
The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web - jonbaer
http://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/telecom/internet/the-fathers-of-the-internet-revolution-urge-todays-pioneers-to-reinvent-the-web
======
pfraze
Ok, a lot of people don't know the context for this.

Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an
opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the
industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of
news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some
of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them feel like fluff
to me. (There are some semi-interesting bullet points buried at the bottom of
this one.)

What _was_ interesting, was the level of focused energy that this event was
showing. The Internet Archive did a great job organizing it, and the speakers
were compelling, but the real drive came from the different teams that were
present. The news orgs all focus on "Recognizable name calls for new Web," but
those speakers only offered spiritual guidance to something that's moving
entirely on its own. And, I think they'd be the first to say so.

There was plenty of self-awareness and open discussion. Kahle gave a good talk
at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the
end-user's interest is here. Are we talking about "open-source websites?"
What's the big picture? Doctorow, Baker, Kahle, and Lee all talked about
values. Cerf talked about Named Data Networking, which is about content-
addressing, an idea that's definitely at the heart of the new work. Zooko
threw cold water on everybody ("Is this just 1999 again?"). It was very
interesting. A lot of it is online [3]

1 IPFS, Dat, WebTorrent, ZeroNet, InterLedger, MediaChain, Neocities, many
others

2 Vint Cerf, Mitchell Baker, Tim Berners Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow,
many others. RMS even made an appearance.

3 [http://www.decentralizedweb.net/](http://www.decentralizedweb.net/)

~~~
mark_l_watson
I also attended the Decentralized Web Summit (the first 6 hours) and it was
great. I hope they have this every year. The Summit was inexpensive, the venue
at the Internet Archive building was cool, the speakers and panels were
uniformly interesting, and the food was tasty. Good job by the organizers!

I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues. Very
few of my non-tech friends & family get why I think government and corporate
encroachment on privacy and freedom is an issue in the USA. So, it was
refreshing to be with people who mostly have the same concerns that I do.

~~~
sanoli
I have zero tech friends. Zero. Not _one_ of my friends cares about privacy.
Never have for as long as they have started using email in the late 90's. Me,
I just gave up trying to raise the issue. So much so that I don't care
anymore. It's a lost war. I'll take care of my own privacy whenever I care
about it, and that's it. The rest of the population will deal with it when it
gets too crazy. If it ever gets too crazy, _and_ if they ever begin to care.

edit: Just to add: I know this is defeatist and negative, but it's the truth
in my case. Got tired of it. It's easier if you have tech friends or activist
friends and they share your concern.

~~~
gleenn
Just because people don't seem to care, doesn't mean they aren't listening.
Even being "that guy" who makes a point about important issues without obvious
agreers can have a positive affect on people. Think of it like advertising:
you might not buy that shiny car now, but when you go to make a decision, all
those car ads you consciously or subconsciously watched make you aware of
their existence. When the time comes and people have to make decisions, many
might bias towards your point of view. Don't nag, but quietly continue making
the point. Stay positive

------
dang
Before posting something dismissive about this, please remember how easy it
would have been to dismiss the internet and the web themselves as things that
couldn't ever happen, nice visions but impossible in the real world, etc. etc.
and so on.

When the people who actually made these things talk about what needs making
next, we should hear them with an open mind, not rush to think of objections.

~~~
nxzero
Not sure it's that, but that the founders had a bit of luck, and to believe
any future efforts would not require luck would be foolish in my opinion.

~~~
dang
Future efforts always require a bit of luck.

~~~
tfb
And a lot of determination! :)

------
sanderjd
> “That utopian leveling of society, the reinvention of the systems of debate
> and government—what happened to that?”

Only speaking personally, what happened for me was that I noticed that these
utopian online communities that we reinvented are not really particularly
wonderful because a lot of the loudest people in such communities are really
nasty people with really nasty things to say. On the other hand, the internet
has proven _incredibly_ useful for enabling people to keep up their deep high-
trust relationships (usually forged offline) across longer distances and more
life changes. It makes me a bit sad too, but it doesn't appear that being open
and distributed is an important ingredient in building these types of
communities, as Facebook, WhatsApp, and others have shown.

It's always amazing to me how much more down on technology we technologists
seem to be than the majority of people I know, who just think it's amazing
that they can stay so connected with their friends and family all the time. If
I told them that Tim Berners-Lee is bummed that they're sharing pictures and
liking posts instead of creating their own web pages, they wouldn't understand
why, and I don't think I could really explain it to them (or myself).

~~~
angry-hacker
Well, even the hackers post their blog posts nowadays to centralized networks.
Why every article has to be on medium.com - I have no idea - but it's very
similar pattern the regular users of Internet have.

~~~
tracker1
Because when you create content, you don't necessarily want to create, or host
the system to manage that content.

By the same not, more and more projects are just using gh-pages... it's
useful, out there, free (of cost to those publishing) and in general works.

In the end, there's a lot of options, I think seeing IPFS support baked into
the browsers will see a new wave the likes that we saw in the late 90's of
customized content, and then tooling that publishes to IPFS will take hold and
some things may become more standardized.

I think there is a need to get to a DNS pointer that can take one from a name
to an IPFS directory (similar to a CNAME) though that may need to be updated
for each publish. In the end it can/will all be very interesting to say the
least.

~~~
lgierth
Hey -- one of the IPFS devs here. You can actually already use DNS to point a
human-readable name to an IPFS hash.

Try out `dig +short TXT ipfs.io`, take the `/ipfs/<hash>` from that record,
and go to [https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<hash>](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<hash>). Then try
[https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io](https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io) :)

------
Animats
The Web has already been reinvented, but not in the direction that Bernars-Lee
wants. We have HTTP2 running everything through one pipe to big sites. We have
Javascript that puts the site in control of the user's machine and makes web
pages display-only, like PostScript. More than half of all traffic is coming
from the top 10 sites. The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have
been replaced by Gmail, WhatsApp, and Facebook.

~~~
walrus01
> The federated systems, email, IRC, and Usenet, have been replaced by Gmail,
> WhatsApp, and Facebook

Ease of use by the vast hordes of hundreds of millions of completely non
technical endusers and thousands of person-hours by highly paid UI/UX
designers have trumped decentralization and autonomy.

point, click, drool.

~~~
Animats
I know it's a rant, but open source people do not know how to do user-friendly
user interfaces. A few days ago, I posted the home page links for Diaspora,
Gnu Social, and Friendica, and commented "any questions".

Blatant UI bugs often don't get fixed in open source. There's a bug in Ubuntu
on some machines which causes the cursor to disappear after coming back from a
suspend. (You can get the cursor back by typing CTL-ALT-F1 / CTL-ALT-F7.) The
bug has been reported repeatedly for _five years_.[1]

 _With enough code bloat, all bugs are deep._

[1]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+cursor+disappears](https://www.google.com/search?q=ubuntu+cursor+disappears)

~~~
freshhawk
Definitely, but I look at it from the direction of "No one has pulled in the
good UX/UI people to do open source work" and that's simply a social/culture
problem.

I also think it's completely fixable, because all the reasons to do open
source programming work apply to UI/UX work. Getting your work in front of a
lot of people, gaining experience and notoriety, getting to scratch your own
itch.

There just was no Linux for design people to jump start that culture. And
Mac's always had such nice design that they didn't have as many itches to
scratch.

~~~
pjmlp
Mainly because of culture differences.

Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most
professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator,
Sketch, Maya, Poser, you name it instead of constrain themselves to "worse is
better" just to feel good.

So in the end, most don't feel the need to join any FOSS community and rather
build their portfolio on online design galleries and magazines.

~~~
edraferi
> Good UX/UI people don't bother to pay for their tools, like in most
> professions, and prefer to work in software like Photoshop, Illustrator,
> Sketch, Maya, Poser...

Doesn't Adobe continue to charge big $$$ for Creative Cloud? I don't
understand how these statements mesh..

~~~
pjmlp
Yes it does.

"Don't bother" as in like most professionals they see a value in paying for
their tools and don't mind having to pay them.

~~~
diyorgasms
Just FYI that's basically opposite how the phrase "doesn't bother" is
idiomatically used in at least American English.

~~~
pjmlp
Thanks for the hint. I am not native English speaker.

~~~
infinite8s
You want to say "are not bothered to pay for their tools"

------
jokoon
Whatever the solution is, I really believe data must be on user's devices, not
on proprietary servers.

Open source won the battle of software. The next battle will be about data
itself.

It surely implies very hard problems when it comes to standardization and how
data is exchanged. It might involve something like flatbuffers. How data is
exchanged, what rights you have on it, how it is made secure, there are no
ubiquitous idea or software that can reinvent the web because network
programming is just hard and it wont change soon.

What I think could really be relevant is a database that syncs itself like the
kinds of bittorrent sync and syncthing. Once you have atomic data that is
spread across users, nobody needs to rent servers, and the data belongs to the
users. That is a true and real way to reinvent the web, it also solves some of
the controversial problems of the internet: advertising and surveillance.

~~~
mtVessel
Nobody _wants_ their data on their own device. Nobody knows how their devices
even work, let alone wants the responsibility of managing them.

What they want is what they're (sorta, kinda) being given. My device takes my
data and puts it somewhere where all my other devices know how to get it. I
don't wanna know how it happens, I just want magic.

We, who know how our devices work, and don't want anyone else managing our
data for us, are in a vanishingly small minority.

The big companies are putting their money on clouds and centralization. And
that's where it'll all go, because they have all the leverage. Twenty years
from now, I'd love to reflect on how wrong I was to say this. But right now, I
doubt it.

~~~
quadrangle
Speaking as a not-so-technical (never run a server) reader myself, what people
like me want is not whether or not the data is on our own devices (that's an
implementation detail) but the real issue of real reliability, privacy, and
basically not having all the centralized bullshit that makes me feel helpless.

None of the big systems run by the big corporations are actually reliable
long-term. They change stuff all the time, come and go, change terms, and
generally mistreat everyone. So we just learn to be mostly passive and kinda
just play the game. It's a weird and totally undemocratic form of extreme
bureaucracy, and we have no idea how to do anything more than superficial.

So yeah, people don't want to take responsibility for all the data, but they
_do_ want the people responsible to actually be trustworthy, reliable, and
serve the public interest. Is that just a complete fantasy, totally
unrealistic?

~~~
freshhawk
The problem is that I'm not sure anyone has a way for you to get reliability,
privacy and not having to deal with centralized bullshit without caring about
that implementation detail.

Because if you leave it up to someone else, they can make a lot of money by
removing all but reliability from what you want. So they do.

~~~
Kadin
Well, you can, but you have to be willing to pay for it. _That 's_ the key
problem. Users love the idea of a free service that stores all their stuff,
and that's pretty clearly not sustainable from a business perspective, but it
makes it hard to compete with a real service.

They'll keep their stuff on the "free" service right up until it crashes and
takes all their crap with it, or the TOS is abruptly changed to delete
everything older than 12 months or that's connected to an inactive login or
whatever, and it's gone.

~~~
freshhawk
Yeah, I was counting those types of "free" services as falling in the
"centralized bullshit" category. Bit of a fuzzy use of language there
admittedly.

------
pudo
The argument to re-decentralise the web wildly confuses economic, technical
and political concerns. The reason that Facebook runs a centralised system
isn't that it cannot figure out a technical alternative, it does so for
economic reasons. To assume that making incremental advances in decentralised
technologies will somehow fundamentally alter those economics is wishful
thinking.

Instead, we need to recognise the fact that all of this is not ultra-new and
never-seen-before, but rather an issue of market failure and growing
monopolies and that there's an existing mechanism to deal with it: government
regulation.

We can treat Facebook & co as utilities, as monopolies - there's a whole range
of regulatory options and those in relevant agencies could really use the help
of the tech community to figure out how to apply these tools.

Instead, the web community is out on the playground building DHT sandcastles
with a bitcoin moat. Let's grow up.

~~~
woodman
> ...there's an existing mechanism to deal with it: government regulation.

Lay your hopes on a monopoly on force to solve an economic monopoly? That
doesn't seem like a well founded long term solution.

~~~
abiox
this seems like equivocation.

~~~
djschnei
What about that was ambiguous? He's pretty clearly pointing out the logical
missteps of attempting to use a monopoly to regulate "monopolies".

------
z3t4
The web is already decentralized, but lack the convenience of Facebook et al.
where you have a virtual identity, a friend list and can choose who get access
to your images etc.

This can however be accomplished with something like SSH keys, where your
"friend" list is basically a list of public keys. And a small daemon that will
let "friends" make queries like "is this a friend or a friend", etc.

With a identity system in place, other things get more easy to solve, like
spam, and micro-payments based on chain-of trust and reputation. I also think
it would be fairly easy to implement in current web tech like browsers and
http servers, e-mail servers, and chat services.

Note that your id will only be a hash (public key), and you will thus be
anonymous until you tell others that this is you, and the client software
could also ask the user before giving it away to a server.

It would also work with something like TOR, where your IP is hidden, and the
hash is your fingerprint, witch you can change whenever you want.

~~~
corv
You've practically described ZeroNet. The difficulty lies in getting people to
replace browsers with new software.

~~~
z3t4
The problem with these _platforms_ is that they try to do too much. While all
we need is a client/server handshake. Kinda like IP white-listing but with
public keys instead.

------
doublerebel
I think there is a ton of validity in this desire and I've collected a long
list of projects, articles, and leaders that are pointing towards a similar
conclusion.

Most of us are too deep into the status quo or our view of technology to break
in a different direction. Most of the projects so far aim to reinvent "from
the ground up" like Urbit or IPFS -- which is an impressive goal but misses
what I think is the main point: the average person should be able to grok and
contribute to the Internet. We can do that with the simple tools already
included with every computer. Ground-up can come later.

I think that posting global knowledge should be as accessible as posting to
Twitter. And sharing that knowledge should be as simple as email or Airdrop.
This is what I've been working towards with Optik.io. It's in stealth but I'm
always looking for like-minded people to join with to achieve such a knowledge
freedom for all of us.

~~~
workingwriter
As a relative newcomer to this approach, but becoming enthusiastic about its
potential, I'd love to see your list.

------
danjoc
Have they forgotten an important area in need of decentralization? I didn't
see any mention of the internet networks in the article. The network is
currently very centralized. Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, etc. Communities need
to own their network, not rent it from a giant corporation. I can't run my own
server, because my ISP says I have to pay extra for business class. All
they've done is block ports on the network to my home. Municipal fiber and
wifi networks have actually been outlawed by these big companies in various
places around the country. When the network itself prevents running peer
nodes, I don't see how any amount of software running on top of that will
help.

~~~
brokenmachine
They can't block all ports coming out or the network won't work at all.

An ISP can artificially try to price you under the "business class", but they
have to let you send packets out, otherwise what is the point of having an
ISP?

My kingdom for some net neutrality!

------
michaelfeathers
The deep learning is that there are forces that lead to centralization:
generally they are variations of human choice and seeking economies of scale.

For instance, it's no accident that we started with hundreds of thousands of
small websites and ended with most traffic going to a few. Ask yourself how
the internet could have been constructed that would have prevented sites like
Facebook or Twitter winning the popularity contest. The 'Power Law' dynamics
behind this are the same ones that lead to some airports being hubs and others
not, the fact that there is a backbone rather than everything going point-to-
point, and many other phenomena.

We can have decentralization but there are costs. Someone has to pay them.

~~~
pessimizer
> The deep learning is that there are forces that lead to centralization:
> generally they are variations of human choice and seeking economies of
> scale.

The reason that some airports are hubs and some are not is due to the the fact
that it's a system spanning large areas of varying densities. Distance doesn't
exist much on the internet, other than firewalls. The goal of most internet
companies is to create that distance through lack of interop, in order to
guide the maximum amount of traffic through a single point where it can charge
a toll. It's typical rent-seeking. I'd argue that a bureaucratic metaphor is
far more apt than any spatial one.

~~~
michaelfeathers
I think it's more graph theory than distance. A fully connected graph costs
more than an minimal spanning tree.

------
LukeB42
[https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony](https://github.com/psybernetics/synchrony)

I'm working on something else right now but when it's feature complete I'll
port synchrony to Go. The plan is to give full consideration to potential
pitfalls of multiple overlay networks, the contacts list, and of course peer-
to-peer streaming hypermedia.

"ENABLE_WEB_APP" is also going to be a configfile option.

Users should also be able to modify a list of domains they won't utilise
overlay networks for.

It will also have to perform the necessary alpha transforms on javascripts to
prevent them from modifying the proxys' interfaces' objects whilst presenting
a public API, so that in-network resources can do friends list operations for
things to the tune of "network/nodeid/uid would like to play grand theft space
wizards with you".

~~~
peatfreak
I looked at the README but I can't understand what this project is or what it
is for. Is it something for collaborative editing?

~~~
LukeB42
It decentralises HTTP in-place. No hashes instead of URLs. The thing just
treats the hash of a URL as a peer node ID and you ask that node or whoever
you find on the way if they've seen anyone reporting that they'll serve data
for the URL.

If you're lucky your peers will provide you with an associative array of
content hashes referring to nodes who'll serve data corresponding to them and
their last-seen times.

[https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony/blob/master/synchr...](https://github.com/Psybernetics/Synchrony/blob/master/synchrony/controllers/dht.py#L2144)

------
textmode
Can the "Fathers of the Internet" offer a financial incentive or even a
stipend to nerds that want to work on these projects?

I was reading a book a while ago on peer-to-peer technologies written some
years ago and there was a chapter by a very talented, well-known programmer.

Today, like Cerf, he's on the Google payroll. Needlesss to say he will not be
working diligently on releasing finished projects that help to decentralize
the web.

~~~
vishnuks
Out of curiosity which book were you reading?

------
krapp
>Think about some sort of publish/subscribe system, in which a web-page
creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes it available for
archiving, and various web archives can subscribe to receive updates

This seems like something we could (should?) have right now. Maybe IA should
write a Wordpress plugin, if they haven't?

>Think about creating an archive of software as well, that perhaps may have to
include emulations of defunct hardware and operating systems to make the Web
always backwards compatible.

A site that archives software and runs it in js-based emulators sounds like a
great idea. It would probably be illegal, though. And it almost certainly
wouldn't work properly for everyone, as long as it depended on the browser.
But still a great idea. That any runtime and software can have a URL is
incredibly compelling.

Maybe we need to leave the browser model for documents and come up with
something else for using what amounts to streaming software?

>Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a
name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people
were comfortable with that.

YES. No TLDs, just unique arbitrary strings.

~~~
epeus
>Think about some sort of publish/subscribe system, in which a web-page
creator can regularly hit a publish command that makes it available for
archiving, and various web archives can subscribe to receive updates This
seems like something we could (should?) have right now. Maybe IA should write
a Wordpress plugin, if they haven't?

I think you just reinvented [https://pingomatic.com/](https://pingomatic.com/)

~~~
krapp
I was vaguely thinking more of publishing and updating directly to IA through
some kind of API, (rather than having them scrape everything - that may
actually exist, I don't know), something you could even add as a button to a
text editor. But that is pretty close.

~~~
epeus
that exists too - load web.archive.org/save/[your url]

------
tmpanon1234act
I can say with some confidence that the blame lies almost entirely with the
stewards. Until we learn how to converge faster towards consensus, things are
going to remain painfully broken for long stretches of time. The inhibitor
here isn't technological and it has nothing to do with the people on the
ground relying on the web. It has to do with how things get run at a top
level.

------
GroSacASacs
> Lee and other speakers at the event pointed out a key problem of the Web
> today is its ephemeral nature

Why is it a problem exactly ? If something great appears on the web it will be
shared, saved and discussed and not forgotten. If something is useless or bad,
it will be lost when the server stops, and that's good right ?

Same happened with paper books the last 2000 years, great one were replicated,
shared etc. others went lost.

Not every website has open useful data for the long term.

------
tracker1
I'm thinking that there is a lot to look forward to when the browsers start
supporting the likes of IPFS, along with some DNS hints for IPFS nodes...
perhaps something similar to a CNAME record, that points a DNS name to an IPFS
published directory... Although, that would need a relatively low TTL, as it
should be possible to publish, then update said reference quickly.

~~~
lgierth
Mentioned this in your other comment too, but this time with name and link :)
We "invented" dnslink for that, which is a TXT record of the form
`dnslink=/ipfs/<hash>` or `dnslink=/ipns/<hash>` --
[https://github.com/jbenet/go-dnslink](https://github.com/jbenet/go-dnslink)

------
epeus
My notes from the 3 days of this:
[http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-07.html](http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-07.html)

[http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-08.html](http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-08.html)

[http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-09.html](http://www.kevinmarks.com/decentralweb2016-06-09.html)

------
jlg23
* The technology for a lot of things is there (e.g. diaspora instead of facebook, etherpad instead of google docs) but hosting these costs money. And people don't want to pay and they don't understand they currently pay with their data/privacy.

* Making the data behind a commercial site open is a great, noble idea - but all of the current big, consumer facing players make money with the customer data. They have no incentive to open their data.

* Big players have absolutely no incentive to inter-operate with new competitors and this means that those who use new, decentralized services have to maintain two identities or lose contacts.

I think the only thing that has a chance to get us out of this is intervention
by the government:

a) Make running your own node a human right.

b) Give every person on the planet a free node if they cannot afford one (paid
for but not controlled by governments).

c) Make IPv6 mandatory (so b can work)

d) Subsidize open source efforts that enable us to have a virtual presence
hosted on our own node, interconnected with our friends' nodes.

e) Elevate all electronic communication to the legal status of snail mail: If
your MTA blocks my host, you have to have a damn good (security) reason, tell
me exactly why and timely unblock me when I have fixed the problem (Yes, AT&T
and 1&1, I am talking to you.)

f) Enforce net neutrality.

g) Force current big players to allow machine readable, convenient exports of
user generated content by the user.

~~~
freshhawk
I also see the sense in the idea that these more modern protocols, that make
some of the current problematic uses impossible, can also allow some cool
_new_ things as well. And can allow some new kinds of killer apps that will
attract enough people (who probably don't care about the
distributed/privacy/security aspects) to get critical mass and be real
competition.

The interesting part is the high chance, given recent history, that the first
of these killer apps will be things that are under-served for non-technical
reasons. Like sharing copyrighted media, or censored media/communications or
black market marketplaces.

But I think you are probably right. Unfortunately the ability to push for
these interventions gets harder and harder as the current environment
concentrates more power among those who are directly opposed to them.

------
hNewsLover99
So... these internet-founding Einsteins actually think that Bitcoin should be
a part of "our" future Utopian web? Well what do they (and all the other
blockchain fan-kiddies) think of the fact that Bitcoin has now replaced
Western Union as the preferred getaway car for ransomware and other
extortionists around the world?

Businesses, universities, and even hospitals whose critical activities grind
to a halt at financial gunpoint, and who are advised by law enforcement to
roll over and pay up because nothing can be done for them - must be delighted
to know that the tools of their demise are so "Utopian".

The internet isn't never was and never will be securable. Even the most
resourced orgs are unable to defend their data. The founding fathers of the
internet and W3C should admit this, apologize, and stop holding out false hope
for the future.

~~~
Natanael_L
Are you equally hostile to cash, the primary preference of criminals since
millennia back?

------
skywhopper
Some good ideas, but I find some of them at odds with the rhetoric.
Decentralize the web with new centralized naming and archive systems. Come up
with new ways of doing things that there are already multiple failed solutions
for.

Separate content and presentation layers, URLs as names, open pub/sub systems
--these all have good solutions. They haven't failed to catch on because the
technology wasn't there.

Anyway, to a large extent we already have a re-invented, private, encrypted,
Bitcoin-funded, de-centralized web. It's called Tor, and it's not always very
pretty.

------
LinuxFreedom
What is the current state of diaspora and similar things?

Is there a _cough_ centralized collection of decentralized software
alternatives, like an "awesome-decentralized-net" on _cough even harder_
github?

Thanks!

------
yugai
I think Internet is great in it's current state. The most popular sites are
among the worst in my opinion, but there are others. Internet offers
diversity. Internet would be pretty much the same without Google, Facebook and
Apple because there are equivalent alternatives out there.

------
manju_sharma
“extra credit if we can make it that people can make money by publishing
without going through a third party.”

Why is Google sponsoring this event?! Won't they lose big chunk of revenue if
this happens

------
rajanchandi
I guess it's time to do away with the web (as it is) and build something
entirely 'ephemeral' without that heavy HTTP protocol and 'web pages'. The new
thing should be real-time by default and work across web/mobile. Ephemerality
is the best way to protect privacy and real-time is the best way to create an
amazing experience!

------
qwertyuiop924
I'm not optimistic for this effort succeeding, but it's doing the right things
to make sure that success happens eventually. Instead of having a big get-the-
corporations-to-work-with-us feel, this very much had the "screw it, let's do
this shit" feel. It doesn't guarantee success, but no technical project ever
succeeded by having people sit around talking.

~~~
pdimitar
"Get the corporations work with us" didn't work so far, I don't think it will
magically start working from now on.

It's my opinion (which is somewhat "backed" by a load of tech and economical
news; I know that's not an evidence for anything) that the corporations are
just fine with the situation right now; if anything, they fight to centralize
even more services.

It's true that projects like "the next web" (or however we word it) don't
succeed with people sitting around talking, but the way you worded it is
really cynical. How do you think ARPANet was born? Surely not through a crowd
telepathic effort, right? People sat and talked. A lot.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
What I meant was talking about design ideas endlessly won't get much done. You
get an idea out there, you build the thing, and than you standardize. Sure,
talking to people is necessary and incredibly important, but don't overdesign
and than wait to get everybody's permission. If you want to change the world,
getting a working, if unpolished, version of your idea made is your first
order of buisiness.

~~~
pdimitar
Yes, you're correct. Trouble is, the people who can make this run much faster
in terms of adoption and being end-user-friendly, are senior devs and
maintainers and have zilch amount of time for this. :(

The game is mostly rigged but some of us still find the time and motivation to
try and apply some forced evolution. ;)

------
carlsborg
Re-posting a link to the key part of Tim Berners-Lee's talk at the summit:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=4395](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yth7O6yeZRE&t=4395)

------
Rathor1
I don't think we should reinvent the net, in its present day shape it wasn't
supposed to be monetized or for statistics mining. I'm certainly frightened of
the internet 2.0

------
bertan
Aral Balkan and his small team are already working to develop a p2p web and
they need help and funding.

[1] [https://ind.ie](https://ind.ie)

------
zkhalique
That's funny, they are basically describing our platform.

[http://qbix.com/platform](http://qbix.com/platform)

~~~
zero_iq
That's funny, they're really not.

According to your own documentation, you have a traditional centralised
client-server architecture. (Albeit one with some bells and whistles.)

~~~
zkhalique
Your mistake is thinking that the relevant centralization is in the client-
server architecture. The real reason that people have centralized social is
because it's hard to let people authenticate and find their friends across
domains. And even further, there are no good tools comparable to Facebook when
it comes to subscriptions, notifications, updates, realtime collaboration, and
all those other multi-user things that happen on a centralized domain.

The Web is decentralized, email is decentralized, git is decentralized,
bitcoin is decentralized, now what is the analogue for social? That's the
reason github is centralized. You get all the goodies of the accounts. Once
you disrupt this social layer with something decentralized, you disrupt
centralization in a big way. That's the more relevant phenomenon.

Once you have a conversation with multiple parties, you need to elect someone
to be the authority on "what happened". Mental Poker is still an unsolved
problem for arbitrary conversations and participants. So that may as well be a
server. The question is about centralization in the macro sense.

~~~
zero_iq
The discussion point of the article is how we can build such technologies for
the kinds of things you just listed as needing a centralized domain.

You claimed that they were describing your platform.

But in the 'macro' sense, your platform is nothing like that -- it's a
different flavour of Web app server, and fits in with the existing paradigm.
Yes it may be part of a decentralised system (the Web), but any large Web
application developed using it would be exactly the kind of centralised
information silo that the people in the article want to avoid. The article is
about how the existing paradigm is insufficiently decentralised.

Your platform could be a great Web app platform, but it does nothing to
address any of the points raised in the article.

~~~
zkhalique
" _It does nothing to address any of the points raised in the article_ "

Really? It seems that many of the _actual quotes_ from the Fathers of the
Internet in the article apply to existing web client-server architecture:

“We hoped everyone would be making their own web sites—turns out people are
afraid to.” - Tim Berners-Lee

“People have their friends on Facebook and some photos on Flickr and their
colleagues on LinkedIn. All they want to do is share the photos with the
colleagues and the friends—and they can’t. Which is really stupid. You either
have to tell Flickr about your Facebook friends, or move your photos to
Facebook and LinkedIn separately, or build and run a third application to
build a bridge between the two.” - Tim Berners-Lee

(by the way, we address this explicitly in our platform)

"Don’t discount Wordpress, it has been embraced by large numbers of people,
perhaps the new web should have a decentralized Wordpress type of service." \-
Brewster Kahle

That doesn't sound like a necessarily serverless architecture to me.

~~~
zero_iq
I'm not talking about serverless, I'm talking about decentralised. The article
is talking about decentralised. You're talking about decentralised, even.

But your platform is a centralised platform just like most other Web app
platforms. It is not at all like what the article is discussing, contrary to
your claim.

How would a Facebook or WordPress clone built on your platform be any more
decentralised than regular old Facebook or WordPress?

In fact how would it address any of the questions raised?

Is your platform distributed and decentralised?

Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress
and without a central service provider?

Does your platform prevent government snooping?

Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information
silo?

Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised
than it already is?

Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?

Does it unlock published Web content when copyright expires?

Can it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?

Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network
outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of
the Web?

Because those are the things the article describes.

And that doesn't sound at all like your platform, which is another Web
application stack, very much the opposite of what is suggested in the article
on fact.

~~~
zkhalique
_Is your platform distributed and decentralised?_

Yes

 _Is your platform easier for Joe public to publish websites on than wordpress
and without a central service provider?_

Yes, just as easily as in multi-person Wordpress. But it does much more than
just publish a website. It can power a web app, one that goes in the app
store, support social features like contacts, access control, realtime updates
and offline notifications, and more.

 _Does your platform prevent government snooping?_

Yes, by preventing data from accumulating in a single information silo. More
than that, we believe that access to the global internet (as Facebook was
trying to with Internet 2.0 in India) should be unnecessary, as people on
cruises or local villages should connect on local area networks, and only
access the wider internet when necessary. We believe the older tools in the
dialup era were designed more properly than the ones which assume always-on
broadband access and only have "isOnline/isOffline" dichotomy.

 _Does your platform prevent the accumulation of data in a single information
silo?_

Yes. People choose what organizations they host with. When they visit another
domain, they have an instantly personalized experience, with all friends who
wanted to share that they also use the service. Much better than "Your friend
XYZ is now on Instagram" without their permission, and much better than oAuth.
Over time, you might import enough information to have a full-fledged presence
in both communities, and choose which one to auth with. Some communities are
for your videos, the others are for some group activities or whatever. Any
community can embed components from any other community. Any aggregator can
subscribe to publishers (with their permission) and get realtime updates, with
custom stream types, instead of e.g. Google spidering your site.

Just take a look:
[http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed](http://qbix.com/platform/features/distributed)

 _Does it reinvent the Web, making it, as a whole, inherently less centralised
than it already is?_

It builds on top of the web, which is already decentralized, and makes it
possible for communities to deploy apps on their domain which rival those on
facebook.com, and which allow users to seamlessly use their identities and
friends across domains.

 _Can it do all of the above in a non-centralised way, resilient to network
outages, and loss of resources at their original location, across the whole of
the Web?_

It is designed to power mesh networks such as the ones being set up in various
cities. The mobile wireless infrastructure is still centralized, but that will
eventually change.

 _Does it embed key moral principles into the fabric of the Web?_

See [http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135](http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=135) for
my own overview of the moral and political principles behind the platform.

Some of the other things you mentioned aren't really addressed, such as "Can
it verify financial transactions and authenticate data sources?" That's more
for blockchains. Our platform does _not_ rely on any global resources except
possibly DNS.

------
ionised
They can't reinvent the web, they are too busy coming up with ways to fill the
current incarnation with advertisements.

------
aboveL4w
security flaws are racking up like crazy. the dom was designed for the 1990s.
it will happen. but its going to be one hard transition. we all know how hard
small scale migrations can be. now consider that on the scale of the internet.
they need to enforce new password schemas, disable capchats , they are
irritating and mak eppp leave and bots get by them anyway, and windows needs
to fix their api. you can never fix a bug before someone exploits it, but you
design standards that force the user to follow best practices and force tech
giants to stop using oaml. vulnerabilities on large traffic sites should be
jail time for the person responsible. i may just active my vpn and use tor for
now on for everything, compromise my bandwidth to protect my information. btw,
im sure all the cloud competition does not share data with affiliates to
profit enabling black hat to exploit and use targeting techniques to launch
dox attacks against individuals. im not a sec major. just my 2 bytes. also,
critical 0 days need an amber alert like system that forces you to change all
affected sites.

~~~
abiox
is this like generated from a markov chain or something?

------
tylerlarson
I can't build all of this by myself but I would be happy to help.

------
peterwwillis
What is the web, essentially? Connection. Connecting communication, connecting
content, connecting media, connecting communities, connecting trade. The Web
is designed to connect things.

The web is already decentralized; just ask anyone who was at one time
restricted to the "online service providers" like AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.
But whether or not the web is decentralized, it still connects things. I don't
think decentralization will _improve_ the connections; rather, as anyone who
has ever run a large network will tell you, decentralization causes almost as
many problems as it solves.

In many ways, making the web more decentralized could make it easier to defeat
its simple design and raise new problems. So to my mind, we need to be
addressing more specific challenges and design with the intent to address
those challenges, and not simply to make change for change's sake, the way
most technological improvements have haphazardly occurred.

As a very simple example of the decentralization of the web, let's look at the
_real_ new Web: mobile application platforms. On Apple's platform, pornography
is not allowed. This is the result of the kind of "social protections" that
our societies have traditionally been governed by. But if this was instead
totally decentralized, there could be the potential for "harming children" and
other persons sensitive to certain content, and as a result, governments both
local and around the world may enact laws forbidding certain content on the
network, or even the whole network itself.

Is the loss of certain content like pornography - _specifically in a
_centralized_ marketplace like the Apple Store_ \- worth the access to such a
large marketplace of content and applications? Or should we tempt society at
large with unrestricted access to content? One could argue that if we were not
so dependent on the internet already, modern uses could have resulted in it
being banned around the globe long ago.

Here's an example of a _targeted solution_ : an open platform, with
subscriber-specific controls. Imagine a universal mobile network and platform,
so apps would just run on Android, iOS, etc. But now, to find and access the
applications, you would pay $1.99 a month to a company that curates the
content for you. Less of what you consider garbage, more practical content.
And you could use the company that restricts pornography, or the company that
promotes totally unrestricted content. Suddenly there is both increased
freedom, choice, and universal compatibility.

Then there's questions of how connected we really want to be. YouTube comments
and Twitter are some examples that to me exemplify the kind of harsh
environment that the human mind is capable of creating. Will decentralizing
the web further result in an increase in this kind of damaging combination of
anonymity and unrestricted communication? Is humanity really ready to have an
unrestricted, unlimited form of connection?

Now keeping that in mind, let's imagine a new decentralized web: platforms
that provide the same content in different ways. Imagine being able to browse
YouTube comments, and only see the ones flagged as positive, uplifting, and
helpful - but _not by YouTube users, but anyone who used that specific
browsing platform_. You could choose a platform that conforms with your
particular world view, and thus see primarily content that you agree with. But
wouldn't this simply breed new forms of closed societies that don't take into
account things that you don't like, or information you wouldn't have normally
wanted to see or hear? Could this not actually set humanity back by reducing
exposure to the parts of life we may not like, but are ultimately real and
part of society?

We are as flawed as we are complex, and the unforeseen side-effects of the
changes we implement will affect the future of how humanity is connected. I
think we should tread carefully.

------
tootie
Their goals seem at odds with the economic incentives in the entire developed
world. It's a beautiful dream, but we're not sufficiently civilized to make it
reality.

~~~
nxzero
>> "we're not sufficiently civilized to make it reality."

To me, the opposite is true, society has become too civilized. True change
would require risks that the majority of Internet users would see as too
risky, unnecessary, and a threat to stability & safety.

~~~
xkarga00
I don't understand why tootie is getting downvoted but it seems that both of
you talk about the same thing, albeit with exactly the opposite wording.

------
mxuribe
I - for one - am quite excited about this future!

------
sidcool
The Seif project is an attempt in that direction

------
pasbesoin
_cough_ physical layer _cough_

------
ObeyTheGuts
Maidsafe is comming dont worry!

------
kowdermeister
What I don't see among the raised call to action questions is "who pays the
bills"? It's a very important question that explains the existence of silos
they feel sad about.

The number of people using the internet won't shrink, but grow steadily.
Facebook, Google has enormous operating costs and if they want to offer an
alternative, a better future, those costs (at least bandwidth) should be
factored in. The infrastructure is not free, but Facebook and Google users are
not paying for it now (well, not with money). But imagine if we say that hey,
here's the new web, it's awesome: it's decentralized, privacy is baked in and
works everywhere. You just have to pay 0.01€ to access the New York Times. Per
page. Then it would be a different situation if costs are not baked in the
beginning.

Then there's video. Gazillion of videos are created per day and it grows
exponentially as devices get better and better at recording ultra high
resolution. Now, again, YouTube pays the bills and users get it in exchange
for watching advertising. How do you want to offer an at least as good service
as YouTube, but decentralized, privacy concerned and universally accessible
and free?

What I see here is a problem that really exists, but the proposed radical new
solutions are a bit misguided. You won't convince people with a sub par (but
technically better) alternative you have to propose a iPhone level of wow,
because only then you can get people's attention.

> Change the naming system, and stop thinking of the URL as a location—it’s a
> name, a format he picked to look like a Unix file name simply because people
> were comfortable with that.

That's a problem again, most people use Windows. Don't assume that the end
users will instantly "get it" because it's more Unix like. This leads my to
the next point.

Another question I haven't seen raised is User Experience. UX. Today's web is
rather good at it, at least the top players embrace it very well. Most company
websites now pay attention to get it somewhat right. Startups also pay a lot
of effort to get UX right.

How about baking in good UX too to the new web? Today I only need to buy a
$500 phone and I'm ready to consume the web. How? I type in a string and the
rest is magically handled for me. I can read, watch anything. Can yo do the
same with the decentralized web? I don't want to install anything, nor
download terabytes of blockchain data, no encrypted distributed filesystem of
somebody else's cat videos, waiting for hours to sync in. I also don't want
pay for hosting somebody else's cat videos. Torrents work well for TV shows,
but what would it look like on YouTube scale?

That's they key part here. To have a radically new internet, getting
technologies right doesn't stop at replacing HTTP, HTML, CSS, DNS... you need
to replace ISP-s and infrastructure providers too or at lest factor them in so
that the new system is not born dead.

------
nickpsecurity
Alright, a lot of statements made by bright people. Now, lets evaluate them
one-by-one to see which get praise or reality checks. :)

re silo effect

Schneier calls this the Feudal Model of Security or Convenience with nice
write-up here:

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.html)

We can also look at it as a form of lock-in. In any case, recent discussions
on Elsevier and other scientific publishers shed light on where it might take
us. Many academics gripe about not knowing the state-of-the-art or even prior
work in their field since they can't afford access to the silos its stored in.
Many, despite being customers of Elsevier et al, rushed to download all kinds
of stuff from Sci-Hub when it appeared. Now lets imagine that effect applied
to most knowledge or content to see how bad it could be for progress of both
knowledge and society. Let's, if not paywalled, think of how restricted search
and selective promoting can create similar effects by preventing people from
connecting dots or even experiencing new things. Then, we see that the siloing
could have tremendous, negative impact on people in many ways. Better to
switch to something similar to old web where all kinds of content appeared,
was easily accessible, and easy to build on.

re trading privacy for free stuff is a myth

It's actually a reality given users dumped their freedom, privacy, and paid
offerings in mass for ad-supported, web content/services. The demand side of
this was so strong and so many experimental alternatives failed that providers
were largely pushed in the direction of ad-support just to survive. It also
came with significant, financial rewards. Good write-up here:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advert...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-
is-the-internets-original-sin/376041/)

So, he needs to quit pretending people are ignoring some solution that works
in favor of ad-supported, free-for-users content in a target market that
almost exclusively goes with ad-supported offerings. The rational choice is to
do what works in a market or with given demand. If they want privacy, they can
pay for it or take steps to get it. It's why I have a paid, MyKolab account w/
GPG keyring. Many others used Fastmail or Lavabit for years. Yet, vast
majority uses surveillance platforms (eg Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft) that sell
them out to advertisers but also reliably handle the email on the side. I
can't remember the market share but I put money that it _massively_
contradicts those arguing against ad model in terms of what people _actually
do_ versus what they say.

re sites blinking on and off. Big problem. Needs to be eliminated in next
architecture or at least Wayback Machine-style thing with greater
integration/convienience. Think snapshots or rollbacks at the browser level.

re sketchy privacy controls. User's fault. They didn't care in practice. They
do business with scumbags whose whole model is selling them out _and who have
a string of abuses_. Most won't pay even $2 for private messaging app or $5/mo
for private email. Yet, they gripe about privacy issues. I say stick with
self-selection plus reboot a simpler, effective model for evaluation of
product/service privacy or security along lines of Common Criteria. Security
experts, esp experienced in realities of fielded programs, would contribute to
it from many different countries to reduce risk of subversion or simply
unworkable ideas. Baseline of features & assurance activities critical to
privacy and security of product or service plus independent review they're
implemented & trusted distribution. Nothing more unless company volunteers as
differentiator.

re Vint Cerf. Good ideas across the board with products/services actively
attempting to deliver all of them except copyright. That one isn't legal yet,
though. The pub-subscribe is a decent idea given there's many robust
implementations, even high-assurance schemes, for that sort of thing. Even
military is deploying something like that now with at least one high-security
demonstrator (below). Commercial/FOSS sector has things like ZeroMQ, which has
other benefits. Much field experience out there in doing it right. The older &
more field-proven something is, the more likely it will work right the next
time. Tried and true beats novel and new.

[http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA425566](http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-
doc/pdf?AD=ADA425566)

Note: DTIC is another source of wisdom in terms of old papers with great
ideads or implementations in them if you know how to find them. Can't help
there but keep the DTIC link to anything you find that doesn't have a steady
link elsewhere. DTIC link usually stays available longer than average website.
CiteseerX and obviously archive.org as well.

re Lee. His idea on URL has been implemented many times over. Just doesn't get
acceptance due to bootstrapping problem where all the web browsers have to
support the alternative but they're not adding something with little demand
most of the time. Dot-archive is nice and could integrate with archive.org.
Might even do it with a small fee that simultaneously supports archive.org (or
its replacement) plus gives clean link in return similar to subdomains or
shortcut links. "Surface the data" is idea behind Semantic Web. It was largely
a failure. Market went with API's instead. They're _probably_ better but
mixing two might create interesting hybrids.

re Kahle. Decentralized clouds like Amazon definitely worth imitating. Google
applied principle to RDBMS's nicely with F1 RDBMS. Awesome stuff. JavaScript
will be necessary evil due to market share, ASM.JS, and so on. However, still
room for another Flash to happen across a significant chunk of market if done
well enough. _Don 't_ think of blockchains as about every goal we've listed
has been solved in isolation & sometimes decentralized without them. Its
inefficent alternative. Now, Merkle or hash trees will likely be useful at
some point. Keybase.io & others working on public key angle. That "Wordpress"
and "Wordpress alternative" are typed into Google many times a week make his
last point solid. Even Freenet and I2P support forms of blogging.

re Doctorow. Vulnerability research being legal is a must. "Computer obeys
owners" is a good principle but lay owners vs technical attackers make that a
weakness. Feudal model gives up control for safety with good results on Apple,
etc. So, maybe an override the user can activate locally or maybe physically.
I'm still a fan of jumpers or physical switches for write-protect of critical
storage. :)

So, that's my take on these statements.

------
johan_larson
Too much rough consensus. Not enough running code.

------
teraformer
Job 1: Advertising interests be damned, this mass surveillance thing has got
to go.

~~~
gallonofmilk
but what do you want? privacy or security? because you can't have both

~~~
freshhawk
Privacy is a form of security. This view of them as opposing forces only makes
sense if you view "security" as only meaning the security of those in power
against those they have power over.

That's one type of security, and the security of your state isn't unimportant,
but it's not the only kind and for those in the western world it's not even
close to the most important.

~~~
gallonofmilk
I think you're missing the point. In the modern world there comes a point
where we either have to sacrifice some privacy for increased security or we
can have total privacy (encrypt everything) and lose our security. If you
think it is any other way you are foolish.

~~~
freshhawk
I get the point, I just think that the idea that total privacy would "lose our
security" to be completely unconvincing. Encrypt everything would only be a
real problem for mass surveillance technologies.

I guess the difference is that I see mass surveillance and any movement
towards a panopticon as much more dangerous than terrorism or espionage have
ever been. There is no rolling back a panopticon as that's very close to
complete and unlimited political power.

------
tsunamifury
Most of these guys are a disconnected from where the global market is going
and are proposing preposterous ideas for west coast tech scenes own problems.

The web was based on a Western educational reference model that is not the
normal mode for 3/4ths of the planet.

The new web would need to be pushed based, not pull based. It would need to be
need to be instantly authorable and aware of people and devices, Not document
based.

~~~
neilk
I'm surprised that people seem to believe you're trolling. Or perhaps that
confirms your point!

tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric
model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project
was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers.

Even in the world of HTTP/2 and all the other horrors of modern adtech, we
still have this model. The site operator painstakingly prepares some info for
anyone to find via a universal locator. And then it sort of runs itself.

(Caution: the following is handwavey bullshit I'm just making up right now.)

It's at least _thinkable_ that we could go in a totally different direction
now that we have instant messaging, always-connected devices, and some ability
to do automated natural language processing.

tsunamifury mentions how most of the planet still runs on person-to-person
messages. But for Westerners, think about how many jobs have operated in this
mode forever, where all their actions are about filtering incoming messages,
making decisions, emitting messages, and otherwise coordinating the work of
others. In the West, front-line service workers do this, and so do executives,
but everyone in the middle has more abstracted work product.

The web made everyone a publisher. Maybe the next thing could be: everyone
more empowered to be the customer-relations person / executive of their own
life.

That doesn't mean document-centric publishing goes _away_ , but maybe it's not
central to the next wave.

~~~
jakub_h
"tsunamifury is absolutely right that the relatively static, document-centric
model of the web is an extension of Western academic culture. TBL's project
was originally shaped by the need for researchers to share papers."

Wasn't the original WWW editable? I mean the thing that ran on NeXT boxes.

Anyway, the DynaBook idea is still alive for me. And it's probably close to
the thing we actually need.

