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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

#131

Post by peterwwillis »

hestefisk wrote: post #34
peterwwillis wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really technological or social, it's logistical. We've had all kinds of redundant network topologies that used independent networks for decades. The internet is decentralized, and it works pretty well, all things considered. The web is fairly decentralized, too: DNS is independent of a registrar is independent of a network service provider and all are independent of ISP's, and even those are independent of b…

HTTP is client / server (session) based, but TCP / IP certainly isn’t. I’m is act as a client / server protocol because we tell it to, but IP networking was written to be distributed / decentralised so as to provide better resilience, unlike other networking standards at that time (token ring, anyone?).

TCP is connection-oriented, and each connection is a session. IP is decentralized, but the way it's used now in consumer devices makes initiating connections to them difficult and dangerous. Any realistic hope of a successful new distributed web should address this problem, though probably the current solution is "have clients join a private network and route back through it", completely side-stepping firewall concerns. If you ignore the concerns, I guess these protocols aren't that big a stumbling block.

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

#132

Post by hazz99 »

briatx wrote: post #109

Repeat after me: The Internet is already decentralized. The web is already decentralized. Blockchains do not have a monopoly on decentralization. People who assert this are trying to redefine the term to mean some kind of extreme P2P model that fits their narrative.

Repeat after me: It's effectively centralised. It's effectively centralised.

Almost all our traffic goes through Google, Amazon and Facebook. It's extremely centralised.

Blockchain a don't claim to have a monpoloy - they're just the most recent thing that's repopularised decentralisation.

If Amazon servers go down, so does a significant portion of the internet. That's centralisation at work!

Blockchain tech doesn't claim to have a monopoly on the term 'decentralisation', it's just re-popularised the technology.

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

#133

Post by hazz99 »

pankajdoharey wrote: post #110

Hasnt half of the decentralisation problem been already solved by the Tor network which is encrypted and already decentralised? And they still regularly identify and stop tor servers. What makes them so sure that the decentralised nodes on a bitcoin network cannot be physically identified and stopped ? A truly decentralised network cannot be built on borrowed network. A truly decentralised interruption free, governme…

Important note: Tor does not encrypt your traffic

Tor simply hides where your web requests originate from - it's up to you to to visit HTTPS sites and encrypt your communications.

Also, Tor is quite decentralised but the existence of directory authorities undermines this, since presents a centralised component.

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

#134

Post by rspeer »

gsich wrote: post #128
rspeer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the key difference remains: there aren't many personal computers that we leave plugged in and turned on 24/7 anymore.

This was never the case.

Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them.

If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?

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

#136

Post by wila »

pfraze wrote: post #78
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…

Some things in p2p hypermedia (dat) that's not possible with http/s: * You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites * Integrity checks & signatures within the protocol which enables multiple untrusted peers to 'host'. This also means the protocol scales horizontally to meet demand. * V…

This is a very interesting topic, thanks for working on it and answering questions here.

The first concern I had/have is about security. If everybody runs their own server, isn't this a security nightmare waiting to happen?

I understand from the presentation that these websites won't run php or other server side scripts which at least take some concern away.

Tara also showed how easy it was to copy a website, while pretty cool, that is also a nightmare scenario for most companies. If your competitors can clone your websites and pretend to be you, how do users know who's data they are looking at?

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

#137

Post by amelius »

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".…

On a related note, I'm wondering how distributed systems that rely on atomic clocks (e.g. Google Spanner) would work in the space era, given that relativity says that there's no such thing as a global clock.

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

#139

Post by edwintorok »

nine_k wrote: post #71
femto wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cra…

I'd hazard to say that the concept of "wiki" is what successfully implemented that early vision of editable WWW. Wiki markup is different from HTML markup, but it represents many of the same (early) text-formatting and resource-linking concepts, while limiting the excessively powerful features of arbitrary layout, scripting, etc.

Have a look at the federated wiki [0], it allows someone to easily fork someone else's page, edit it, and host it. History is tracked at the paragraph level.

[0] http://fedwiki.org/view/welcome-visitors

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

#140

Post by CryptoPunk »

antpls wrote: post #39

When we think about decentralization, we sometime think about uncontrolled extreme decentralization. That's the ideal : no single point of failure, with everyone hosting their data where they want, and deciding who access what about them. Practically, as pointed in the article, there are laws to comply with and those are IMHO the biggest lock to decentralization. The fair middle ground between extreme centralization…

Practically laws are forced to contend with the challenges of decentralization when it emerges, as in the case of nunerous laws that became harder to enforce due to the internet.

Federation is what we have now and it has a tendency toward centralization, as we see with the WWW and the mega sites where users aggregate.

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