alchemical

I still think there's a need for passwords depending on the context. For example I would worry if Google employees didn't encrypt their work laptop with FDE as there are very motivated people who super want access (even a tiny slither will do) to Google's internal infra.

Google has enough dirt on people anyway to implement a passwordless system because they practice very rigorous fingerprinting of individuals regardless. You don't even need a Google account. Google knows who you are as you traverse the web in any meaningful way. They do this through fingerprinting captchas / supercookies, and subsidizing core internet infra like Blogger, any number of vanity URLs (goo.gl), and they have others at their disposal.

But do note: Google are not 'too big to fail' like a bank.

The great Alphabet Leak of 2030 is upon us and we better be ready.

> Can be viewed with a radically stripped-down web browser.

Like Lynx?

In terms of sites versus apps, I think the browser vendors are responsible for making this happen. Adobe AIR was the closest effort I saw of marrying web technologies with apps.

Sadly AIR never took off and whilst I appreciate the intention, it left a huge looming question of what do we actually do with all this new web technology?.

One answer I came up with in recent years was what you suggested: of partitioning off the people who want to work with the technologies and keep them separate from the text+image+CSS based web we've all grown to love.

Similar to how the demo-scene was an offshoot of game development...

> HTML 5 and JavaScript is fluff for most websites

Yeah but HN can be progressively enhanced and it's also one of the few exceptions to the rule.

    <table id="hnmain"..

Indeed.

Worth noting the small eco-system of HN redesigns which all leverage HTML5+JS in some way :)

All sites should be like an electric stairs: the stairs still works when the power is cut off, but to the inconvenience of the users.

And for the websites that leverage browser features, those are the websites that stand out and shine.

It reminds me of Sturgeon's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law

If 99% of everything is crap, you can bet a sizeable wager the 1% wheat from the chaff are using HTML5 and Javascript APIs.

Also if a content silo counts as a 'top website' then this is an outlier and not to be included. Facebook is a walled garden and not indexable. Facebook is parasitical to the web. Twitter and Google are not the web either.

For those concerned about the possible bandwidth issues or scalability issues Twitter might have implementing their 'even more' characters, don't forget we can post upwards of a 2-3MB JPEG and Twitter handles it just fine.

I always liked the idea of stuffing data in metadata. For me, most tweets are insubstantial and thinly veiled metadata. There are always those claiming a tweet 'means' something but the context is usually entirely missing, hence the phenomenon of 'subtweets' and worse: the dreaded tweetstorm.

I could even encode arbitrary data in a JPEG if I wanted and get back data byte for byte. I just wonder what my followers would make of such tweets and if they are clever enough to fuzz the JPEG for meaning and context.

Internet scale packet timing collection only works when the traffic is not messed with when routing through TOR. It's quite a headache when {proxy}.appspot.com is used, or technical documents are exclusively routed through GoogleCache, or even CoralCDN for that matter.

There's even users who configure BitTorrent to use TCP instead of UDP so that it's very difficult to write DPI rules to parse out the TOR traffic. Couple this with meek, VPNs and traffic shaping tools and it's quite bothersome for them.

Honestly when I read the title I thought GH switched their business model and offered free users the ability to start a private repo, but this is not the case.

If it is the case that I have to pay to have privacy on Github, then it imposes a privacy-rich versus privacy-poor dichotomy which I am uncomfortable with. Now I know as far as these things go (GH can be subject to National Security Letters), that GH is not really absolutely private. (Backdoors into people's 'secret' GISTS anyone?).

GH had an opportunity here to change their business model so that free users can avail of private repos, and GH could still manage to bring in revenue. GH primarily makes the bulk of their income from what I call 'stakeholder accounts'. That is; those companies who simply couldn't function correctly if GH didn't exist. It is in these stakeholders that there is a symbiotic relationship of revenue for GH, and value for the stakeholder(s).

There are very little lone private individuals who have that kind of symbiotic relationship, and so at least give these low income users the same equal rights of privacy as behemoth tech organizations. It makes sense.

In terms of how GH gets revenue from these users, there are countless other ways to do this instead of relying on the monolithic device of a premium subscription model. Offer paid licenses for their proprietary GH clients. (A one off payment of $20.00 for the GH Windows client is something I would actually pay money for)...