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Comment by colinplamondon | Hacker News Reader

This is so intensely cool.

Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW.

This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW.

It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW.

Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space.

Right now there isn't a good pseudonymous layer, because everything is very tied to real identity. Privacy doesn't really exist in a world of shadow profiles. And, with my commercial hat on, not do I want it to. I want to be able to retarget the shit out of email lists, and run intensive Facebook ad campaigns.

The needs of commercial space are not the needs of personal space. One solution could be different protocols, or at least different spaces, for each.

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"Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space."

Excerpt below is from the file /scripts/web included with the original netcat in 1995.

   #! /bin/sh
   ## The web sucks.  It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand
   ## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line
   ## clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run
   ## *commerce* over the damn thing.  Ye godz.  Welcome to TV of the next
   ## century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and
   ## about as much security as today's cable industry!
   ##
   ## Having grown mightily tired of pain in the ass browsers, I decided
   ## to build the minimalist client.  It doesn't handle POST, just GETs, but
   ## the majority of cgi forms handlers apparently ignore the method anyway.
   ## A distinct advantage is that it *doesn't* pass on any other information
   ## to the server, like Referer: or info about your local machine such as
   ## Netscum tries to!
   ##
   ## Since the first version, this has become the *almost*-minimalist client,
   ## but it saves a lot of typing now.  And with netcat as its backend, it's
   ## totally the balls.  Don't have netcat?  Get it here in /src/hacks!
   ## _H* 950824, updated 951009 et seq.
   ##

FWIW, I still use original nc and similar TCP clients to "interact" with the www. Works great.

Not fan of SSL, now TLS, which was in fact created to facilitate commercial use of the www, or "e-commerce", in 1990's.

As an ongoing experiment in a different protocol/space, I run CurveCP on home LAN.

Whoa CurveCP looks super interesting.

Any resources you’d recommend beyond the main web site?

For mobile users:

The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!

Having grown mightily tired of pain in the ass browsers, I decided to build the minimalist client. It doesn't handle POST, just GETs, but the majority of cgi forms handlers apparently ignore the method anyway.

A distinct advantage is that it doesn't pass on any other information to the server, like Referer: or info about your local machine such as Netscum tries to!

Since the first version, this has become the almost-minimalist client, but it saves a lot of typing now. And with netcat as its backend, it's totally the balls. Don't have netcat? Get it here in /src/hacks!

_H* 950824, updated 951009 et seq.

Wish I had scrolled down first :D

Incidentally, "Netscum" is a reference to Netscape Communications Corporation. They introduced SSL. This company was founded to commercialise a web browser, called NCSA Mosaic, that was originally co-written by venture capitalist Marc Andreesen of a16z.com as part of an academic project at U. of Illinois. The name "Mosaic" refers to its support for a variety of internet protocols, not all of them web-based. Netscum code-named their derivative browser "Mozilla", marketed under names like "Navigator" and "Communicator".

Fearing the growth of the web, Microsoft acquired rights to use the NCSA Mosaic code and produced a derivative browser called "Internet Explorer", which they included as part of Windows.

As web use grew, Mozilla Foundation, who inherited rights to publish the Netscape source code, added a "search box" to their derivative browser called "Firefox" and started directing search queries to Google, receiving large payouts in return. Mozilla Corporation was formed.

Google later hired developers from Mozilla to write another derivative browser called "Chrome".

+1 to all of this. I hope more innovation happens in this area over the next years. This also makes DAT, IPFS, etc. to be interesting technologies (IMO) as they help to decentralize our highly centralized/commercial "web" as it is today.

> Urbit was on its own island until recently

In what way?

This might be me missing some awesome projects, but I haven't heard of many other projects with Urbit's scale of ambition and scope.

WWW is so powerful, everything exists within it. There's not much competition at the OS layer, and virtually none at the protocol level.

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