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Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

ruben.verborgh.org

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Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#131

Post by fwip »

alexashka wrote: post #115

Huh... > The situation becomes problematic when we are robbed of our choice, deceived into thinking there is only one access gate to a space that, in reality, we collectively own. Robbery - the action of taking property unlawfully from a person or place by force or threat of force. [0] Deceit - The action or practice of deceiving someone by concealing or misrepresenting the truth [1] That's what those words mean. The…

I don't think quoting the dictionary here makes you look especially smart.

Are you railing against the use of "rob" with an intangible noun? Would you cry foul at phrases like "robbed of their dignity?" Do you ignore alternative definitions like "to deprive of something unjustly or injuriously?"[0]

Do you believe that nobody involved in centralization conceals or misrepresents the truth? Does a marketer never overstate the benefits of their hosted solution?

[0] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/robbed

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#132

Post by jancsika »

TylerE wrote: post #117
jpollock wrote: post #116

Technology won't help with this, regulation will. We have parallels from other platforms - specifically the fixed and mobile phone networks. There used to be monopolies in local phone service. There were new competitors, but to change provider, you had to change phone number. Even changing cell phone provider required a number change. This obviously had strong network effects pulling you to stay with your provider. Y…

If you have ever seen any attempt by any government to regulate software you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.

If you have ever seen any attempt by any volunteer-run FLOSS team to solve nationwide social problems with technology you would know this to be a Lovecraftian nightmare, and not a solution.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#133

Post by brianberns »

rubenverborgh wrote: post #97
tmcw wrote: post #79

It puzzles me that the linked data future is still discussed, as if we didn't already try it, and didn't already discover that developers dislike arcane RDF standards and the academic-rooted designers of the specifications have a terrible track record of solving real-world problems. And that now they're presenting linked data as some critical component of the decentralized web while skipping out on the debates that e…

You'll be surprised to hear that developers like Linked Data. People starting with Linked Data development today are not burdened by the Semantic Web legacy and mistakes of the past. We've been working with front-end devs who have never seen RDF, and never will. They enjoy how Linked Data is able to cross borders and leads to more data than a centralized database could ever give you. The confusion in your comment is…

The very first paragraph on linkeddata.org says it is for "exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#134

Post by pbalau »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #77
pbalau wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decides I can or cannot get foobar.tld?

You are perfectly free to run your own nameserver, nobody has to use it though.

Yes I can run my own top level dns. Yes, people can chose to use my dns or they can chose to use the google one. The question is why would they do either, why would they pick mine over the google one, or the google one, over mine.

You can argue that the google dns can sign the answer with a cert you trust, thus you know you got the right answer. And then, when you get the address of the service you want to talk to, you can check their cert and know for sure you are again talking to the thing you want to talk to.

And here lies the problem, how are you going to check those certs? Are you going to queue at a google office and obtain a cert on a usb stick, then import that in you environment, then do the same for all other services you want to talk to? Or are you going to trust a central authority? What if this central authority is messing with you? What if someone up the chain is messing with your central?

Let's not talk about how your router might send your dns request to some guy's home server that answers to 8.8.8.8, instead of google and you can't do shit about it...

Everything we know about internet works the way it works, because everybody involved agrees to do the right thing, from ip routing, to dns resolving, to certs verifying. All of this is based on a set of rules set by a central authority, that everybody choses to follow. You can't speak about web decentralization as long as proving who you are is a very centralized system.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#135

Post by peterwwillis »

kjetilk wrote: post #127
peterwwillis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can already do this - but it's a bad idea. Plenty of services are API compatible with Amazon S3 (e.g. anyone can run their own S3 clone) so people can modify existing sites to use S3 with OAuth. Use OAuth to allow the user to delegate access to their S3 service link. No new protocols needed, no big innovations required. But for this to work on anything other than the most rudimentary data (media files, blog posts,…

OK, so nobody said decentralization is easier. There's been plenty of academic papers saying pretty much the same as you do. But we have to, not for technical reasons, but for ethical and social ones. So, we're starting to tackle it head on. Your TV Guide is a good example of things that aren't hard. They don't change very quickly, so you can just use a cache. That's easy. Finding the number of RTs, that's also easy,…

Actually, the TV Guide example uses data that updates constantly. Every single interaction a user has is recorded and is used by other systems. The guide also changes based on user-specific views or preferences. Another example is Netflix's famous user-specific recommendations, which, changing constantly and whose algorithm is regularly fine-tuned, is a strategic feature. Even just playing a single show requires a dozen different calls to authorize its playing, based on a number of considerations.

Finding the number of retweets is also more difficult, because there's other data that gets recorded too. Not only do you have your own data now, you now have the data of everyone else that retweeted you. Is it your data, or theirs? Who is caching it, and how long? How does refreshing the cache effect consistency of each user's views? With decentralized applications you have to choose what kind of functionality you will support.

But, yes, in theory, if you allowed only one service provider to use some given data, you could rely on caching (read: holding a copy of data indefinitely) to a good extent. But as soon as you have multiple using it, you enter the extremely hairy world of multi-master high-availability strong-consistency replication. AKA, absolute hell. But this isn't even the most difficult problem to me.

We already had some good data access standards. The question is, why weren't sites using them to allow data interoperability/mobility? Answer: they didn't want to. So even if you create a technical solution for all of this, the best you will get is the Facebooks of the world publishing a read-only calendar feed, clunky, slow export tools, and single-feature one-way application integrations. Like we have now.

I don't see an ethical or social reason to decouple the data from the services I use, and I don't think the majority of the world population does, either. The only ethical/social concern I have is with the very existence of the service, which is a different concern.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#136

Post by nothrabannosir »

diminoten wrote: post #90
rubenverborgh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does running analytics on my site impair my ability to talk about what Tim Berners-Lee wants to do for freedom and control? ;-) Yes, I track how popular what content is on my site. Motivates me to write more. Please feel free to block trackers; I do that as well.

It undermines your argument, is what it does. You can talk about it all you want, but as long as you continue to participate in the very thing you rail against, you're going to struggle to be taken seriously.

People who participate in something are often best positioned to criticise it, because they:

A) know how the sausage is made, and

B) stand to actually lose something if people believe them, i.e. they are standing by their point in spite of the negative consequences to themselves.

People on the dole who argue against (details / implementation of) social security should be taken seriously. Rich people arguing against tax breaks for the wealthy. Programmers against big tech firms. Etc.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#138

Post by skybrian »

I'm not sure this is a coherent plan, since it doesn't talk about how privacy rules get enforced for services. Who vets the services? If a fun game that you let have access to your "personal data pod" and it turns out to be Cambridge Analytica and just copies everything it sees into its own database, how is that an improvement over Facebook apps?

Choosing between service providers is no more meaningful for privacy than asking Windows users to download arbitrary apps. If smart phones are any more secure than desktops, it's because Apple and Google are constantly improving OS-level security and policing their app stores for malware.

Of course app stores have well-known flaws. But if we want to do better than that, someone has to figure out a better way to choose good rules and enforce the rules better.

Re: Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time

#139

Post by Perceptes »

rubenverborgh wrote: post #36
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like the same argument: "Al Gore claims he's an environmentalist, yet he flies using his personal gas guzzling plane." And yeah, it's an ad hominem. "Is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument" You can most definitely use centralized servers to disseminate…

More specifically a Tu quoque / appeal to hypocrisy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque :-)

Thanks for sharing this! I wasn't aware of this term and it's very relevant to another topic I often discuss. It'll be very useful to me. :}
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