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The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

nytimes.com

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Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#41

Post by erez »

Fice wrote: post #40
goldenkey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The federation idea seems to be the best way to create decentralization . The problem is that most people working on a type of website usually combine forces and host together. ThePirateBay and Libgen have come the closest to being federation-like. Tons of mirrors and different host names with the same source code and content that is meshnetted across the federation. The only thing that tpb isnt a good demonstration…

Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

Technically email isn't federated. Like the web you have an email server that hosts an email address and all mail to and from go to it, and while you can IMAP to it through a client, and host a "mirror" of it, to send/recieve emails you still need to go through the single email server.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#42

Post by ZenoArrow »

jacquesm wrote: post #13

It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on. It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be peer…

I agree with your assessment.

It sounds like the path forward is going to rely on improving IPv6 adoption as a first step. We aren't likely to get rid of NAT without it. Consumer pressure could be placed on ISPs and web hosts to push things forward.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#44

Post by decade21 »

cheez wrote: post #14
elcapitan wrote: post #7

I think the way the web has been conceived once and then evolved around a relatively small set of core concepts is amazing. I find it hard to imagine though that after 20 years of evolution we could go back to a point where we apply another round of centralized planning how it actually should look like. The existence of centralized services is the result of demand and evolution, not of false planning in the beginning…

One way to think about this is that these guys are going to try, they'll come up with stuff that no one uses and it will be some nerd somewhere that comes up with the next iteration of the web. I.e., it won't be Berners-Lee that does it, it will be the next Berners-Lee somewhere. Satoshi (whether one person, or a group) did it with Bitcoin. The concept is now ingrained into every architect's toolbox. While Bitcoin it…

>Then in 50 years, maybe we'll all have our own anonymity-preserving "cloud boxes"

Urbit looks really promising in that aspect

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#45

Post by 6stringmerc »

Fice wrote: post #37

Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it. No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wal…

So I agree with you in general and also wish to un-pack a little of what you mention based on my personal growing up alongside internet access. As in, I can do the 2400 baud modem handshake from memory, ran a server on a cable modem, and now consider myself more a user/consumer of technology than a creator/in the field.

Traditionally access to the WWW had a pretty high threshold of combined factors: Cost for hardware and communications, time and effort to understand how things worked, and a still pretty basic group of sites and such. Lee is wrong in that the Web used to be 'more open' from a general social sense - it was AOL chat rooms before Snapchat, it was GeoCities before Facebook, and on and on and on. Large organizations like Dropbox have made it competitive and a more intelligent decision than trying to set up a personal server and jump through all sorts of intellectual and digital hoops to make it work.

Or, in other words, the easier something is to use, the more idiots are going to get their hands on it and use it. The Web is simply a reflection of the human species. Both stunningly beautiful and tragically ugly, it's certainly evidence to me that Utopia is, fundamentally, irrational and likely impossible without exlcusion and selection bias.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#46

Post by markdog12 »

jasode wrote: post #28
jacquesm wrote: post #13

It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on. It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be peer…

>It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days It's not really simple. It's actually complex and having a general purpose computer be hardened enough for non-geek homeowners not to screw up (social engineering, security warnings fatigue, etc) is possibly an unsolvable problem. If RSA SecurID whose very business competency is security can be hacked[…

Thanks for Russinovich link. I hadn't read it and it was extremely interesting.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#47

Post by kordless »

Software is the result of business models. Business models are the result of risk management around desired outcomes. Making more money, for example. Making more money is the reason we've had bubbles and new business layers appear. MSPs were the precursor to SaaS, for example.

Software sucks because business models must frequently be addressed before customer's needs are addressed. Of course this is a simplification of the process, but no company continues writing software if their business models for that software fail and they run out of money or is threatened with shutdown if they don't comply with the government.

To "reinvent" the "web" (or what I call the Intercloud), business models must be removed from the equation. New models of work storage and exchange must be created to allow developers to write code for the people who need it. When a user relies on a feature, there should always be a clear path for them to a) continue using that feature for as long as they see fit and b) enter into a contractual agreements with a developers to develop new features they need. This should be able to be done without a corporation or business model getting in the way.

It also implies all the software down the stack is reinvented in the same way to support this new methodology. Deployments/installs, for example, will need to be done differently moving forward.

This is obviously bad news for the "startup" scene, but good news for humanity. Things are getting complicated and clearly don't scale well doing it the old way. It's time for a change.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#48

Post by mcphage »

infodroid wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #13

It's simple: make computers secure enough that connecting one to the net won't imply being hacked within a few days (minutes in some cases). Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections, make them dead simple to set up and bullet proof. And so on. You can only wind this clock back step-by-step, a reboot will break too much that we have come to depend on. It all went wrong at NAT, we were supposed to be peer…

Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. Not to mention their restrictions on open ports and running internet-facing servers. Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism.

> Also in my experience ISP's to this day favour downloads over uploads by at least a 20:1 margin. [...] Though I'm not sure if this was just a market response to customer preferences or if it was a contributing factor to digital consumerism.

Verizon ran a campaign recently where they made their FiOS service 1:1 claiming that it was due to customer demand. But it happened right around when the FCC was debating net neutrality, so I always assumed that Verizon hoped they could fool a few people into thinking that it was what net neutrality was all about.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#49

Post by mcphage »

goldenkey wrote: post #6

The end of the article said it best. It isn't an infrastructure problem. It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services, ie. Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc etc. Muggles don't give two fucks about privacy - idiots aren't usually political dissidents until their food supply gets low or their Snapchat gets filtered by the Great Firewall.

> It's a society problem; people want to use centralized services

Given the nature of network effects, centralized services will always be more valuable to users than decentralized services.

Re: The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It

#50

Post by pjc50 »

gaius wrote: post #26
curun1r wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Re-enable mail servers to be run from home connections Mail servers, perhaps. SMTP servers, not a chance in hell. SMTP simply wasn't designed for a world with SPAMers, phishing and others who abuse email. If we're going to enable decentralized, we need to build in security and accountability from the start rather than relying on the naive protocols from the dawn of the internet. Note that you can have security and…

We only have SMTP because people were too lazy to implement X.400 which lacks most of its shortcomings...

How does X.400 authenticate senders?
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