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Comment by leetsec | Hacker News Reader

The OP here is also the author of MathB.in, a popular math pastebin. He has decided to shut down MathB.in now as a result of this incident. Quoting from http://mathb.in/6 below:

> I have considered shutting down this website several times in the past. But when another of my domain, susam.in, where I used to host my personal blog (archive) was seized and transferred to a law enforcement organization without any notification or authorization, it was the last straw. I do not wish to spend my weekends worrying about spam and unlawful content. I do not wish to maintain constant vigilance on my online servers to maintain ownership. It consumes time, more time than I can afford.

This is sad for WWW. We need more independently run websites, not less. The web of early 2000 is rapidly disappearing.

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It's time for a new search engine -- and no, ddg is not it. We need a search engine that doesn't search the new internet. The instagrams, the pinterests, the wikihows, the seemingly every single blog on the internet that is designed to take your time away from you by hydrating you in droplets between sweat lodges.

We need create a new internet on the internet that does not search the new internet. DDG brings back content from the same sites google and bing does.

I want a new search engine focused on the passionate creatives who produce for the web. The early adopters of the web who have been overshadowed by the adwords and the interstitials and lightboxes.

I want content. I want a recipe site with the ingredients at the top and a list of instructions below it. Not 6 paragraphs of why you want to eat this food because of your grandma making it and then people come NO, just tell me what to put in it and how to do it and that's it and load in .1 seconds instead of 100 seconds and then stall every time I try to scroll because you need to tell your advertisers which part of your page is looked at the most.

Your advertisers are more important than your readers and it's not cool.

Serious question: Would you be willing to pay to access/consume the content found on the search engine?

Yeah this is an important question. A big reason why the internet is the way it is today is because creating and updating quality content takes time and a certain amount of skill, which most people want to be compensated for.

Counterpoints:

* Stack Exchange Sites

* Wikipedia

Compensation does not have to be only monetary. In stack exchange & wikipedia, the contributors are rewards with points & special titles.

While true, this thread was about paying for the "old internet" which implies monetary compensation.

Stack Exchange is a private, profitable business. Wikimedia Foundation collects a hundred million dollars in donations each year and spends 40% of it to keep functioning. The contributors are effectively volunteers supporting these companies, which is a lot different than running your own site or channel and pumping content into it regularly.

I would. I know that because I spent a lot of time on the internet in 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

Today we have the concept of "user-contributed content", which means content produced without expectation of monetary reward, then uploaded to a site operated by an organization with an expectation of monetary reward. In 1992 these for-profit organizations did not exist: the services through which people accessed the content were created and operated without expectation of monetary reward, too.

It was glorious. There are some valuable content and valuable services that weren't produced in 1992 and would not be produced in the future if it became impossible to profit from producing it, so I don't want to remove the profit motive from the internet. But search results from Google (and its competitors) are now almost completely dominated by for-profit actors, and I agree with grandparent that we need a new search engine that essentially specializes in content produced without expectation of monetary reward.

> 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

I don't have any figures - that would be interesting - but I guess even today the 'vast majority of internet content' is produced not expecting any monetary reward. It depends how you count the stuff what exact figure you'd arrive at. 99.9% seems closer to what it might be than 50%. Maybe I'm super-wrong about that.

Good point. The big difference between 1992 and today is the profit-seeking middlemen between the reader and most of the user-contributed content. These middlemen show ads, track people, require people to sign in and force people to shift their attention to the task of getting rid of modal dialogs (e.g., "sign up for our newsletter") before they will display the user-contributed content. They make it hard for the reader to concentrate on the current web page by showing many links to other web pages on the site or on the sites of the middleman's commercial partners. (Even Stack Exchange, named by another comment in this thread as one of the good middlemen, does that.) In contrast, navigating Usenet and the web of the 1990s was a lot more streamlined; to a greater extent than is possible today, a reader could stay focused on the user-contributed content or on his or her reading goal.

Of course there are middlemen today like Hacker News and Wikipedia that pretty much stay out of the reader's way, but they are the middlemen for closer to 0.1% of the user-generated content than 50% of it.

Very graceful disagreeing, thank you! I appreciate it. I have a book called Talking Philosophy that says that when a philosopher at Oxford wishes to express disagreement they say "Quite. But at the same time...", and that one in Sydney says "Bullshit!" p.s. I'm in Sydney :-)

> I want a new search engine focused on the passionate creatives who produce for the web

Serious question: Do you think the 'old Internet' still exists to such a degree? I'm not just talking about link rot (although most of my links from a decade ago sadly no longer work), but also things like outdated content, like a car review of a 2010 Toyota.

I don't know if the old internet exists anymore, as much as I want it. Sure, we are at an old internet site right now (Hacker News), but what more?

I think it does, the signal is just overwhelmed by the commercial internet. I imagine the number of creative, interesting people who publish their content is approximately linear growth, while the number of ways the commercial internet tries to "reach out" and expand is geometric.

Shameless plug: I've recently started working on a recommender system/search engine built on RSS/Atom feeds (https://findka.com).

Check out https://millionshort.com/ Where you can skip the first x sites and exclude lot of sites to skip the promoted and SEOd crap from the results

It's not just sad or inconvenient for independent websites, it could lead to identity theft. I've got my own domain name specifically to not be dependent on the whims of Google or my ISP. I control my own email domain, or so I thought. If someone can take my email domain like this, they can also it access all sorts of sensitive information.

The internet really, really needs to be more reliable than this. Losing a domain name for an unknown reason should be impossible. Also, losing a domain name by accident should be a lot harder.

> This is sad for WWW. We need more independently run websites, not less. The web of early 2000 is rapidly disappearing.

Its still there, but there is a lot less of it. Recently I've decided to go back to ownership of my music and rebuild my old (~20 000 track) collection. Some of the stuff is rather obscure so I end up on niche blogs with pixelated-animated favicons, no weird whitespace and sometimes almost bare HTML. Definitely makes for nostalgic feelings..

But the independent sites are dying for a reason

Because you'll try to put something up and you get flooded with spam/hacking attempts and whatnot

Because registering a domain, deploying wp, etc if not so trivial

Gmail and other "big email providers" are needed since there's no litigation against email abusers, and there's a constant flood of crap to the spam folder

Walled gardens are surely problematic but they're less trouble than going independent.

And losing the domain for "unlawful content" is bullshit.

The OP wouldn't be talking like this if he were actually responsible for the "unlawful content".

And seriously, does Twitter lose its domain because someone posted malware or child porn or whatever?

Edit: So where's a safer place to register domains?

Maybe China?

Can we build another one?

We can build a GNU one! https://gnunet.org/en/

With .org's recent debacle...

Relevance?

1) Both have to do with gTLDs/ccTLDs and sketchy behavior by TLD operators

2) Both have to do with site operators experiencing a sense of uncertainty due to problems with the ICANN landscape.

Is it really so hard to comprehend relevance? I'd tell you to try to keep up, but that's against HN rules & regulations, so I won't say that.

.org isn’t a ccTLD?

You're absolutely right, it's a gTLD.

What is going on in the ICANN landscape (outside of the .Org profitization)?

The project is on the dot-org TLD, which has seen some recent discussion, compiled in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668003

why is this downvoted?

gnunet is an application. the fact that the development is hosted on a .org is entirely irrelevant. gnunet's function doesn't depend on it.

https://urbit.org

I remember reading urbit's launch. It didn't make sense how things worked. What are your thoughts on it?

They could definitely do a better job of explaining what it is, how it works, and why I need it. I am interested though

Long story short, the creator and the relevant technology has strong fascist tenancies and should be stayed away from at all possible.

Cite: look up Mencius Moldbug or Curtis Yarvin. Alt-right 'darling'.

The tech itself has him residing as the root node, and able to 'kick anybody off the island'.

Didn't he leave Urbit earlier this year?

I have no clue. All I know is that it's tainted personally by him. Haven't looked back.

It's easier than ever to built the web of 20+ years ago. Running a VPS with PHP where you had to patch the server and worry about hackers and malware has always been a concern, this is nothing new. But on today's web you can get around all of that with PaaS solutions like Heroku. $7/mo and you can host your custom site all you want without worrying about security or infrastructure.

A domain being seized by law enforcement for hosting illegal content (even if it was put there by hackers) is nothing new and has nothing to do with the state of the modern web.

You should probably also be worried about VPS seizure by the hosting provider.

A web hosted in the hands of a few is exactly the problem leading to the problem here.

Centralization is the issue. May it be registries, ISPs, hosting providers or anything else. Heroku and PaaS do not solve this at all.

Was the Web of the 2000s really based on completely decentralized ISPs, registries, and hosting providers? I was there and I seem to remember there being a small number of ISPs, a small number of registrars, and a small number of hosting providers. A site like this would be registered at GoDaddy and hosted at DreamHost.

Of course many people could fill out the ICANN paperwork themselves and run a server from their own home, but many people can do that now too. And if you do that, you still run into the issue of hackers being able to install malware on your systems. But instead of the police seizing your domain, they kick in your door in the middle of the night with guns pointed at your family.

Maybe it would clear things up if you could lay out for me the exact scenario that combines "the web of the 2000s is rapidly disappearing" with "registrar, ISP, and hosting provider centralization is the issue" and ends with "if that wasn't the case, this website would never have had to shut down". I feel like you're remembering the web of the 2000s very VERY differently than I am.

In the early 2000s there were probably 10-20 national dialup services, plus tons of local services (it was an easy business to get into, either get a t1 for upstream internet and a t1 for your modem pool, or run a radius server and contract out through megapath), dsl had competition with clecs running in the central office and mandatory line sharing, and these were also in competition with cable (which had some minimal line sharing in areas).

There were a ton of hosts back then, but there still are. I don't remember exactly when registrars became a concept, i'd guess that might have been 1999 though; I don't think there's that many more or less now. A lot more registries with .ninja and .bike and whatever.

I agree though, if law enforcement wanted your domain back then, it would be about the same as now. Although, maybe someone would have called/emailed you about it with whois contacts back then.

Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, HughesNet, Exede, CenturyLink, Frontier, Cricket, MediaCom, Cox, Sprint, Windstream, T-Mobile, WOW, Dish Network, Cable ONE, Suddenlink, US Cellular, Google Fiber...

Actually it might just be easier to link to the Wikipedia article about ISPs serving the US because there are a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...

Sorry, one of my pet peeves is when people say "the Web of [insert time here] is dead!" when the Web has never been more accessible both from a consumer standpoint and from a developer standpoint. The existence of Facebook and Google can be completely ignored if you actually want to. Emphasis on if you actually want to.

That's a big list, but often, you only have 1 or 2 of those options available to you.

85% of Americans live in urban areas where they would have at least the choice of one cable provider (Comcast, Charter), one DSL provider (AT&T), all of the satellite providers (HugesNet), and at least the big four cell phone providers. Not to mention local dial-up providers which do still exist.

Again, it all comes back to the idea of some people "wish" the web of the 2000s still existed, but aren't willing to sacrifice the comforts of the 2010's web to make it happen. You can host your own lightweight website but Wordpress and Facebook is easier. You can search the web without tracking and Javascript but the modern websites don't work without it. You can pick from a huge variety of ISPs but they won't all be at 100 Mbps. Basically, you can have the web of the 2000s, but it comes at the cost of some of the conveniences of the 2010s web. A lot of people aren't willing to make that trade.

Nostalgia is hard. It seemed amazing back then but not many people would choose to go back to dial-up and phpMyAdmin. For those who say they would... what's stopping you? It all still exists today.

It is not easier. If you don't host your website behind cloudflare it can be easily ddosed.

The only way to get good ddos protection is to centralize because it requires you to have close personal relationships across the world in order to get good bandwidth at every location.

Or to massively decentralize so that you need to bring down the entire network.

You could be. But you won't be. Getting denial of serviced on the web running a personal site is like getting attacked by terrorism. Sure, it happens, but it only ever directly effects the lives of less than half of a percent of people even with the most generous definitions of "terrorism". It's the reactions to it that cause damage.

And it's the same reactions to it on the internet that hurt and not the DoSes. Just run your website. If it gets DoS'd no big deal. It's not like you even need a single nine of uptime consistency.

I've run my for 20 years from my home connection, I've been a jerk on IRC, I've used it for gaming clans, I've hosted and continue to host tor onion services. I have never been DoS'd.

At all my past jobs we've been hit with DDOS (either directly or indirectly via our customers). If the odds are like terrorism I must work at firms with the world's unluckiest businesses.

Sounds like you are involving money. Don't do that.

Plenty of non-profits have been ddosed. Your website is either small or is just lucky to have an audience that isn't inclined to ddos.

Yes. Like most websites.

The threshold for "small" is a lot smaller than it was in 2000.

There are a lot of people in this thread who have very valid complaints about the web, but don't make any sense at all in context. This one is a great example. Sure DDoS sucks but what at all does that have to do with the difference between today's web and the web of the 2000s? Today's web offers DDoS protection (optionally) and the web of the 2000s did not.

The first DDoS happened in 1996. Absolutely nothing to do with the current topic at hand, completely off topic.

It is way easier to ddos a website today than back in the 2000s. Back in 2000, you could block almost every ddos simply by having gigabit. Now there are millions of more exploitable devices.

Do a search, https://www.google.com/search?q=stresser

An attack that can cripple all but the largest networks can be had for $5-10.

I always take those speeds with a grain of salt as it is likely that they dont actually provide those speeds. What is someone gonna do if the speeds are wrong? Sue them in court for not commited the crime they are paying to commit enough?

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