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.
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.
I sometimes I feel like I am by my self on privacy and freedom issues.
In real life, I also often feel like I am alone in caring about privacy and freedom issues. Sometimes I feel like a crackpot when trying to explain to people who don't care why privacy is important.
However I am hopeful that us techies who are actually the ones creating the future of the web are aware of and give weight to those issues.
It seems from reading the comments on slashdot and here, that privacy issues certainly are considered by techies.
I'm not in the US, but it is almost beyond belief to me that anyone in the US could not consider the wholesale spying on their own people without judicial oversight a privacy issue. I feel like those people have very little knowledge of history and even less ability to extrapolate from that knowledge.
You are not alone, I just hope there are enough of us to make a difference.
I think privacy/freedom issues are symptoms not root causes.
The Internet today allows/has allowed for the rapid extraction of information/wealth from the masses into the hands of a few.
I am totally opposed to the propping up of Mark Zuckerburgs and Larry Pages. Who then get to decide who and how the worlds information shall be accessed. This should not be the point of the internet.
There are too many unintended consequences that a Page or Zuckerberg are struggling to handle by themselves.
We could have handled nuclear tech in the same way we handled the internet "to spur innovation" and propped up a Zuckerberg of nuclear tech. But we haven't. Why? Because we know there will be nonrecoverable unintended consequences.
It's time we handled the internet the same way.
I was shocked with the quality of discussion at Facebook about Trump. Its as if only because Trump appeared in the US the issue has come to the forefront. How many other Trumps and ISIS type orgs(that we haven't heard about) have been propped up around the world? Forget about the national consequences, there are local unintended consequences in every neighborhood and sphere of life when unchecked information is spread too fast.
If people take information out of the system, they have to make it available to everyone else (or some variation of it) has to be a guiding principle.
I know election season can make us all a little crazy towards the 'other team', but are you seriously putting Trump in the same camp as ISIS?
Hitler, Nazis, etc. have been used so often in the past 50 years by all sides that it is easy to brush it off as empty rhetoric. But if the left has become so blind in their hatred towards Trump, that these comparisons can be made without a second thought, it is hard to take anything you say seriously.
I do agree with your comments up to that point, and apologize if I misinterpreted the point of the last paragraph.
I am not taking a position on that, but have you asked yourself under which circumstances you would accept a comparison with Hitler as valid? Or do you think that something like Hitler could never happen again, and therefore, the comparison cannot ever by appropriate again? If so, why?
I think the Hitler comparison is more as a very persuasive orator and the contents of his speeches (blaming the foreigner/other for all your society's ills) rather than his more notable sins like the holocaust.
I think its being referenced because it was brought up at a Facebook Q&A session with Zuckerberg. As in what about the rise of characters in other parts of the world. It's all good that no one is responsible right?
"Why? Because we know there will be nonrecoverable unintended consequences ... It's time we handled the internet the same way."
You can set down your phone anytime you want to. It just feels like you can't.
The degree to which "Internet" becomes a driving force in your life is the degree to which you diminish your life to allow that to happen. It doesn't have to be this way and it takes very little effort or imagination to keep it from being that way.
There is also the option to only use sites that respect your privacy. This rules out Facebook for me, and so far I don't miss it at all. I am happy to email or IM people I want to communicate with, or actually call and talk to them. I don't care about people adding likes to photos of my lunch.
I personally am hopeful that there will be a better solution over the horizon.
Zeronet is very interesting to me as a proof-of-concept, not perfect but very interesting and a glimpse into what I would like the future of the internet to be.
> We could have handled nuclear tech in the same way we handled the internet "to spur innovation"
We did in fact, handle nuclear tech in the same way - briefly. You might not have heard of the "Atoms for Peace"[1] program launched by president Dwight Eisenhower back in 1953. It really did spur innovation (research and development of peaceful applications of nuclear physics - e.g. medical equipment).
The "Atoms for Peace" program was also directly responsible for the first nuclear reactors in Israel, Iran and Pakistan.
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.
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
Why not just donate to FSF/EFF? My situation is the same, but I do not feel lonely because I know there are huge non-profit organizations fighting for me.
> 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
Privacy and Freedom are values. The web (along with Facebook et.al.) is a product.
I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting distinction to make.
The WWW as Tim designed it solved a problem it turns out many people have. Most people don't perceive a privacy and freedom problem though. The can say what they want online and most of us haven't felt tangible effects from a loss of privacy. Perception is reality after all.
What I want to know is what is the next revolutionary WWW like Internet product that solves a pain many people feel? After the WWW what hidden pain is there that might bring about innovation in the truest sense?
> What I want to know is what is the next revolutionary WWW like Internet product that solves a pain many people feel?
I think that already happened and the answer is/was "smartphones". Most people circa 1999 probably wouldn't have thought that they needed an always-on, always-connected computer in their pocket (they sort of existed, e.g. the Apple Newton, and weren't that popular). The "killer app" for mobile phones at the time was voice, and maybe texting, but primarily voice in the US. "Apps" -- as in the general ecosystem, rather than a particular app -- are the 'killer app' of smartphones; it's the idea of having small task-specific apps rather than big general-purpose application suites.
I'm not sure what the next revolutionary product/application is, but it seems likely that it won't be on the PC. I say that as someone who vastly prefers the PC over mobile or set-top or embedded or basically any other platforms, but the PC has been the focus of 30+ years of concerted effort while some of those other platforms represent near-greenfield opportunities, so it's likely that the as-yet-unmet desires of the general public are going to be there.
I once read that Steve Jobs told Drew Houston that file sync was "a feature not a product". Obvi SJ was wrong but it's an interesting distinction to make.
He might have actually been correct if Apple could make iCloud work properly. As it is you'd be crazy to trust your data to it and Dropbox is a no-brainer product.
I think the thing to remember is that people interested in tech are the ones who experience these problems first. For example, most of us experienced ad fatigue, clickbait fatigue, and social media fatigue years ago, but now these are all mainstream frustrations.
It often seems like it's too late for things to change direction, but what I've observed is that when one of these angsts afflicts a sufficient portion of the population, the reaction is decisive and rapid. See: the exodus from MySpace to Facebook.
Freedom and privacy might not have instant appeal to the masses, but I will tell you what does: attention-shaping. Google, FB, etc. all shape what information you are exposed to and provide limited or no controls over how to control that exposure. DuckDuckGo got a lot of traction on this issue alone, but I think it remains a key element for any open web advancement. Not to simply say "this replaces Google" or "this is an alternative to Facebook" but to say "how about looking at things from this perspective? What if you want to control these aspects of what you see?"
> 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.
That pretty much guarantees they will outgrow the venue shortly, if not immediately.
> "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?""
To me the answer is obvious.
Look at how the web is used now. Like it or not a high proportion of web activity is social. However, users of sites with a social focus recognise that there are drawbacks to the current arrangements, in that your user experience does not always reflect what's best for you. To give a simple example, the news feed on Facebook is curated based on algorithms you do not have full control over.
From a technology perspective, there are two key parts to what could replace this arrangement to provide a tangible benefit... home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure. Decentralised identity would then be used to connect to the home servers.
One way to think about it would be... instead of typing in a website address, you choose from a contact list. Whatever people share is held on their personal server. You could use apps that run on your own server to aggregate media from your contacts.
The tangible benefit is found in connecting to others without relying on middle men. Contact is direct whilst still retaining convenience.
> home servers and decentralised identity. Home servers would need to be as close to zero configuration as possible, whilst still remaining secure.
People aren't going to buy more black-box hardware they don't directly interact with. Consumers already struggle with routers.
I agree with the core concept, but I think we'll need mobile servers instead of home servers... a simple "Internet" app that installs on anyone's laptop, desktop, or cellphone. Something with a distributed/peer-to-peer file system for ubiquitous content, and peer-to-peer RSS.
The harder question is (complex) querying. How do we avoid the centralization of Google, while still retaining the functionality? I don't see how such a new service could survive if there's a regression in search.
People struggle with routers because they're terrible. Buggy, inconsistent, and their UI is full of detailed technical questions they don't know the answer to.
I imagine the box of the future is a home cloud box with a small touchscreen on it for the easiest bootstrapping ever. Enter a name and that's the new dynip subdomain and said. Enter a password and that's the password for wifi and for accessing the group shared content online, and the encryption key for cloud backup. Dont ask the user what encryption they want, just set up wpa2.
Physical panel is always admin. Let the panel admin create users and admins with their own credentials for all the usual cloud services - docs, email (at their subdomain), some kind of social networking/IM node, with easy-to-download apps for various other services like minecraft or music streaming or whatever, etc.
I think we are looking at this the wrong way. We are looking at it like techs. These kind of problems need to be looked at from the customers point of view (ok, I know that Facebook users are the product, not the customer but the analogy works)
Ask yourself one question: What problem am I solving with this?
Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device, however simple, just to connect to others in a decentralized way? Would your mum use it? That's your target audience.
I firmly believe the future must have a better way of doing things but we need to look at the pain points, the current problems that the current tools are attempting to solve and then coming up with something better and easier (let's keep network effects out of the equation for now).
I don't know what that is but it must be as simple as clicking something that says "Log in to <Product Name>"... not another device, however cool or simple it is.
Perhaps a router that gives you a simple question during setup, e.g. Would you like to enable SocialCloud? A major problem I could see with something like that is that I imagine most people get their routers from their ISP and I have no idea how big the router market is... I got mine from Sky and have no intention of replacing it.
Consider what would happen if you asked the same question about technologies that are popular today before they were popular... What problem does WhatsApp solve? What problem does Instagram solve? What problem does YouTube solve? Instant messaging apps, photo sharing websites and video sharing websites all existed before WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube, yet they all took off in a big way. Home servers can take off despite the competition so long as there are enough early adopters willing to take a punt. Network effects can kick in after there's a small, dedicated group getting use out of the technology.
> "Can you honestly see the Facebook-masses buying a blackbox device"
They don't have to buy anything. You can run a home server on computing devices you probably already own.
Apple proved your point with Rendevous on Mac OS X. I actually got burned by its easy setup when I bought a Mac laptop for air-gapped use. They used to advertise WiFi as an optional feature, which this ad didn't have. Turns out, it did have WiFi, activated when I turned it on, and Rendevous already had it setup in the background on an open connection. I remember being confused at just how up to date the Apple Store looked. Very, briefly confused followed by eye roll and sigh that an $80 device was already compromised for use case.
Nonetheless, things like it and Time Machine illustrate just how much use one can get out of certain features if the UX is bulletproof or nearly so. Routers might be done as easily depending on the circumstances. I'm almost certain ISP's could pull that off. Give them username and password to use on a HTTPS site that downloads the right configuration into an OpenWRT router they supply with any configuration software built-in. It then prints locally-generated password and other configuration data on form for customer to safely store. Any recoveries can be done with it or through ISP.
IPFS already does this and exists. It is decentralized, it lets you put your own content in it whenever you want, and anyone can use it.
IE, you can simply drop an html page into your own IPFS directory, and other users of IPFS can browse to it (assuming you put global read permissions on it). It is no more complicated than a daemon and a virtual file system.
Querying is indeed the real issue. I've between reading up on delay tolerant networking; it seems pretty tough to hit the right balance between making metadata generally available and crushing the network with metadata updates. Centralized directories make it easier, though still not trivial, to make content findable on a network.
There have between a bunch of proposals (eg, grokster) out there which have started off as radically decentralized, but eventually took on a layer or three of super peers to manage that metadata transfer, after the fully decentralized model failed under real traffic.
(Good datasets also seem to be a problem here. The available ones are pretty small or have a lot of caveats, which makes it tough to really see how a solution will play out is the real world.)
Also, if the idea takes off, I'd expect to see the functionality being built-in to home routers. However, that's not necessary for the popularity of home servers to grow.
Very interesting idea about simple home servers used to eliminate the middle men. I have to admit, this actually seems like a viable option if it could be done right. Good idea that I think deserves more thought and should be looked into. I'm curious what the opinions of others are on this idea.
This is what I'm working on at Optik -- but forget the idea of a server. All we need is a device, a writing program, and a sync program. Everyone already has these tools in their pocket, they just have a bad interface and therefore nobody knows how to use it in this manner.
Identity is solved by real-world trust. Facebook has proven most of us are separated by less than 5 degrees.
The only thing I don't like about it being in a phone is what happens when you change phones? How's that transfer made easily? How can v you guarantee everything will be removed when they get rid of their old phone?
Also, I have only about 15 apps, 300 pictures, and 10 sorry videos and I'm constantly running out of space even with half the stearate being on an SD card. I can't imagine puerile having enough storage to run something like this on their phone.
We could easily fit more storage (and more battery) on phones, there just isn't the market demand for it. With such a decentralized system, demand may increase.
Most knowledge as we use it now is ephemeral and can be somewhat centralized safely. The permanent knowledge or at least the trusted hashes of that knowledge can travel with us.
Which is why you want content-addressable decentralized storage, so the content gets distributed either peer to peer or through public caching infrastructure that's operated by ISPs, just as IP router are nowadays.
Ever thought about whether the assumption that having control over what your see on your Facebook feed might be incorrect?
If we're talking about the ideal world that may be true, but the real world is far from perfect. If you ask 100 people do you want to live a meaningful life, probably 99 of them will say yes. But do they? Probably 1 out of those 100 will live a meaningful life. If you ask people do you want to be told what to do, or do you want to do what you want, most of them will say they want to do what they want. But in reality most people just want to be told what to do because making decisions and being responsible for it is not an easy thing.
Coming back to Facebook feed, there's a reason why people keep using Facebook even though many people hate it. Sure it's not ideal but there will never be an ideal world. I think the reason why most "decentralization" advocates never succeed is exactly because they're being too ideal (read naive) about this.
That said I think the pendulum will swing back someday in the future surely, it just won't be by these guys. It will be from some random technology which didn't even aspire to "disrupt" the web.
> "But in reality most people just want to be told what to do because making decisions and being responsible for it is not an easy thing."
As I said before, content could be curated by apps. You could choose the apps that present the information in the way you like. The difference is, if a better app comes along you can switch to it without losing your past data because all the data would be application-agnostic, there's a greater degree of separation between the raw data and the presentation of that data.
I think it's just about network effects. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook.
Although network effects work the other way as well, when people start leaving social networks they collapse exponentially just like they grew exponentially.
Yes, I was very interested when I learnt what Urbit did, as I think it ticks a lot of the right boxes. The only weakness for me is how it handles distribution of identity, but that's not a fundamental issue, it can be changed whilst still keeping what makes Urbit promising as a home server platform.
> Zooko threw cold water on everybody ("Is this just 1999 again?")
I have all the respect in the world for people like Vint Cerf, but the fact that he mentioned "copyright" and "intellectual property" twice in his list of otherwise quite interesting proposals make me doubtful about "1999" ever making a come-back. (I personally view the 1999-2005 or so period as a "good" one for the Internet, all of the dreams of that period have mostly been shattered by now).
I only came online in 2000, so to speak, but I distinctly remember that back in those days IP and copyrights were the last things on people's minds. Things like Napster and Audiogalaxy were pushing the Internet forward, and you can look at Wikipedia as "infringing" on the British Encyclopedia's rights to be the ultimate encyclopedia or you might take a second, more cautionary look, at the fact that Google built its business and its current $500+ billion status on stealing other websites' content and storing it on their servers.
Jaron Lanier has written about the hallowing out of the middle class due to intellectual and creative property being accepted as "free on the internet". As it stands the Googles of the world have private servers, patents and proprietary technology, ( and the money to protect themselves) but Google can scrape the creative resources of billions of individuals without paying them. In that regard a return to creative/intellectual property rights specifically for individuals might be a forward thinking move assuming it leads to payouts. I know the details are more complicated ( and I might be wrong) but I thought I would chime in.
The middle class has never been involved in creative IP in huge numbers. What they were involved in is a lot of officework which has been automated away, and union-protected jobs that have now disappeared. Stuff like designing presentations now done in Powerpoint, typing up reports now autogenerated, doing typographical work now completely removed, manning and stocking a shop you can now bypass with Amazon, distributing products to such shops which are now gone, raising ads for now-dead newspapers, managing factory processes that are now in China, working for local authorities now so cash-strapped they're literally bankrupt...
The IP industry actually boomed in the late '90s, as the Internet was booming. We now produce more IP content than ever before, selling to the entire planet. I don't see any relationship whatsoever between IP and middle-class crisis, tbh. Disintermediation simply kills people in the middle. Some of those middlemen might have been IP-related, but they were few.
He was mainly talking about how hard it is for individuals to capture value they create online. For example, it's very difficult to make money off of a viral video, popular Pinterest page, or a niche blog. Basically, only the biggest silos have reasonable monetization options, and the individual users who are creating value get screwed.
I agree there's a technology gap there, as would anyone watching the adblocker war. My biggest criticism is economic: there are so many people online that massive supply dwarfs demand, pushing prices to zero (Exhibit A: journalism). Conveniently, zero is the only price you can really charge online, and you get a feedback loop.
Patreon is my favorite answer to this problem so far.
That problem is entirely disconnected from the concept of IP. Draconian enforcement would kill Internet virality, not enable anybody to make money from it.
The real problem is to incentivize payment. As Valve says, piracy is a service problem. First your service must be wanted, then it must be valuable enough to pay for, and payment has to be easy too.
Jaron Lanier also talks about a mythical 20th century that was good for middle-class artists and musicians, completely in contrast to evidence from reality.
He's 100% right that hollowing out of the middle class is a serious problem for a free society. His prescriptions about IP are mostly nonsense.
I suspect some perception bias. There weren't that many artists and musicians around to have significant effect on the middle class whole (and artists and such weren't especially middle class).
The Internet (including their imagined markets!) would be entirely dead without the likes of Google search. Those who see these technologies as infringing and as leeches have no understanding of where value comes from.
Trivially with robots.txt, which is standardized and so well known among anybody doing webservers that not having such a rule ought to be considered as consent.
About the same as the rule here in Sweden on filming - you're free to film in any private venue until told not to.
The ideas they talked about at this summit were really exciting: my favorite is the Interplanetary File System: a decentralized way to share files without a server. They did a crazy demo of a chat room where you could chat live, drag and drop to share files, even watch streaming videos inline, all without a central server! It was completely peer-to-peer, and all done in JavaScript!
I'd prefer some action items from meetings like these. What we need is an interledger + IPFS integration with some form of ledgered/DAO backed deployment mechanism. This will give us high trust software deployments that also scale for high decentralization across the world's infrastructure. IoT updates done this way, for example, would allow devices get their own wallets and use those funds to pay for their own existence.
Never have I read a post where Poe's law applied my strongly.
If you are serious, I think perhaps you are trying to solve too many social problems with technological ones -- see the recent DAO drainage -- if devices had wallets to pay for their own existence, they would almost certainly just get hacked. They'd certainly be a great target!
The drainer of the DAO well might have a point arguing it is "legal" to do, given the protocol allows it. Solving that without a hard fork will be exceedingly enlightening. Solving social problems is a separate problem entirely, given the socials require centralization. We still need centralization, of course, but it has zero to do with embodying trusted infrastructure.
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/