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Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

theguardian.com

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Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#61

Post by 7373737373 »

zmw wrote: post #60
kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

I checked out Beaker Browser, and apparently it's based on the Dat project [1], which seems to be very similar to IPFS. Then apparently it follows that, just like IPFS, you can't throw random things onto the network and expect it to stick; you need to pay someone for hosting and bandwidth (that someone could be yourself) to have it pinned, and in order to have it available worldwide at all times you still need to pay…

The fundamental difference is source independence. It doesn't matter where the data is, as long as someone has it pinned, you'll be able to access it.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#62

Post by femto »

kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

I'll mention Amaya here.

https://www.w3.org/Amaya/

The original vision for the web was that editing/creation had the same status as viewing/consumption, and that websites were writable as well as readable. This is what Amaya implemented. It never gained wide adoption, but is served as a reference implementation of the W3C's vision of the web. (In my experience Amays is not particularly usable because it regularly crashes, but that could be fixed.)

Is Beaker similar to Amaya extended to use transport layers beyond http, such as ipfs?

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#63

Post by [deleted] »

7373737373 wrote: post #61
zmw wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked out Beaker Browser, and apparently it's based on the Dat project [1], which seems to be very similar to IPFS. Then apparently it follows that, just like IPFS, you can't throw random things onto the network and expect it to stick; you need to pay someone for hosting and bandwidth (that someone could be yourself) to have it pinned, and in order to have it available worldwide at all times you still need to pay…

The fundamental difference is source independence. It doesn't matter where the data is, as long as someone has it pinned, you'll be able to access it.

[deleted]

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#64

Post by godzillabrennus »

sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#65

Post by adventured »

skybrian wrote: post #31
sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

This seems implausible. Moore's law is over and phones are limited by size and power. There's no reason to believe progress will continue until a phone is the same speed as a typical desktop machine, let alone a server rack.

Interestingly it's the centralized network that will grow radically more powerful, while the home devices continue to stagnate.

The total capacity of infrastructure entities like AWS will increase by 10x at a minimum over the next decade. By comparison, your phone or laptop will modestly nudge forward. Consumers are not going to buy 10x the number of laptops, desktops and smartphones that they do today, ten years out. Most likely, those figures will barely move (the smartphone industry is already stagnating). Most of the incremental spending and investment will go into the centralized infrastructure by the giants.

Network speeds will continue to increase relatively rapidly. We can easily go from routine 50-100mbps home lines to 1gbps over the next decade. We're not going to see a 10x increase in the power of the average laptop (lucky if it doubles in ten years). It's primarily going to be useful for streaming/consuming very large amounts of data from epic scale central systems for gaming, 4K+, VR, etc. Decentralized systems owned by consumers will be far too weak to fill that role.

The AI future isn't going to be decentralized. The very expensive infrastructure that will demand, and its need to run 24/7, will be centralized and owned by extraordinarily large corporations.

It's precisely the typical consumer's home hardware that will act as the ultimate bottleneck guaranteeing decentralized can never take off. This has always been obvious, it won't prevent the fantasy from maintaining its allure of course. That will perpetually draw headlines and hype in tech, for decades to come, with no mass adoption breakthrough.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#66

Post by newnewpdro »

kickscondor wrote: post #25

Beaker Browser (mentioned as one of many possibilities in this article) is the real deal. If it doesn't get you fired up about the possibilities, then - well let me explain I guess: * The interface is dead simple - share this folder, done. * It is a read-write browser. Netscape (and other browsers) used to be this way - they had some limited HTML creation tools. Beaker brings this back in the form of making an "edita…

Am I correct in undesrtanding no consideration is being made for server-executed code?

How is access control implemented?

It seems like this basically only applies to web content you want to give everyone access to and can have 100% of application logic run client-side.

That's a pretty narrow cross-section of the existing web...

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#67

Post by mr_toad »

buboard wrote: post #37
sheeshkebab wrote: post #27

With phones doubling performance every 1-2 years, and desktops/laptops largely stagnating, it looks like in a few years, a server rack will fit into your smartphone. And most enterprise software (and almost no individual user) barely needs more than a rack of current gen servers. So yeah, decentralization will be upon us soon enough.

network performance + battery consumption make phones an impossible choice for distributed web. The decline of the PC is a bad thing for the distributed web. It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7. I believe we re not going to see distributed services like good old torrents or kazaa until PCs (or at least home routers with a lot of storage) start dominating again

> It's the only box that can stay online with a stable connection 24/7.

My router stays online 24/7. It already has a web server built in. I could hack it to make it serve a public website.

But there’s absolutely no way I’m going to do that. The security and maintenance requirements are just too much of a PITA.

It’s much easier, more secure and more reliable (and likely cheaper once you figure in depreciation and opportunity costs) to set up and maintain an instance in the cloud, or a serverless site.

And if you don’t like the big cloud providers, there are many smaller outfits that can do the basics - compute and object storage are all you really need for a small site.

Consumer hardware and software are not really well suited to running publicly faceing websites.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#68

Post by GW150914 »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #64
sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.

Quantum entanglement seems poised to provide real-time interstellar communication.

That makes for good science fiction, because Quantum Mechanics is so poorly understood by most people, but it’s in no way possible or implied by the theory. Any entangled channel of communication would appear to be random noise without a Classical channel of communication, which effectively limits entanglement to light speed.

The first answer gives a nice explanation in depth. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/203831/ftl-commu...

The key point is this:

Alice therefore still measures two overlapping bell curves, overall! Where are the interference patterns?! That is very simple: when Bob and Alice compare their measurements in the first case, Bob's 0-measurement can be used to "filter" Alice's patterns...

That comparison is what requires the Classical channel, and we’re back to light speed. If you try to use a Quantum channel to compare you just have two things to compare and a lot of noise.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#69

Post by nine_k »

sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

The "Fire upon the Deep" describes an interstellar communication system which is very email-nntp-fidonet like. I'm afraid it's more realistic that we could imagine.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#70

Post by kickscondor »

kingnight wrote: post #46
kickscondor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, so in my case, I wrote a blogging thing that runs in Beaker. I can run it from any of my machines and it has no server. This is great because it is insanely portable - I can setup the software on a new machine by just going to the URL. It is just "software as a service" but there is no server. It's somewhat similar to TiddlyWiki but Beaker adds automatic synchronization. (I still manage the JS code itself in gi…

For blogging use case, I have a few questions: 1. A (current?) limitation I've noticed with Beaker is that you can only edit a site implementation (for a specific address) on a single machine. What would you do if you had multiple computers / locations that would want to make updates (JS or User Content) 2. What about errors. Don't they persist in the address's history? What if there's something undesirable that got…

Yeah, cool - thank you for the questions, kingnight.

1. So this answer is a bit convoluted because I am still learning, wish I could keep it short. So my setup might be a bit 'naughty' because I'm currently saving the 'key' in my JS in a seperate dat. Right now I have one dat that acts as the 'admin' and one that is the actual blog - but I am going to move to hyperdb (the new solution for multi-writer support.) There are actually a couple libraries cropping up for doing this sort of thing and I'm not up on all of them. So this is more of a 'need to make up my mind' thing than a capability thing with Beaker. There are a TON of libraries and a TON of possibilities - (there's an 'awesome dat' page that just goes on and on and on...) - but I am still researching a better way (and, who knows, maybe my way is fine.) I want something that could be in place ten years from now - because I do think JS and HTML will.

2. No, files can get replaced. Not sure if that is your question. Yes the undesirable will persist in the history, but you can overwrite it. I can prevent bad content, though, by checking it in my JS code and allowing a preview first.

3. Yeah this is a problem - there is a Bunsen Browser in development, but I haven't tried it. I am honestly okay with everyone browsing through HTTPS, though - I like Beaker for the admin tool. Again, I have a browser-based blog software without needing to run a server anywhere at all.

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