Re-decentralizing the Web, for good this time • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 2:29 AM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #155

jakelazaroff wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what stronger alternatives you're referring to. Can you elaborate or share any resources?

If, instead of identifying services by some human readable name, they are identified by their public keys, then we don't need certificates - there are several encrypted and authenticated transport protocols which only require knowledge of the destination's public key upfront. You then need an alternative name system which links a unique human readable name to a public key. This is the tricker part (see Zooko's triang…

> links a unique human readable name to a public key

Easy: use DNS, store the PGP key ID a TXT records, and then look up the public key for that ID using a PGP key server.

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

#272

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

pnut wrote: post #219

kjetilk wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, it is pretty much the other way around. :-) We're basically building the simplest thing that could possibly work, they are rebuilding a lot of infrastructure that they have to use, but we can use where it makes sense. So, they are kinda trying to implement the Web, which is a much bigger task than adding access control and identity... :-) There's also been quite a lot of overlap between people working on…

Just FYI, it is unclear from your comment, which of these organisations you associate with. Is "we" Solid or Ethereum?

In kjetilk's profile...

> about: Hacker, community guy and project release manager at Inrupt, working on Solid.

HTH

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

#273

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 2:50 AM UTC

mikob wrote: post #140

What's to stop a service from having a pod that stores user's data in a mutated form? (Forgive me for the basic question).

Signature hashs of the files, (possibly/probably) with those signature hashs being further signed/verfied with the user's key, to establish trust. With further chains of trust through key signing, if needed.

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

#274

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 3:13 AM UTC

miguelrochefort wrote: post #202

Great article Ruben! I've been following Solid's progress for a while, and I think your article very eloquently summarize its purpose and relevance. I'm especially interested in the ability to circumvent the middle-men, and resolve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem once and for all. Watching your TED talk in 2013 was one of the most influential moment in my life, and discovering the semantic web was perhaps my…

Maybe take a look at FRED? (Disclaimer: not used it myself)

- Homepage http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/fred/

- Paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280113533_FRED_From...

There are likely other projects and papers, google 'text to rdf nlp'

Stephen Reed (ex-Cyc engineer) also did some interesting work in this field, in his Texai project, over 10 years ago. Although there are few references to it on the web now: that part of his project is no longer open source (and I know of no known mirrors).

- Paper https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8026/107de65c5a14aa8d0d47f9...

- Homepage http://texai.org

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

#275

Post by EGreg » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 3:37 AM UTC

Since 2010, no single browser has gained more than two thirds of global market share anymore

Pretty sure Chrome did. Or WebKit/Blink family. This is GOOD imho.

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

#276

Post by richardw » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 3:56 AM UTC

eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #221

svachalek wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I found it interesting they highlight the decentralized nature of email. And yet the decentralized design meant spam was basically unsolvable. It wasn’t until Gmail came along that they largely solved the spam problem. There are so many abuse related issues on the web and I’ve seen no decentralized effort that works unfortunately. Cloudflare brought cost effective DDoS protection to the masses.

Certificates? That's a pretty decentralized effort. It works because certs whitelist you. You don't claim to get one until you've been whitelisted somewhere, by someone else who has been whitelisted. (Generally). With email we assume the sender is a good actor and then have to run around blacklisting spam. Helped with the network effects but caused untold hassle.

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

#277

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 4:03 AM UTC

jimsmart wrote: post #274

miguelrochefort wrote: post #202

Great article Ruben! I've been following Solid's progress for a while, and I think your article very eloquently summarize its purpose and relevance. I'm especially interested in the ability to circumvent the middle-men, and resolve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem once and for all. Watching your TED talk in 2013 was one of the most influential moment in my life, and discovering the semantic web was perhaps my…

Maybe take a look at FRED? (Disclaimer: not used it myself) - Homepage http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/fred/ - Paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280113533_FRED_From... There are likely other projects and papers, google 'text to rdf nlp' Stephen Reed (ex-Cyc engineer) also did some interesting work in this field, in his Texai project, over 10 years ago. Although there are few references to it on the we…

Actually, the online API for FRED seems broken, and none of it seems to be open source - and the paper is light on details.

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

#278

Post by jimsmart » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 4:10 AM UTC

jimsmart wrote: post #274

miguelrochefort wrote: post #202

Great article Ruben! I've been following Solid's progress for a while, and I think your article very eloquently summarize its purpose and relevance. I'm especially interested in the ability to circumvent the middle-men, and resolve the marketplace chicken-and-egg problem once and for all. Watching your TED talk in 2013 was one of the most influential moment in my life, and discovering the semantic web was perhaps my…

Maybe take a look at FRED? (Disclaimer: not used it myself) - Homepage http://wit.istc.cnr.it/stlab-tools/fred/ - Paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280113533_FRED_From... There are likely other projects and papers, google 'text to rdf nlp' Stephen Reed (ex-Cyc engineer) also did some interesting work in this field, in his Texai project, over 10 years ago. Although there are few references to it on the we…

Related paper by Stephen Reed, "A (very) brief introduction to fluid construction grammar"

- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228378264_A_very_br...

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

#279

Post by int_19h » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 4:17 AM UTC

cwyers wrote: post #177

cookiecaper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 walled gardens exist because the open Internet kind of sucks, really. E-mail is pretty much the last bastion of the old open Internet, and the amount of resources needed to just deal with malicious e-mails is huge. Mindbogglingly huge. And those costs cut out a lot of organizations from being able to operate their own e-mail servers (either the costs of doing it or the costs of verifying to the big players that t…

I find that self-regulating communities are much better at it than large platforms with lengthy EULAs written by lawyers. So yeah, if the people I cared about were on UseNet and IRC, I'd switch back to them in an instant.

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

#280

Post by tmcw » Sun, Jan 13, 2019, 4:35 AM UTC

walterbell wrote: post #218

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…

> skipping out on the debates that everyone else in the space is having - like whether decentralization can be fast, or how to ensure data authenticity, or whether a 'local server / pod' can be built that doesn't get hosed by hole-punching through a home Comcast connection Where is a good place to participate in those debates, especially data authenticity and local server pods? FreedomBox didn't go anywhere. FreeNAS…

Some relevant efforts are dat (and Beaker Browser, the user-friendly frontend), Secure Scuttlebutt (and Patchwork, the user-friendly frontend), and IPFS. Somewhat less legit (imho) is ZeroNet, and somewhat earlier-stage or more obscure is Upspin.