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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

#171

Post by chriswarbo »

Carltonian wrote: post #99
williamcotton wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, like a whole bunch of the new technocratic futurists, have almost no ability to discern fantasy from reality. What you're talking about is popularly known as science fiction. You should be writing books and not pretending like you know the first thing about politics. The reason why things take so long in reality is because there is a multitude of voices. Reddit does not promote pluralism, rather a giant circle-j…

It's not compromise. Compromise implies you give a fuck about the wills and whims of the other party or parties out of concern or compassion or belief in some objective fairness. That's not how shit works. You aim to get what you can anyway you can or you lose to someone else who does. That's politics.

What usually happens is that a policy will have some ridiculously extreme measures added to it, which no sane person would ever agree to. Then, in the name of "compromise", those extreme measures will be taken out and the policy ends up passing in its original form. As an added bonus, those who oppose the policy's original measures are "paranoid" and "unwilling to compromise".

Some examples which spring to mind are the Snoopers' Charter and Digital Economy Act.

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

#172

Post by coldpie »

doctoboggan wrote: post #94
p4bl0 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite nice. You should submit it as a "Show HN". You can be sure that as soon as you have a free software replacement for btsync I'll use it at least to serve my personal website. By the way, have you heard about Freenet? https://freenetproject.org/

Yeah I did submit it but it didn't get much attention. I don't know the etiquette on resubmitting items.

Try again when you've got a new feature or make a new release or something else noteworthy. There's always some timing luck to a HN submission.

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

#173

Post by zupa-hu »

techaddict009 wrote: post #32

Time Berners Lee : "I would have got rid of the slash slash after the colon. You don't really need it. It just seemed like a good idea at the time." When asked what he would have done differently!!

I think that was rather a joke. A good one, though.

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

#174

Post by smnrchrds »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #125
chroem wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free software ; the term is free software. In other words, software that respects your freedom. Refer to this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.htm...

And it's not Linux, it's GNU/Linux!

That statement would make sense if the distros we are using were mainly just Linux kernel + GNU tools. If we are going to give everyone their deserved credit, we should call it GNU/Linux/KDE/Apache/LibreOffice/...

Good thing 4-clause BSD never caught on in the Linux world.

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

#175

Post by zokier »

I'm surprised by the amount of comments declaring "Berners-Lee supported DRM so his words are meaningless". Not that I myself put a lot of weight to his words, but not for some silly DRM issue (frankly I didn't even remember that), but because I can't really say what his contribution to the web (or anything relevant) has been in the past couple of decades. Looking at his wikipedia page, it mentions that he founded W3C in 1994, and that's about it. Everything since seems to be some sort fluff, often with grandiose names and concepts but very little substance.

So I'm not surprised that people do not put weight on his words, but rather the reason why they don't and the apparent recency of this opinion.

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

#176

Post by shmerl »

robmcm wrote: post #168
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's completely the wrong way around. The rights owners could not sell anything to the BBC if the BBC were to simply refuse to buy anything they can not publish without DRM, and not selling anything is not a particularly good business model in most cases. "The rights owners" are in a market, and if the market simply refused to buy broken products, they would have to either deliver a non-broken product or go ban…

The BBC fights hard enough to win the rights to show this content, if they didn't the content owners would go to the other channels, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, 5 or even create their own distro like HBO. People, the majority of people don't know what DRM is, they don't care, they just want to watch content. One of the biggest problems in tech and forums like these is that everyone thinks they are so much more significant t…

BBC as a distributor still has way more influence than a single individual. By rejecting DRMed content they'll send a strong message to the publishers. It works in other cases, so I see why it can't work with video as well.

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

#177

Post by LinXitoW »

agildehaus wrote: post #121
fafner wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't need DRM. DRM does not work. Just go to pirate bay and you'll find every TV series, movie (with DVD/BluRay/Stream release), album immediately after their release. They think they need DRM. But in reality they don't. It doesn't stop piracy at all. It's a burden only to their legal customers and not to the pirates. It is all about easy and affordable access. If a company insists on using DRM then they should…

It stops plenty of piracy as without it piracy could be as easy as a single click from a place like Netflix, Google Music, etc. Just because it's easy for you to circumvent doesn't mean it's easy for the everyday user. But totally agreed that it doesn't belong in web standards.

I don't know about "normal" people, but all the pointless shit they put on Blurays made me go BACK to piracy. I started my first real job 2 years ago, so i felt i should buy my movies. Turns out, Blurays are EVEN WORSE than DVDs. Nonstop trailers, that use your bandwidth to download new fucking trailers, a hundred warnings about piracy and a DRM that requires constant annoying updates and a crappy PowerDVD software.

If i sound angry, it's because i am.

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

#178

Post by peterwwillis »

dclara wrote: post #153
peterwwillis wrote: post #98

This actually has nothing to do with the web in general, or the internet, or politics, or personal liberties, or peer to peer networks. This is about designing stable distributed applications. Almost every really big, really stable website (or network service) is built on a set of distributed applications. Global data redundancy is just one of the considerations. If you want your application available everywhere, all…

I partially agree with you in the sense that we don't need new network with p2p or self-hosted solutions, but need stable distributed applications. How? I cannot agree with you to realize it via data redundancy and replication. The way you mentioned is just what Google is doing right now, which is not true distributed computing. Google's architecture relies on replicating services across many different machines to ac…

As far as i'm aware there's no such thing as "true" or "real" distributed computing. It's a wide field of study with many different overlapping concepts.

The paper you linked to does describe how queries are resolved by Google, and not quite the whole picture required for a typical distributed computing model. But to say it's not distributed computing is... confusing. Clearly they must support this model over many sites the world over, and we know from other documents that they geo-locate data to make it more convenient, meaning it's portable and partitionable. Sounds like a distributed computing system to me.

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

#179

Post by jnbiche »

oscargrouch wrote: post #133
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…

>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. You might find QUIC interesting (being implemented on chrome): http://blog.chromium.org/2013/06/experimenting-with-quic.htm... The "SPDY" application layer its implemented on top of it…

Oh, thank you. I hadn't heard of QUIC. It's tunneled through UDP...does that mean it's NAT-friendly? Presumably so.

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

#180

Post by williamcotton »

l33tbro wrote: post #132
williamcotton wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You, like a whole bunch of the new technocratic futurists, have almost no ability to discern fantasy from reality. What you're talking about is popularly known as science fiction. You should be writing books and not pretending like you know the first thing about politics. The reason why things take so long in reality is because there is a multitude of voices. Reddit does not promote pluralism, rather a giant circle-j…

You offer a lot of piss and vinegar, yet little insight. Please elaborate on "fantasy and reality" and "science fiction" instead of throwing up bombasitc refute. Also, parent post has no mention of Reddit. What are you actually saying here? IF you're going to barate parent comment, then you're going to have to (at the very least) back it up with a few reasons why his/her system would fail.

The basic tenant is know as 'conservatism'. You may be surprised to realize just how lacking in radicalism any sustainable political systems are. US style liberal democracy wasn't a large departure from UK style parliamentary democracy. The president is modeled on the King, the Senate on the House of Lords and the House of Representatives on the House of Commons. Slowly over time the Senate and the Presidency were made more directly democratic. Our system of common law has a continuous chain of statements going back to England for many hundreds of years. Capitalism was going on for hundreds of years before it was described by Adam Smith.

You know what always fails? When a group of nitwits gets together and decides they've got it all figured out and then submit the rest of society to their hair-brained ideas. In the last 100 years engineers have have played a large role in a number. See: Franco, Pinochet, Mussolini.

So yeah, expect a lot of vitriol from students of history when some engineers start getting really excited about playing the role of political radical.

The meritocracy the SV loves so much is basically a nightmare when applied to society st large. You'll have designed a system by and for computer engineers with the premise that all of the unwashed masses will either have to sink or swim in your newly founded utopia system. You're going to fuck it up and along with that you're going to fuck up millions of lives.

Are there any fucking adults on this forum any more? Do your parents know where you are? If not, you should probably call and let hem know, they are probably worried sick.

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