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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#71

Post by ashark »

wvenable wrote: post #66
ashark wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with that approach is that you have to define all your possible use-cases up front. If the web had stayed as a simple document format, it wouldn't even be worth talking about now. Everything but web apps and spy-vertising would be better (for the user) without Javascript, overall. I submit that those can live on some other platform (the current Web could keep going) while most of the rest could switch t…

> Ecommerce, Facebook, webmail, all that stuff would be fine without Javascript... But something as simple as voting on reddit would be tedious.

Why?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#72

Post by agentultra »

pfraze wrote: post #34

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

I don't have a question, just praise. It'll be interesting to see how dat addresses could be persisted or addressable; content searched, etc. Nice work on Beaker. :)

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#74

Post by wvenable »

ashark wrote: post #71
wvenable wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ecommerce, Facebook, webmail, all that stuff would be fine without Javascript... But something as simple as voting on reddit would be tedious.

Why?

Every upvote would refresh the whole page.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#75

Post by hateduser2 »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #68
schnable wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on sever…

Don’t forget that we WANT to eliminate all the middlemen if we can, because middle men = bloat. It IS undeniably cheaper to interact directly than it is through a middle man. Don’t forget that!

This is analogous to function pointers (or vtables or dynamic dispatch) in programming. It’s a really tight analog actually, almost literal. It’s slower (more expensive) to go through a cranks. You only do it for external reasons, but you should always try to eliminate them. I hope people around here saying these companies add value aren’t forgetting that we want to destroy them because in an ideal world things are more direct than they are already. We SHOULD want that too, that is the right direction to move in.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#76

Post by cJ0th »

schnable wrote: post #63
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…

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

> Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#77

Post by pfraze »

mr_spothawk wrote: post #57
pfraze wrote: post #34

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

How might search engines work in a DAT enabled web? (beaker's neat... i'll check it out)

macawfish is suggested distributed search indexes, which is a neat idea that YaCy [1] explores.

We're looking at adding a private search index in the browser itself. This index would be constructed by adding dat sites to your 'library,' and directing it to crawl the outbound links.

What's unique about this is, other than the private queries, we can establish trust relationships with all the data in your results. This is particularly useful for searching for users or software, since you want to trust those results. Dat is a cryptographic network - all sites, users, and apps are represented by public keys, and all data is signed - so your search results are a search against your personal Web of Trust.

When you search for "Paul Frazee," if you had previously added 'dat://beakerbrowser.com' to your library, then you'd see a result for "Paul Frazee (via beakerbrowser.com)". We can layer those signals too by matching URLs, so your result might be "Paul Frazee (via beakerbrowser.com, Alice, Bob)." Dat uses secure ledgers internally [2] so this is really a pretty decent form of key distribution, but of course it can be generalized to searching for all kinds of information. We just have to find out the limits of disk space usage.

I have more to say, but I'll add it with a reply to remain timely.

1. https://yacy.net/en/index.html

2. https://beakerbrowser.com/2017/06/19/cryptographically-secur...

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#78

Post by bogomipz »

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…

>"The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera?"

I don't see any handwaving in the word "prefigure" at all. The first middle men were arguably dial up ISPs. They literally brokered your connection to the internet. You got an IP from a dial up pool. Besides having a transit connection these companies had the pool of IP addresses you needed to be a node on the internet.

And so in some way that was the first "computer in front of your computer" business model. I think the author is drawing a through line from there and the business of brokering internet traffic. I don't believe they not saying that NAT enabled FB.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#79

Post by Chaebixi »

soared wrote: post #33
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.

Spam, scams, and bad ads have been around since the start, what internet were you using?

They were, but back then, that stuff seemed much more marginal, now it's seems front and center with even major players engaging in some bad behaviors.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#80

Post by dTal »

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…

>How did IPv4 and NAT play any role in the dominance of Facebook, Airbnb et cetera?

Very directly, I would say, by making the barrier to running your own low-traffic website too high. Modern social media is all about hosting content - microblogs, photos, etc. Geocities was an early workaround to an inability to host things, and it's worth remembering that MySpace was originally positioned as a kind of evolution of that with the social aspects bolted on - it (notoriously) allowed arbitrary HTML, so that you could make your own "homepage" on the internet. Facebook further evolved this, offering a much more restricted experience. Were it not for NAT, I would have expected an explosion in tiny self-hosted personal sites around the time that dialup was replaced by always-on cable connections, and before long we would probably have had various wordpress-like frameworks to do the social aspects. Which is not to say we wouldn't have eventually had a Facebook-like entity, but it would have faced much stiffer competition than it did, and people would perhaps have been less forgiving of its restrictions if they'd had an easily-accessible wild-west to compare it to.

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