The Open Web Is Dying
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Or ICQ, then AIM and MSN messenger, then various, culminating in a WhatsApp owning IM.
Or MySpace’s social media monopoly being replaced by Facebook?
Yeah privacy is important. Has been since long before we were railing against the Clipper chip in the 90s.
Yeah companies have been grabbing data for a while. And it predates the web back to direct marketers and before.
Walled gardens and vendor lock-in are nothing new. The publishing platforms of today are doing exactly what AOL was doing over 20 years ago.
Today’s web let’s anyone spin up a fresh IP in seconds and use 100% open source software that they can freely modify to publish just about anything they want, while retaining full control of the entire stack down to the NIC, with total portability.
If you use one of the many platforms that want to lock you in and eat all your data, that’s your choice. But you don’t have to. Is it that the open minded consumer is dying?
I'd bet the number of open-minded consumers, if anything, is growing and is bigger than it ever was. The problem is the number of not open-minded consumers is perhaps growing faster.
The usual "most people don't care" argument aside (which is debatable, IMO, but a tangential issue), consider the literature— a lot of this open world has been written, discussed and built for the english-speaking world. How can a user begin to care if they are never exposed to alternatives, or don't find the support they need in these communities due to language barriers. All of this is just my own guesswork, and I hope I'm wrong, but as the web grows worldwide, the percentage of open-minded consumers with knowledge of these alternatives will probably keep diminishing unless more active work is actively done in making it available to them.
That's true on the software side, but on the hardware side, China has a much more vibrant hacker culture, mainly because they're not afraid to defy draconian US intellectual property laws. And they speak the second most popular language in the world.
I run Linux and use the open web BTW, I'm just old enough to know that insulting people you are trying to convince of something usually backfires. And, most importantly, you should know that they may not want or need your help. You calling them uninformed/ignorant/closed minded/etc. will just get you kicked out faster.
Advocating for some rando normie to use Linux is arguably malpractice.
Advocating for a software enthusiast / developer / privacy wonk etc to use and create open systems and tools is completely reasonable and potentially impactful.
It’s the people who create stuff that need to take the moral stand. The unwashed masses are, uh, the unwashed masses.
Every industry goes through a period of experimentation. In his 1985 book, Innovation And Entrepreneurship, on page 121, the great business guru Peter Drucker offered this:
In the 1920s, literally hundreds of companies were making radio sets and hundreds more were going into radio stations. By 1935, the control of broadcasting had moved into the hands of three "networks" and there were only a dozen manufacturers of radio sets left. Again, there was an explosion in the number of newspapers founded between 1880 and 1900. In fact, newspapers were among the "growth industries" of the time. Since World War I, the number of newspapers in every major country has been going downhill steadily. And the same is true of banking. After the founders -- the Morgans, the Siemenses, the Shibusawas -- there was an almost explosive growth of new banks in the United States as well as in Europe. But around 1890, only twenty years later, consolidation set in. Banking firms began to go out of business or to merge. By the end of World War II in every major country only a handful of banks were left that had more than local importance, whether as commercial or private banks. ...But each time without exception the survivor has been a company that was started during the early explosive period. After that period is over, entry into the industry is foreclosed for all practical purposes. There is a "window" of a few years during which a new venture must establish itself in any new knowledge-based industry.
The open period for the Internet appears to have been the 20 years from 1990 to 2010, give or take a year. The biggest surprise about this is that there was a constant public rhetoric about the Internet that argued that it would be the most naturally competitive ecosystem ever invented, the one most resistant to monopoly, but in fact the opposite happened -- it consolidated much more quickly than any other major industry, certainly much faster than the examples that Drucker gives.
This is a great great point!
No. It was ubiquitous, but not a monopoly as it did not control anything. It was the best implementation at the time, similar to how KFC never had a monopoly on Fried Chicken, despite KFC being the only commercial offering in many regions.
I remember when Andreesen wanted to commercially license Netscape Navigator to companies.
I remember when Microsoft perceived the web as a threat and wanted to act as the gateway to it.
I remember when Google was just a search engine and had no business model.
Perhaps the lesson is that there really is no money to be made from consumers, including corporations, for being the "gateway to the web". Rather, the money is in manipulating or selling out those consumers for the benefit of third parties. The money is to be made from third parties, not consumers. Whomever is the gateway is in the best position to do that.
Even now, most of the top tech companies are known as hardware companies (Apple, Samsung, Foxconn, Huawei, Dell...). Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook are exceptions. And out of these three, only Alphabet and Facebook thrive on middleman strategy.
That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons.
A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that.
So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends.
You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.
E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.
Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls per day. I'm tempted to change my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.
Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.
Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?
For someone who can't imagine that email may sometimes come from people who doesn't have their best interest at heart, sure.
Me, I receive 5-15 spam emails a day, which are filtered only by my local mail client, with some false negative, and extremely rare false positives (I spotted one in several years, and I always look through my spam folder).
Despite my lack of Google grade filters, I can use email just fine.
Windows is a minefield to download for.
Linux is a yum or apt away.
And iOS is antiowner garbage.
MacOS is targeted a bit less than Windows because its user base is smaller, tends to be a bit more technical, and running arbitrary apps while allowed requires magic incantations like right click open (twice) the first time or opening a terminal.
Every non technical person I know loves iOS because it just works and doesn't rot from malware or badly written apps that trash the system.
Never ever underestimate what people will do for even mediocre amounts of money. Look into the enormous ecosystem (bordering on a subculture) that exists around click fraud and other forms of ad network abuse, or try to search for some Windows software and look at how many fake sites you get. It's unreal. There's money to be grabbed, so it gets grabbed.
or even just for thrills or for nefarious purposes!
Reminds of me of that backdoor in Notepad++[1], an app many developers I've worked with used.
[1]https://www.hackread.com/wikileaks-vault7-cia-docs-notepad-p...
Surely we ought to be able to recognize this claim as culturally dependent. While the Western tradition has been deeply concerned with the concept of freedom since the Greeks, that does not hold for other cultures which are currently ascendant. If anything, they might see an unfree state as the natural order of things, and "striving for freedom" as a source of social instability which is a net negative.
You mean $10 right? Because that’s about how much I pay for my domain a year and I don’t spend a dime more. I mean, even with Medium you have to take the time to write and format your articles…
If by the end of the day you feel accomplished and happy about what you have achieved then I would count that as a win.
Does your girlfriend know how to make website without your help?
Nearly every online community I've seen recently has a discord server. And the range is wide and far. Minecraft, piracy, Linux, fashion, literally anything you can think of. And I think their market share is only going to go up. Their numbers pale in comparison to facebook, but their audience is young and trusting. Ask literally anyone below 20, and they will have a discord account.
What's the conscious effort to stay on email? It seems like most people use email because everybody else uses email, not because it's federated.
There are fewer IPv4 addresses than people, which means ISPs who haven't deployed IPv6 are a threat to the open web.
Entirely incorrect: none of the folks in my immediate social network would be able to do something like this. Only a techie would. And statistically, as a group, techies are a tiny minority.
Sure you can do those things in seconds, as long as you don't account for the 10 years it took to train in the tech background and ecosystem that them let's you do that in seconds.
I'm a techie/data scientist, but it would probably take me a week of reading and experimentation to put up something minimally useful, because I've got no explicit web development knowledge.
To my non techie friends, you might as well tell them to move a stone using the force...
Source: I spent a _long_ time fixing harcoded URLs in a wordpress site that my wife built locally.
(Key word being service. You don't own a blog, you rent it.)
I was just speaking as another data scientist/techie person, like the OP.
I do agree that it is 100% not easy for most people.
Social media isn't the only way to stay in touch. In fact all it really is, is a way to automate the means and pleasantries by which we relate with others at the more human/animal level. We "poke" and "react" and "share" on these platforms just like we do via other communicative tools like phones, letters, and telegrams.
With the gamification and addictive nature of these social media platforms, we sort of merge sports and games with socializing, allowing everyone to be a socialite like the ones we all have read about from yesteryear. This devalues social relationships and puts a greater emphasis on MORE of them; an opiate addict always ends up eventually using heroin.
Choice two: No longer answer the phone in a timely manner. Don't follow up on friends. Shut yourself from many social circles. In other words, stop being a first class citizen.
There was a time where slaves were considered sub-human because they chose life over freedom. They had a choice, and they chose to be beasts.
There's a difference of degree, but but it operate under the same principle: when you have two option, one of which is unacceptable, you don't really have a choice.
In the beginning of the internet, there were more tech-savvy people on the internet. I assume that these people were more open minded than the rest of the population on average. Then came the big masses, and the percentage of open minded consumers on the net dropped. But, with improved access to information the open minded consumer on the net is on the rise again.
Its the mindset that has changed. The only way to fight that would be anonymous, secure, decentralised tech
Ideas and articles such as these often come from a more credentialed yet less historically literate/knowledgeable generation.
I think you typically see similar articles conflating these larger private companies and their shenanigans with the state or federal govts who have actual men with guns to impose their will.
For better or worse, words have much different meanings for younger generations.
Before the web browser wars, we had (in the US) three big platforms: AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe. They all had highly censored, walled-garden forums with different focuses. The services had different price points. Something full of well-heeled professionals like Hacker News (bad example, because I’m ignoring the Internet; think quants, or suits) would be on CompuServe, which was far too expensive per hour for students and middle class teenagers.
We’re headed back there, and fast. I’ve heard the forums on some of the paid news sites are quite good for discussion of economic matters, for example.
Apparently, if I want medical information about coronavirus from actual medical researchers, I can no longer go to YouTube, since they’re taking down all content that hasn’t already been approved by the WHO. Moving forward, I guess that’s all going to paywalled inside $$$ medical journal sites.
Self-hosted Wordpress requires a lot of setup for non-technical users. They need to:
- select a web host and set up an account
- use cPanel or some other tool with an ancient, confusing GUI to install WP on the server
- set up their MySQL and WP login passwords. Which in addition to the web host account, means they need to have 3 sets of logins to do one thing.
and that's not even mentioning the security or functionality issues they may face if they don't set up backups, or decide to fill the site with plugins to accomplish basic functionality that WP doesn't provide.
I think this paragraph, particularly the last sentence, is misleading. Apple and Google are working to implement this at the operating system level in a way that does not share any information about you at all, with anyone [1].
If you want to have technologists read this article and get past that point without a huge grain of salt, consider reviewing the specs and revising that description to be a little more correct.
I also personally love it when authors / technologists / etc. put in the work to describe the tools needed to 1) put the problem into perspective and 2) create around it. Either bringing the _spirit_ forward if it's a difficult technology-arena problem, or bringing the _technology_ forward if it's a difficult social-arena problem.
In short, it says users have to specifically enable the feature and can opt out at any time. Isn't that completely sufficient to eliminate it as a privacy issue?
If it was opt-out, I would certainly feel very differently.
I am curious how you believe it's misleading? In its simplest form, is that not how it's going to work in Phase I? User has to input their information, platform will do what it does, health organizations will consume some aspect of that data. It will then be used for notifications when in proximity of others?
In the link you shared, in the intro:
"Exposure Notification makes it possible to combat the spread of the coronavirus — the pathogen that causes COVID-19 — by alerting participants about possible exposure to someone they have recently been in contact with, who has subsequently been positively diagnosed as having the virus. The Exposure Notification Service is the vehicle for implementing exposure notification and uses the Bluetooth Low Energy wireless technology for proximity detection of nearby smartphones, and for the data exchange mechanism. "
The last sentence was "Building a web of social behavior information." Is that in essence what is happening? I am not saying that controls are not going to be implemented, and that data is not going to be protected. I am also not denying the social frameworks that another commentator alluded too.
I am, however, implying that regardless of what you find in documentation, I have been around technology long enough, and at the most senior levels of tech companies, to understand there is a difference between what you read and what a platform can, and can't, do.
Why is that misleading? Is it simplified for users to understand, sure, but dismissing it because it doesn't reference technical specs is a bit shortsighted.
The appeal of the low bandwidth - which should be enforced by design - would be a very text-based communication which would attract user-profiles similar to those prevalent during the early days of the internet.
This would also prevent/discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie torrenting.
Also the mashability would make the network resilient against infrastructure breakdowns, government censorship and corporate copyright abuse.
By keeping the specs open all sorts of interfaces could be created by so-inclined users. Amateur radio people might use that network for hops and interface it via antennas. Utilizing electric infrastructure might be possible. Bluetooth repeater. Simplex where necessary and duplex where possible.
I'm not really competent in this area at all. But it seems doable to me if there are enough people dedicating to it.
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I'm very privacy conscious but I can see how society perceives the internet no longer as something compatible with the values of the open web but instead as infrastructure which requires protection and regulation. Yes, I think the gov should have the right to execute search warrants (assuming the we're talking about democratic processes at play) and read through letters and documents. And disk content, mails, chat protocols are just that - only digital. But every power needs a balancing antagonizing power. And with surveillance getting more and more capable I fear this is going to get progressively difficult to do on the conventional internet.
TFA's point, to summarize radically, is that the individual and the society remain in tension. Society tends to crush the individual.
But I'm more sanguine. I submit that humanity is a saturated, agitated solution with societies precipitating and breaking up continually.
What's to be feared is the loss of agitation, but that's beyond our scope, so do your best where you're situated.
To make it explicit in context of:
>> This would also prevent/discourage abuse for exchanging c/p or movie torrenting.
Usenet is a system very similar to e-mail in terms of data exchange format; both are textual and originally intended to exchange plaintext. Both developed convenient forms of encoding arbitrary binary data. Today, Usenet is in fact used for piracy, and I wouldn't be surprised if c/p was present on some groups too.
Doubtless someone can name the fallacy surrounding efforts to produce a closed-form technical solution to matters of agency.
Minimize? Sure. But as long as Bad Actor can fog a mirror, the potential for evil is present.
What destroys openness is commercialization. It's hard to make a business in an open environment, because you'd be relying on the good will of people whom you provide value. So everyone tries to lock everything down and set moats. For instance, a good chunk of non-openness of the web boils down to: you can't let people access your site programmatically, because they'll develop more ergonomic/efficient UIs to it, and suddenly masses stop visiting your site and viewing ads.
Openness works best if things are given away without strings attached. So if you have an open side-web, you'll need to set up a culture or a set of rules to protect it, and be prepared that they'll kill the commercial usefulness of it.
It reminds me of a documentary I saw years ago about the origins of Linux. At one point, I think rms was quoted as saying that even the GPL had “room for (commercial) business to be done.”
Yet I suspect most companies balked at the idea once they discovered that using the GPL made everything under it open as well - there was no competitive advantage or differentiation left once that happened.
Then there are application protocols for linked documents and menus that are decidedly simpler than HTTP+HTML like Gopher or the more recent and even less popular descendant Gemini.
The problem isn't so much the technology, but that people in general don't really mind the current state of affairs to the extent that they're going to do anything substantial about it. I could host a private encrypted chat or forum from home and governments and advertisers would be none the wiser about what goes on there. The network infrastructure is there and I have access to it. It's getting people to give up the perceived convenience of gigantic services that's hard.
MAYBE regular HTML and CSS could be allowed for some authentic geocities design but no JavaScript whatsoever.
Being able to run client side code has a lot of benefits but currently it's an unholy mess that would require a complete replacement (Which means depreciating basically everything currently online) to fix and even then the mere presence of client run code has been a double edged sword for years with resource hogging pages and nasty tracking/virus scripts. HTML5 has mitigated a lot of the need for stuff that would have previously needed JavaScript or Flash such as video so I don't think it'll be missed that badly.
E: Just realized that I pretty much described the tor default browser
F.x.: https://prism-break.org/en/all/#mesh-networks, there's IRC, XMPP, ...
But those projects mostly seem to try to establish alternative internets / protocols mostly based on the conventional internet.
The active enforcement of low-bandwidth-use would in my opinion be the core concept. As soon as media can be transferred it's going down hill in many ways. I think usenet died this way. c/p, content sharing, viruses, spam, ... all that crap
My instincts tell me it was coined in the 90's amid the disgusting/edgy phase after the long "dad jokes" phase of the years before. (Unix, byte, nybble ...the list continues)
it's quite a common term outside of software development too.
Edit: googling the term, it seems to have been coined in as early as the 1930s: https://grammarist.com/idiom/spitballing/
However as others have said, I don't think the problem is technical, it's societal. It's hard enough to migrate users from one social network to the next, and you're essentially saying we need to migrate users from the whole web to another kind of web. The only way forward I see this thing happening in the large is if a big player steps up and does it for free for a large part of the population.... at which point we're back to square one
The question is how a significant number of people can be made to use that.
consumer web is done, its owned by private companies, which control discoverability (google ads let’s say) then monetization (google ads) the Platform itself (android which gains data), membership and enforcement (google dev account) the government is too scared to break up google or amazon. user acquisition costs will continue to go up and google as an example for most queries shows 50% ads and 50% organic. Not to mention the word ‘ads’ has no background now and is so small that most people don’t notice that it’s an ad. Well played. Pay to play or get out. Monoply doesn’t exist the product is free to use for consumers so consumer isn’t being ripped off. Government is powerless in this sense but the FTC can help with things like you can’t advertise your own properties in results, you need to provide small business a chance (so 80% organic results required), Ads need to be labeled with contrasting colors, for each large company whose organic result shows provide a chance for a small company to show as well 5:1 ratio. Otherwise most small businesses are done. Google is the yellowpages, you live or die by it if you are a small business.
I couldn't agree more. It's really tough to write and share on your own platforms because exposure and dissemination is not what it used to be.
> consumer web is done, its owned by private companies, which control discoverability (google ads let’s say) then monetization (google ads) the Platform itself (android which gains data), membership and enforcement (google dev account)
I sadly, also, agree with this. This is another article I plan to write.
Now, so much of moderation comes from the users, and a downvote to show that a comment is inaccurate is indistinguishable from "I do not want people to see this opinion, even if it is true," and so a great deal of moribund condition of the Open Web is due to things like manipulation of rankings. Sure, why not file a false DMCA copyright claim on YouTube? Get that thing you don't like off the Internet.
I have no ready solutions to offer.
What about for every comment you get the right for one downvote? More comments from people why they feel the need to downvote, that would clarify a lot more and could bring new insights to every discussion in general.
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-abo...
Since Chrome v80 they forced <video> <img> content to switch to HTTPS, if the page itself is served https. Is it really a good idea? So for Intranet URLs with customize TLDs, you have exactly three choices:
1. Turn off the upgrade-insecure-requests or CSP crap in browser config completely. This voids all the security features browser-wide.
2. Install a company wide root cert. Yeah because enabling the company to MITM all TLS traffic is more secure than streaming videos over http in a company LAN.
3. Train the end-users to click "trust certs with invalid Common Name". That's will teach them.
Did I miss something here? What kind of Web do we live in these days?
If the intranet isn't set up to be able to serve over HTTPS, then wouldn't the intranet page be served over HTTP too and not make this an issue? Is it really common to have intranet sites where you have some of the endpoints covered by HTTPS and some not, and further, the HTTPS intranet page embedding content from intranet HTTP sites?
The page itself is served in both HTTP and HTTPS, can be visited in and outside the LAN.
The <img> and <video> content fail in HTTPS without explanation in Chrome v81+
So why can't you use one of these options:
1. Redirect all users to HTTPS, since you apparently already have a globally valid certificate.
2. Rewrite the tags to use HTTPS only when the page is loaded over HTTPS.
3. Set upgrade-insecure-requests only when the page is loaded over HTTPS.
However I can use reverse of your methods to redirect every HTTPS to HTTP.
Inside the LAN, when you visit the page over HTTPS the URL bar has a globally valid domain, right? So why do you even want the LAN machine to have a custom TLD, if that's going to be invisible to the user?
Certain pages of have media content that can only be viewed in LAN. However since the the HTTPS page is used in and outside lan, users tend to keep visiting the site with HTTPS enabled. After Chrome upgraded to v81, the images and videos failed to load. And there is little site admin can do to quickly restore the access.
Yes I can make that switch, but I also think every domain should be considered normal.
However in this particular case, the Intranet TLD is purposely hidden from public resolvers.
I understand the need for hiding your TLD though. I don't see a nice solution here, sadly.
If you're already serving regular content over HTTPS internally, then I don't see the big issue in serving video and images the same way, but I'm not familiar with your particular use case so you may of course have a point here that I'm ignorant of.
We are talking about the Open Web here. I think TOR wouldn't be as popular if we do not allow custom TLDs.
And I politely disagree with ICANN's new gTLDs expansion. domains like blog.google is wrong.
The company TLD was purposely built to hide behind the LAN. Been publicly resolvable is a huge a security risk. Public recursive resolvers will log where and when a user visits an internal site.
I really fail to see a point here. Can you please mention a compelling case?
No I did not. Sorry. Just because it's popular does not mean it should be implemented.
Also isn't HTTP content makes the whole monitoring crap easier? Sigh.
There are many BYOD companies, it's uncivil to monitor other people system wide.
Lastly, encrypt with TLS then MITM decrypt is not carbon friendly. It's such a retarded waste of energy. Might just allow a directive in CSP to force downgrade everything to http. Problem solved.
> isn't HTTP content makes the whole monitoring crap easier?
Not really. HTTPS remains encrypted where servers reject a downgrade, but an intruder can potentially force a downgrade in something misconfigured and snoop something important without having the root key.
> not carbon friendly
I suspect that switching off some of the endless lights in offices when sunlight more than suffices would have a seriously larger energy-saving impact.
You are right, there are rules, like the custom TLD is for authorized LAN users only. A public resolvable address is risky be cause the domain has a traceable ownership and identity, it relies on unnecessary external authorities.
For the migration I am considering deploy a company wide cert. But also I am frustrated because browsers shouldn't dictate the kind of Intranet structure we use.
If we still believe the Web should remain open, let the browsers behave more neutral.
I wish those companies good luck, and I wish an open Web moves away from those companies as far as possible. If browser vendors wants to kiss corporate ass then I vote by uninstall them.
Regarding censorship, there will always be corner cases where reasonable people can disagree or even where most people can agree a decision is wrong. But what's the alternative? It's certainly not a free-for-all as that quickly devolves into a cesspit of pirated content, porn and illegal content.
The value in a property like Youtube is that it is somewhat curated and not the Wild West. That's why users go there and there's no right for anyone to be hosted on and distributed by Youtube. Nor should there be. People may want a distributed or even federated alternative to Youtube and I know you should say it's never going to happen but... it's never going to happen. It's a naive pipe dream.
Now the biggest problem I have with this:
> ... think we can all agree that this level of invasion of privacy should never be tolerated.
Nope. No sale. If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2 era is the rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to the point that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-sighted way is like a badge of honour. Maybe it's part of the rise of anti-intellectualism? I don't know.
I'll say it: there exist situations where the public interest overrides personal interests. Shocking I know. In Australia we now have a government-issued app for contact tracing (edsentially). It's entirely opt-in and has had a ton of downloads (>1M IIRC).
Not every surface is a slippery slope.
Effective contact tracing is.a necessary precondition to easing pandemic-related restrictions and even with that we'll still be stuck with social distancing for awhile.
I actually think using that device almost all of us carry everywhere (ie a smartphone) with a Bluetooth receiver to achieve better contact-tracing is a genius idea.
And I really don't see what any of it has to do with the "open web".
It's not for monopolistic corporations to take actions about illegal activities but for law enforcement agencies.
Banning some video on YouTube because you disagree with it is just not right.
If they continue on that line, they will lose customers.
> If anything I'd say one of the biggest problems of the post-WW2 era is the rise in irresponsible, unfettered, unaccountable individualism to the point that asserting one's "rights" is a completely selfish and short-sighted way is like a badge of honour.
What individualism has to do with protecting people's freedom and refusing mass surveillance and censorship?
Users go there because it's free, easy to use and has wide variety of content. Users don't go there because some content is or might become randomly unavailable.
Arguably, measures of a state of emergency are best left to the sovereign state, which is kept in bounds by the constitution and an elaborate system of checks, which arose because of these exact problems.
Edit: (1) Meaning, nationalized, now state controlled postal services in combination with sovereign censorship were, apart from taxation, how most citizens were confronted by the state on a practical level, often so for the first time. Most of our ideas of civil rights resulted from this confrontation.
And then proceeds to use his political and personal bias to write a blog article that actually ignores the technology entirely.
1) Apple and Google should be commended for their approach to contact-tracing. It is opt-in, secure, private and does not provide data to governments or third parties despite a lot of pressure.
2) It is illogical to suggest that Apple or Google could use contract-tracing to invade your privacy. They own the OS. They can do whatever they like and as users we would never know about it. If they wanted to do this they would've done it a decade ago and we likely would've found evidence a decade ago.
3) Spreading FUD about this contact-tracing initiative will literally result in more deaths. I really wish people would be mindful of this and just be careful about what they post.
His points about censorship were as flawed as those about privacy... The YouTube video he mentioned was blatant misinformation which compared incompatible numbers to create the illusion of a valid point (for example case fatality rate of the flu versus an extrapolated estimation of what the population wide fatality rate would be for COVID-19). It was essentially another "COVID is just another flu" conspiracy theory dressed up with convincing sounding numbers.
And people bought it. I was forwarded that video more than once.
The protests that Facebook banned were found (thanks to the work of both homebound Redditors and various reporters) to have been funded by commercial astroturfing companies and run through gun rights groups. It was an orchestrated misinformation campaign that was putting public health at risk.
Again, people bought it, thousands of them.
I agree with the author that the open internet should be sacred and consolidation by a few large players is bad. I agree that privacy and free speech are important. I dislike government intervention that threatens those principles.
But the examples he picked are, ironically, the perfect counters to his premise: Contact tracing that doesn't actually threaten privacy. Companies shutting down undeniable misinformation in an age of Russian troll farms.
If social media companies aren't proactive about tamping down verifiably false information then at some point governments are going to do it, and they'll make a huge mess of it, as they have with most tech regulation in recent years.
The author seems to be unwittingly arguing for the latter outcome.
Speaking as someone who has worked with govt.
Seriously, this care around privacy DOES NOT EXIST with govt agencies.
For example, they have an app (literally "The Police App") that you can install if you want notifications from police reports in your area. Think missing persons reports, wrong-way riders, etc. Now, they could simply make a database of every app user and track their location in it to know who to send a push notification. But, even though the app requires no signup, they decided that this was too privacy-invading and they had no business tracking people's whereabouts. So for each notification, even if it was only relevant to a tiny low population town in the middle of nowhere, they'd send a push notification including some geofence data to every single app user, and then the app would locally compare that data to the current location and simply block the notification from appearing if it was outside the target region.
That's wasteful and messy, but it was very privacy conscious. I was pretty impressed.
So no, plenty government agencies care a lot about this stuff.
I'm always curious about how dutch governance works so well!
The Police App isn't that widely used, and there's no obvious way to find out that it's not sending your location to a central server - after all, you still need to give the app permission to read your location!
I think if they had put in a database and gone on some blarb about how the app is entirely anonymous (it is) and the location database is well secured, nobody except a few privacy extremists (akin to the author of the blog post linked here) would've thought twice about it.
They didn't do it out of fear of repercussions but because they took both the actual rules about police-citizen-privacy, and the spirit behind those rules, very seriously.
Note, though, that this app was made by the media and PR department of the police. They didn't have much to lose by respecting privacy, except maybe spending some more tax euros. There's other government agencies that don't share this attitude (eg our intelligence agency, who thinks everybody is a potential terrorist and deserves to be treated as such), and I wouldn't be surprised if even other branches of the police itself wouldn't take that whole privacy shizzle so seriously. Eg the ones occupied with catching bad guys. It's not all roses and sunshine.
But it's still pretty nice.
See 45 C.F.R. § 164.512(f).
Furthermore, the ACLU's position is that HIPAA does not do a good job protecting people's privacy from the government and may be a violation of the people's 4th amendment rights. Unfortunately, it hasn't really been challenged Constitutionally to date, so we don't know.
What we do know is that HIPAA is probably not a good example to "dunk on" someone else, due to these concerns.
I am reminded of when an airline roughly pulled a doctor off a plane -- the company lost billions in market value. They won't make that mistake again. That's moral capitalism at it's best. If it had been a government owned service, I don't think there would be such a powerful feedback cycle.
Similarly, because Google would lose billions if they didn't care for my data, I trust them more than gov't.
Note that this only works for consumer brand capitalism -- it didn't work with Equifax.
Appearances and all.
s/value/trust/g
Companies might see a decrease in revenue because potential customers lose trust. Or more specifically, they lose trust because they stop believing that the outcome of striking a deal - purchasing a ticket for a flight - won't be as positive: either the direct outcome to themselves, or an indirect outcome towards all customers.
This is exactly the same dynamic as the public views a government. Trust matters. There's absolutely zero difference.
Members of the public trust that mandated politicians will act in their best interests. That, when given power, politicians can and will be held accountable to their personal responsibility. An election is a renewal of an exchange of value: I, as a member of a the public, will cede a part of my freedom to do whatever and submit myself to a vested authority in return for protection of rights.
However, a loss or a gain of trust doesn't necessarily translate into dire consequences for a company nor an incumbent government.
Facebook and Google keep churning happily along despite many scandals. And it remains to be seen if the current inhabitant of the White House will have to vacate in January 2021.
> If it had been a government owned service, I don't think there would be such a powerful feedback cycle.
There's a difference between public administration and party politics. The former is infrastructure, the latter are the people who manage that infrastructure and, theoretically, can be held accountable for their performance.
The primary goal of any government service isn't perpetuating it's own existence or turning a profit. It's serving the interests of the collective first and foremost. Which is vastly different from serving the interests of individual customers.
Succinctly phrased, this is how freedom, capitalism and government work: "Your right to swing your arm stops where my face starts."
Basically, a government service represents the common interests of a community. That common interest could be preventing people from getting hit in the face. So, government services reside in the space between the end of your fist and the start of my face.
Economic capitalism, however, is nothing more then just you - or anyone including Zuckerberg - wielding arms. Because that's what you want to do for whatever reason. Including a profit motive.
If your arm doesn't hit too many faces, and not too many people speak up about it, then you could happily keep swinging about, without caring what people might think.
Whereas if politicians try to curb your freedom to swing about just one bit, a vocal group will be all up in arms about it (pun intended) in no time.
Finally, let's not forget that trust doesn't follow any logic rules, and the memory of a collective is short at best:
The stock price of your airline bounced back, trading above the original price just 5 days after the incident. Which isn't surprising since analysts have stated consumers don't have a choice due to consolidation anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...
Meanwhile, Equifax has been trading higher then before the 2017 data scandal.
It won't really be opt-in, and we all know that. Yeah, most probably the Government won't come knocking at your door forcing you to enable the app but what will most probably happen is that the person choosing not (or simply not able) to install the app will find out that they suddenly can't enter certain stores (which will probably have signs like "you're not allowed to shop here if you don't have the tracking app enabled"), or ride public transport, or just be allowed in at their places of work.
Coercing the use of COVIDSafe
(1) A person must not require that another person:
(a) download COVIDSafe to a mobile telecommunications device; or
(b) have COVIDSafe in operation on a mobile telecommunications device; or
(c) consent to uploading COVID app data from a mobile telecommunications device to the National COVIDSafe Data Store.
(2) A person must not:
(a) refuse to enter into, or continue, a contract or arrangement with another person (including a contract of employment); or
(b) take adverse action (within the meaning of the Fair Work Act 2009) against another person; or
(c) refuse to allow another person to enter premises; or
(d) refuse to allow another person to participate in an activity; or
(e) refuse to receive goods or services from another person; or
(f) refuse to provide goods or services to another person;
on the ground that, or on grounds that include the ground that, the other person:
(g) has not downloaded COVIDSafe to a mobile telecommunications device; or
(h) does not have COVIDSafe in operation on a mobile telecommunications device; or
(i) has not consented to uploading COVID app data from a mobile telecommunications device to the National COVIDSafe Data Store.
Note that this is only a ministerial determination, which I believe means that it can be changed or withdrawn at any time, and is overridden by legislation. But if Parliament legislates this when it next sits, I will be quite impressed.
This comment seems to highlight the OP's main point, namely that the idea of discussion/debate is being removed, replaced with right-think.
> If they wanted to do this they would've done it a decade ago and we likely would've found evidence a decade ago.
Aren't these two sentences contradicting each other?
I don't share your faith in Apple's or Google's commitment to privacy. If the source code for these apps is entirely open so independent third parties can audit it, then we can talk. But taking their public statements at face value, given their past track record, seems extremely naive to me.
Also, you’re ignoring the part where contact tracing becomes mandatory in some jurisdictions if you want to leave your house. So, now you can’t even opt out of the corporate surveillance state (by not carrying your phone) without breaking the law.
Sorry to say point 3) is actually spreading FUD. Contact tracing can only be efficient if enforced.
And last but not least, you remember WebAssembly right? Transparency-wise, it is worse than obfuscated Javascript since now you're loading a binary from someone else's server, making DRM and closing the web much further and easier, which is why the FAAMNG companies all have a reason to sit at the W3C round table.
If you have Mozilla receiving millions from Google for its search engine as the default on Firefox and Microsoft conceding to Google to build upon using Edge using Chromium, then we know who really runs the web.
It is far more open now than it has ever been. Anyone can launch their own web app/site for a few dollars a month. Anyone can affordably build and scale the next Facebook, Google, Youtube on cloud technologies.
And people are far more free to find platforms where they can say what the want and do what they want e.g. Tor.
Instead people are more entitled. They deserve for their content to be on the websites they like. They deserve the huge amounts of traffic that they had no help in creating. They deserve to be featured in algorithms that ruin the reputation of the website. They deserve to spread their propaganda.
1. Retail ISPs 2. Physical backbone/infrastructure providers 3. service & content providers (Facebook, Netflix, twitter etc)
We’ve seen centralization across all three areas as the market demand has outstripped our ability to supply open access standards in any given area. You’d need government-supported decentralization of all three areas to make it harder to censor or surveil, which is in no government’s interest.
The Great Firewall of China allows proliferation of #1 and #3 but provides mass surveillance and censorship via #2. As an aside, It’s really funny to interact with Chinese servers, I deployed a virtual host web server once via wildcard DNS, and it was like rolling the dice for any given dynamic hostname if the firewall decided that hostname needed to be censored or not, regardless of the content being the same.
Snowden also showed that the USA also does mass surveillance (just not censorship) via the network.
The only approach to discourage mass censorship and surveillance is extreme decentralization enforced by law: open access networks, widespread end to end cryptography, and a renewed investment in web architecture and technology to incentivize open activities. IMO the technological and usability failure of Tim Bernard Lee’s Semantic Web drive has been the root of the rise of the Facebooks of the world.
The open web is dying, sure, but this an agony started 10/15 years ago. It is certainly still worth writing stories about it.
But still, now the web is browsed by just about anybody and that makes a fair share of people with low education, no scientific background and mostly computer illiterate (they typically make no difference between their computer/smartphone and the internet). Governments just cannot make them understand even the simplest message about how to behave, e.g. during a pandemic (assuming said government acts in good faith). And that tends to rationalize discretionary actions by technologists.
I feel like the title and/or thesis statement of the article is mislabeled. The arguments are more specially related to responses to covid19 than anything to do with "the open web" as a whole.
The questions of "should we" or "will my future self will hate me" are both intensely political.
Society has displayed ways of sheltering and hibernating through tulmultuous times and subsequently developing some kind of response.
Chief among this is the reuse of the old. Of course you can build new quickly; that's what Andreesen calls for. And it's easy, as these things go: Hand some money and labor to someone who wants to bark orders and throw their weight around and they'll get a thing made, like Ozymandias building his monument. History always provides such people.
But reusing old successfully is the thing you need crafty witches and wizards for, and they usually only reveal themselves when a dragon shows up and needs a talking-to.
In this case, the dragon is that tendency to push information towards a model of legibility by the state and for the populace to in turn aim to be inscrutable, a back and forth that has occurred throughout history. Sometimes this shapes spatial life, as with the story of medieval taxation based on the number of windows in the house. At other times it uses political theory and precedent to assert rights. Here we have the opportunity to be inscrutable by a rather direct escape from the norm, simply using some less popular alternative.
This is a crisis mostly in the sense that we still crave to have a popular, inclusive, fast-moving discussion while being inscrutable to power, and you can't square that circle so easily. Rather, you have to look towards gradual redefinitions of reality and possibility to counter normalization. This is necessarily a slower process than simple surveillance and seizure.
With respect to the Web, it's clear enough that it was built with holes in it, and much of the resulting stack was further distorted in turn. Why? Because it was a new thing - and evolved defenses as it went along.
But now it is an old thing, and as a popularizer of concept has succeeded wildly. The concept is what we'll probably use, and the specific tech only in parts.
You don't. It's over and done with. It started with Microsoft shipping Windows with Internet Explorer. And it probably ended with Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp.
Long gone are silly, goofy, pointless GeoCities sites, webrings, and phpBB forums for just about every topic you can think of. I mean, just think about how ridiculous it is that WikiLeaks has a Facebook page or that Snowden has a Twitter account. The final nail in that coffin is that a significant portion of the web is accessed these days via phones: which, by Google or Apple mandate, are extremely locked down ecosystems. You've still got a couple of crazy idealists out there like Stallman, but they're far and few in between.
The open web is dead. Long live the open web.
It's click a button and get a random website.
Push Notifications (engagement)
Web Payments (monetization)
Contact Picker API (virality)
WebRTC (peer to peer data, files and video)
ServiceWorkers (caching and more)
Crypto (peer to peer encryption, auth)
PWAs (add to home screen)
But what about Web 2.0? There has to be a sort of "operating system" of reusable components the same way that MacOS did buttons and menus and windows.
We have amazing hardware. But we rent our software from Zoom, Facebook, Telegram. Why? Because it's very hard to replicate everything we've come to expect from Facebook today, and not in 2004.
Well, there are projects out there on the front lines doing it. Like Inrupt (née SoLiD) from Tim Berners-Lee. I met most of these guys and teams over the years. We started before everybody, in 2011, so we have had a bit of a head start. Nearly 10 years and over $700K spent from our revenues. I'm not proud of how long it took. But it has been a long slog. But yes, we want our platform to be the next Wordpress and liberate the Web from Feudalism to a free market:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
(Here is the larger vision, not realized yet: https://qbix.com/QBUX/whitepaper.html#Distributed-Operating-...)
Similarly, despite the fact that the user's data can be hosted on their own computer (ex: name service), I find it hard to believe that any major site hosted with Qbux would not still have sign-in pages and de-anonymize their users. Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the on prem data / distributed approach?
1. Qbix is the operating system (available today)
2. QBUX is the token (monetizing open source and digital content)
3. https://intercoin.org is the next generation (launched in 2017, still in early stages)
Let's go through the roadmap. So basically, what Qbix does is gives you choice of landlord. It replaces the Feudalism on the Web with a free market (of hosting companies, plugins, etc.) There is no one middleman - not even Qbix Inc. - that prevents you from selling your software, digital content and services (hosting, translation, moderation) to communities, who in turn take their members' money and pay for the services.
Once all this is commoditized, there is competition rather than a monopoly or cartel of large corporations. I should say that, by and large, all the problems we see from corporations and governments have to do with a lack of a real open source alternative. At Qbix we wrote an article a year ago that was largely like the OP one, but used the events of its time. You could write an article like this any month of the year btw:
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Alright so now we have a choice of landlord, which is capitalism and competition. That's pretty good, but we can do better. We could replace that with an autonomous, self-healing, end-to-end encrypted framework that has no user accounts and every infrastructure node just accepts cryptocurrency and stores stuff. One such system is http://maidsafe.net/ They are probably the furthest ahead. They started before Qbix, in 2006, and they are still not done. They are far beyond IPFS in their vision.
We started a spinoff company called Intercoin (that one, I can actually say, is selling tokens in a regulated presale at https://intercoin.org). The goal is to build a distributed platform and protocol that is cryptographically secure AND scalable, unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum which are only secure but not scalable. It would be used for many applications, including payments, micropayments, UBI, fundraising, but also things like anonymous and secure voting, elections and governance. Here is my article in CoinDesk from last month about the details of that:
https://www.coindesk.com/in-defense-of-blockchain-voting
So in the end game, "communities" are simply superconnector users, and any user can grow and become one. They are no longer privileged by virtue of operating or paying for the hardware servers. Indeed, every Inter.Activity is end-to-end encrypted and stored on K nodes that run a consensus about its state. The Inter.Activity can be a chat, or it can be a coin, or whatever that evolves over time, and every Inter.Action is M-of-N signed by the current owners of the Inter.Activity . Some of our early thoughts in 2018 can be seen here:
https://qbix.com/blog/2018/04/03/onward-to-qbix-platform-2-0...
By now you can see a lot more of the "finalized" architecture here: https://community.intercoin.org/c/technology
A lot of what I build is "graduating" from the level of technical programming and more to do with societal programming... i.e. like the US constitution, it basically has to be architected to shape the growth of communities in a positive direction. That is a lot of responsibility. I have been thinking about these issues for at least since 2012: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=114
This is why we've recently taken on advisors from many different schools of economics, sociology, etc. to understand how our architectural decisions. Our company's mission is to Empower People and Unite Communities.
PS: If you're an advanced JS + Web developer and you'd like to potentially get involved, email me at greg @ either one of the domains qbix.com or intercoin.org ... we could use all the help we can get.
Some of them still certainly exist, but are dying because the people who started them are growing old, and the next generation would never find small, interesting websites on google or similar. We need a place that's dedicated to finding and connecting people, not companies and advertising. What that looks like is up for debate. An IRC server, federated social media, or even an entirely new, separate internet, I'm not sure.
The problem is that most of these just don't provide enough to people now. With any service, people have to feel like they are getting some value out of using it, and that benchmark has increased with the amount of media, information, and knowledge anyone can consume these days.
And because let's face it, the American Dream.
How is that the final nail in the coffin?
How much are we really loosing when the most vapid platforms continue increasing their censorship?
Which is more informative, a 5 minute youtube video with a 2 minute intro (please like and subscribe, I beg you!) or a book on the topic from libgen?
Please don't confound publishing on the open web with platforms centered on exploiting consumers' vanity.
Nope. That's as political as it gets, and plenty of people won't agree.
Same applies to his case against censorship, which fails to pre-empt the obvious counterpoint: this misinformation is killing people, by the hundreds at the very least. [0]
[0] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/iran-700-dead-drinkin...
The challenge for open web proponents has always been compelling the masses to join their open network. The history of the internet is pretty much other things happening than what open web proponents advertise. Everybody can have their own website became everybody has a myspace profile, and later a facebook profile. You see the same with attempts at creating a decentralized web right now. Same crowd, same ideals, same level of indifference from everybody else. It's not dying, but also not on any kind of path of addressing this.
There are, however, large (and popular) systems on the open web which might misuse privacy and instill a form of censorship. This is also part of the open web. What is dangerous is the open web is being dominated by such large system and the mass are accustomed to only using such systems. Such system may also encourage, non-anonymous, or real accounts, where in past, people may have been "accustomed" to anonymity. Not to say one is better than the other, but there may be places and at the moment the pendulum seems to be swung. I do believe there needs to be accountability, for cases like defamation. At same time, being free to be both anonymous or not both have their places.
On Censorship: Of course there is both sides to this. I think here a more appropriate method can be to "indicate", or inform the content may be questionable, for example, with an indicated banner or some other form. Rather than outright censor the content like a modern version of Fahrenheit 451.
Oh, I know: (continuing and expanding of) social and technical efforts to make running their own websites and connecting them with websites of their friends easier for the average user.
By "social" I mean: it's desirable, it's a good idea, so let's stick to that and simply keep our "prognosis" of how it's all too late, or how people don't want that, to ourselves. They should want it, that's the point. How to achieve it is another thing, that's where wide debate is necessary, but that computing should empower people rather than make them less free -- that should be a baseline demand that doesn't adapt to reality, but seeks to adapt reality to itself.
The web doesn't deserve any of this. It- we- can be so much better. Hypertext Markup Language has so much potential. But we squander it.
Flash was attractive to digital agencies because of the tooling that the Web is yet to provide.
Now with the browser being just yet another general purpose VM, the revenge of plugins was bound to happen.
Perez criticizes the objection to statements of the type 'take vitamin C; take turmeric, we’ll cure you’. But 'cure' is the problem since it's unsubstantiated. There are many peer-reviewed papers offering excellent reasons based on biochemical evidence, for taking, in some measure, vitamin C and turmeric (and other phytochemicals). But use of the word 'cure' is a step too far.
Too bad. We invented the transistor. What are you gonna do?
> The fact is, as humans, we are susceptible to our irrational, and sometimes, ignorant beliefs.
Right, and that's the problem, not machines that can trace viral infections in near-real-time. Those are going to be the only way to return to some semblence of normal.
We are already being tracked. Your phone tells "them" where you are at all times, and you're fine with it as long as they're just using it to bombard you with ads, but God forbid "they" use it to save you from the covad.
What am I missing here?
There is weak evidence that the internet is created to be free. By reviewing the history and the pillars of the networks which were the primitive versions of the internet, and by tracing the evolution, I see a centralized, controlled technology. Second, many of the greatests innovation are backed by governments, especially in war times.
The COVID contact tracing framework from Apple and Google is just a framework for using background features of the phone. There’s currently a fight with some governments (UK and France) over whether this will be mandatory or not. The UK NHS have figured out a way to run low energy Bluetooth background activity without this framework and are going their own way. This might actually mark a turning point in relationships with these tech companies: if Apple/Google insist on enforcing government activities through their framework, those governments probably will stop being so hands off with regulations of the various App Stores and phones. We will see.
Stepping back, this is not about mandating apps against user demand, it’s just that the open web has not kept up with user demand for a richer experience both client-side (beyond HTML) and server-side (beyond HTTP and closed data).
Really, it’s a longer conversation, but I’d say that the technological and economic failure of the Semantic Web is largely why there is widespread server-side centralization (ala Facebook or Twitter), and the failure of the HTML standards (and innovation!) process has led to the explosion of JavaScript use as a market blowoff valve, with native apps being the culmination of this market demand for richer experiences.
The open web is still at the core of all of this: the URL, MIME, HTTP, etc. are the glue that holds this haphazard global networked device world together. The open web is not dead. It is stagnant. It’s ASCII, or SCSI, or PCI, or any number of boring decades old layers buried in our systems.
It’s a matter for someone to decide to find ways to invert the economic incentives towards centralization back into the decentralization we were seeing back in the mid-oughts with RSS, Atom, etc. We hit a technological wall (the semantic web) and didn’t have the investment to climb it. We got a new type of computer (the smartphone) and couldn't get past HTML’s history of being a PC-focused UX. So we all jumped onto the easier answers: Facebook and native mobile apps.
That doesn’t mean it’s the end of history. Some entrepreneur has to figure out the business and technical models to get decentralization, open data, and rich hypermedia back as a priority.
...and then, in the very next paragraph, disown that comparison you just made to insulate yourself from any criticism.
Adding that disclaimer is tantamount to acknowledging that this is indeed a political question. In doing so, the author has preemptively refuted his own attempt in the next paragraph to claim that it is preferable to argue this issue on purely technological grounds.
This is a public health crisis that is killing hundreds of thousands of people and setting every economy on the planet back by maybe 20% to 30%, or the equivalent of close to a decade of typical growth, at least for the richer countries. "Politics" isn't a dirty word here: it's how societies try to chart some sort of sensible path through this. Because balancing competing objectives is the essence of politics, anyone single-mindedly focussed on just health, or just prosperity, or just "the open web" is guaranteed to be disappointed by what will happen, and will become even more cynical and prone to disparage the idea of "politics" in this manner.
But it is so blatantly obviously impossible to ignore these issues that even he making that argument failed to pull it off even before he got started.
Specific to this article, I can confidently predict that "politics" will matter to it in a very practical sense, in that the political process is going to completely ignore it.
I mean, I kind of understand privacy concerns, even though I find them somewhat unwarranted, considering the rather elaborate scheme Apple and Google came up with to preempt them. And I do, in principle, care about the "open web".
But even after reading this article, I haven't the foggiest idea what this contact tracing scheme has to do with the "open web".
Last and definitely least: a similar, but lesser, point:
Signing/crediting your pull-quotes
with your own name is cringy as hell.
--IAmEveryoneThe major search engines have a bias towards large commercial sites, likewise for the articles linked to by major news outlets and the recommendations made on social networking sites. There are likely good reasons for this. Links to commercial sites or commercially hosted sites are more reliable and the content being more generic, thus applicable to a larger audience.
None of that means the open web, or open internet, does not exist. It simply means that it is incredibly difficult to discover.
I've watched a lot of good videos about C on YouTube. According to one of the channels one of their older videos had been deleted. I think that's not too serious. YouTube isn't a lost cause at all!
Everyone wants just to use, and let someone else manage the web. That situation keeps cranking out opportunities for closing the web.
The bigger picture is some countries especially one can come out but you cannot go in. If that works (for them), why anyone not work out that there should be a country based Internet. It is already working like this a bit.
Just getting that far told me that reading this was a waste of time.
A. No one is going to use this opt-in shite
B. I don't care if I can just not care
The platforms also don't generate a profit or operate at a loss YouTube generated $15 billion last year[1], but Google/Alphabet never disclosed profitability and has only broken even in previous years[2]. Twitter also took over a decade before it even reported a profit[3]. These kinds of ventures would be choked out by competition and by a lack of investors normally. But monetary profits aren't the goal. It's all about control.
Take Facebook for instance. Over half of the US population has a Facebook account[4]. Facebook is also known to engage in psychological manipulation of its audience to determine reactions and behavior[5], even shadowbanning users and content that it disagrees with[6]. This is a great recipe for broadcasting whatever message the controllers of these platforms want and for reinforcing those beliefs with positive messaging. I won't even get into the political ramifications like with the Cambridge Analytica scandal[7] or that Facebook advertises using your name to your friends[8].
I'm trying to underline the point that Perez makes in the article. It's incredibly dangerous to trust these platforms with anything. They disguise their motives in corporate speak and platitudes while shutting out any dissenting voices. The solution is to get off of these platforms that stifle speech and thought. Otherwise, we're doomed to live in Edward Bernays' wet dream.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-ad-revenue-15-billio... [2] https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-still-doesnt-make-go... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/technology/twitter-earnin... [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268136/top-15-countries-... (the US population is 328.2 million) [5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-... [6] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-patents-shadowbanning-183641134... [7] https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-a-guide-... [8] https://www.facebook.com/help/214816128640041
This is a strange disclaimer. This post is absolutely about politics, and there is nothing wrong with that. Politics is not some dirty word. Politics is about the ideas, values and decisions that govern society. I understand what the author means, politics as in "Trump this, Biden that". Accepting this reductive version of what "politics" means is detrimental to us all. We have been conditioned by click-bait media to not being able to have a civilized discussion about the things that matter the most.
> we the technologists blah blah blah
"We the technologists" have no agency whatsoever. "We the technologists" are just middle class workers who will mostly do what it takes to secure employment, hoping to get a promotion as to be able to buy more toys.
The open web existed as a niche. It did not survive contact with the general public nor with corporate interests. This is because of a more general state of affairs, that has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with technology.
The share buttons load trackers from the social network sites that follow your activity around said site. It is not there for the user's convenience at all.
That's already an ethically questionable action.
https://www.csus.edu/indiv/g/gaskilld/criticalthinking/six%2...
Note: I have provided an example by saying this.
Even though this might not be the strongest argument from a purely logic point of view, it can still be a valid critique on the author.
We actually cannot agree on this! I have a strong preference that my loved ones and I do not die in an unprecedented global pandemic. You can't just state libertarian principles like this as a fact and expect everyone to automatically agree with you.
This is just how things work in the early stages before open source alternatives. Look at videoconferencing. Zoom grew a lot in the past couple months. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.
Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it’s been from the beginning. It’s the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.
But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.
In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.
The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.
Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?
Web browsers already have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.
There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.
That’s basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.
These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.
So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.
Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a “Show HN”
We built it over the last 10 years and we’re giving it away:
https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it’s more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as https://yang2020.app
Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:
Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)
Q.Users.login(options)
Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()or with jQuery:
$(element).tool(name)
.activate(options)
If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at greg at the domain qbix.com
Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.
Oh and last thing... it’s interoperable with everything else so you’re not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconference in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.
1. Contact tracing is just a necessary evil, and I for one am fairly happy with the way Big Tech has handled this. Many nations in the EU preferred a centralized approach so they could follow the epidemiological development of covid-19. It was Apple & Google who in the end decided that "nope, not doing that", thus dictating a more privacy-preserving way of doing this. Likely because it's in their interest to have this app/data-collection being as privacy-preserving as possible, to avoid the type of FUD that this article is trying to disseminate. If you accept that contact tracing is necessary, then what we are currently seeing is actually the best possible scenario for preserving everyone's privacy and the web's openness. I'm all ears for better approaches. What would YOU have the smartphone producer's do?
2. This brings me to the next point: censorship. It's tricky. Not just in this instance, but in general in the current development. Personally, I'm seeing more and more that an entirely "open web" doesn't seem to work out so well due to all the misinformation we're disseminating, and something's got to give. The example the article is citing is a very good one, I think the conclusion that are drawn in the article are wrong:
> They were sharing their observations, and opinions. Right or wrong, is not the point.
In my opinion, this is EXACTLY the point! A medical doctor who uses his authority to spread what he thinks is the right message, but goes against what most informed scientists consider correct, is EXACTLY spreading misinformation. The same way we're seeing this with anti-vax, homeopathy, chem-trails or whatever other nonsense: Yes, science is a discourse, but the right way of discussing is within the scientific community. So you don't call a press conference to spread your observations -- especially if the implications of you being wrong are so dire. You write a paper (NEJM is publishing a lot of discussion-pieces these days, why not send it there, to reach the medical audience?) or maybe as a first step you call your friendly epidemiologists and talk it over with them. Given the circumstances, removing this video was absolutely the right call.
With that said, I agree that this is a much, much, much larger problem. Given how important Youtube, Facebook and Twitter are in disseminating information, it is concerning that they can pick what they want to publicize/suppress (often w/o chance of recourse to the censored). To me, this is one of the biggest issues we have in our current times. I hope we'll be able to find good solutions. But given the current situation we're in (not just Covid19, also populism and targeted misinformation), censoring might be a necessary first step to fight our way out.
If everyone would think like you, science wouldn't progress far. Einstein would have never happened. While Einstein was busy developing his theory of relativity, the majority of the scientific world thought Newton is the end of it all. He was the crazy dude who dared to go against the order.. even annihilating academic friends by doing so.... However, the crazy dude was right.
Having Majority DOES NOT EQUAL Being right. Always remember that.
You even write 'to spread what HE THINKS IS THE RIGHT MESSAGE' > Thats a mega important point. If he is convinced that this is how things are then there must be a (public) place to share those ideas. Even though he might be wrong in the long run. And that's different from FAKE NEWS, where an actor spreads midsinformation with a malicious goal. Hence in the FAKE NEWS case, he would KNOW ITS NOT RIGHT but spread it ANYWAY.
See what I mean?
In a democracy, it kind of does. And science is a democratic discourse. If 99.9% of all scientists say global warming is real or evolution "just a theory", and 0.1% says it is not, the likelihood of the 99.9% being right is... well, 99.9%. When people mention how Einstein revolutionized science, you have to remember that he was the absolute, astounding and rare exception. The very vast majority of people who go against the grain of the dominant scientific belief tend to be crackpots. Always remember that.
You even write 'to spread what HE THINKS IS THE RIGHT MESSAGE' > Thats a mega important point. [...] Even though he might be wrong in the long run. And that's different from FAKE NEWS, where an actor spreads midsinformation with a malicious goal. Hence in the FAKE NEWS case, he would KNOW ITS NOT RIGHT but spread it ANYWAY.
I agree with you, "fake news" was a bad choice of words. I think that's the extreme end of a spectrum of "spreading non-true information", and I personally think that's what this doctor did. But my beef isn't even with that. It's perfectly okay (Very, very much encouraged, actually) to voice dissenting opinions in science! That is how science works, after all. And hence it is important to voice dissenting options in a scientific manner. Which brings me to:
> If he is convinced that this is how things are then there must be a (public) place to share those ideas.
There absolutely is: Peer-reviewed scientific literature. That's the place where scientific ideas are evaluated, based on their merit. You don't go call a press conference when you have a plausibly sounding hypothesis that might explain some observations you made. You write a paper about it, make your case, back it up with data and experiments, and evaluate your findings to see if they hold up to statistical scrutiny. And then an informed discourse among peers can start, and the facts & data will decide who is right/wrong. And if you want to prove something that most of the scientific community thinks is wrong, and when potentially many lives are at stake, then the burden of proof rests on you, and that burden is rightfully high. Much higher than "I called some friends and we our subjective impression is that this is overblown". And _THAT_ is why I think this is misinformation, even if I'm sure it was done with the best of intentions.
How did Newtonian physics threaten human life? Also, Einstein had no authority, so he couldn't possibly abuse it to spread his message.
I think the author means that he loves the unfair markets which benefited him personally. I don't think I've ever seen such a thing as a free market.
We have a few large stock exchanges in each country which dominate our entire economy and dictate which company can or can't be listed. How is this a free market?
Also, this article is extremely hypocritical coming from someone who co-founded a startup (CleanBrowsing) whose main line of business is censorship.
> It is the idea that the web we interface with should continue to be open and transparent.
This is still the case and I don't see any threat that will likely to change this. Of course, governments will continue to pull off shady things, like break encryption, but we fight back all the time.
The web is fine. It comes in many shapes and forms, there are endless communities and the technology is smoother than ever to build on it.
If you look at the graph of hosts on the internet, it seems to be plateaued at around a billion, almost dead. This could have backed up the author's claim, but he would have entered the numbers territory where it could be read with a totally different outcome.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264473/number-of-interne...
The web is fine.