241–250 of 295 posts
In 2005, I worked at a startup that attempted to solve the problem of privacy and security for personal information (photos, home videos, music, personal health/finance documents, contacts etc) while also providing ability to share and collaborate. The solution involved running a mesh network with nodes on user's laptop or desktop and a corresponding node in the cloud. These nodes would index local data and provide r…
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there is a "deprecated?" server software. i use it daily, its called Pichat, and so far it seems to be deleted from the internet. it is a chat server/webserver/fileserver. it comes in linux, and win version it is on horde as well as the SDK for it. Tell me if you would like to know more. this is not my software, if you [whomever that may be] are the person or part of the team that created this [pichat] please chime i…
https://github.com/zabirauf/pichat is this not it?
http://erebor.ftp.sh:8008/public/
i think im rate limited right now so i cant get into any long back n forths right now :-) BTW the link leads to an instance of pichat.
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apps do it on first install, why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch?
> why shouldn't browsers do it on a website's first launch? Because users would riot, and would use browsers or plugins that suppressed these notifications.
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I really, really sympathize with the goals here but when I read through these proposals a few months ago I literally facepalmed. They seem about as realistic as praying for some kind of deus ex machina. Ultimately I think there are technical solutions to making the decentralized web more attractive than the walled gardens, but at this point they will need to be ridiculously polished and shiny to even get a look, and…
The internet is already decentralized. Some billionaire can't do anything to fix the situation, at least not directly, because our draconian copyright and network access laws are the only reason that walled gardens are able to exist. The internet doesn't really tolerate serious technical barriers stopping someone from automatically multiplexing the content from various social networks into a single read-write stream,…
The internet as used by many, many people consists of a few centralized walled gardens. Walled gardens also exist because of network effects.
An open internet is _not_ a technical issue. It's a legal one.
Perhaps it's a social one as well.
For decentralization the root problem always existed, while pointing at another resource requires no permission, receiving and hosting that resource does. Your government has to let you receive it and your ISP has to let you host.
This is a much lower level problem compared to the three challenges Berners-Lee puts forward, which seem to have little to do with decentralization.
1. taking back control of our personal data;
2. preventing the spread of misinformation;
3. realizing transparency for political advertising.
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IPv6 will help by eliminating NAT (and thus port forwarding problems). IPFS might help with redundancy. But yeah the cost and complexity are major problems. I think the biggest problem is making open standards that can evolve quickly. All the big chat platforms have switched to proprietary protocols so they can iterate and roll out changes on their own.
Basically all home routers block incoming connection because so many shitty IoT devices were built to trust anything that is able to connect to it. My router doesn't even have an option to turn off the block. Can only unblock ports 1 by 1
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Gmail "solved" the spam problem not by making email centralized, they did it by making a good spam filter.
Gmail basically took over email through centralization. A lot of companies and people use it because the price is fair and the spam filter works better than almost anything else. I have tried FastMail and I like the company, but the spam filtering is not good. But good luck even trying to replicate FastMail anti-spam if you roll your entire email stack yourself. I have run my own email server even well before Gmail w…
It definitely is necessary to once set up proper DKIM, SPF, DMARC and TLS by default (thanks to Let's Encrypt), but after that the setup is pretty much hands-off.
Spamassassin filters my spam down to at most one mail a day, and that's usually because they have some new type of topic not caught by the previous bayesian filter.
In 2005, I worked at a startup that attempted to solve the problem of privacy and security for personal information (photos, home videos, music, personal health/finance documents, contacts etc) while also providing ability to share and collaborate. The solution involved running a mesh network with nodes on user's laptop or desktop and a corresponding node in the cloud. These nodes would index local data and provide r…
> unfortunately, as a business it never took off
Sounds like the timing was too early in 2005. I believe these days we're all so tired of the privacy and security situation, that the world is ready for something like this.
> [it] utilized zero knowledge protocols and made it accessible to common people to manage their data and share with others
This describes exactly what the re-decentralized web needs.
Seeing the many attempts over recent years, it looks like there are significant technical, financial/business and social challenges - but I totally agree with your conclusion, that "the stage is set for this disruption". It also feels like the tide is rising, that the solution is being worked on from numerous fronts and eventually a more evolved system will be adopted by the public.
I've read a bit about Solid in the past, but never quite understood how it will handle different data models. Does it force social data to all look the same (as in, have a predefined set of fields)? If not, how do apps built on it interoperate? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for projects like this. I think it's wonderful. I just never really got how the apps will work with the same data without being forced into a parti…
Great question, because it is basically the most ignored problem in the Semantic Web community and thus the one that we are spending quite a lot of time on. So, basically, there is one data model , RDF, but RDF does not require the same set of fields, to the contrary you are free to write your own. Obviously, you wouldn't get good interoperability if you do. So, there are several things you can do: 1) Adopt what othe…