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.
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.
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.
His right wing authoritarian base is a bit terrifying though.
Here is a holocaust survivor's take: http://www.thewrap.com/are-hitler-trump-comparisons-fair-a-h...
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
That pretty much guarantees they will outgrow the venue shortly, if not immediately.
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.
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.
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.
Complete 1-stop wifi and cloud server.
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.
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.
What you think?
Already done with the Almond+ and others. The problem is that at best, the firmware behind the pretty screen is terrible. At worst? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/13/home_router_botnet/
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.
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.
If it's simple enough to be mobile, it's also simple enough to be static and self-hosted. And there are advantages to that.
Replication, redundancy, and consistent presence, for starters.
Identity is solved by real-world trust. Facebook has proven most of us are separated by less than 5 degrees.
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.
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.
- Data plans. Everyone connecting to your blog through your phone would use up a hell of a lot of data.
- iPhones are notoriously hostile to P2P apps, so that rules out about half of all smartphone users.
There are other issues but those are the most significant imo.
Maybe this can be solved with good caching.
But what you don't want is your site / post going viral which will bring down your internet connection.
This means that reverse scaling effect kicks in. The more popular the file is the less people access it from original source.
Without the serialisation of actions that centralisation gives, it's much harder and hence more expensive to create things.
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.
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.
Although network effects work the other way as well, when people start leaving social networks they collapse exponentially just like they grew exponentially.
I like the concepts of Namecoin & Keybase, IPFS and Tahoe-LAFS, etc, Tor and I2P, CJDNS, PHB's Mathematical Mesh, and so on...
Having your own server or cluster that your own devices connect to for anonymization, identity, syncing, federation, etc, would simplify so much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't anyone exclude their pages from being scraped by google if they so desire?
If you post something on a site that allows itself to be scraped, only then it will go on google.
About the same as the rule here in Sweden on filming - you're free to film in any private venue until told not to.
Corey Doctorow also had a really good talk, I encourage everyone to watch the stream. There's a summary and link here: “The Internet is the Only Weapon We Have Left” @odbol https://medium.com/@odbol/the-internet-is-the-only-weapon-we...
Offtopic: Even Canva, an Australian company that knows I'm in Australia, sent me a Father's Day related email.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father%27s_Day#Dates_around_th...
And a couple dozen other countries.
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!
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/