Why We Need To Decentralize The Web (postlight.com) 69
One could argue that the web is already decentralized. But with major websites like Google and Facebook, it's increasingly harder to stay decentralized. Paul Ford writes: There's a good research report that was just published. It's called "Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future?" (That's a PDF so watch yourself.) What is decentralization? Take the web: Anyone can set up a web page and link to any other web page. That's decentralized. Anyone can make a search engine to find those web pages. That's centralized. The search engine can add blogging. That's Google + Blogger. Now it's both a publisher and a search engine. It has more power. Decentralized things are harder to manage and use. Centralized things end up easy to use and make money for relatively few people. The web is inherently decentralized, which has made it much easier for large companies to create large, centralized platforms. It's a paradox and very thorny. God bless the authors of this paper, they don't make you wade through. They pop up with recommendations by page 5: "We advise investors -- whether motivated by civic or fiscal concerns -- both to watch this space closely and to advocate for the pre-conditions that we believe will enable a healthier marketplace for online publishing. A precondition for the success of these distributed platforms is a shift towards user-controlled data, the ownership of a user's social graph and her intellectual property created online. It will be difficult for new platforms to develop without widespread support for efforts towards data portability and rights over data ownership. Data portability also enables new models for aggregation. Small, thoughtfully curated news sources will be made more powerful by having access to the user data currently locked inside mega-platforms, but right now, federated clients that interoperate between different platforms are borderline illegal -- fixing this may require adjusting overly broad regulations, like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
"We believe that these user-controlled data rights are essential to develop a more robust market and allow new efforts to emerge from existing communities. Though individual users might not directly care about or understand these rights, their adoption will free developers to create applications that leverage users' existing data, so that they can provide compelling, interesting new experiences, even with a small user base."
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FFS, does anybody know what decentralized means?
Decentralized, as the arpanet/internet was designed from the ground up, means that there is not single point that could be attacked to bring it down, and that it would be resilient to multiple attacks via a cell and mesh system that can isolate traffic when connecting links go down.
If you look at the 'physical wires' (I am sure you meant fibers), then you will see multiple providers, with multiple connections to any site.
Even if you look at a large single provider like Google, their infrastructure is a perfect example of a distributed network that can operate individually if it loses access to other segments of the network.
Guess what happens when we have vast amounts of smaller individual systems providing various ways to access all the same services?
Inevitably, without fail, those small groups slowly coalesce or are bought/sold directly in to slight few, yet larger groups, who them repeat the process until we're left with very, but very large groups of connected systems..
Not even w/ regard to tech specifically... It happens in all manner of areas.
People will start out being OK with everything being decentralized, but over th
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You missed, entirely, the point of my post with regard to the intent of "decentralizing" the web (or anything for that matter).
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The problem is that the national and international providers moved over to a hub network architecture. Cable companies with their "head-end" servers, satellite companies with a broadcast satellite. The telecoms companies might have multiple peers but websites have to have a host, a DDNS protection service, and depend on DNS for people to find their website. Any of those can be affected by political pressure.
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The internet is a series of connections that require physical wires. The owners of those wires will always be an authority
This is nonsense. Sure Comcast and Spectrum/TWC are a near duopoly, but that has nothing to do with the dominance of Google and Facebook on the content side. If you want to set up a website, no vast conspiracy of ISPs is going to stop you.
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Depends on what you want to say :)
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The internet is a series of connections that require physical wires.
You're wrong. The Internet is a series of tubes.
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There are already decentralised and open messaging services, the problem is if a system is open its also open to spammers too (eg email), and also getting users to use it...
Anyone can run their own XMPP server which will talk to any other XMPP service in a similar way to email, you simply need a valid domain name to create your own server.
XMPP spam (Score:2)
Anyone can run their own XMPP server which will talk to any other XMPP service in a similar way to email
Any email server can refuse to accept connections from other email servers. One example of this is blacklisting known sources of unrequested advertisements. Likewise, any XMPP server can refuse to accept connections from other XMPP servers. Spam control is ostensibly why Google Talk defederated from other XMPP servers when it became Hangouts and switched to a proprietary protocol [bitbucket.org].
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The problem is that there are blacklists which include ranges of dynamic IP addresses allocated to cable companies and other broadband service providers. If you do purchase a domain name with a static IP address, then usually all your Email gets stored on servers outsourced to an affiliate of Microsoft or Google.
The web has changed (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a rant about this from 2012:
Yeah, the web has changed in my day.
It used to be full of homepages. Personal sites. If you searched for something (and search sucked in those days, trust me), more often then not you found a website that someone had made on their own time and covered whatever subjects they wanted it to. And not a blurb on some reviewing site. No, the whole damn site was theirs. It depended on what you were searching for, but it ran the gamut of important to trivial. From fan-reviews of books, to people raging about how awesome the newest game was. But also important stuff like the effects of the fall of the Berlin wall the the social entanglement the web is posing for Muslim women.
Most of these pages were hosted for free. And I believe that's where I came in. Way past the endless September. Before the 90's putting something on the web required you to run your own server. Or have access to one in college or something. In the 90's, geocities and all lowered the bar for the internet and hosting was now free, with a small string attached.
Now a days things have changed. People no longer have their own servers or websites, that's too much work. The bar has been lowered even further. You no longer need to know HTML or even what a tag is. In the web 2.0 world, everyone can simply upload what they want onto websites. Facebook, flicker, tumbler, wordpress, and all. Those places have done the heavy lifting of making the webpage and all people have to do is insert the content. Web pages that take in people's information, pictures, links, knowledge and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see. When you google something now, the first result is usually wikipedia. Because wikipedia is where people upload their knowledge.
And that's it's own separate rant on the importance of wikipedia.
But anyway, today's internet is more centralized. If you want to know about a movie, you don't find someone's website with a page dedicated to ranting about the movie, you go to imdb and find facts and reviews uploaded by people. You see someone's rant that was upmodded by other. The one that got downmodded is buried and the truly insightful one got censored. (and then you go torrent it, but that's not the web).
This is a slightly disturbing consolidation of the web. Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web, the meaningful web is now a handful of sites dedicated to their particular topic. It's arguably more structured, but it's taking the power from the people and putting it in the hands of the companies that own the sites. It's arguably the natural course for these sorts of things. Something new came along. Everyone competed, and then a few, very few, people won, ate up the losers, and the consolidation left one or two victors. Which is why everyone was desperate to become to defacto standard. Fighting that process is hopeless. But the natural way things work is kinda crap. It leads to monopolies, and abuse of power. I guess I'm simply unsure about the nature of our gatekeepers.
And Jesus christ. Think about email. A wonderfully decentralized system where it's a no-holds-bar capitalist survival of the fittest right? We SSSHEEEEEIIITT boy! There's Gmail, yahoo, and maybe hotmail. There are also corporate mail servers. But by and far, for most of the populace, email has consolidated. When the fuck did THAT happen and how did I not notice?
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Whereas there was once an ever-increasing amount of participation on the web
Such as IMDB's message board. Also comment sections on all sites. Mostly gone. If a site does have a comment section it is usually Facebook or Disqus.
Always liked the way Slashdot did things with comments. I recall Kuro5hin and another site Advogato(?) had similar yet different comment systems.
Re: The web has changed (Score:2)
Yeah basically when it required some skill to have a webpage people more intelligent things were being said. Now you have some guys flat earth theory or anti GMO rant on being more widely distributed and presented as quality over science about the eclipse or genetic engineering by actual scientists.
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I guess he never did rank very high or get spread around much but there were plenty of young earth sites that were passed around back then. I got sent them all the time from my mom and step dad back then, now they just post that stuff to facebook instead.
Re: The web has changed (Score:2)
The timecube guy was/is deranged and everybody knew it and it wasn't being passed off as factual.
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In many ways, though, things haven't changed at all. Those hobbyist websites still exist. The web (and other internet services) that we all remember and love is still there. It just doesn't look like it because Google won't help you find most of them.
I do think that the dominance of search engines has created a bit of an illusion here -- lots of people seem to think that if Google doesn't index it, then it must not exist, but that's not true. But some of my all-time favorite websites intentionally keep sear
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> Facebook, ... and all that crap and host it for everyone else to see.
FecesBook, noun, a place where people post their crap that no one gives a fuck about.
--
Fuck You Red Cross for hijacking a red square and white plus symbol in video games.
Evolve! (Score:2)
to MESH networking.
One service to rule them all. (Score:1)
More like a decentralized SERVICE than a physical web. Problem is is that if it's not a Facebook/Google people are going to, it could be someone else.
Stupid use of the word (Score:4, Interesting)
The web is a decentralized because it sits atop of the tcp/ip protocol. Datacenters are scattered all over the place and not in one, central location. Traffic is routed all over the place. Packets still get scattered around the world. It's as decentralized as it's going to physically get. Because that's a physical concept.
But that's not what they're upset about. They decided they don't like that Google and Facebook get a lot of traffic. Too bad. They built useful shit. You make not think so, but millions of other disagree. Search engines made it so we could find those thousands of other pages. FB made it so we could find those friends we're not so good at keeping up with and made it easier to keep up with them.
Unless you're going to show us a way to spread all that traffic out so we don't need a search engine or a facebook, please just be quiet and leave us to get on with life.
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The web is a decentralized because it sits atop of the tcp/ip protocol. Datacenters are scattered all over the place and not in one, central location. Traffic is routed all over the place. Packets still get scattered around the world. It's as decentralized as it's going to physically get. Because that's a physical concept.
No, it's just as much a logical concept that the end points are not relying on a centralized service as much as a central server. If you set up your own SMTP server, it's decentralized. If you pass everything through Facebook messages, it's centralized. Why? Because they're a third party that is in total control of what they choose to let pass.
Decentralize Search? (Score:2)
Is it possible to build a decentralized search ranking system based on a block-chain cryptocurrency model? Google's monopoly is built on its search engine, and Facebook's is built on convenience and network effects. Myspace shows that Facebook's monopoly can be broken, so cracking search is the tough nut. I'm thinking of something where entities are given cryptocurrency for participating in the computation of search ranking computations, and can exchange the cryptocurrency for other currencies, or redeem it
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I think that YaCy might make you very happy: http://yacy.net/ [yacy.net]
wishful thinking (Score:1)
Not really about "the web" (Score:4, Interesting)
This is about large social media platforms and news aggregators rather than the internet or webpages in general. Here's the thing, this problem has already been solved (multiple times) which they admit to in the paper but don't think it's good enough because... not enough people use them and they aren't integrated into the "mega-platforms".
Sure sounds to me like the neo-nazis and their bile spewing kin aren't taking being kicked off twitter/facebook very well.
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I'm a jew, and I've been called a nazi for saying things like "mao killed more people than hitler". I think that the definition of nazi today is simply "whoever we don't like".
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I'm a jew, and I've been called a nazi for saying things like "mao killed more people than hitler".
It's best to add context. Mao killed more people though Hitler killed more Jews. It's not recommend that you reverse that statement lest people get the wrong idea.
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The context was me correcting someone who said that hitler killed the most people. I said that hitler killed 6 million jews but mao killed 80 million chinese. I was told that I'm a holocaust denier in response.
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Shocking, there are fools on the internet! I suppose citing a source would be helpful in such instances.
Then Do It. (Score:2)
Then build a decentralized search engine. There are many, many, examples of distributed systems - if "we" need to do something, or "one" could argue, I think it's time for "you" to read some academic papers on ring / distributed algorithms, blockchains, byzantine generals, submit papers to academic journals if there is a hole in the academic literature (doubtful), start cranking on code (probable), and start marketing existing solutions (almost certain.)
How do we block sites we don't like? (Score:2)
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When the web is decentralized, you can choose to omit domains from your view of the index.
Where are you, word salad sayer? (Score:2)
Where's that anonymous coward who calls posts critical of Google "word salad"? I miss that shill.
er, there's nothing wrong with that (Score:2)
If a decentralized system ultimately finds VALUE in some order and organization (in search function, for example) that may just be a natural and healthy evolution of a system.
After all, in the entropic universe, we have people. Clearly local organization is possible while entropy (in total) is increasing.
If there's ultimately a drawback, as the OP suggests, then the results will follow. To demand somehow decentralization is like emplacing a tyrant to impose anarchy - sort of self-defeating.
A similar view of just a 6Y break from blogging (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of an excellent post from an Iranian blogger who was put in prison [slashdot.org] for six years, from 2008 until an unexpected pardon in 2015. It's worth a read, especially for the younger folks who weren't paying much attention to information theory or internet philosophy prior to the Rise of Social Media.
- https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426 [medium.com]
See also: https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-01-04/after-six-years-prison-iranian-blogger-sees-very-different-internet [pri.org] and http://www.businessinsider.com/iranian-blogger-hossein-derakshan-internet-changes-6-years-filter-bubble-2015-7 [businessinsider.com]
We have the technology, but not the will. (Score:2)
We have ways to decentralize. We don't have the will to make it work. As already observed, we are moving toward a one-to-many relationship on the web. Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube etc harvest categories of information and harvest users who want that information.
Decentralizing requires us to return to a many-to-many relationship. The technology is almost ready. With bittorrent we have a beginning that could be further developed. Inherent redundancy would strongly resist tampering by powerful entities. A
It's deja vu all over again! (Score:2)
Then along came personal computers. Suddenly, computer power was put in the hands of the unwashed masses. Anybody coul