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

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

wired.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 205 posts

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

#151

Post by robmcm »

shmerl wrote: post #108
desireco42 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't share completely your assertions. In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm. This is just enabling them to do business. I believe that free and open, given some semblance of equal playing field will always win. Just to be clear, if they came and say, no drm in html, I would stand behind that as well. I just accept their judgement that this was necessary at the momen…

> In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm This is false. Those companies can use the HTML without DRM with the same success. No company ever needs any DRM.

The BBC can not show the majority of their content on the iPlayer because the rights owners won't let them without DRM.

The BBC needs DRM to be able to give us that content.

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

#152

Post by robmcm »

betterunix wrote: post #126
desireco42 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't share completely your assertions. In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm. This is just enabling them to do business. I believe that free and open, given some semblance of equal playing field will always win. Just to be clear, if they came and say, no drm in html, I would stand behind that as well. I just accept their judgement that this was necessary at the momen…

"In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm" Not our problem. They can take the web or leave it. Why should we pander to them and screw up a good thing in the process?

They currently are leaving it, there is a lot of content I can't get through a web browser that I can through a native app or through a plugin player.

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

#153

Post by dclara »

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 achieve distributed computing/storage and fault-tolerance across the world. See the reference here: http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust...

The real distributed computing solution for providing a well-organized web has been proposed to build a layer on top of the existing physical infrastructure of the internet to present the web in a de-centralized manner under a systematic way. http://bit.ly/MwT4rx

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

#154

Post by stormbrew »

fafner wrote: post #53
desireco42 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's crucify his for that :) I hear what you are saying, but there is also reason for drm. Or we will have flash forever. What I am saying, I at least can understand why he did it.

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.

> And you know at least Flash was separated from the browser and ported to several systems

It really is astounding, and bears so much emphasis, that the proposed DRM module system is actually worse than Flash.

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

#155

Post by 4ad »

robmcm wrote: post #151
shmerl wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm This is false. Those companies can use the HTML without DRM with the same success. No company ever needs any DRM.

The BBC can not show the majority of their content on the iPlayer because the rights owners won't let them without DRM. The BBC needs DRM to be able to give us that content.

This is an argument against DRM.

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

#156

Post by gritzko »

zwegner wrote: post #87
zackmorris wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that TCP/IP is decentralized, unfortunately due to NAT and corporate firewalls, vast swaths of users have been relegated to second class citizens who can only act as data consumers. Unfortunately this same misguided approach to security, or as I call it suckerity, has been carried forward into IPv6. There is some hope that WebRTC and other p2p technologies might alleviate the problem but then the task o…

As far as a decentralized content-addressable network goes, the swift protocol[0] seems pretty close to what you're talking about. I heard about it here a while back, and was quite interested in it, but it doesn't look like it's moved much lately (the page has a copyright date of 2010). [0] http://libswift.org/

(Co)author here. The libswift effort got converted into IETF PPSP eventually https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ppsp-peer-protoc... Also, folks in Sweden tinker with the codebase, mostly from the video distribution angle.

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

#157

Post by fafner »

desireco42 wrote: post #120
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…

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

But we don't have to bend over for their believes! They can continue using Flash or Silverlight or write their own crap plugins. Why should we destroy the open web for them?

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

#158

Post by fafner »

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.

Everyday users fail at saving a youtube video. And someone who knows how to rip a youtube video usually also knows about pirate bay or other pirate websites.

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

#159

Post by fafner »

robmcm wrote: post #152
betterunix wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In order for commercial companies to be able to use html5, they need some form of drm" Not our problem. They can take the web or leave it. Why should we pander to them and screw up a good thing in the process?

They currently are leaving it, there is a lot of content I can't get through a web browser that I can through a native app or through a plugin player.

And that's fine. If they want DRM they should write a proprietary app or plugin. But we shouldn't turn the web into a proprietary app controlled by Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

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

#160

Post by jiggy2011 »

EGreg wrote: post #142

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 c…

Git is an interesting example, even though the software itself is decentralized it seems to be most commonly used around centralized services. See how upset HN gets when github goes down.
Post reply on HN