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Web by Google (TM)

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Re: Web by Google (TM)

#391

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

JadeNB wrote: post #262
codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm supposed to be represented by my government, which we collectively give power to through the constitution. There's no constitution for Google. We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. We are just figuring out how to curtail the power of internet giants today. There is no inconsistency.

> We don't talk about centralization of government because we figured it out ~250 years ago. I know that your parent explicitly mentioned the US, but let's not pretend either that the US found the, or even a, right answer to structuring government, or that no other country has found their own answers.

Eh, the USA is working okay all things considered.

There's not one right answer here.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#392

Post by LockAndLol »

And what are we doing about it? The majority (even webdevs) use Chrome, we don't use Firefox or other alternatives out of principle, we just pick what's easiest. A lot of us could be participating either in Firefox or a web-engine that's easier to integrate, but we aren't? What are we doing instead?

It doesn't seem as if most of us care.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#393

Post by adamnew123456 »

grumbel wrote: post #378

I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function. You can consume on the open web just fine, but for publishing you need to own a server, not just a client. That in turn gave growth to Youtube, Facebook and Co., as they allowed people to publish content with just a web client. Search and payment are important as well, but only really become relevant when the content is on the web…

> I think the biggest failure of the open web is simply the lack of a "Publish" function.

The simplest approach to something like this is Apache homedirs or finger plan files [0]: you write some text in a file in your home directory and a service makes it accessible to anyone who connects to your machine. Apparently plan files were somewhat popular thing at one point; you could finger the machines at id Software and read what John Carmack was doing on any given week [1].

The problem with this approach is that the internet (not just the web) is not end-to-end. Assuming your ISP isn't using CGNAT, I have to:

- Punch a hole in my firewall or setup up a DMZ host. Unless my workstation is the only thing on my network and hooked directly into my modem, but nobody does that. Everybody has a LAN with private addressing.

- Setup dynamic DNS, since there's no guarantee that my ISP has given me a static address. In practice this isn't that bad, but if I lose power in a thunderstorm you need to have the same name you had before.

- Harden and update whatever service I run. It'll get probed regularly, and is a high value target since it presumably runs on the same machine where I run my password manager or buy things using I credit card.

A VPS is just a convenience and security measure here. You get a public IP address without any additional management (default-deny firewall, NAT) and can isolate your private data from the VPS which is more likely to be compromised.

The alternative would be to make a new network which gets rid of all the extra layers of management - just your machine, with a publicly accessible name that you can point people to. No smart network appliances in-between imposing NAT, DHCP, or firewalls beyond the one on your machine. I think there are P2P networks which work like this, or Tor if you give your machine a name in the .onion namespace. I don't know of any which are better on the security aspect though.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/P/plan-file.html

[1] https://github.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#394

Post by joshuamorton »

mvn9 wrote: post #145

>I think it’s safe to say that Google’s AdWords is the dominant advertising platform on the open Web, which means it holds a commanding position in the Web’s finances. That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. (Which is enhanced by content providers being threatened by AMP.) I don't see Googl…

Google's actually tried a native payment option more than once (Google contributor). Web sites dislike it. Established Web content producers prefers ads to micropayments.

There are obviously subsets of the web where this doesn't apply (twitch and YouTube where patreon is common, onlyfans, etc.), but that's almost solely for video and live interaction.

Micropayments are, apparently, not what the textful web wants.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#395

Post by joshuamorton »

walterbell wrote: post #296
doublerabbit wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the problem for anyone outside of the CompSci field. To those it looks like URL non-sense but it's rooted far deeper then that. This isn't philosophical. By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse. Your supporting the…

On the plus side, amp-specific text is now on the end of URLs, making it easier to delete before sharing the URL. The larger threat with Amp is signed content, where Chrome address bar drops URL and has only the legal name of the site owner.

Why is that a threat?

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#396

Post by hakfoo »

mvn9 wrote: post #361
cheph wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a very interesting observation. Google will thus prevent a native payment option at all costs, which leaves a huge opening for Brave or another payment provider. Can you elaborate on what a native payment option would entail? How would it be different from non native payment options? How would it be different from crypto or other payment options that already exist?

Like barrenko said in another comment [1]: >Wasn't it that the creators of Netscape wanted to put some kind of payment protocol similar to crypto in the original browser but ran into trouble with the government, can't remember anymore. 402 error was famously reserved for money trouble. You could have one standard, in the same way that webpages are standardized. Then you could use your preferred option on any webpage.…

I always thought a sensible approach would have been a sort of "payment tag" that browsers could render directly.

Something like 30.00 USD 123456 https://secure.gateway.com" merchantid="123456" /> This would render as a group of buttons representing the payment choices. The browser would pop up an appropriate form-- potentially in an isolated context where the fields can't be sniffed by on-page scripts, perform the remittance, and submit a structure of verifiable confirmation details in the field transactionId when the form was submitted. Since the flow is steered entirely by the user's browser, there's a stronger degree of trust and control; I could imagine, for example, bank-provided plugins that required a seperate authentication before relaying the card details, or more sophisticated 3-D Secure style checking and fingerprinting. The entire PCI compliance and trusting merchants with the card number problems would never have come into play.

There is the Web Payments API now, but it's a clunky ball of JavaScript with limited support. This could have been demoed in 1997 and universal by 2000.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#397

Post by scotu »

simias wrote: post #84

The problem is that, IMO, centralization of the internet is simply the natural course. Especially when people seem to care so little. Centralization is cheaper, easier to monetize, easier to control, easier to update and upgrade. That's why people prefer Discord to IRC, that's why people prefer Slack to SMTP or Jabber, that's why for many people these days the distinction between git and GitHub is blurry. I suspect t…

I think this is one of those things that you don't "solve" and it's done. You might be right that things tend to centralize, that's why there is a need for some force to break things apart once the players become too powerful. Maybe it's regulation, maybe it's competition, maybe is people being loud enough (probably not...)

Just like democracy, you are never "done". "Oh great we are in a democracy nothing can remove that from us!" nope, gotta fight to keep it that way...

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#398

Post by leppr »

alangibson wrote: post #140
andromeduck wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO one if the biggest blunders of Moz was not having had the vision to champion the open web by becoming an alternative monitization platform like Patreon. The biggest reason why the open web failed and will continue to fail is not because of aggregators like Google, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter but rather because there's simply no way for people to vote with their wallets. Moz was uniquely positioned to drive such…

Totally agree. This is why I included the second of the Web's original sins in lack of native payments. We really need cryptocurrencies to succeed here. However I fear that that whole sector has been totally swamped by get rich quick and libertarian wackos with no interest as something as pedestrian as Web Bucks

Putting aside the valid complaint about the noise from get-rich-quick opportunists in this field:

Implementing simple "Web Bucks" is not pedestrian at all. There are real reasons why all Paypals suck, and you can't simply ignore them and hope to build an open cash alternative unbothered.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#399

Post by RonanTheGrey »

josho wrote: post #147
treis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concept of AMP makes a lot of sense. It does speed up browsing and prevents sites from being terrible. The prloblem is that the implementation isn't great and it's Google driven. But the concept is sound.

My understanding is that amp forces pages to stop doing the things they’ve been doing for years that made their pages bloated and slow to load. It’s too bad the sites just couldn’t do that on their own and avoid the need for amp.

Exactly. Google could simply have changed their algorithm to penalize that behavior and it would have led to the same outcome.

Instead they created their own monster in response.

A reasonable person might ask why they didn't go the simple route.

Re: Web by Google (TM)

#400

Post by joshuamorton »

doublerabbit wrote: post #217
ceras wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an end-user, AMP sites load faster and with less clutter. The only downside is a clunky URL, but I rarely care about that. AMP improved my mobile search experience. The main AMP concerns seem philosophical, which I don't think OP was asking about.

And this is the problem for anyone outside of the CompSci field. To those it looks like URL non-sense but it's rooted far deeper then that. This isn't philosophical. By choosing to use AMP, you are ultimately choosing to destroy the internet. You're granting the power of one company to run and control what you visit, do, use. Your surrendering your data for them to make money off to use and abuse. Your supporting the…

This is an amusing bit of sci-fi. But it's just that, and it's got nothing to do, specifically, with amp.

The rhetorical strategy used here was to make up a dystopian example of search being bad, and then say amp.

Amp isn't more expensive, WordPress templates handle it automatically today. And the whole tangent about misinformation is interesting, but it's not how things really work. While speed is a signal, reliability is also one, which means that it would be cheaper to advertise you're vet article and it would be more likely to appear near the top anyway.

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