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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

#91

Post by ssalazar »

dTal wrote: post #80
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 th…

The barrier is from the tools, not NAT. Maintaining your own server is prohibitively difficult for pretty much anyone besides niche technology enthusiasts or IT professionals.

> 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

NAT never stopped you from port forwarding 80 to your local server and many people (myself included) do this/have done this with even e.g. DynDNS to have a decent looking host address. At the end of the day managing your own server hardware/software is a far bigger barrier than NAT.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#92

Post by pfraze »

codeisawesome wrote: post #55
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?

1. Yes. Economic models are challenging, especially if ads don't work well anymore. (One thing I'd point out is that most ad revenue is sucked up by Google and Facebook, and they're the entities most ripe for disruption.)

A core motivation for Beaker is to explore new political systems which control information, software, and Web communities. If you view the existing Web as a political system, you might say that clients only have the "rights" to consume and filter information, whereas servers have the "rights" to publish, moderate, and set the software. Clients have to borrow publishing rights from the servers, and that means that all authority is derived from the citizenry of servers. A peer-to-peer Web unifies publishing and consumption rights under one class of device (the "peer") and so it equally distributes the authority over moderation and software among the peers as well.

I bring this up because it alters the service-driven packaging model for the Web. Rather than having software be delivered in a one-size-fits-all package from a given .com, the peer-to-peer Web is a customizable network of packages. There's no builtin authority over the composition of software. All users can customize and share customizations. Therefore no two devices have to share the same application code; they just need to share data formats and protocols.

I'd keep an eye out for how software is packaged for non-hacker use in the p2p Web, because that's probably one place for economic models can emerge. It makes a lot of sense for indie programmers to think of themselves as content creators, and to then cultivate patreons around their modules and packages. For larger projects, we run an Open Collective [1] and have found some initial success there.

The reality is, without a mechanism of user/data capture, it is very hard to create huge profits, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I'd rather trade a situation where 1% of the population gets stinking rich if it meant we get the general wealth of FOSS and open data. I think enough incentives will remain to do good new work.

1. https://opencollective.com/beaker

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#93

Post by coding123 »

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.

I think there will always be a value in middle men for something, but to me the argument is about how many. As time moves forward there are fewer and fewer domains we go to for things. Facebook Google Amazon. Sure there will be competitors and that's what makes this still fair. But over time, the largest entity of each domain captures an ever larger percentage of traffic, revenue, etc..

The current method of aggregation is to empower fewer and fewer companies to control the rules, what you see, how to sell, what percentage they will allow a sale to generator for the seller, how products are shippped, and how returns work.

This works great for buyers, it always works great for buyers, but behind the scenes what is this doing to our economy and distribution of wealth. It also tends to have a major effect on the country of origin of products - everything is globabalized, so when we purchase something from Amazon we are purchasing something made also increasingly from a single country. Yes other countries will need to address that (as a separate issue too) but still the effect of letting fewer and fewer companies control the market, its no longer a free market.

Is there a way to regain independence? Can Cryptocurrency help? What other peer to peer technologies need to work in concert for us to break our dependency on Amazon, Google, Facebook?

Another way to ask the question: How do we make the online like the offline used to be (we drive down the street and go into a shop - except without the Walmart) but still make this fast-trustable and simple for the buyers.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#94

Post by pfraze »

codeisawesome wrote: post #55
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?

2. See my reply to 1!

3. I'm not personally familiar with OpenMined but decentralization is a pretty active space. SSB and Dat/Beaker have a few things in common: overlap in the communities, a focus on p2p hypermedia protocols, and not a lot of love for cryptocurrency solutions. That last point may change over time, but currently the usability, performance, and waste of the coins has left us all saying, "can't we do this without them?" And we think the answer is yes.

(That's said, I respect other people trying the coins. Everybody has to place their bet somewhere.)

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#95

Post by cJ0th »

niftich wrote: post #85
cJ0th wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion. How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judge…

Here is a purely fictional example. I frankly don't know how feasible something like this would be:

The search index could be build using blockchain technolgy. Each transaction is an entry of the search index. For efficiency, such an index could then be mirrored by many different institutions. For example, universities. Each snapshot of the search index could have something like a sha256 sum. If the server you use per default returns a hash that differs from other institutions you rate trustworthy then you should be skeptical.

As for search queries, since the index should be standardized in some way there could be many open source apps that require their own syntax for queries so that they suit different purposes and preferences.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#96

Post by ashark »

wvenable wrote: post #74
ashark wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Every upvote would refresh the whole page.

See discussion in this thread about the "204 No Content" response code. Not all successful HTTP requests trigger a page load. And that's without having to change anything about current HTTP/HTML—except maybe giving hyperlinks and/or forms access to more HTTP methods, though for god's sake we ought to already have that in HTML and if you'd told me in 2007 that in 2017 we still wouldn't be able to PUT or DELETE on a web page without Javascript I'd have laughed at how implausible that was, so that's a long-overdue change anyway.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#97

Post by bo1024 »

austincheney wrote: post #43

If you really want to rescue the web find a way to restrict adware, spyware, and the like. I upgraded internet at my house to 1gbps (about 890mbps down and 920mbps up) and I hardly notice any speed difference surfing the web. Sad. Everything else is fast as hell though.

The good news is we have tools (browser plugins) to help us take control of our own machines while web browsing. The bad news is that sites are actively hostile to these tools. I think it's as much an incentives problem as a technological problem.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#98

Post by wvenable »

ashark wrote: post #96
wvenable wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every upvote would refresh the whole page.

See discussion in this thread about the "204 No Content" response code. Not all successful HTTP requests trigger a page load. And that's without having to change anything about current HTTP/HTML—except maybe giving hyperlinks and/or forms access to more HTTP methods, though for god's sake we ought to already have that in HTML and if you'd told me in 2007 that in 2017 we still wouldn't be able to PUT or DELETE on a we…

You'd have way no indicate that your upvote succeeded with a 204 status code.

Going back to my original point, and what you're arguing for me here, is that do this properly you'd have to imagine and implement every possible use case. In 1993, nobody envisioned web pages like Reddit. And yes, without JavaScript the web would be much faster and much safer but also much less interesting and powerful. It's hard to imagine websites without simple upvote/downvote mechanisms but that's what you're asking us to do. And that's just one tiny feature that barely scratches the surface of what is possible.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#99

Post by freeflight »

gregknicholson wrote: post #83
at-fates-hands wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive! This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

> Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

How so? What makes Facebook so appealing is the fact that pretty much everybody is on there, just like a telephone book. As such an alternative, with a huge positive effect, has to deliver at least this "centralization" to fulfill the same needs Facebook has been serving until now.

This is a pretty common theme around IT savvy communities: People complain about Facebook and how there are so much better alternatives and how you supposedly don't even need Facebook. But the reality for over 2 billion people (among them many friends and family members of said tech-savvy folk) out there looks quite different, they use Facebook because it's what everybody uses, it wouldn't even work without that, which is what most Facebook competition comes to realize sooner or later.

I just don't see any good solution to any of this that doesn't involve some paradigm shift how we handle private information as societies and as businesses.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#100

Post by Chaebixi »

genki_teacher wrote: post #20

People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.

> History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.

Facebook has learned the same lesson, and is explicitly trying to keep it from ever happening again.

See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/18/technology/frightful-five...

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