Tim Berners-Lee's plan to save the internet is admirable, but doomed to fail | Hacker News Reader

Tim Berners-Lee's plan to save the internet is admirable, but doomed to fail

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14 pointsc89X9 comments

Despite being the ever pessimistic type, can't agree with this article, and am not sure if the author even agrees with himself.

There's plenty of things to be encouraged by: my tech-illiterate family were harping on to me about the wonders of adblocking the other day. More eyes than ever are focused on cryptography thanks to the fairly maligned rise of cryptocurrency. Privacy invasions as a default, internet of shit as the cheapest product, ever-intrusive T&C's. It's bad yes, but more people than ever are fighting against privacy invasions, more people than ever are aware of it. Crypto-war II is right upon our doorstep and I think the cypherpunks actually have legions of people from all walks of life, with all various sorts of power behind them this time around.

We'll get through it.

I agree, just recently the FBI has been warning against the use of Smart Tvs, and in the UK there have been news reports about not buying certain popular toys for Christmas as they can enable hackers to communicate with your children.

> Smart Tvs

How are you going to find a non smart TV? That boat has sailed.

That's one of the things that keeps me from buying TV's: it'll eventually be a big security hole that will be the probable main entry point for an intrusion; I'm looking into projectors for the moment.

I'm just curious why the likes of ipfs, namecoin, opennic, onion websites are not more popular than they are now among tech people. We dont like the existing internet. We have alternatives. Why are we not leaving in droves? Why are we all still...here?

How do I use any of those things to do social link discovery like on HN, reddit, etc?

Because the problem is not technical but societal/political ? We all know Google/Facebook/Twitter and friends are farming our data, but in return they offer all of us (techies or not) extreme convenience. We have pieces of the technology to replace them, but we don't have a sustainable way of maintaining it in the long term at such vast scales. Everyone is too accustomed to not paying anything on the web and using services with as little hassle as possible, so we won't be able to finance it large scale by making people pay for it, at least not directly. What business model is left ?

I'm not desperate, I know something will emerge that is going to put the cursor further in the direction of decentralization and individual control. But nothing clear is there yet.

> We have alternatives

We have alternatives for serving flat, dumb content. But not for the things that really matter: Social discovery and discourse.

They're not fast enough, and disks aren't free.

People don't have just a few bytes that they'd like to store content-addressed. We have, as a commons, about 3-4 PiB of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21752320data to store, at a minimum. This data cannot possibly live in one place, it cannot possibly be checked all at once, and it cannot possibly be enumerated or searched.

These all operate over the existing Internet, by the way. There are proposals like NDN [0] for doing something different from TCP/IP, but odds are good that we don't need NDN, we just need less bad content-addressable systems.

I suspect that we'll need either a compression revolution, or an ISP revolution, in order to get more speed. It doesn't seem like existing distributed systems can improve on their use of local CPUs much more.

[0] https://named-data.net/

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