookshelf.

(In Scuttlebutt terms, the village library is a Pub; the home bookshelf is a Scuttlebot following only your immediate family and friends; the backpack supports out-of-order messages and discards anything more than a few weeks old.)

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