
The Web of Alexandria - GuiA
http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/2.html
======
chubot
I have had a similar thought about something related.

Why doesn't every person with a computer have all the world's open source
software on their machine? The entire Debian repository can fit 10 times over
on a 1TB hard drive [1].

Why not leverage that tremendous body of free knowledge and work?

The answer I've come up with is that the state of software security is holding
us back. Even though we have all this free knowledge, it's not worth it for us
to just try new stuff. I remember as a kid I would download new stuff from
BBSes and just try it. But no more.

I just stick with a small set of well worn programs that address my needs.
Perhaps this is a habit from the Windows days, where installing a new piece of
software could break ANY existing piece of installed software. But the risk is
still non-zero on Linux distros.

We need operating systems that treat programs as adversarial rather than
trusted, and then every computer could have every piece of software installed
locally. If you wanted to try out 100 different audio editing programs, you'd
be free to do so.

Or perhaps there would be no monetization model for that. Just a thought.

[1] [https://www.debian.org/mirror/size](https://www.debian.org/mirror/size)

~~~
mburns
A distributed filesystem like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-
LAFS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe-LAFS) or
[http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/) would become incredibly useful if they got
sufficient adoption.

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
I gotta say, IPFS looks nice. Thanks.

------
carussell
Bret expresses uneasiness about accepting that the web and the world that uses
it should have permanent memory. My perspective is one that falls more in line
with efforts like the Internet Archive: save it all, wholesale.

He mentions technical solutions for enforcing ephemerality, but under the
guise of _preserving_ ephemerality. The problem with this is twofold:

Re preserving: The ephemerality guarantee was never there. I've been watching
The Americans. (Side note: good show.) If early 1980s Henry or Paige wanted to
spend all evening talking on the phone and keep a recorded copy of their
conversations, they could have. Tape recorders existed. If something
interesting was said, and they realized they wanted to keep it on record after
the fact, they could have written it in their journals. The end of
ephemerality began long ago, before either the writers of this comment or the
linked article were born, and before our Paige and Henry were born into their
fictional universe.

Re enforcing: This ephemerality guarantee can't exist. The analog hole is
inescapable. If I understand correctly, Snapchat exists to allow expiry of
content and even place preconditions on sharing, such as who it can be shared
with when using the app's own sharing mechanism. This isn't enforcing a
standard for ephemerality that has been lost. It's attempting to enforce a
standard for ephemerality that never existed; it exploits the properties of
digital transmission to _synthesize_ something that doesn't and can't exist in
the analog world. And failing. Because the digital world still has to
interface with us through our analog one. So for all the effort that has gone
into trying to make Snapchat's protections work, those efforts can be
circumvented by something as simple as a 10 year old who can operate a camera
or just possesses the ability to recount what he or she has seen or heard.

"Should the web remember, and should we use a medium that has permanent memory
for so much of our business?" are the wrong questions, and trying to answer
them is a distraction.

~~~
mindslight
> _If early 1980s Henry or Paige wanted to spend all evening talking on the
> phone and keep a recorded copy of their conversations, they could have_

The key word being _wanted_. Most forms of person-to-person expression were
_default_ ephemeral. And failing that (eg a written letter), generally
required explicit copying. Contrast with an email - by the time you even read
it, how many copies have been made and where do they reside?

I completely agree about "enforcement" being laughable, but there is room for
parties voluntarily agreeing to not permanently record things. It can even be
beneficial to a would-be recorder (eg legal discovery). Of course it can be
quite beneficial to defect. But that calculus may even change as non-signed
logs start to hold less weight (eg OTR's auto-repudiation).

However, none of that really applies for explicit publishing mediums like the
web. The next generation of content-addressable systems will be ultimately
based on persistent data structures, with garbage collection of older versions
only being necessary as a storage optimization.

------
frobozz
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOCKSS)

------
stared
It's why I think that Web Archive
([http://archive.org/web/](http://archive.org/web/)) is one of the most
important projects.

------
anifow
We have a perfect solution for the kind of publishing model which Brett is
referring to, which operates in sharing and replication rather than central
repositories which are historically prone to snuffing out. Just use
Bittorrent.

Bittorrent was embraced for pirating music and movies, but it has major
benefits if adopted as a back-end protocol for distribution of content on
mobile devices. Bandwidth isn't an issue as long as everything is done on WiFi
when plugged in, then it's just like a laptop. You are obviously looking at
poorer seed ratios than the desktop-centric distribution we are used to, but
it will be relatively cheaper for content distributors to support some of the
seeding with their data centers than to absorb the entire responsibility.
Granted, this is way less efficient than just doing central distribution from
a data center, but you gain in resilience, and since you aren't depending on
this for the navigation and basic UI, the user experience isn't dependent on
real time network transfers which still are very from being dependable. This
model might not work for everyone, but I think it is the ideal model for
sharing data sets, academic papers, DRM videos and music (though I'd prefer
non-DRM), public digital arts projects, and rich interactive news stories
(with a collection of video, models, etc). The Web was great when bandwidth
was expensive, but today it is cheap and unevenly distributed, and it is time
for a new model.

Apps can serve as trackers which curate links (bonus points if Android / iOS
bake the protocol into the OS so that your device can keep track of torrents
without that information being locked into your app (can probably get some
efficiencies in managing sharing if those settings are centralized in the OS).
I also wonder if seed ratios can be shared between different distributors and
bought and sold from data centers. It seems only fair. It does go against net
neutrality though, as I can imagine a situation where people are given less
bandwidth because they don't have a seed ratio of 100 or something (i.e., 100
GB of upload for every 1 GB of download). Nonetheless, this may be a fairly
healthy way of having people with better means subsidize the content to those
less fortunate. You can even run all monetization of this scheme by having the
distribution networks downloading it to themselves, jacking up the seed ratios
that are possible.

Someone else here mentioned the need for an app ecosystem that treats apps as
adversarial. I think that is exactly what we have seen with Android and iOS.
Want to use my camera? You need permission. Granted, there are some social
engineering issues with people not really considering the rights they give up
when they tap on the Install button,even when it is spelled out in simple
language (I can say this because I know I don't care as much as I should, so
it's not coming from a lack of technical knowledge). I think it's a short
matter of time before Android becomes a serious competitor to Windows. iOS is
more tricky as it would cannibalize the Mac ecosystem which is heavily built
up. Things that would signal things moving in that direction are for example,
Adobe releasing a complete version of photoshop on one of these mobile first
OS. Also, Microsoft releasing their tools on Android (unless they keep that as
a competitive advantage of the windows os, which is likely).

In either case, I think the death of the Web is near on mobile. The benefits
include more safety, more functionality, a collection of trusted brands
(unfortunately, innovation WILL be hampered by this move. People will accept
toy apps that don't take permissions, but otherwise people will have a really
hard time competing in the Web ghetto)

------
satyrnein
The other post I read this morning was about Bitcoin, where each party
necessarily keeps the entire blockchain...

------
endergen
I'm starting to feel like Bret spends more time saying what's wrong with
things than providing solutions. I'm a huge fan, but just saying, hoping to
see him ship something representing his ideas.

~~~
widdershins
I don't think that's entirely fair. It's true he hasn't shipped any finished
products, but he's shown concrete examples that have inspired a lot of people
to do better. One example that comes to mind - livecoding using C++ JIT [1].
The creator of this cited Brett's work as a prime inspiration.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkVkRg-
geI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imkVkRg-geI)

