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A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

staltz.com

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Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#81

Post by notduncansmith »

dash2 wrote: post #53

Here’s the problem with IP addresses: there aren’t enough of them.... As a consequence, the Internet has allowed intermediate computers to rule. These are like parasites that have grown too large to remove without killing the host. The technical flaw that favored intermediate computers prefigured a world where middlemen business models thrive. The handwave is the word "prefigure". How did IPv4 and NAT play any role i…

The author does not seem to be asserting that these services add no value, rather that similar value can be added by decentralized alternatives.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#82

Post by cJ0th »

genki_teacher wrote: post #20

People were sounding the same alarm in the '90s with AOL. History has shown us that, at some point, a leaner, more innovative company will surpass Facebook.

Well they were kinda right. AOL was merely an early iteration of what we have now. Maybe another company will surpass FB but I am pretty sure from iteration to iteration it will be harder and harder to replace an incumbent since each round's winner will be more powerful than the previous one.

AOL, for instance, was mostly an American thing. FB, otoh, has global power.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#83

Post by gregknicholson »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #68
schnable wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

I was struck with the same thing. There is a reason we moved from newsgroups, to HTML and browsers to search engines. Each step became a better, more powerful tool to find content faster, more efficiently. These days so many of the tools we're using are so entrenched, even with some of the changes the author talks about, it would still be a monumental task for people to change. I mean, look at how bad FB is (on sever…

> FB has such deep roots into their lives, giving it up would have a huge effect on their lives

Then our task is to persuade them that the huge effect would be positive!

This reads like an episode of Black Mirror, only scarier because it's not science fiction: https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical...

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#84

Post by pfraze »

pfraze wrote: post #77
mr_spothawk wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How might search engines work in a DAT enabled web? (beaker's neat... i'll check it out)

macawfish is suggested distributed search indexes, which is a neat idea that YaCy [1] explores. We're looking at adding a private search index in the browser itself. This index would be constructed by adding dat sites to your 'library,' and directing it to crawl the outbound links. What's unique about this is, other than the private queries, we can establish trust relationships with all the data in your results. This…

Another interesting element about the local index is that it might be usable for discovery. Essentially there's a local cache of the Web in the user's browser. Much of that local cache has semi-structured data thanks to JSON, and we've begun to take advantage of that with a secondary indexer called WebDB [1]. It's feasible to imagine an API where apps ask the browser to search for files or Dat archives which match a certain spec. For instance, "Give me all user profiles which match the following JSON schema." Since the local index is curated by the user, this will naturally hit results that have some connection to the user.

The concept is of the browser as a user agent, crawling the Web from the user's input set to find relevant data, rather than an objective "map and rank the world objectively" engine like Google does.

Other than this local index and distributed indexes like YaCy (which are very neat but a lot of work) there's also the traditional hosted indexes. My hope is that people will be able to self-host their own indexes privately, as an extension of their subjective local index (but with a larger graph searched). However, there's still room for traditional search engines to crawl dat sites as well.

1. https://github.com/beakerbrowser/webdb

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#85

Post by niftich »

cJ0th wrote: post #76
schnable wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is important because the author misses the point as to why people get value from the "middlemen" -- to find stuff. Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge.

> Even with a content-centered web, there will be a need to find content and people, and new discovery engines and aggregators will emerge. Sure, but why should we rely on a single middleman who at some point could abuse his power? Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

> Something like Google search could possibly work in a decentralized fashion.

How? Let's suppose I trust Google to crawl the Web and present a plausibly-accurate result to my query. This works because I communicate with Google using TLS (so I trust that Google is in fact Google), Google is the one performing the crawl, and I put my faith (for purposes of this exercise) in Google's editorial discretion and good judgement.

How does a distributed search work? What does my query look like? Where do I send it? How can I gauge how much I trust the response?

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#86

Post by Chaebixi »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #32

Does anyone here have any experience with MANETs? I really like the idea, but is there any way to defend against malicious actors? Are there any protocols that are clear winners? Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea?

> Is the reason it hasn't caught on solely because the big ISPs are against the idea?

While I like the idea, it seems like it would be hard to get the same consistent QOS as you do with a network built using fixed infrastructure.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#87

Post by WJW »

gregknicholson wrote: post #17

There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…

Building a connection across a continent just by hopping from mesh node to mesh node is like trying to drive across a country by just using dirt paths. It is clearly not impossible, but there is a reason that most people choose to use highways for long distances. It is similar with a several-hundred-hop long path through a mesh network vs a single hop over a suboceanic fiber connection.

In particular, step 5 is untrue over large distances such as across the Sahara. Step 6 is true, but does not necessarily lead to mass adoption. Step 7 is feasible, but costs a LOT of money at scale. Also, it seems that economies of scale would rapidly push out all inefficient means of communication in step 9 (assuming that sailing ships across the oceans and/or launching satellites will continue to cost money) and we would end up back with suboceanic fibres.

Finally, while the "next billion" may not be attached to their unlimited netflix just yet, it seems highly unlikely that people in developed nations are willing to accept drastic slowdowns in their connections. Streaming video takes twice the bandwidth (both downloading and reuploading) as required for just watching on EVERY mesh node between the viewer and the producer. Caching might reduce this a bit, but is by definition not effective for "long tail" content. I'd be curious to see how long the meshes hold together when it turns out you can't see Game of Thrones because the next node over has no more bandwidth to spare.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#89

Post by WJW »

jl6 wrote: post #52
gregknicholson wrote: post #17

There's a lot of white on this map: [World Population Density]( http://www.luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/ ) — the hard part is gonna be getting data between Europe and New Zealand without Big Wire. I love how Staltz's solution to this goes hand-in-hand with re-personalising our interactions. In short: 1. The Next Billion haven't yet become used to the idea that useful tech services must be global, and provided for you…

I can’t help wonder if there is a way for Big Wire to exist in a way that doesn’t cause them to undermine democracy, society, free will and all the other apocalyptic end-game scenarios promised for Google and Facebook. Is there no way for long distance telecoms to just exist as a legitimate service that people pay for?

This is how it is already. Just the other day there was a huge kerfuffle about net neutrality on the front page, which is EXACTLY people paying for long distance communications.

Re: A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet

#90

Post by dfabulich »

In my view of history, P2P takes off and does well when it's faster for end-users than centralized solutions; P2P solutions fail when centralized solutions are faster.

This holds regardless of the political advantages (or disadvantages) of P2P.

BitTorrent is often faster for large files than centralized solutions, so people use it. (It's still inconvenient for a new user to kick off their first torrent, but WebTorrent will help.)

Freenet is essentially never faster than alternatives, and so it has stumbled.

If some future P2P network can outperform HTTP, then it will succeed; otherwise, it will fail.

Regardless, unless we see a breakthrough in battery technology, it will never be the case that lots of people will carry around mobile phones in their pockets whose radios are always on and participating in a mesh network. The battery would die in an hour or two.

P2P networks work best when coupled with reliable power networks. But if you have reliable power, you can probably set up a reliable wired network, too.

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