51–60 of 99 posts
HTTP/2.0 is working on encrypting everything though NSA shills have managed to derail the working group by proposing "trusted proxies" that are allowed to decrypt traffic for nonsense optimization reasons.
Will encryption be mandatory in HTTP2?
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a cent…
People who don't understand how systems work often jump to decentralization as a solution to any problem. I'm not sure why. Maybe they've been burned in the past by a centralized service, and think the best solution is to remove what they perceived as their roadblock: the centralization.
Our current situation is nothing like traveling. You sit in your home, or in your car, or at your work, or in a park, or on an airplane, and you can access anything you want anywhere in the world, instantly. There's virtually no time between wanting to read your letter and receiving it. It's fast, it's easy, and it's uncomplicated. And you don't have to prove your identity if you've done it once in the past 30 days. Do you realize how that is possible? None of that is due to decentralized services. Every single service you use on the web is provided via centralized services. And they work beautifully.
Your wireless card listens for access point probes. It hears one from the AP it wants, and it connects. The AP begins the process of creating an encrypted connection. It checks that your credentials are valid, or passes the request up to a RADIUS server, that holds all the valid credentials of all the users. It then establishes the connection. Your host polls for a DHCP server asking for a lease, and the DHCP server, diligently making sure no leases have a conflict, gives you all the local network information you'll need. Your client sends a DNS request to the DNS server, which resolves, caches, and returns your request by polling the closest possible upstream DNS server, giving you a result that's geographically closest to you. Your browser initiates a connection, across your AP, across the cable modem, across the DSLAM, across the POP, across the MAN, across the many myriad routers, switches, traffic filters, interlinks, to finally get to the load balancers that maintain a balance of requests between the web servers of your destination. The HTTPS session is established after you verify the server is who they say they are, and then you tell the server who you are over HTTP, finally asking for your letter, and receiving it. And each route long the way has its gateway configured and routing tables filled with curated BGP tables so that they know exactly where to send your data to get you from a cable modem in Indiana to a datacenter in Brazil.
What would happen if we replaced every one of those centralized services with a decentralized model?
For one thing, you'd have less bandwidth and higher latency. All the devices on the internet would be constantly communicating, trying to find consensus, trying to update routes, trying to search distributed rings (my personal favorite topology) to find peers, connect services, authenticate trust relationships, query data, update indexes, etc. To say nothing of the potential for disruption of networks by various attacks or the difficulty of troubleshooting a random network failure in a massive decentralized network.
For another, storing data on your own host in your own home is taking 100 steps backward. As a very simple comparison, it's like taking your valuables out of a safe deposit box in an FDIC-insured bank and putting them on the front dash of your car. Even besides the security concerns, if you have a fire in your house, there goes your data! It's just a really dangerous idea to put data you care about in a place that's easily available to thieves and isn't backed up to an offsite location and maintained by professionals. That's what centralized services were meant to provide. It makes no sense to try and support those scenarios in a decentralized way, because the very idea of decentralized services is contrary to high-availability data.
Final thought: we put a man on the moon with centralized services. If we had done it using decentralized services, it would have taken a lot longer than it did with a lot more work, for exactly the same result. Sometimes it just makes more sense to be centralized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). I think there is a good reason. Who wants to spend the time setting up and running a server? I happen to run my own, but it is definitely not something I would recommend to my friends and family…
"Maybe someone will come along and create a super easy to install and low maintenance server platform" that's the idea
If you have a smartphone, it allows the carrier (=client) to access the device (=server) remotely.
Same for cable modems.
Maybe you also have a Wifi router. It is listening for HTTP requests because it has a "Web GUI". It is thus a web server, among other things. Maybe it also has a "backdoor" for remote login as reports continue to show this is common.
The idea is your devices are listening for incoming connections and they have data stores to serve on demand.
You may disagree but I would call these servers.
Many people manage to setup Wifi routers at home.
And with a modem or smartphone, there is almost no setup. You just turn it on and it starts serving.
So, I'd argue that "running your own server" is actually something anyone can do.
Maybe the real barrier to "running your own server" is only just confusion over terminology.
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a cent…
With sufficient transparency and checks/balances, wouldn't a partially centralized internet be acceptable?
It's not an easy solution by any stretch of the imagination. If you can come up with a realistic solution then please let us know and we will help implement it.
Nothing is stopping you from hosting servers at your home or place of business (except maybe specific ISPs), isn't this how the internet was originally?
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a cent…
> It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). This is how the internet is designed, and you can already do this today. In my case, I host my own dns, email, and my own webpages, locally on my home connection. You just have to be willing to…
Well many can, but far from all in the context of hosting from home. If you are stuck behind NAT at home then you can't without paying for server resource externally and that is going to be more of a problem over the coming years as IPv4 increasingly becomes a problem and IPv6 (despite recent acceleration) taking a fair long time to become ubiquitous.
> In my case, I host my own dns, ..., locally on my home connection.
What do you do for secondary DNS? Some services respond differently to "address found from name, but server not responding" than they do to "couldn't lookup name".
One particular problem I've seen reported relatively recently is bounced mail when the senders ISP replaces "could not contact DNS server to lookup address" to "I know, I'll show them my own error/adverts web page": of course the user's MTA doesn't know anything about web pages and tries to connect to the host address provided to send mail and is told to go away (either no mail service found or there is one but it refuses mail for that recipient). If you had a secondary then the lookup would pass to there so the right (but currently non-functioning) address would be given to the MTA, it would fail to connect and drop the message back into the queue for a later retry.
It is rare it makes any difference these days (many agents that were sensitive to this, such as mail servers, no longer are because it is quite common for small arrangement not to have secondary DNS and for ISPs to break DNS in the name of making an extra penny here or there) but it is still worth having an externally hosted secondary DNS host even if everything else is a single point of failure for all (hosted on one box on one link). For a small home concern it needn't cost more than ten or fifteen $/year either to run your own bind instance in a inexpensive VPS or to use a specialist DNS service.
I run most things from home too, but have external resources (a backup location and a web service that occasionally needs more bandwidth then the outgoing link at home can comfortably provide) so my secondary services sit out there with them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'm looking at moving my VPS into a box at home, but I have an IP that changes every so often. What's the best way to fix that? I've got no problems with DNS being hosted on Route53 or something else.
Just use one of the multitude of dynamic dns providers.
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a cent…
> It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). I think there is a good reason. Who wants to spend the time setting up and running a server? I happen to run my own, but it is definitely not something I would recommend to my friends and family…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). I think there is a good reason. Who wants to spend the time setting up and running a server? I happen to run my own, but it is definitely not something I would recommend to my friends and family…
Plus, what happens when the power goes out and now I can't receive email?
So perhaps this should start with a reduction in the cost of valid, "don't throw a security warning" certificates down to zero. At the moment the SSL certificate industry is one big ripoff fest...
http://www.cacert.org/ is another option, but their CA cert is generally trusted by default so it is no good for publicly targeted services.
It's time to decentralize the internet. There is no good reason why we can't have email, webpages, photos, even facebook-like social stuff housed on our own machines in our own homes (or some other place under our control). The current situation is akin to having to travel to some centralized letter-reading facility in order to read letter mail. Your grandma sends you a letter in the mail and you have to go to a cent…
Why is it impossible to trust someone? With sufficient transparency and checks/balances, wouldn't a partially centralized internet be acceptable? It's not an easy solution by any stretch of the imagination. If you can come up with a realistic solution then please let us know and we will help implement it. Nothing is stopping you from hosting servers at your home or place of business (except maybe specific ISPs), isn'…
It's not impossible, its just very very unlikely in the context of current economic realities. Those that are currently begrudgingly trusted have time and time again proven themselves so untrustworthy that debates on Hacker News are about not about if, but how thoroughly they should be able to fuck the end user over and justify it with "because money".
With sufficient transparency and checks/balances, wouldn't a partially centralized internet be acceptable?
Finding an alternative seems like the path of less resistance. The people running the checks and balances have proven themselves only interested in the money of the untrustworthy above and their own intrusiveness.