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Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

wired.co.uk

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#141

Post by dclara »

xerophtye wrote: post #138
doctoboggan wrote: post #78

Perfect timing, I just released a tool that enabled a more decentralized web. It used BitTorrent Sync to distribute files and I plan on implementing namecoin or colored coins for name resolution. As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in. The biggest drawback is that you can only serve static content, although I think many websites today would be fine with this restriction. Y…

While i love your idea, (and am glad you found the context to show your project off again. i read the original post), i do have two nitpicks. You said it downloads the entire site when i open a site. Now, this is completely fine for normal text-based blogs, but what if it's an image heavy site? Like theChive? Wouldn't i end up storing several gigabits (possibly terrabytes) of data for that site? Secondly, if somehow…

Agree. Just like the distributed search engines which are not quite practical in the real use, the concept is cool.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#142

Post by EGreg »

I wrote about this as well: http://myownstream.com/blog#2011-05-21

Two years ago I really became passionate about the problem of decentralizing the consumer internet again. We can see with git and other tools how distributed workflows are better in many ways than centralized ones. The internet was originally designed to be decentralized, with no single point of failure, but there's a strong tendency for services to crop up and use network effects to amass lots of users. VC firms have a thesis to invest in such companies. While this is true, the future is in distributed computing, like Wordpress for blogs or Git for version control.

I started a company two years ago to build a distributed publishing platform. And it's nearly complete.

http://qbix.com/blog

http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135

Soon... it will let people run a distributed social network and publish things over which they have personal control. And I'm open sourcing it:

http://github.com/EGreg/Q

http://qbixstaging.com/QP <-- coming soon

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#143

Post by dclara »

surge wrote: post #122
desireco42 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I agree with you completely. But they believe that they need it and will not release content otherwise.

Then they can keep it and they won't get my money, and everyone will just end up pirating it anyway. You don't combat piracy by locking it down and making a pain to access your content, you compete/combat piracy by making sure its always easier and more convenient to obtain your content legitimately, not punish those that are legit for the few that will go pirate it anyway. As long as I can purchase a song for $1 DRM…

wow, what kind of insights! Agree with you.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#144

Post by nathana »

cromwellian wrote: post #9

My own rant on this from 2008 from a different perspective: http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/05/decentralizing-web.htm...

Fantastic! Thanks for sharing. I've been beating the same drum for years within my circle of friends, and I always tend to get the "huh?" reaction. It's always refreshing to discover somebody else who seems to be running on the same wavelength. :)

I miss USENET. Nowadays, my digital identity has been spread to the four corners, across Facebook, Twitter, various unrelated phpBB-based sites, and places such as /. and HN. Even if I wanted to, there is no possible way that I could re-locate every digital utterance I have ever made publicly. Not only that, but I don't truly "own" anything I write anymore. It's stored in some unmarked server somewhere, stuffed into a schema that has no published documentation. I still have e-mail archives going back 10+ years, but if Facebook ceases to exist 10 years into the future, it will be like the (admittedly few) worthwhile written conversations and interactions I had with people on there never happened. There will be no record of it.

There's got to be a better way.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#145

Post by nodata »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #119
doctoboggan wrote: post #78

Perfect timing, I just released a tool that enabled a more decentralized web. It used BitTorrent Sync to distribute files and I plan on implementing namecoin or colored coins for name resolution. As soon as an open source, stable btsync clone is released I plan on swapping it in. The biggest drawback is that you can only serve static content, although I think many websites today would be fine with this restriction. Y…

BitTorrent Sync is the wrong foundation for this revolution. It should be open source from top to bottom.

open source btsync alternative you say? https://github.com/calmh/syncthing

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#146

Post by dclara »

Carltonian wrote: post #96
thisiswrong wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP This is very true. More so if you look at countries like the UK where ISPs have recently been consolidated into MAFIAA-complying monopolies that censor just about anything that Hollywood and the government ask them to. It's scary how close ISPs are to the 'governements' of the UK and USA. Obamas' recent…

I'd think content providers in general would be willing to provide bandwidth under a mesh network. They'd also be the ones most likely to pipe the mesh into the existing infrastructure. Who else besides the likes of Google / Netflix / Facebook would front heavier duty APs city-wide. Every ounce of traffic would have to be encrypted though. The main barriers for mesh networking when I look at it are: First and foremos…

You have some valuable points.

Naturally the internet is not a mesh network because nobody will take this role of gatekeeper without benefit. If somebody does, it becomes ISP again.

However, although the current web is messy, we should be able to organize it using distributed network solutions in a peer-to-peer manner, as proposed in the blog here: http://bit.ly/1e8vrLL. It serves an additional layer on top of the nature internet. It has the protocols built-in and the "Gatekeepers" sitting in between the distributed nodes and a feasible business model to support its execution, rather than the ideal Semantic Web solution requiring DRM.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#147

Post by dclara »

archagon wrote: post #129
dbingham wrote: post #55

Decrentralizing the web's software isn't good enough. We need to decentralize the hardware. Right now, connections to the web look like a tree, where a whole bunch of connections get funneled through an ISP. That ISP has the power. The power to throttle, the power to block, the power to record. And that ISP can be pressured by other powers. We need to decentralize so that instead of looking like a hierarchical tree,…

I sometimes wonder about this. Pretty much everyone already has a connected computer in their pocket. Wouldn't it be nice if we could use the phone without a cell provider? The web without an ISP? Connect to our friends without a social network? Exchange money without a bank? Thinking further, what if all these services could be plugged into a well-abstracted peer-to-peer network, consisting of every connected device…

Your idea is similar to the existing distributed search engines which are up and running on many individual pcs of a P2P network.

Unfortunately, they are not quite practical either due to the security (open local firewall) and duplicates from every node, etc. It's hard to control without a centralized facilitator. However, agent technology provides a solution for that. Check out here: http://bit.ly/1bvvIJ3

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#148

Post by fuzzix »

pekk wrote: post #57
fafner wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash and Silverlight are dying anyway. So it's up to the movie industry and not up to us to bend over. And you know at least Flash was separated from the browser and ported to several systems. DRM in HTML5 will mean that Google, Apple, Microsoft will simply bundle their DRM modules and the free software world can fuck off. DRM in HTML5 is far worse than the status quo.

Whatever we may WISH, Flash is still everywhere. And still necessary, for example, to play sounds across browsers

Indeed, Ireland's Revenue service has a flash "application" to manage your requests.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#149

Post by dclara »

rubiquity wrote: post #77
jnbiche wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the problem. We need a better transport layer. You know, the speed at which SPDY has caught on has given me hope. Admittedly, that's at the application layer, but I think if Google were to get behind an initiative to create a better TCP, it would actually have a chance at working. Historically, Google's incentives were properly aligned with a decentralized Internet, but Google is more and more a conte…

> but I think if Google were to get behind an initiative to create a better TCP, it would actually have a chance at working. I don't think Google has much interest in a decentralized web. Google, along with Facebook, are two of the prime examples of a centralized web.

Yeah, you got the point. They are on the list of "reliant on big companies, and one big server". But "support geo-distributed clusters" remains an open task on Google's radar. See here:

http://highscalability.com/google-architecture

Unfortunately, with the existing architecture and infrastructure along with the team resources, they are focusing more on the algorithms of machine intelligence and AI.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee: We need to re-decentralise the web

#150

Post by jeena »

riffraff wrote: post #50
donpdonp wrote: post #36

The IndieWeb movement is pushing the constructs built on top of the web into a decentralized form using self hosted content and webhook notifications. Example: Comments on a blog post. Given a blog post at URL A, comments are created by posting a note on your own site at URL B, then using a webhook to notify the blog that such a comment exists. Your content cannot go away as long as you host it, and its not dependent…

so, trackbacks?

Oh yeah the good old parsing HTML-comments for weird SGML data, this worked out well in the past ;) It is good for everybody that we tried something like that in the past but please don't bring it back.
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