Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We need decentralized communication

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: We need decentralized communication

#51

Post by im3w1l »

brenden2 wrote: post #13

A big thing that annoys me about buzzwords like "decentralized" is that they're not binary. Another one that's largely lost meaning is "blockchain". Decentralized is relative and depends entirely on the context. They do tend to represent ideas like anti-censorship, individualism, and (sometimes) privacy. I think it makes more sense to discuss these topics in terms of the actual implication of what you're decentralizi…

> For example, the Internet itself is decentralized. But from the perspective of your particular ISP, it's not at all decentralized (if your ISP turns off your Internet, it's game over).

Yes the ISP is a chokepoint and thats why:

1. People push for regulations like net neutrality to legally prevent them from doing something like that.

2. Use VPN's to deny ISP information they could use to decide whose pipe to turn off.

3. Some are trying to build meshnets and physical peer-to-peer infra.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#52

Post by mycall »

ken wrote: post #33
drcross wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone fill me in here please, how did medium become the place for these sorts of posts when self hosted wordpress, ghost, Squarespace, wix and just basic HTML were created so that you can host a text blog running on a server you control from wherever you want? How did medium take hold and why?

Medium was originally a great experience for the reader. No interstitials, no ads, no unrelated photos, no pleading to "follow" or "become a member". Just your text, nicely formatted. Compare a simple article, across the years: 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20141201191740/https://medium.co... 2019: https://medium.com/@fields/now-its-about-the-things-that-you... Once they started achieving critical mass, like ever…

Maybe that was a bad example or my ad-blockers are working really well, but the 2019 edition only has ads at the bottom for me which is easily ignorable.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#53

Post by derrick_jensen »

OrderlyTiamat wrote: post #25
brenden2 wrote: post #13

A big thing that annoys me about buzzwords like "decentralized" is that they're not binary. Another one that's largely lost meaning is "blockchain". Decentralized is relative and depends entirely on the context. They do tend to represent ideas like anti-censorship, individualism, and (sometimes) privacy. I think it makes more sense to discuss these topics in terms of the actual implication of what you're decentralizi…

> E-mailadres is also decentralized, but so what? Most people use the same email providers so it's somewhat meaningless for SMTP itself to be decentralized. Google can still read your emails. I actually think email is almost the ideal implementation of a decentralized network. You're always going to have giants in any communication network- that's simple the reality. Email allows people to use these giants or, and cr…

The issue here is that it is fairly difficult to not be automatically filed as spam, and you can easily be blocked from communicating with large chunks of people if something nasty happens. Of course, if you know these people directly, they can put in various exceptions, but most people you're interacting with won't

Re: We need decentralized communication

#54

Post by esotericn »

brenden2 wrote: post #13

A big thing that annoys me about buzzwords like "decentralized" is that they're not binary. Another one that's largely lost meaning is "blockchain". Decentralized is relative and depends entirely on the context. They do tend to represent ideas like anti-censorship, individualism, and (sometimes) privacy. I think it makes more sense to discuss these topics in terms of the actual implication of what you're decentralizi…

> Email is also decentralized, but so what?

Client implementations being possible is a huge one.

The security claims of a product like WhatsApp (in the news lately) would be far more verifiable if it weren't essentially a black box. It's also just like, basic computer hygiene and _nice_ to be able to have custom clients.

Imagine if the Gmail web interface were all you had and software like Thunderbird or Mutt was just completely impossible.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#55

Post by blakewatters »

The analysis I have read here is far over-indexed on the technology and privacy aspects. Pushing a new messaging platform involves a fundamental change in consumer behavior and this in turn requires engineering, product, design, and marketing to execute in concert. This is why corporations continue to out-deliver Open Source in anything that touches the consumer.

“If we build it, they will come.” Is just a lazy fantasy that lets you stay in your comfort zone, fixing bugs, refactoring modules, and pushing features for the next release.

If Matrix is to succeed as a technology it needs a real, highly competent go to market team and strategy. And I think you have to build some very compelling user experiences to drive switching and combine that with import/invitation features and outreach (pushes, email, etc) to even have a look at the basket. Alignment across platforms is just table stakes.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#56

Post by kixiQu »

CM30 wrote: post #46
piotrkubisa wrote: post #44

> We need decentralized communication > Although Riot has made significant progress in the past few months, there is still a long way to go before it becomes a suitable drop-in replacement for platforms such as WhatsApp or Discord. The problem with adoption client based on Matrix protocol is clearly lack of the quality of clients and being so annoying for users. I think it also stands true for other protocols like IR…

In other words, the project needs UI and UX designers, and more of a focus on a polished user experience. Which seems to be an issue a lot of open source, decentralised projects have to be honest. They get a lot of programmers involved, but seem to struggle to get the aesthetics/design side up to par. What would it take to get the kinds of designers found at the likes of Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, etc working on open…

....money?

Re: We need decentralized communication

#57

Post by no_identd »

tgragnato wrote: post #42
bavell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up by dropping the Internet layer and renaming the Network Layer to the 'Inter'net layer. Can you send elaborate? Genuinely curious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet Back in the day the network layer was not standardised nor interoperable. The "International Network Working Group" provided a communication protocol (TCP/IP) capable of hiding the differences of the different networks. > the job of the TCP is merely to take a stream of messages produced by one HOST and reproduce the stream at a foreign receiving HOST without chan…

Not my point tho, see here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108739

Interconnected Network Networking (what we have today)≠Interconnected Internetwork Internetworking (what we should have but don't)

The latter enables recursive structures, the former doesn't.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#58

Post by no_identd »

bavell wrote: post #41
no_identd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You're always going to have giants in any communication network I suppose you make that claim based on the assumption that any electronic long range communication system at most reduces to a network? If so, your assumption—while applicable to our current global communications network—doesn't cover the communication systems which could (& hopefully would) already exist if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up…

> if the ARPAnet originators hadn't messed this up by dropping the Internet layer and renaming the Network Layer to the 'Inter'net layer. Can you send elaborate? Genuinely curious.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108739

Re: We need decentralized communication

#59

Post by kop316 »

johnboyer wrote: post #8
kop316 wrote: post #4

"This means the only way WhatsApp could comply with these demands is by completely altering their software with insecure cryptography." I get what the author is trying to say, but getting technical details like this incorrect makes it difficult for me to want to keep reading these types of articles. There is no need for WhatsApp, et all to make the crypto insecure, all it needs to do is keep a record of the keys in a…

It was my understanding that the asymmetric key pair was generated locally, and only the public key was exchanged. I am unsure about whether or not this is a requirement of the Signal protocol, but Signal itself will only store the private key locally, meaning they would need to alter their software in order to store said keys in a centralized database.

You are correct. However, that doesn't make the cipher insecure.

The reason I make this distinction is because it makes other attack vectors different. If the cipher was made insecure, then the whole thing couldn't be trusted because anyone can now attack the cipher.

However, if the keys are being stored in a database, it means that the cipher it means you can either attack and get the keys on the local device or the center database.

Those are two radically different attack venues with entirely different consequences on the encryption scheme.

Edit: Thinking about it too, it also makes the defense against it a lot different too. Say I'm in a country that only allows WhatsApp for this reason (WhatsApp allows key sharing). If I wanted to, I could crack the software and just stub out the part that sends the key (or send a dummy key as well). You still get the protections of a secure cipher, and no one else has the key now. If the cipher was weakened, then you couldn't do this.

Re: We need decentralized communication

#60

Post by kop316 »

karmakaze wrote: post #10
kop316 wrote: post #4

"This means the only way WhatsApp could comply with these demands is by completely altering their software with insecure cryptography." I get what the author is trying to say, but getting technical details like this incorrect makes it difficult for me to want to keep reading these types of articles. There is no need for WhatsApp, et all to make the crypto insecure, all it needs to do is keep a record of the keys in a…

Semantics. It doesn't matter if the protocol is 'secure' if the private keys aren't.

See my other post. It does in fact, it means the attack vectors are completely different.
Post reply on HN