I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.
A simple web we own
91–100 of 240 posts
Re: A simple web we own
#92As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…
> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
Kumbaya is never a motivator. Now, self-interest, on the other hand...
Re: A simple web we own
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very right. There are two obstacles. (1) Security. An always-on, externally accessible device will always be a target for breaking in. You want the device to be bulletproof, and to have defense in depth, so that breaking into one service does not affect anything else. Something like Proxmox that works on low-end hardware and is as easy to administer as a mobile phone would do. We are somehow far from this yet…
Both or those are solved by having a tunnel and a cache that is hosted in the cloud. Something like tailscale or cloudflare provides this pretty much out of the box, but wireguard + nginx on a cheap VPS would accomplish much the same if you are serious about avoiding the big guys.
If you already pay for a cheap VPS, why not host the whole thing there? It's the simple Web. (As has been noted in comments elsewhere.)
Re: A simple web we own
#94As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…
> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
Even in our fabulously wealthy societies, people are mostly worried about paying their bills, taking care of their families, and putting food on the table, not in getting together in a quixotic enterprise and paying for thousands of kilometers of communal fiber. Also like in most communist utopias what would probably happen is that the control infrastructure would be captured by special interest groups and now you’ve traded one evil for another, but in addition you’re left holding the capex bag and you’re poorer for it.
Re: A simple web we own
#95A web we own better mobile responsive.
Re: A simple web we own
#96As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point. The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and…
> The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that stuff.
For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most of its infrastructure.
Re: A simple web we own
#97The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.
The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.
Re: A simple web we own
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place. We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible. People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
Kumbaya is never a motivator. Now, self-interest, on the other hand...
Spot the American.
Capitalism is not the only way of life, and FYGM is a mental illness outside of the US
Re: A simple web we own
#99I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name. Then the URL was http://www. /~ I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time. Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
i think Apache sets this up by default or use to. Every user on Linux would get a www, or maybe it was htdocs, folder in their home directory when they were added to the system. Any file you put there is served by Apache at resource /~ which was reading from /home/ /www on the file system. There use to be lots and lots of ISPs and so they were small enough to have a single webserver with all their customers setup as…
Apache doesn't have it on by default but easy to turn it on. It's called usermod or mod_user. By default it's the ~/www directory. So, anyone with /home//www ends up being site.url/~/
It is also possible to add .htaccess and other things there, like username/password challenge (WWW-Authenticate) into that on per-user basis.
Mostly universities had hosting setup the same way. ISPs would also offer a similar thing with an additional fee to your internet-subscription. They mostly provided FTP to upload files. Nowadays if anyone tries to, it will be a SFTP rather than FTP.
Re: A simple web we own
#100I am in the process of co-founding a new protocol which creates a decentralized root of trust using normal plain-text names (i.e. `foo.bar`). One of the goals I hope to obtain is allowing domain-style lookups of private websites hosted on P2P networks. It's lofty, but the dialog used by OP is _very_ close to why I think it's necessary.
I've been interested in doing something similar in the past, but I could really never solve issues like domain squatting and stopping individuals from claiming every name possible. Do you have a place where you keep these plans or have discussions around it? Or even just a place where I could get updates if anything does come of it?