What is "Web"? Side note: both FB and Google cannot be accessed from China.
Uhh... I think it's http. Or maybe it's just any data that a web-browser can handle. Definitely a few OSI layers above the internet.
No question about HTTP. However I'd argue that when HTTP is used for weird purposes that aren't directly related to serving hypertext pages (often to go around draconian firewall policies), or to run arbitrary code (JavaScript), then it's not the Web anymore. (Yes, this means that "Webapps" is an oxymoron.)
> there's no competition to Search on the horizon This is bunk, and it's time for this myth to die. DDG/Bing/Yandex will list the exact same pages that Google gives as a search result most of the time, and sometimes better ones. If you find that the pointless endless-scroll listing of millions of search results (in 0.333ms!) that Google and also DDG gives you isn't helpful, you can also try Startpage.com. What are yo…
I don't want to use neither Bing nor Yandex either, and AFAIK DDG isn't a proper search engine, but takes all of their results from those three. With the recent "collapse" of Qwant, what am I supposed to use now?
What happened with Qwant? I've used them from time-to-time (and love their OSM-based map viewer), so I'm curious.
Wait but goog fb and amzn have been aggressively trying to capture global markets. They have been increasing the footprint, does not that count for % increase from 2014 to 2017 ?? Does not make sense ..point about web is dying is opinionated. Today I can watch Netflix, order from doordash and connect with my family through FaceTime. All via web.
Don't know about doordash, but Netflix and FaceTime are clearly NOT part of the Web. (They are still part of the Internet of course.)
I don't understand, are you advocating for hobbyists to make their own 5G cells, or carriers? Why not use Wi-Fi at this point?
I assume Namibj is suggesting a switch from our current hub-and-spoke ISP model to a peer-to-peer mesh networking model. Radio technologies have strengths and weaknesses. While WiFi works great in a home, other radio types are better at transmitting data long distance. The best solutions combine a mix of radios to leverage their strengths.
Unfortuantely it's not the radio technologies that allow the cell network to work. It's the cell network paying the big bucks for height above terrain on various towers, buildings, and the like.
This is the problem mesh networks have to solve: height. Everything else is cheap and easy. But without height above terrain and line of sight it simply won't work.
Hi Marcus, Thank you for your questions. Disclaimer: I also work on WTM from time to time, so I hope can answer these questions to some degree :) 1. WhoTracksMe is served via CloudFront, it only get's the IP that CF reports. To get the country, there are two ways that can be used. IP => Country mapping via a Database or additionally, because CF has multiple edge locations, if needed the you could see which edge locat…
1. Ah, OK, that's useful. I was thinking that dropping the last byte of the IP address would still be able to give us the country via database lookup, but anonymise enough. But getting it via CF (or similar) would be a good alternative. 2. Chances of a hash collision on IP address is pretty small (i.e. statistically insignificant). But adding a daily salt would decrease the odds, for sure. 3. Sorry, my bad, I meant C…
> 2. Chances of a hash collision on IP address is pretty small (i.e. statistically insignificant)
The problem, as I understand GP, is not so much the fear that two different IPs might collide. The problem is that seeing the same hash, you know that it refers to the same IP, and as such you can correlate users/sites over time (a privacy invasion).
20+ years ago, we wouldn't discussing the ethics of server/client based tracking with a straight face, because that shit is creepy as fuck. Now, everyone takes tracking for granted as if the option of not being tracked is some sort of unachievable goal. That's the issue. It isn't tracking A as opposed to tracking B. It's tracking period.
I need to understand why my customers are not clicking on the "subscribe" button. I'm not selling adverts to them. I'm not capturing personal information. all I'm doing is trying to understand who my customer is and why they're not buying my product. Why is this unethical? And why is it OK to analyse server logs, but not OK to use javascript, to do this?
So, if you have a main street shop, it would be ok to have detectives monitor people as they enter the store (EDIT to add: or, actually, as they're window shopping), take notes as to what they buy, surreptitiously check their ID, and then follow them home (or place a bug on their car) to find out where they live, what car they drive, etc., so that you can better understand "who my customer is and why they're not buying my product"?
Look I know this is going to get downvoted because of the token thing, but really, read it: https://qbix.com/token This is how we can rescue the Web, and maybe fulfill the vision of Xanadu
I think the downvotes are more about the fact that you're shilling this thing on pretty much every social-media-related post.
If a post is about how the web needs rescuing, and it takes years to design an actual solution, why is posting this solution considered shilling?
Fine, let’s just let the Web keep becoming a feudal society like it was with AOL MSN and Compuserve. A free open source platform to prevent it should not be mentioned, that’s shilling!
Btw by that logic isn’t Andre Staltz shilling Scuttlebutt every time he writes about the Web? He should just not mention it, right?
In addition, what's changed between 2017 and now is that back then Google was still admired by the tech people. "Google is evil" sounded ridiculous only a few years ago. I've been ridiculed by my colleagues and fellow engineers every time I said it. But I think it began to change with the introduction of AMP, a growing list of products discontinued for no apparent reason, failures of some of the new products often pr…
There have been a lot of discussions on Google Search quality lately on HN. (eg here: [1]) I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that. Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era…
>Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory.
Those are subject to the limitations of hierarchies [1]. They don't work well beyond a quite small data set. And for a directory curated by someone else, you would need it to be someone that organizes things in exactly the same way as you would. Tagging and faceting can help a bit with that in the early stages of growth, but ironically you ultimately need a way to search the contents of the hierarchy.
Small pet peeve: why do some people write GOOG, AMZN, etc instead of Google and Amazon when the context has nothing to do with the stock market?
I'm guessing to easily refer to the parent company (not sure if these collections are still called companies, english is not my native language). Instead of GOOG one could probably use Alphabet but differentiating between Facebook and FACEBOOK might be a bit confusing and for Amazon that might just be to be consistent with the rest of the article.